Sagebrush, creosote, ocotillo, waving fields of parched grasses uninterrupted to the horizon. The occasional juniper like a blemish on the emptiness. Even the tumbleweed doesn’t seem stagy, doesn’t seem added for effect; that’s how Vanessa knows she’s where she’s supposed to be, in a place where the wind on the rails really does howl, where the freights do rumble through the crossings for the rest of the day, where the best bar in town can’t afford a neon beer sign, where the one dilapidated market has an entire aisle of tortillas. A swirl of dust blows up around you, as if the range has a quarrel with you for cluttering its absences. You startle an antelope or a deer when you go out walking, but you shouldn’t go out walking, because no one does.
Alpine, Texas. She’s come here to find that it’s among the last places in the country unexploited by the film business, an exploitation she now means to bring about with a vengeance. She means to line up a bunch of trailers, longer than the longest freight train, and she means to assemble a bunch of union guys who will descend on the local bars by the dozens, and she means to send extras in Mongolian outfits into this rangeland, and these Mongolians will be stabbing at one another, with the fight choreographer yelling from just offscreen. There will be helicopters hovering over all of the action, equipped with cameras and massive lenses.
Her itinerary: first, the Gila National Monument. From there, she moved south and east. Vanessa liked it better in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and she liked it there for one reason. The Low Rider. Well, there was also the possibility of Alamogordo. Yes, Vanessa favored the idea that a Geiger counter might pick up echoes of long-ago blasts. But what Alamogordo looked like was like everything else. On the second day, they turned south toward Carlsbad. Why is it, at these caverns, that there’s always a tour guide who has to point his flashlight at a stalagmite and compare it to an elephant? No way. Cutting short Carlsbad, they decided to head east toward the Big Bend. It was a long drive, and they let themselves stop at whatever picturesque roadside beguiled.
Then, while driving east into the dawn, in a Pontiac Grand Am in teal, Vanessa managed to stumble on this place, scarcely of note on any map, except for its state university. Alpine, TX. She had no reason to know that she’d long been yearning for such a place, a place so slow and backward and lost. Maybe the whole month of November had been bringing her near to Alpine. With each bit of bad news in the prior weeks, she had drawn closer. Fuck Dallas and its oil culture; fuck Houston and its art museums. Out here was a plateau the size of Rhode Island with only seven thousand legal inhabitants, a few starveling longhorn steer, some horses, and antelope. Heartbroken towns full of tumbleweed and excessively large pickups with tinted windows.
Her room at the Javalina Motor Court smells like a swimming pool, and the hot water isn’t hot, and Vanessa’s stomach is knotted from the taco she ate in town, and there are a half dozen distressing messages on her voice mail, not one of them from her mother, who she still expects will call. There are the frequent messages from the department of Missing Persons. Madison, meanwhile, claims to have found a good office rental in or near to the World Trade Center. Means of Production will be closer to Robert De Niro and the other classy addresses of Tribeca. But still. There’s no cell phone contact out here in Alpine, so there’s no point in trying to return the calls now at the inflated motel rate. If you drive up into the mountains, she was told by Jack from Brewster County Properties, you might be able to make contact with a satellite.
And speaking of space junk, Alpine is a known location for unidentified flying objects. So it is that Vanessa attempts to roust Allison Maiser, intern and location scout. They are going to drive into the hills to watch for UFOs. Jack knows the guy who knows where to go. It’s big business hereabouts. Vanessa saw a storefront that boasted trips for prime viewing. This sounds like something that could be worked into the script. Maybe dowsing, the skill passed down through the generations in The Diviners, was first learned from interstellar wayfarers. Maybe there should be UFOs or space aliens at the end of the story.
Allison’s door is beige and is peeling, and the room number has come loose, is dangling upside down, revealing an aqua paint coat underneath, from a cost-conscious period of motel administration when bright colors prevailed.
“Get up!” Vanessa pounds on the door. “I have an idea.”
Allison sticks her nose and homely eyeglasses into a narrow space between the door and its frame. In her hand, a dog-eared paperback that she picked up in Albuquerque, Louis L’Amour.
“Unidentified flying objects! When else do you think you’re going to get the chance!”
“I was reading —”
“Divining is some kind of genetic mutation, and maybe there are UFOs at the beginning and end of the story, and the dowsers are touched by the lights given off by the UFOs, and that’s how they develop the skill, and the mutation is passed down. Should I call Ranjeet? At the end of the story, the last dowser is conscripted into NASA.”
