ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Werner J. Egli is an accomplished Swiss writer with novels for all ages, published in German-speaking Europe, where he received some of the most prestigious awards for his writing. His books are translated into many other languages. He got nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen-medal after Tunnel Kids was published. It is his first novel translated into English. Werner J. Egli lives near Zurich, Switzerland and in Tucson, Arizona.
Published by ARAVAIPA-Verlag
Zelgmatt 24, CH-8132 EGG bei Zürich, Switzerland
First published in Germany by C. Bertelsmann/Random House, Munich, 1999
Copyright by Werner J. Egli, 2017
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-3-03864-220-6
Jacket design: flin
Jacket art: Bert Silberstein
Translation: James Pierce
Edited by Esther Porter
PUBLISHER`S NOTE:
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, government agencies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Acknowlegments
I would like to thank Melissa Gray, who worked as a first
draft proofreader on this book, to Marlies Single and to James
Pierce, who helped me get it started.
For my kids, Tamara, Dunja, Lara and Nicolas
and for my grandson Yannick.
SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico
“Indian rebels retreated into the jungle yesterday, leaving three villages to the 12,000 soldiers who have entered this remote region of Mexico to put down a bloody rebellion.”
The Arizona Daily Star, January 1994
“They call them tunnel rats. It is easier for a society that labels its children as vermin to treat them as vermin.”
The Arizona Daily Star, May 1994
The photo was of my mother, but it was also the memory of the day a tourist bus strayed into our village. Santa Claus staggered out of the American bar on his way to the soccer field where all the children were supposed to get a present.
Santa Claus was a gringo. The people of our village called him Papa Biddle. Once, he bribed me with a dollar not to tell my father about how I’d surprised him grabbing my sister under her skirt with his fleshy gringo hand as he was telling her a funny story.
I would often think back to that Christmas day. Because of all the festivities, it did not fit into the life I was accustomed to. Shortly before noon, Papa Biddle stepped out of the American bar and went across the street, listing to one side, and through the soccer field to behind the goal in the forest’s shade. We had all gathered there, about two hundred children from the entire region, some from even farther away, from around Rio Pequi and from the village of San Isidro. We each got our present from the Red Cross by way of Papa Biddle’s trembling gringo hand, his fingernails as brown from smoking fat cigars as his few remaining teeth.
My mother, my sister Theresa, and my brothers Miguelito and Francisco were there. Mother had the baby, Paolita, in her arms. And, suddenly, this small tourist bus halted at the edge of the soccer field, which was also the marketplace and fiesta-place for our little village. And then people from all over the world that had come here to see us, the descendants of the Maya Empire, moved hurriedly across the rough plaza, where the grass grew so sparsely that not a single goat could grow fat on it.
One of the tourists, a gringo with a goatee and a wallet that hung heavily in the back pocket of his baggy pants, took a flash photograph of my mother just as Papa Biddle leaned forward with his flowing beard to give Paolita her Christmas present. The baby screamed, and Mother looked distraught, probably because Biddle had just exhaled his whiskey breath directly in her face. The gringo with the goatee had pressed the camera button at the same time, the flash startling her. This photo was my strongest memory from that day. The gringo took it with a Polaroid camera, and seconds later he proudly showed it around before he handed it over to my mother. It was a wonder in a day full of wonders, which were happening only in my head, as I sent my most secret wishes to Heaven, along with the cloud rising from the men of our village. They all sat in front of a bodega, completely bored, smoking, drinking beer and watching Papa Biddle parcel out the presents. They also looked at my mother, who had once been the most beautiful of all the women in our village, more desirable even than my sister Theresa.
That Christmas now lay four years back. My mother’s face at the stench of Biddle’s whiskey-filled breath, the terror in the baby’s wide-open eyes and Papa Biddle’s furrowed, bulbous nose, red as a rotting strawberry.
