That helpful lard-ass back in Guanajuato wasn’t shitting me — the Manzanares Mesa is filled with a whole lot of nothing much. I’m glazed with boredom, staring out the windshield at a vista of altiplano scrubland. The road is an ugly gravel slash through the agave and brittlebush. It follows an intermittent chain of runty hills, a geological fault line riven with natural springs, the only reliable source of water in this near-desert. Every once in a while a ranch appears, a cluster of whitewashed mud-brick buildings with corrugated aluminum roofs that glint in the sun. They always look vibrant until you get up close, when the whitewash is revealed to be graying and roofs are caving in and open doorways gape into ruin. Their barbed wire corrals are empty, fencing in brown grass. If there’s a windmill, it’s still as a picture.

Eventually a small town appears on the horizon. I can see Quonset huts from this distance, each one a telltale bubble of reflective glare. Between them is the heatwave shimmer of pavement. The pueblo draws closer with excruciating slowness, even though I’m driving as fast as I dare — not very, since my truck is threatening to rattle apart on this washboard of a road. I notice the vista compressing a little, top and bottom. My eyelids are sagging from a bad case of highway hypnosis. I drink more coffee, crank the music louder. What the hell am I listening to, anyway? Some French neo-rap group, I guess.

Hard to believe that’s only Tanquian up ahead. After Tanquian — the so-called “Gateway to the Manzanares Mesa” — there are still three more pueblos and god knows how many more hours before I finally get to Ahorcada, where Nooshin has blown like a tumbleweed.

“Nooshin,” I whisper plaintively. The word is a razor blade in my mouth.

I imagine her emitting some possibility of forgiveness — for that greedy impregnating interlude in the shower, for dragging her deeper into Mexico, for staring mutely at her instead of promising “I’ll never leave you”. Her embrace will be soft and fierce, and I’ll say all the right things, and we’ll laugh about this awkward distance years from now. She won’t become a world I gained and lost.

Tanquian is the only crossroads on the Manzanares Mesa, an intersection of ruts in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. There isn’t much to the town. Mud-brick shacks crowd together, including one hung with a crucifix — the local church, I presume — and another ringed with plastic playground equipment, which is probably the only school on the mesa. A newly-painted Pemex station sits in a lake of asphalt. Quonset huts are lined up with doors open, totally empty.

I pull into the Pemex station and tank up my truck, watching the old-fashioned pump spin. Shadows turn lazily on the asphalt around me. Their outlines are the shape of vultures, circling high in the cobalt sky. The dials slow, then stop.

The interior of the Pemex station could use a new paintjob too. The walls are mottled and peeling, and scratched by racks of expired foodstuffs. Insect carcasses accumulate on strips of flypaper that hang from the ceiling. A fan beats the tired air.

The attendant is an old used-up scarecrow of a man dressed in layered sweaters. His attention is fixed on a portable black-and-white TV behind the counter. A Mexican talking head is interspersed with file footage of the aftermath of a gun battle. Shotgun blasts and bullet holes have shredded the interior of a small house, peppering walls and tearing up furniture. Sheet-covered bodies are scattered around like laundry in a tornado. In a hallway are bodies that fit under towels. Children caught in the crossfire.

“Another narcotraficante shootout, huh?” I say in Spanish, settling my elbows on the counter.

“They gunned down a policeman and his entire family. 11 lives snuffed out, and for what? Even the Colombians don’t kill a man’s family. And during Semana Santa, the holiest week of the year. Right before Easter! What kind of animals are we becoming in this country?” The attendant’s voice is an emphysema croak. Then he turns my direction and his rheumy eyes widen. “Hey. You’re an American.”

“Yep,” I say, reaching into a cargo pants pocket for my wallet. “Pump #2. 335 pesos.” I count out the multicolored bills.

“You need change?”

“Nope.”

“Then just leave it on the counter,” he tells me, and raises a gnarled hand in demonstration. “I’m useless because of the goddamn arthritis. Reuben? Reuben!”

A teenage mechanic bangs in from the back garage, smoking and sweat-plastered and wiping greasy hands on his sweatshirt. He scoops up the money and punches open the cash register. “What’s the score?” the kid half-asks, half-complains in between drags on his cigarette.

“How can you think about soccer at a time like this? The drug cartels are killing entire families now!” The old man turns to me and wags his chin deploringly. “The country is running with blood, and all this asshole cares about is soccer!”

Reuben acts like he didn’t hear the insult. He finishes separating the different peso denominations into their tray compartments — then slams the cash register shut, violently enough to make the attendant startle.

I brandish a polaroid of Nooshin, flashing it back and forth between them. “You guys see this American girl come through here a couple days ago?”

“Yesterday,” the old-timer croaks, staring at the TV. Pools of blood are neutered into spilled oil on its black-and-white screen. “She took a map.”

“One of these?” I ask, grabbing a trifold map of Mexico from a dusty rack. It’s superficial and outdated. Only the major highways and roads are depicted, and several new tollways and bypasses are missing. I put the map back. “Yesterday? You said you saw her yesterday?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You said you saw her — ”

“What?”

“He asked if you saw her yesterday!” Reuben interjects with an irritated face, his voice raised.

Now it’s the attendant’s turn to grimace in irritation. His eyes disappear into angry creases. “That’s what I already told him!” He swivels back to me. “She got off the bus to Guanajuato and waited for the other bus. The one that goes east into the Huasteca.”

“East into the Huasteca,” I echo dully.

“That’s what I said! But there was a big thunderstorm over the mountains. A trucker came through here earlier, said the road washed out.” His emphysema croak is distinctly jealous. If only the Manzanares Mesa got rain like that.

The kid is staring past my shoulder. “You got 4-wheel drive on that thing, right?” It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the Explorer. When I nod, he says, “You can probably make it.”

That speculation outrages the elderly attendant. “Don’t tell him that! If he wants to go into the Huasteca, he should detour around on paved roads, Highway 13 — ”

“Highway 113,” Reuben snarks, correcting him. “But with 4-wheel drive — ”

“4-wheel drive? I don’t care if he’s got 100-wheel drive! If there’s no road — ”

The door slam shuts behind me, silencing them in mid-argument. I escape into the hot angry day. My heart feels misplaced, either in my throat or sunk into an ankle. East into the Huasteca…

Back in the Explorer I stare at my road atlas of Mexico, a single question looping through my head — where the hell does Nooshin think she’s going? South and she’s back in Guanajuato with me. West is the direction of Tijuana and America. North is where she came from, the dead end trail that culminates in La Ceja. But she’s heading east, across a mostly-empty swath of map, aiming for the Gulf of Mexico.

And not the touristy part of the Gulf, like Cancun or Cozumel. The Huasteca is a tropical region of dirt-poor Mexican Indian villages. Keep going east and she’ll hit the selva — rainforest — that shadows the coastline in spinach green. Nooshin amidst malaria and poisonous snakes and a million different kinds of parasites. With only a mostly-empty backpack. Not much money. Alone.

Well, not exactly alone. My gaze wanders across the cab to the passenger seat, her usual station. A paperback lies in her place, glossy with newness. The English-language version of What To Expect When You’re Expecting. We purchased it from Amazon.com because they ship to Mexico, but the book arrived after our scene in the plaza of the Museo de las Momias, after she fled. Add a pregnancy to the very short list of things Nooshin is taking into the rainforest.