Vanessa explains how she saw the storefront advertising expeditions, and about the tip from Jack the Realtor. Allison Maiser could refuse, of course, because she’s Allison Maiser, but she ultimately gets a coat on, though she’s still wearing her pajama bottoms. It’s back into the Grand Am. Soon they have met up with their guide, Bo Fontaine, a one-time military man who has seemingly spent the last twenty years drinking too much and who has failed in this period of time to perfect the art of shaving without a mirror. For fifty dollars, Bo says, they get to go for a drive and hear his spiel, which is about a woman called Brenda Mae Millerton, who, in these very parts, just north of the town of Alpine, was taken up into a shining disk, probed, and released, during which adventure she learned, above all, that the aliens have been visiting the southwestern United States simply for the reason that the landing surfaces here are amenable to their craft. These aliens also visit the Nunavut Territory, and that’s why the Inuit drew those unusual drawings.
The aliens understand and are attracted to love, Bo continues, in his four-by-four, and therefore, “It’s pretty likely that they have a conception of Jesus. In the beginning was creation, and that means all of creation; it doesn’t just mean creation here, it means creation far and wide, creation scattered about in the night skies, creation amongst the galaxies that you see from that telescope . . . what’s that . . . the Hubble telescope. Creation means the creation of galaxies; it means those are real pictures coming from real galaxies, black holes, and such, which means He was there when the aliens were created, as He was always there. He’ll be there when we travel to the stars. Put it another way: The aliens are aspects of creation. The aliens are in His own image, just like we are.
“No need to fear the unidentified flying object because even if the pilots of that craft have three heads or eyes in the palms of their hands or whatnot, they know love, see what I’m saying?” Bo goes on without self-consciousness. His chatter is transitional: from the lights of Alpine to the blackness of the farm road that leads due east. Again and again, in the days of driving, Vanessa has found herself at night in a landscape that has more nothing in it than anywhere she’s ever been. Here it is again, producing a feeling both soothing and unsettling. The arresting nothingness of the back roads, jackrabbits hopping off the tarmac before their headlights. It could be mountains out in that darkness ahead and behind; it could be a stately sequence of ridges. It could be nothing.
They don’t know anything about Bo. They don’t know, really, that he’s not a rapist in training or a world-class serial killer. There must be more serial killers in the great state of Texas, because they execute so many of them. Vanessa knows how to kick a guy in the balls hard and she knows how to punch at the Adam’s apple of a man with a sharp jab so as to choke and incapacitate. She’d do either of these things before she’d let a sweaty redneck dishonor her or the intern.
In fact, if she needs to, she resolves that she will maneuver herself into a position where she can inflict bodily harm on Bo, after which she will tell Allison that she has been wanting to kiss her. Because ever since the night when they watched The Werewolves of Fairfield County together, the night when Vanessa found herself in bed with Allison the intern, who was definitely a top, there has been no consort between them. It should be, when women love women, that the male tendency toward callousness, toward the recoiling from intimate talk, sharing feelings, never rears its head. Women shouldn’t fuck and run. But once Allison had wrapped her arms around her, and inserted some things in her, and used her tongue on her, and told her that she was now Allison’s possession, until Vanessa was laughing because it was all so funny and so new, laughing until the moment when she started crying, once Allison had done all these things, it was as if she embarked on a campaign of neglecting Vanessa in the office. If not for serving as location scout, which Vanessa offered Allison in hopes that they would then share a hotel room, she would probably be as far away from Vanessa as she could get. It has been a little tense. Nevertheless, Vanessa will tell Allison that something has come over her, some feeling has come over Vanessa out here in the desert, in the limitless night. She will tell Allison that she thinks that this life is made for more than work and pizza and television. She wants Allison to understand that they could address these philosophical issues together. This conversation would involve a fair amount of kissing. And more.
“Is there a reason why we have to be so far out of town?” Allison asks Bo, from the backseat.
“We have to be this far out of town,” Bo shouts, and he seems to like to shout, “because right near here is where Brenda Mae Millerton was when she was abducted by the disk-shaped object I was telling you about. Right along this road is where the visitors, because that’s what we like to call them, visitors, made themselves known to Brenda Mae.”