It was not the photo itself that I had carried with me since then; instead, it was my memory of it. I did not know who had that picture now, or whether it still existed. For a while, Mother had it hanging in our hut. Then, when Father left our village, Los Chorros, to join Subcomandante Marcos in the revolution for justice, freedom, and democracy, it disappeared. I think, at the time, Father had it in the breast pocket of his old jacket, directly over his heart. Later, when he returned, and everyone thought the revolution was over and that the government would at least return a bit of our land to us, it was again in our home. When I looked at it closely the last time, there were dark spots on it, and I knew that they were flecks of my father’s blood. Maybe it is still hanging there, fastened with a nail to one of the posts that held up the roof.
Biddle died in the meantime. He drank himself to death in the American bar. Theresa had been working for several months as a waitress in there. She no longer lived with us, but with a young man named Hector, who worked at a sawmill where they cut trees into lumber. They lived in a hut near Acteal, provided by the company that ran the sawmill. Theresa never stayed at our home anymore. She came only once to get her things from under her bed. I asked her if she was going to marry Hector. She laughed and said that she had no intention of marrying anybody. But she was pregnant. I heard her fighting with Mother, who called her a person with no sense of responsibility, just like the whores in the bars of big towns. Theresa ran out of the house to where Hector was waiting for her in a pickup truck that belonged to the company. Before she climbed in, she looked around once more not wanting her heart to forget where she had come from—her bundle pressed to her as if it were a baby.
A few weeks after Theresa left, they took Paolita and Francisco away. Mother had given them up for adoption because our life could no longer be called life; instead, it was torture. At the time, I did not understand adoption. It was only a word to me, nothing else. Only when some people from the city came and took Paolita and Francisco—only then did I understand what was happening. I could see it in my mother’s dark eyes. I could see the pain in them, the sorrow. I ran into the forest and cried my soul out of my body. I knew that, because of my father’s murder, our family had ceased to exist. It was destroyed, our blood-bond torn apart. When I came home, Mother was in the field. Miguelito sat in the hut and stared into a hole. Mother had not given him up for adoption. Nobody would have wanted him. From his birth, something was not right in his head. So nobody wanted to have him, except for my mother. She loved him more than Paolita or Francisco, perhaps even more than me.
I thought about it for a long time, but I never understood why Mother did not give me away too. I thought about it every day for weeks, especially at night when I couldn’t sleep. Maybe I was too old. Too rebellious. Too convinced I would go my way, undeterred by anyone or anything.
“Your son is dangerous,” the men who thought they knew me had warned her.
“You give this boy his way, and there will be a disaster,” they said. “He cannot be satisfied with his lot in life.”
And so it was. I thought I might kill someone if they put me up for adoption. I was ready. Death did not scare me anymore. Death was my friend—a liberator from pain. Whoever gave their lives to it found peace.
My mother and I hardly spoke to each other anymore.
Then, when the long rains were over, I took the wallet I had pulled from the gringo’s baggy pants pocket four years back, and I left our village.
I went northward along the old cart road through the forest. For the first two days, I hid in the undergrowth whenever I encountered someone. On the third day, I came to the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I went to a store and bought a pair of proper shoes, a pair of pants and a shirt. I also purchased a hat because the shady forest stopped here at the bank of the river, and beyond lay open land where the sun burned down. I left the city in the night and walked in the moonlight through the open country until I was tired. Then I lay down and slept with the wallet in my pocket and my right hand tightly gripped around the machete I had brought with me from home.
It was this way every day and every night. I was a stranger in a strange world, a descendant of the Maya empire. My mother tongue was not that of the people with whom I came into contact. I learned Spanish in our village school, but my native language was Tzotzil. To everyone who was not one of us, I was a Tzotzil Indian.
I did not trust anyone and nobody trusted me on my way north to the big city. The capital. Twenty million people lived there. I tried to imagine how it looked from high above. Like a colony of millions of ants on a hill, I guessed. And I was one of them, the only one who didn’t know anything about anything, just roamed around aimlessly, sometimes here, sometimes there. Crossing the streets on the red light. “Hey, are you colorblind, kid?” Against the flow of hurrying people. “Get away, kid.” And stepping on all kinds of people’s feet. “Excuse me,” I’d say, to which the response usually was something like “Pay more attention to where you’re walking, you filthy little bastard.”
