Kevin felt a slight pinch of rejection, not so much in her words but in that glance. He struggled for something to say.
Finally: “That damn dog doesn’t hang with the rest,” more a question than a statement, and the second ill-placed use of the word “damn” was embarrassing, but the girl pretended to take no notice of it. She’d rolled the sleeves of her canvas camouflage shirt up to the elbows, and the blood had come to that point but no further, a trick Kevin could never manage.
Done with the gutting, Amanda drew a cotton rope from her fanny pack, tossed it over a mesquite limb, passed it through the deer’s opened hocks, and tied it off then dallied the other end to her saddle horn. “Bonny’s kind of a loner,” she said, “but she’ll stay on a cat trail just as well as the others.”
This, Kevin did not believe. If so, the dog would have gone with the others.
The girl clicked her tongue and Dunk stepped forward, raising the carcass to where the nose was about a foot from the ground. Amanda half hitched the dallied end of the rope around her hand, walked to the mesquite, keeping the rope taut, and tied it off around the trunk in no more than forty-five seconds.
“What if the others strike a trail?” Kevin asked.
From her pack, Amanda had taken out a sharpening steel, over which she stropped her knife blade with half a dozen quick, chirping passes. She looked up at Kevin, squinting for the sunlight at his back. “She’ll hear them baying and catch up after a while.”
Kevin didn’t believe this either but didn’t want to say it. He wanted to stay longer, but knew, and understood the girl knew, his lingering was useless toward any purpose either of them could think of. The embarrassment of Hallot’s earlier teasing still hung on the air about them, and Kevin suddenly became anxious to leave. “You’re taking the deer home?”
“I think so,” the girl said. “Then I’ll come back.”
But she glanced toward the ground when she said this, a signal, to Kevin’s thinking, that she was not comfortable spending too much time alone with him. He both wanted her to stay and wanted her to go, those conflicted feelings pulling at him. This was a moment, in years to come, he would recall and regret many times.
He nodded, clicked his mule to a start and turned to go, when the girl called out to him.
“Hey, Kevin.”
He had never heard her use his name before and was surprised by the strange warmth it sent through his chest. He stopped his mule and waited, the girl’s pauses as unnervingly long as her father’s.
“Tell my dad not to worry,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
“I don’t think anybody’s worried for you, Mandi.”
She smiled, brightest one of the day, perhaps for the sound of her name on Kevin’s voice, perhaps for the comment itself. “Why’s that?” she asked.
Kevin nudged Sally to a start and turned her up canyon. “Looks like you can take care of yourself.”
Kevin rolled in from Tucson just after eight o’clock Thursday morning and stopped at the same Circle K which had stood at the west edge of Douglas some thirty-five years now. The woman behind the counter, Yesenia Romero, was the same clerk hired the day the place opened for business. He could tell that Yesi, though she didn’t let on, recognized him. For how many times as a youngster had he purchased beer and cheap wine illegally across that very counter? He put down his Danish and coffee and the woman did not look up at him.
“How you doing, kiddo?”
“I’m okay, Yesi.” He said this as though that interim span of time had been a week instead of thirty years. “I’m in Tucson now.”
“S’what Oli tells me. Me dicen que estás muy bien.”
“Gracias a Dios.” he said. “I’m still here, still walking around.”
“¿Qué más se puede esperar?” she said. What more can you expect?
When Kevin pulled out of the Circle K, he noted the beautiful morning, his mood elevated now that he’d made the decision to come here. He’d driven Pan American Avenue no more than a block, when he caught a flickering in his rearview mirror—police lights, that of a Border Patrol cruiser, in fact. It took him a moment to realize those lights were meant for him. Having lived in southern Arizona most of his life, Kevin had been stopped by Border Patrol a half dozen times, but never for more than a routine check. This part of the state bore a number of rotating checkpoints, and anyone who lived close to the Mexican border was accustomed to the dark green uniforms of these federal agents.
The young man who stepped up to his vehicle was blue-eyed and square-bodied with a buzz haircut and a slight paunch and seemed interchangeable with every Border Patrol agent he’d ever seen.
“Good morning, sir,” he said through Kevin’s open window. But after that, the agent seemed at a loss. Kevin recognized the same confusion he’d seen in his students’ faces over the years when they tried to pretend they understood something—Derrida’s concept of relative truth or Edmund Wilson’s views on Faulkner.
“Can I help you out with anything?” Kevin asked.
“Well,” the officer said. “I just need to see some identification.”
“Okay,” Kevin said, opening his wallet, which he’d pulled out as soon as he’d seen the flashing lights.
The agent took his driver’s license, said thank you, and walked slowly back to his vehicle, peering down at the document cupped in his hand as though he’d picked up some interesting artifact, a pot shard or arrow head.
His back still turned to Kevin, the agent reached through his window and picked up a hand radio. As he spoke into the receiver, he moved his arms, and Kevin sensed something in the movement, sheepishness perhaps, like an adolescent explaining a dented fender to his parents.
When the officer came back to Kevin’s SUV, he hesitated before handing Kevin the license.
“Is everything okay?” Kevin asked.
“Oh, yes,” the agent said. “We, um, received a call on a vehicle like this—just routine. You’re okay.”
“You sure?”
The agent nodded, looked toward downtown, then back at Kevin. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Have a nice day.”
The incident left Kevin perplexed, though the recondite agendas of law enforcement, especially the Border Patrol, had always been a mystery and of little interest to him. He checked into the Frontera Motel a little while later, after driving around town for a bit. Outwardly, Douglas had changed little. The buildings that lined G Avenue, though ramshackle, looked generally the same. The government brick had endured well over a hundred years. Most of the structures were stucco, and patches of that brick showed through the less maintained edifices. The better part of the downtown had been built in the crib-row, parapet façade urban architecture of the early twentieth century, so that the building-lined street looked almost like a time capsule of 1915 small-town America, flecked unselfconsciously with elements of its southwest border-region environment. Touches of green, red, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, had found their way subtly into the grain of the townscape. The sign heralding La Frontera Bar and Grill sported letters alternating those colors, the Modern Look discount clothing wore them in proud, foot-wide swaths across the awning, the barber pole at the door of Albert Garcia’s shop bore a green stripe along with the usual white and red.
Kevin noted that all but a few of the old prominent businesses—Ortega’s Shoes, Thompson Jewelers, Douglas Drug—had been absorbed in the last few years by “big boxes”—Wal Mart, Target, and Ace Hardware had lumbered into even this remotest of regions. There seemed a gut-it-out toughness