“How did they make themselves known to her?” Vanessa inquires.
“That’s what I’m getting to,” Bo says. “Brenda was on her way into town from her family’s ranch, she was fixing on going to a restaurant, and she was on this road when she looked up and saw something gleaming in the night sky. What she saw was a disk-shaped object performing a rapid-fire Z-shaped maneuver —”
“What’s a —”
“This is military country. We know what kinds of maneuvers could be performed by the modern aircraft from our arsenal. We know it wasn’t any fighter jet or what have you. No stealth bomber could perform the kind of maneuver I’m speaking about. Brenda Mae saw the rapid-fire Z-shaped maneuver of the flying disk, and she felt cocky about it, prideful, because she knew that we live in a region where unidentified flying objects are part of life. I’m guessing you ladies might not feel the same way about it. I’m guessing that you think this is a big laugh, how this is the region where the visitors come. You think you’ve paid your fifty dollars and that’s a big laugh. And you get to hear a local citizen tell you tall tales of the night. Am I right?”
Vanessa says, “We’re here on a very important mission.”
How long havethey been driving? Forty minutes, and there has been nothing. Less than nothing. No city in the distance. No light pollution from a town twenty miles away. Nothing to separate or divide the immensity of the night from itself. Anything could happen here. Things without explanation, things that make mockery of the United Broadcasting Company and its parent corporation, all the employees thereof.
“Brenda thought she was safely out of the way of the craft that was performing the Z-shaped rapid-fire maneuver, and she thought, Well, it’s probably some kind of border patrol, and she kept driving, singing along with Tejano music on our local station until, at a certain moment, and for no reason other than a little bit of restlessness in her heart, she looked into the rearview. What she saw was that there was a light hovering right behind her, hovering above the road right behind her automobile.”
Of course, Allison looks behind, because she’s sitting in the backseat, and Vanessa looks back at Allison, longingly, and there is nothing out the back window at all.
“How big was it?” Allison asks.
“How big was it? Many have asked, of course,” Bo says. “And the answer is that questions of size are earthbound questions, because, according to Brenda Mae, the scale of the lights of the visitors varies depending on where you are in the story. At this point, when the lights are flying right behind her vehicle, the lights are about what you’d expect on a standard-issue farm tractor. But before you get the idea that these lights are just the headlights of the car following her, you need to know that they were hovering above ground and they were, as she watched, rising up above the stern of her car, up above the trunk, and, as she looked back, the lights were now above her car, and she was afraid.”
“What kind of sound did the thing make?”
“A very good question, and it’s not a question that most people would think to ask. Most people just want to know about the shape of the unidentified aircraft and the size and stature of the visitors. Most people get right to those kinds of questions, and those questions would indicate that they haven’t thought much about issues of propulsion, fuel, aerodynamics, plasma, things of that nature. The question of what kind of sound the unidentified aircraft made is an interesting question, of course, especially for the reason that the aircraft made no sound at all.”
“Oh, come on,” Vanessa says. “How would she know if it made no sound at all?”
Bo applies the brake as though he’s test-driving the four-by-four for its manufacturer, as though he’s in one of those commercials invariably filmed in landscapes just like this and he wants to highlight his antilock braking system. The four-by-four, recently driven well above the legal limit, lurches to the dirt shoulder with a minor skid. Bo shuts off the engine.
“The answer to the question, ma’am, is that she knew the unidentified aircraft made no sound because she pulled the car over, just like I’ve done, and she shut the car off, and, you know, this was in early September, and so it was the time of year when you might have your windows open because you like a breeze. So Brenda Mae had her windows open, and she pulled her car over because she was afraid, and she turned off her car, and she heard nothing. In the wide open plains of the great state of Texas, here, she heard nothing, not even crickets, like everything had come to a stop, like the night had come to a stop, and she could feel the light shining on her from above because the light had warmth, heat, even, and she knew that there was something up there, all right, but all she could hear was her own breathing, her shortness of breath, and that was when the light, because the aircraft was experienced by her as a kind of light, got in the car with her, into the backseat of the car with her, just like if the light was your friend back there. What’s your name again? What I’m saying to you is that the size of the vehicle, the unidentified flying object, seemed to expand or contract based on a lot of individual factors, and for now it was small enough to waver like a mobile of lights in the backseat of Brenda Mae’s car.”