It seemed I was nothing but a wretch without a home or family. Outwardly, I was no different than the other ants. But I did not belong. I was an outsider. A dangerous little scoundrel no one had better get in the way of.
A kid stood next to a stand where there was cold soda. He was a boy scarcely older than I was. He stood there staring at me with a smile.
“Where are you from, my friend?” he asked, perhaps feeling like nothing more than an ant himself, young like me and maybe without a home or family, although he did not look as run down.
“Chiapas,” I said and paid for the glass of soda.
“Chiapas is far away,” he said.
“Very.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Santiago Molina.”
“Jesus.” He stretched out his hand, which was missing two fingers. “Like He who got nailed to the cross for your sins.”
“What about your sins?” I answered.
“You can trust me,” he laughed. “I am like you.”
I looked him in the eyes. He was not like me. He was like Jesus. Soft and without deceit. His eyes were like my mother’s, and hers had been like Maria’s, the holy one, until Father’s blood had covered the picture in my head. My mother’s name was Maria and, to me, in my early youth, she was like her too.
“I’ll bet that you want to go to America,” said Jesus.
He meant the United States of America. I had learned that in school. That everything was America here. From Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. America. It was my land; Indian land was stolen from us, for which my father had fought at the side of Subcomandante Marcos. But when people like me traveled, they traveled to foreign parts. To America. The United States. The land of the proud and free. The land of gringos Papa Biddle called it, even though he was one himself.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” I said.
“Bet you’re going to America.”
We shook hands, and he said that he knew where I could spend the night.
“My mother will make you a meal, and you can sleep in my bed,” he said. “You evidently haven’t slept in a regular bed for many days.”
“Weeks,” I said.
I went with him, diagonally through the city, through crowds of people in the streets. He cleared a path for me, using his elbows to do so. No, he was not Jesus. People did not step back from him, nor bow to him respectfully. He did not lay hands on the heads of any of the crippled beggars hunkered before the old churches and on the marble benches to free them from their pains and cares. He pushed people out of the way. He bumped into a man who came out of a store. He ran across the street between honking automobiles, leading the way for me. He laughed as one of the drivers shouted angrily at him and shook his fist and pounded a dented fender. He spat against a dirt-smeared windshield, the car horns calling to us as if they were a pack of chained animals.
“This city is Hell,” he said. “A person breathes in more exhaust than air. The water makes you sick, and if you find a place to lie down and die, the rats eat the sandals off your feet before you’re even dead.”
“Why don’t you live somewhere else?”
“Where else would I want to live?”
I ran along with him blindly until we came to a sheet-metal hut, where his friends waited for him. There were four of them, including a girl wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt full of holes.
“This is Santiago,” he said to them. “He is on his way to America.” They studied me. It was as if he had told them that I had come from another planet, a little green man from space. Only the girl smiled at me. For some reason, that scared me.
“Where have you hidden your money?” one of them asked me.
“I don’t have any money,” I lied.
“You don’t want to have any money?”
“I don’t have any money.”
He walked around me and stopped behind my back. I sensed him behind me, but I did not turn toward him. I did not risk looking at the girl. I looked at Jesus. I looked into his eyes.
“I told you,” he said. “This city is Hell, and a name like mine is only a camouflage.”
The one standing behind me blew cigarette smoke onto the back of my neck.
“I’ll ask you once more,” he said. “Where have you hidden your money?”
“Tell him before he gets angry,” the girl demanded. Better tell him where you’ve hidden the money.”
“If I had any money, I would give it to you.”
“Then take off your pants.”
“No, I won’t do that.”
“You should undress,” said the girl.
“Do what he says,” said Jesus.
“I’m going now,” I said while I moved toward the door. I wanted to get out of this tin shack, where the floor was as black as tightly packed coal and stank of motor oil. To get out the door I moved toward the strips of light shining between the metal pieces, but the girl and the two others blocked my way.
“You can all see what is in my bag,” I said. The bag lay on the floor. They searched through it and scattered my stuff across the floor. They didn’t want it. Only the machete got their interest. One of them picked it up from the floor and held it in his hand. He grinned at me showing me my machete.
