There is no sleeping on the ride across the Manzanares Mesa, not on the so-called roads that meander through the scrub. We bounce around violently in cracked vinyl seats as the old schoolbus rattles across washboard sections and potholes. The windows are down and dust is blowing in, turning our faces strangely pale and chalky, red-rimming our blinking eyes, burning our lungs with every breath. The floor of the bus is piled with garbage up to our ankles, mostly empty Coke cans and food wrappers. A relic of a woman leans against me, smacking her kerchiefed head against my shoulder with every jounce. Glazed with exhaustion, I try to stay upright but keep getting knocked into a young father balanced in the aisle like a surfer, a baby wailing inconsolably in his tattooed arms.
Eventually the endless expanse of scrub is interrupted by a few cinderblock huts with corrugated aluminum roofs, then more. Soon we’re grinding past stucco buildings that look a hundred years old. I ask the young dad if this is finally La Ceja, the end of the line. He motions to his ear and makes a face. I repeat the question, shouting this time. He gives me a sympathetic look and tells me no, it’s Ahorcada. La Ceja is the next pueblo up the road, still one more bus ride away.
The bus creaks to a halt in the plaza, just a big empty swath of dirt, and we spill out unsteadily into the blazing heat. My body feels like it’s been shaken to pieces and only loose scraps of skin hold me together. The driver climbs up on the roof and begins unceremoniously heaving luggage off the rack, starting with an old Samsonite hardshell. The suitcase almost hits me and bounces off the ground, indestructible. I step back out of luggage-heaving range, then yell stuff at the bus driver in Farsi until I feel better.
I smack dust off my clothes and tighten my backpack straps and walk over to the plaza store, a cinderblock building painted pee yellow. Even though it’s probably 90 degrees inside in the shade, it feels cool and refreshing compared to being outside. I buy a Budweiser — more plentiful than water in Mexico, and safer to drink — and sit down on a wooden bench with a view out the window-less window, really just a framed-out hole in the side of the building covered with bars.
Visions ripple in the heat waves. Kids playing soccer with a homemade ball. Two rear ends sticking out from underneath the hood of a pickup. A shabby-looking hut in the slow but sure process of keeling over.
The bus’s engine roars to life way sooner than previous experience has led me to expect. I gulp the rest of my Budweiser and trot back outside, where the sun beats at me with hot fists. The bus driver sees me coming, making eye contact as I run across the plaza. I raise my arm in a “wait for me!” gesture but he doesn’t, he closes the door and the bus shudders into motion. I take a few desperate strides after it, reaching a hand down my t-shirt for my moneypouch, realizing only a bribe might stop him now. But the bus is already rumbling away and disappearing behind a whitewashed church, giving me a brief glimpse of the old woman who was leaning against my shoulder, now looking out the window at me impassively. Then I’m standing alone in the plaza.
I return to the plaza store and its wooden bench and sit there with another can of beer, grimy and exhausted and thinking about absolutely nothing at all.
A couple hours later my butt has fallen asleep but the rest of me hasn’t. I wander outside and circle the plaza, which is only fringed by a few buildings with wide spaces in between — the store, the church, what must be the town hall although I forget the Spanish word for it. An entire side of the plaza is empty, filled only with a view of the mountains that have been creeping closer all day. I find myself wishing I still had my sunglasses. I encounter a few people, but they notice my crooked eye and turn away, making the sign of the cross.
After a while I return to the plaza store and reclaim my bench. The heat dissipates with the sun, which slowly ebbs behind the whitewashed church across the plaza. I buy a corn tortilla for dinner. It sits in my stomach like a stone. The store owner, a stoic unblinking man, shoos me outside and closes up for the night. He just laughs when I ask him if Ahorcada has a hotel.
I walk in the dusty gravel streets without knowing where to go, my backpack feeling impossibly heavy even though there isn’t much in it. I begin to wonder if I’m being followed. The pueblo is falling into shadows that become whatever my imagination makes them. Almost no windows are lit.
Then I’m at the edge of town, an undergrowth of ruin. A disembodied gateway arch is jutting from ocotillo blooms, which are almost luminescent in the moonlight. Barbed wire plucks at me, tearing a hole in my jeans. The remains of a fence disappear crookedly into the dark, the poles still standing. Cacti spill over a heap of something.
A shallow pool of sand becomes my bed. The residual heat of day seeps through my body, lapping at my alertness. Noises seem far-off even when they’re not. Every once in a while I stir, opening my eyes into tired slits. The moon is always in a different place than I expect, stealing across the sky in leaps.