For dramatic effect, Bo throws open the door on the driver’s side of his four-by-four and climbs out onto the pavement. There are some pinging tones—the engine cooling from its gallop—but otherwise, around them, there’s only the night. Vanessa and Allison get out, too, and they are brought up short in the perception of the night sky. It’s a night sky that they would never see back east, where industrial residue enhances the sunset but forbids the glow of unmediated stars. Here they can see the planets low on the horizon before them and, above, the ceaseless churning of the Milky Way and its constituents.
“The period of her blackout started right at this point —”
“Her —”
“Memory loss,” Bo says. “Could have been traumatic, of course. Because she was seeing things no one has ever seen before, things that you don’t expect to see in this life. Maybe she bumped her head somehow and suffered a concussive injury in her brainpan. The fact is that Brenda Mae was in her car, and she remembers having pulled over the car, and she remembers seeing the blinding light in the back of the car, and she remembers looking out the window and seeing it, seeing something out there, and asking herself What is that thing? And then she remembers nothing. She doesn’t remember walking away from her car, even though she certainly did walk away from her car, since she was found wandering, in an unclothed state, forty miles from here; and did I say that those forty miles were in the middle of the range? Forty miles as the crow flies in the middle of the range. By roads, it would take hours to get there, and you’d still have to hike in. Maybe, you’re thinking, she used some kind of ATV, the kind that leaves no tracks. Maybe she parachuted in. I’m in no position to judge, but that range, that meadow where she was found, is this very field, that’s what I’m saying, this very field right beyond the road here. If you look out in that direction, that’s the field where Brenda Mae was found thirty-six hours later, wandering in an unclothed state, disoriented and measuring extra high on a Geiger counter. With a story about being shoved out of the craft, the unidentified flying object, and no memory of what the visitors looked like.”
Good thing they paid up front, because one question Vanessa asks herself is whether the story is worth fifty dollars. The whole way back to town, while Bo chatters on about other sightings, she’s thinking about Brenda Mae, who he says works at a hotel in the next town, as a waitress. Is the story worth fifty dollars? Did Brenda Mae Millerton go to the psychiatrist after her experience? Did she go to the church of her choice? Did the evangelical church help her with the feeling that she’d been abducted and probed by the visitors? Would the Seventh-Day Adventists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses welcome such a parishioner?
Bo says, “All of these persons I’m telling you about were administered lie-detector tests by the sheriff of Alpine, who considers himself an expert on alien encounters. Brenda Mae passed the lie-detecting test with flying colors, indicating that she believes without reservation that the events took place as I’m describing them. She was also hypnotized, by a fortune-teller from Midland, and the fortune-teller believes the story, too. In fact, this oracle actually hinted at some of the experiments that might have been performed on Brenda Mae, tests that probed the cellular dimension of human tissue, things of that nature. The last thing I’ll say, before I conclude for tonight, is that Brenda Mae reports that in the weeks after her abduction she was suffused with warm feelings for humanity, feelings of love. She believes that the lesson being imparted by the visitors was the lesson of love. She believes that she was being probed so that the visitors could try to understand why there was so much hatred here on Earth. Brenda Mae wishes she could travel back up into the craft now because of that sweet feeling of union.”
Back at the hotel room, Vanessa’s mother’s voice beckons to her from the complexity of silences, her mother’s unearthly voice, reached by remote, on Vanessa’s machine back in Brooklyn: “Don’t want you to worry . . . in Florida, honey . . . don’t want you to . . . now, I want you to promise that . . . everything . . . got an important . . . taking marching orders from an important . . . nothing to . . . people making the decisions . . . in close contact . . . calling me and . . . front of the courthouse . . . because there’s just . . . hang on, just a, I’ve got to . . . who would have thought . . . old mother . . . weather is . . . only just a couple of weeks . . . young men in suits . . . people have to stand up . . . proud . . . moments like this . . . in case you have forgotten . . . just as soon that I . . . not thinking too clearly . . . really ought to give it some more thought . . . got a swimming pool . . . a long bus ride . . . very nice man came today . . . the justices are . . . the ruling is . . . that woman is . . . my stomach is . . . don’t worry about a . . . back before you . . . on the next bus and . . .”