The one standing behind me pushed the glowing tip of his cigarette into my neck. The sudden pain made me cry out because I was not expecting it. Pain like I had never experienced before.
He stood over me with his legs spread apart and he looked big and vicious. I only saw him vaguely in the low light. He smoked a cigarette, and the ash fell through a strip of sunlight, breaking into small flecks that fluttered down to me. He raised a foot and stepped on my midsection.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “You’re lucky we don’t kill you.”
I wanted to tell him that he should kill me, but I couldn’t put the words together. Something wasn’t working right in my mind. My thoughts filled with all sorts of possibilities all jumbled together. Why don’t you go ahead and kill me, you bastard. It raged inside my brain, but it never left my lips. I thought about the photo. My mother’s face. Papa Biddle’s rotten strawberry of a nose. Paolita’s eyes.
My eyes saw something else. My eyes looked back to Los Chorros and into our hut, where my brother Miguelito stared at a hole that he had dug in the floor with a stick. He simply stared into the hole, where a small bug had fallen in and was trying to climb out unsuccessfully.
Blood smells good, my head thought. Better than motor oil.
I was freezing because I was naked.
The girl looked at me. She didn’t smile anymore. She was afraid. Now, it was the girl who was afraid. Not me. I was at home. I saw the bug crawl out of the hole, and I saw Miguelito jump up and step on it.
Jesus stood at the door.
“Okay?” one of the others asked him.
Jesus opened the door a crack. Glaring sunlight transformed him into a shadow. He stuck his head through the gap.
“Okay,” he said.
The others went out. Only Jesus remained. He looked at me.
“I’m sorry that I had to disappoint you,” he said. “We could be brothers and it would not be any different. In our world, you can’t trust anybody.”
Now, he left too. He left me behind in the hut, and I lay there and closed my burning eyes. My heart pounded as if it wanted to explode. I had blood in my mouth and my nose. They had beaten me with their fists and with a piece of a water pipe until I fell to my knees. They hit me in the head with a brick, and they burned me with the glowing ends of their cigarettes as I lay naked on the floor.
I wanted to die, but I could not. Then, I wanted to live. I pulled together all my strength and pulled on my pants and shirt. They had taken my shoes with them. I picked up my bag from the floor and put my stuff they’d left behind back in. It was dark when I left the hut.
The city rumbled in the night that was not night. Lights everywhere. A sea of lights. Light and noise. The sky was light, but there were no stars. No moon. Light, bright and streaming and dirty like the humid night air.
I went down a street and in the dim light of a lamp, at a fountain dedicated to an angel, a man lay there on the ground, an old man on whose furrowed face the lamplight shone mercilessly. The white stubble of his beard glittered. His mouth was half opened, but he did not breathe. The man was dead. He had come here to drink some water. The stone angel looked down at him with one eye. Someone had knocked the other eye out. I drank the water, which did not taste like water. I washed the blood from my face, cleaning my wounds. I cooled the aching burns in my skin.
In a park, I lay down, hiding deep in the shadow of leafy bushes. I thought about the rats. I fell asleep and woke up with a dog licking my face.
The small dog was a shaggy cur that smelled like garbage. It had a red leather band around its neck and a piece missing from its floppy left ear. I liked dogs. At home, there was always one roaming around thinking it belonged to us. My brother Francisco was bitten once by a bitch. Javier Chavez, the police officer at Los Chorros, had shot and killed her after that. Because dogs, he said, had no right to bite people.
This dog with one and a half ears probably thought I needed a friend. As I woke up and pushed him away, he began to bark at me.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He raced around me in a circle, jumping over my outstretched legs. His floppy ear fluttered next to his head, and the other was half raised. He raced around me, barking as if possessed by the Devil. I tried to catch him, but he easily evaded my hand.
“Stop it,” I shouted at him. “I’m getting dizzy.”
He stopped and lay down in the grass a few feet away, panting. His eyes were half closed, and he acted as if he were looking past me. He was waiting for me to try to grab him. If I moved only a single finger, he stopped panting. He wanted to show me how intelligent and quick he was and that it would be impossible for me to get a hold of him.
