“That’s my bus, right down there…”

I follow the line of the bus driver’s pointing arm. There’s a jagged gap in the walls of lush emerald jungle pressing against the road. A muddy swath of destruction leads downward. Trees are knocked out of the way, undergrowth flattened. At the bottom of a ravine is the converted schoolbus, its rainbow colors dirty with mud and leaves. The bus is miraculously upright.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I gasp in English.

“Que?” — what? — he asks uncomprehendingly.

I ease my Ford Explorer to a halt, wary of the still-muddy road, and switch back to Spanish. “How the hell does a bus crash into a ravine and nobody gets hurt?”

“This is nothing,” the bus driver yawns. “When I first started driving, 10, maybe 12 years ago, I went over a cliff.”

I wait for the punchline, but there isn’t one. He’s a reclining figure in the passenger seat, not wearing his seatbelt, a half-empty bottle of tequila in his lap. Any more relaxed and he’d be comatose.

“Anybody get hurt that time?” I ask.

“Yep,” he nods.

We sink into silence — or as much silence as you get in a rainforest with the windows down. Invisible monkeys are howling. Birds dart through the thick foliage, exploding into histrionics. Overhead the canopy rustles in a distant wind.

I’m imagining Nooshin and a busload of Indian peasants, staring out rain-lashed windows as the world suddenly tilts and accelerates, the bus hurtling down down down through bone-jarring impacts, trees snapping like twigs, the screams of —

“You think my bus can be winched back up?”

I glance over at the bus driver. His inkspot eyes are roaming beneath a brow of sweaty ringlets, gauging the physics of weight and angle and leverage. The cruel physics. There’s no way in hell that bus will ever see this road again, and I tell him so.

“You’re probably right.” He tips the tequila bottle against his bushy mustache and holds it there for several swigs. The perfect que sera, sera gesture.

I’m noticing the footprints in the drying mud. They rise from the bus and pool in the road around us, then recede in the direction we came from — west, back toward the Manzanares Mesa. All of the footprints except a single set. Those long strides aim east. “That was her, huh?” I don’t have to specify the pronoun.

The bus driver nods. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she said she wasn’t going back.” He waves the tequila bottle in the direction of the rising sun. “Tlacoteotalpan is the next pueblo that way.”

“Tlaco…teo…what?”

“Tlacoteotalpan. It’s a long drive. An even longer walk.”

“How far?” I ask, stricken.

“A couple dozen kilometers.”

OH. MY. GOD. Suddenly I’m on the verge of tears, picturing Nooshin half-drowned in the deluge, wading even more deeply into the jungle, refusing to return to the same village that I can still see in my truck’s rearview mirror. She must hate me to death.

“I talk Nahuatl,” the bus driver is saying. “That’s all they talk in Tlacoteotalpan, far as I know. I don’t think there’s anybody left who talks Spanish. Does your girlfriend talk Nahuatl?”

“No,” I mutter, babying the Explorer back into gear. The engine sounds like a rockslide gathering momentum.

We lurch into motion messily, slipping and sliding down the road. The driving is treacherous, which I find strangely reassuring. This is just like spring on the farm back in Iowa, when the ground thaws and the fields turn into quagmire. My father’s driving lessons are still with me, like rusty nails pounded into my skull. Keep a firm hand on the wheel. Stay in the low gears. Don’t spin out. And his other lessons come flooding back too, the bitter lessons about failure and punishment. When I bogged the tractor or slid into the ditch, my father let me have it — with words, usually, although sometimes he used a belt or even fists. Over the years his angry prediction became a chant, the rumbling background noise of my life: “You’ll never amount to nothing!”

Until I met Nooshin I didn’t have anything to live for, only against. Now I’m going to be the father, and the new life she’s carrying will be my son or daughter. Time to break the chain of harms propelling me. I won’t abuse my kid as my father abused me, and my grandfather abused him. I swear it.