The part that gives Vanessa the creeps is not the slurred speech on the message, the marginal clarity, but the fact that the call seems as if it’s all part of the same evening’s entertainment. The call should be reassuring, because at least her mother is still her mother, doing the things that her mother seems to do, but of course there is no number where she might return the call, and she can’t shake the feeling that her mother is one of the visitors.
Vanessa wants to go to Allison’s room. She wants to knock on Allison’s door, and she wants to be admitted to Allison’s room, and she wants to wrap herself in Allison’s arms, and she wants to tell Allison what’s going on. She wants to have one of those heart-to-heart conversations that other people seem to get to have, especially after they have slept together.
But next morning Vanessa’s all business. If life is love and work, and the love machinery has blown an important fuse, well, at least you still have work. So in the morning, all Vanessa can talk about is the border, how they need to get closer to it. The Chisos Mountains, for example, she has the map to indicate the mountains, the Rio Grande, the thousand species of cacti, the geological layers. Allison has barely finished her coffee and huevos rancheros before they’re driving south, into a landscape so flat that it’s easy to see why Bo Fontaine’s visitors would have landed. Mountains hover in the distance, bisected by clouds and heat mirages. Vanessa gets the rental car up near a hundred miles an hour, since there are no other cars, until the Grand Am rattles as if it’s going to break apart from the g-forces of her fanaticism.
Past the entrance to the national park, of course, because it will be full of college students on Thanksgiving break. Nothing ruins the feeling of adventure like kids sporting hemp products. She turns right just beyond the park entrance. And the next town on the road that shadows the river is:
“Terlingua Ghost Town,” Allison says, reading aloud. “Blah blah blah, mining company once employed thousands of workers, vanished as quickly as it was established. Countercultural types in residence, blah blah.”
“What could be better?”
“On the other side of town is the new state park. Four-wheel drive only.”
They stop for gas in Terlingua, and the first local they observe is in his fifties with a ponytail tickling his lumbar region, riding a bicycle with a Chihuahua in the front basket. The guy looks as if he might be carrying gas back to a jalopy that ran dry somewhere on the roads out of town. Or maybe he needs to restart his tractor, so that he might harvest some righteous bud, completely organic. They disappear into the low mesas, where the road threads through the abandoned mines, the quicksilver mines of Terlingua’s former glory.
Beyond, the road is rutted and pitted to such a degree that the Grand Am must slow to a proverbial crawl. To the right of them, the state park rises unvisited. To the left is the river and, therefore, the border. Between the two, the dirt road on which they travel. A bird twitters somewhere and falls silent. A breeze whispers.
They get out of the car.
The two women pry apart the barbs of the fence and they trespass onto the state land, because Vanessa wants to be on the top of the hill about a mile distant, because she wants to see all the way into the interior across the muddy river. Vanessa won’t hear a word about snakes. She threads her way around the prickly pear and agave and starts toward the hill. This is what John Ford saw, this is what Edna Ferber saw, when they looked over to the other side. The border across which all is uncertainty, radical factions, kidnapping, persecution of the natives, executions by the police, disappearances, diviners, sorcerers, visionaries, penitents, this is what they saw when looking out from here.
It’s Allison who breaks the silence.
“So who came up with the idea, anyway?”
Vanessa’s already sweating horribly. She keeps dabbing at her forehead with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “We should have brought water.”
“I mean, who really came up with the miniseries? If everybody has a different version of the story —”
“It was just some piece of coverage that Annabel had. I don’t know. Some novel.”
“I kept trying to, you know, find the original manuscript, but every manuscript that I found that was supposedly the manuscript, it turned out it wasn’t anything like the coverage, the stories were completely different.”
“Melody Forvath? Or whatever her name was?”
“I don’t think Melody Forvath wrote anything about dowsers. She’s friends with my mom, you know.”
“Your mom is friends with her? We could have saved money! You could have said it was a film school project or something!”
The river and its flagstone bottom begins to come into view, winding away like a lasso. Beyond, the neighbor to the south.
“I don’t think there is a book,” Allison declares.
“If there’s no book,” Vanessa says, “then what is there?”
“I don’t know. But there’s no actual book,” Allison replies. She stops. “I’m getting blisters.”
Not much farther. Always a little farther. Always a little more. The farther up you go, the farther you want to go. Once you get to the top of this hill, you just want to crest the next. You want to see the Solitario, the crater from the dormant volcano, and then you want to see the butte beyond.