“You’re not as sly as you think,” I said.
He grinned at me, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
“It’s just that I don’t think I can take on a dog. I wouldn’t know what to feed you.”
I was hungry myself. The last things I had eaten were a couple of refried bean tacos.
“Come here.”
The dog just lay there.
“You better come here.”
He did not obey. I found a few dried tortilla crumbs in my pocket. I put them in my hand and offered them to him. He did not move off his spot. I licked the crumbs out of my hand and lay back down. I had no idea what time it was. Middle of the night it seemed. Maybe three o’clock. I lay there and could not go back to sleep. My body ached. It took me a while to get used to the pain. I got up and went to the park. The dog followed me. I picked up a stone and threw it at him. I didn’t mean to hit him, only to make him go away, but I hit him on the leg. He jumped back and snapped at the leg as if a wasp had stung him there.
“See, you’d be better off if you’d get lost.”
I went on. He followed me through the night, sometimes merely a shadow. He followed me through early morning. Then he disappeared. When I turned to look for him, I saw him in the shadow of a giant building—a museum. He was limping. I began to run, but I stopped again soon, because my entire body hurt. It hurt so much that I had to clench my teeth. I sat on the steps of an old church in the warm morning sun. Below, on the plaza, someone pushed a handcart to the edge of the street. He unfolded a box, and three or four metal buckets came to light. The box lid became a shelf where he lined up bottles that each contained liquid of a different color. Some were green. Some were red, yellow and blue. Like the vivid colors of a rainbow. He stretched open a sunshade and hung a sign on the stand: Cold soda for every taste.
Two old ladies came up the steps and disappeared into the church. A nun bought soda for a small child. Raspberry. The child and the nun went on, hand in hand, sharing the soda between themselves. I greeted the nun when she looked up at me. She nodded to me as if she knew something about me nobody else knew. I searched my conscience. There was nothing. Not even a trace, nada.
I stood and then I limped up the granite steps to the door. It was so cold in the church that I began to shiver. I sat down on a bench in the back, next to a niche where a saint made of stone stood on bare feet, a crucifix in his hands. The way he looked at me made me feel uneasy. On the pedestal before his bare feet lay a small offering plate with a few coins in it. This offering plate was not a plate at all; it was a basket with a small opening in its leather top. The opening was held small by a cord that could be opened to enlarge the hole and take the collected money out of the basket. I remember thinking, heck, they don’t seem to trust some people not to get tempted and steal from the basket even though the saint held a rather watchful eye on that money. About three or four dozen candles were burning, but only a few coins lay in the basket, twinkling in the candlelight. My thoughts began to race. I thought about my father who was in Heaven, if there was a Heaven. It was also possible that he was in Hell, because he had a history of smashing my mother’s teeth when he’d come home drunk. “Wherever you are, may it go well with you,” I prayed. I stood up. As I left, I quickly opened the string and reached into the basket to sort out a few coins. I put them in my pocket and immediately left the church, running down the steps despite the aches and pains. The dog waited below. He looked at me the way the nun had earlier. As if he knew I had stolen from God. I got angry and kicked him in the stomach. It came as a surprise to him, and he yelped and jumped back. Then he followed me at a distance.
I went across the plaza into a narrow side street, where night shadows still nestled. The warm light of the morning sun flowed from the cracked house walls. In the windows were reflections of a cloudless sky. With some of the stolen coins, I bought a sausage at a butcher shop. We shared it. “Don’t ever look at me like that again,” I said to the dog, but I saw in his eyes that he did not understand. He was only a dog. He licked my fingers and kept his eye on the foot I’d kicked him with. For him, the foot was the danger. Not me. He no longer trusted the foot, this suspicious little cur. I liked him because he was my friend. The only friend I had.
In one place, there was a market. I walked off with a poncho, but someone noticed and shouted for the police.
“Stop that thief,” a man yelled. “There he goes with his stinking dog.”