“That doesn’t make any sense —”
“Unless Annabel —”
“Did it herself.”
“But why would she —”
“Well, she has this awful script about the wife of the Marquis de Sade. Handcuffs and ivory dildos and all that. I always put off dealing with her script.”
“I thought it was good.”
“You read it?”
The ridge of the hill, just another fifty paces. Only when they have trudged the fifty paces, thinking about a story idea that has apparently sprung into being without an author, only after they have gazed solemnly on the land to the south, across the border, only then do they see what is on the north side of the hill, cowering in the shadow of a rock formation. A family of Mexicans. Not exactly a family of Mexicans, or not certainly. The group of Mexicans has no patriarch. The family of Mexicans is composed of women and children, namely a woman who looks as if she’s maybe in her early thirties, a little heavy, careworn, wearing a nylon tracksuit; and a girl in her teens, in denim and halter top; a boy about fifteen, with a first faint growth of mustache; and two little boys, maybe six and eight.
What Vanessa notices right away is that all of them are wet, the legs of their trousers are wet. They have been immersed, maybe in a place where it is possible to ford the great muddy creek.
“Ohmygod, they scared the shit out of me,” Allison blurts out.
It’s the teenager, the boy, who looks as if he might do the two women harm. The others are frightened. And dusty. And wet.
Vanessa says, “Uh, hello. We’re really sorry we bothered you. We were just going for a . . . for a hike.”
The absurdity of her worldly concerns, talking about some miniseries, who wrote the miniseries, who came up with the idea of the dowsers, when nearby this is taking place, the drama of woman and children in pursuit of things that this place offers, this country.
“You guys speak any English? Ingles?”
The woman shakes her head. The teenage boy nods, then changes his mind.
“Allison, you speak any Spanish?”
“I can order dinner in Italian.”
“Where are you going? Can you answer that question?” Vanessa tries, with the family. “Can you say where you are going? What town? Terlingua?”
The woman in the tracksuit, whom Vanessa thinks of as the mother, shakes her head violently. But even if the family could answer where they were going, they wouldn’t, because where they are going is El Paso or Las Cruces or Albuquerque, where they have cousins or other relatives or neighbors who are going to help them slip quietly into the American economy.
“Do you have agua?” Vanessa asks, and she gestures as if to drink from a flask or canteen. The Mexicans stare at her, as if the question is an impropriety, and then, as if there is some preliminary agreement among themselves to scatter in the face of Anglos, especially these filmmaker yanquis wearing too much black and standing in the middle of the desert without water or sunblock, the Mexicans start down the hill, heading north toward an expanse that will take them the whole morning to get across.
“Wait,” Vanessa says. “Wait.”
Allison says, “What are you doing?”
“They can’t,” Vanessa says. “There are bears out there and stuff. They can’t sleep out there.”
She addresses herself to the teenage boy, trying to act it out. “Don’t go, don’t go.”
But the mother begins to head off again, and the boys follow her soon after, and it’s only when they begin walking that Vanessa sees that the teenage boy has a good reason for looking fierce, for looking menacing, namely that he’s limping badly. It’s only after they’ve watched the Mexicans attempt to descend into the valley that Vanessa feels the beginning of responsibility in herself. For certain, this is a tonal color that she has read about but never quite known. She’s skeptical about the Mexican boy. She’s skeptical about what she should do about it. She’s skeptical about the part of American movies where the sentimentalists rush in. She’s skeptical about epiphany, about the Greek origin of the word, the making manifest. Simplicity nauseates her.
But in the moment of being undecided, intellectually, her physiognomy leaps into decisiveness without hesitation. There’s the border patrol somewhere in the distance, and the border patrol will be coming this way. And there is the danger of exposure, and there’s the danger of hypothermia or death by thirst, which is apparently a horrible way to die. She doesn’t know what she feels; she feels something in the crimson range, something in ultraviolet, but she knows she’s going to do something about the Mexican family and she doesn’t care what gets lost in the process.
“You have to help me,” she says to Allison, and she begins running down the hill after the pollos, and Allison the intern follows after, and in the illusionistic space of the desert, the pollos are a hundred yards away, though they seem much closer, and she seems to run after them without ever getting closer, calling all the while to the teenage boy. In the distance, she can see the mother, carrying one of the younger children now, as though the younger boy were a papoose. The little one nuzzles at her, the cuffs of his jeans pushed up so that Vanessa can see that his socks are lime green.
“Wait,” Vanessa says, “wait.”
And as if he understands, the teenager turns and stops, his face sweaty with discomfort.
“Do you need money? Dinero? We can give you dinero.” She goes into her wallet, and she pulls out twenties, and she starts putting them into the hand of the teenager. “Take these. Just take them.” And then she points at her ankle. “Don’t you want to let me see your ankle?” And Vanessa pulls off her own hiking boot, hopping up and down, and then her rag sock, and she shows her ankle to the boy. She’s never realized that she has a perfect ankle before. But that’s what it looks like now. The perfect ankle of privilege. She has made her ankle available to him just so that she can point at him. “Let me see. Let me see if you’re injured.”
The mother has doubled back now, and she and her teenage daughter, if that’s who the younger woman is, are repeating the word no to the boy, over and over, and there are some other bits of advice in Spanish: No es tiempo de haraganear, de todos modos seria demasiado peligroso quedarnos por acá, y aquellas son unas locas, a lo mejor estan drogadas, así que deben alejarse de ellas, but the boy has taken the twenties and he is going to display his ankle now, with a kind of bravado, and he sits on the dusty hillside, and he pulls off his damp sneaker and his muddy sock, and he smiles gallantly, and Vanessa can see how his ankle is already swelling up.
“When did you do this? Did you injure yourself in the river? Trying to cross? You know it’s going to get worse, right? It gets worse for forty-eight hours. That’s what happens with a sprain. It’s a sprain, right? You didn’t get bit by a scorpion or anything, right?”
When she touches him, she touches him as if she knows, as if the skills of the nurse-practitioner are suddenly hers, though she’s just a hypochondriac with a home medical encyclopedia, nothing more. “You should let us drive you, wherever you need to go.”
Allison chimes in. “We have a car, back there. We have a car. Pontiac? We have a car and we can drive you wherever you need to go. Because of the border patrol. And we can get you water. Agua.”
The mother says no absolutely and firmly, and then the group of them is standing there in the middle of the desert, the Mexican border jumpers and the two Anglo filmmakers, without having ten words of a common tongue between them. It’s only performance that is going to make the point clear, Vanessa thinks, and it’s not even a performance, when it comes to her. Who’s even thinking about the movies now; the movies are for kids in private colleges, so that they won’t feel lonely on weekends. Movies are so that she’ll have something to tell her grandchildren one day, about the people she met. Movies are because it’s the thing you can do here in this place; you can make a movie with your millions of dollars. Movies are nothing compared with the boy with the sprained ankle and the faces of his little brothers, sun burnished, etched with concern, desperate.
“We can’t let you go walking into the middle of the state park, where you are going to get picked up by the authorities, so that you’ll be delivered to Immigration and get deported immediately. We can’t let you do that to yourselves. If you came with us, you could come back to our hotel, and then we’ll find a way to get you into the interior of the state somehow, away from the border and the border patrol, and then we’ll leave you with whomever you want, in whatever city that you want, and then you can try to get some work somewhere. I’m not saying that I have any comparable experience, but I feel like you can understand some of what I’m saying here, and I’m being genuine about what I’m saying, that we just can’t let you do that. There are coyotes out there, there might be mountain lions out there, and it’s dangerous. We have a car, and we have unlimited Avis mileage, and we think you should get into the car with us, and we’ll bring you to the new life, if that’s what you’re after. We’ll bring you to the life on this side of the border, even though we sort of think this new life isn’t all that great. We don’t want to judge what it looks like to you, we just want you to have what you want, because we have enough to share. We can give you the chances you want, at least for now. We can give you the promise of this side of the border, if that’s what you think you need. Please just don’t go walking toward that volcano crater in the middle of the park when you can’t even walk, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen out there.”
Can’t the Mexican family, with their ruddy features, understand the human truth of the moment? The truth in the earnestness of Vanessa’s “please”? They must understand. They can understand that the teenage boy cannot walk into the desert with his ankle as it is, and they can understand the shoulder that Allison offers him now as they begin to head south, toward the car.
At the top of a hill, Allison tries her cell phone, on a hunch.
To the teenage boy, she says, “Ever tried one of these?”
“Sí,” he says.
“Hey,” Allison says after a moment. “There’s a message from my dad!”