We ran in between the market stands and a few people tried to stop me. I threw the poncho away and ran over a woman, who tried to grab me by the arm. The woman fell and turned over a table full of fake designer watches. I ran like a rabbit and was beginning to believe I had made it when, seemingly from nowhere, a police officer struck me on the shoulder with his club. It happened so suddenly that I could not dodge the blow. I felt something break in my shoulder, and the pain brought tears to my eyes. The police officer got behind me and pressed his club across my windpipe. He held it fast with both hands while he pushed his knee into my back. He choked me, cutting off my air with his club until I almost blacked out.
“If you make a move, I’ll break your neck, you toad.”
I didn’t try anything. I couldn’t. I could not even breathe. I just looked around for the dog, but he had disappeared. I saw the man from the stand where I had stolen the poncho. He was coming toward me with his fists swinging. His face was dark red, and he seethed with rage.
“That’s him,” he roared. “He’s a thief. I’ll bet he has money to pay for the poncho. They all have money, these little bastards.”
On and on he went in his rage. My ears registered his voice, but I did not want to listen anymore. The lights went out, and the noise became softer and softer until it finally stopped.
I awoke because I had to pee. Slowly, clenching my teeth from the pain, I sat up. To my right was a door with iron bars. To the left, a set of bunk beds. On the lower bunk sat a man, staring at me. He wore pants full of holes and a dirty white undershirt stained from sweat. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. The smoke crept up from his face to a small barred window high on the wall.
The man looked at me with dark, tired eyes.
“I have to pee,” I said while I tried to stand up.
“You look like you’ve been living with dogs,” said the man.
I pushed myself up to all fours and wrenched up what I had in my stomach. My body cramped, and I threw up the sausage and the blood I had swallowed. The man shouted for a captain. Captain Mendoza.
“I am trying to keep this cell clean,” the man scolded. “Look around. Everything is tidy, dammit.”
A man wearing a khaki uniform arrived. It was Captain Mendoza, a police officer. A golden badge stuck to his uniform shirt, a gold tooth and shifty eyes, in which I could see nothing but malice. He looked between the bars.
“What’s going on here?” he said after staring at me for a moment.
“He is messing up the whole fuckin’ cell,” complained the man on the cot.
Captain Mendoza opened the door. Behind him was another police officer, who held a baton in his hands. Their badges sparkled like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Once again, my mind turned to the photo. Papa Biddle, who showed up to give out small presents from the Red Cross to the children and the big Christmas tree behind the soccer goal. The colorful balloons hanging on it and the garlands and the little dolls made of straw and the men sitting in front of the bodega, studying my mother and my sister Theresa.
“He threw up?” the captain laughed. “You’re lucky he didn’t shit, you pig.”
He came over to me and kicked me in the stomach. I doubled over on the floor into my vomit. He stood before me, his legs spread apart, his thumbs hooked in his belt. When I looked up, he spat in my face.
“Get up,” he said.
I got up, surprised that I was able to do it.
“Outside,” he said.
I went out. The man outside stuck the baton in my stomach.
“Wait,” he said. I stood there.
Capitan Mendoza closed the cell door behind me. I waited, with my legs dangerously close to collapsing.
“Let’s go,” said the captain. “Forward.”
They took me between them and brought me into a washroom. I had to undress, and they watched me as I took a cold shower, letting the water run over my head and my skinny body. As the water washed over my neck and my shoulder, where they had struck me and burned me, it stung my skin, and I tried not to wince.
“Wash your things,” the captain ordered.
I saw in the shadows on the wall that the captain stepped behind me. I felt his hand on my back, and I felt his breath. I washed my pants out with soap and tried to rub the blood spots out of the material, attempting to ignore what I could feel on my back—the touch of his fingers on my wet skin. His breath on my neck where there was that burn, and his voice in my ears scaring the hell out of me.
“Come, little man,” he said. “Blow me one.”
His hand crept up the nape of my neck. He grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. I groaned from the pain. The man at the door laughed as Captain Mendoza’s hand traveled over my chest and stomach. He grabbed me between the legs; he grabbed my penis, and he squeezed my balls so hard I went to my knees. He went down with me until I knelt on the floor. He stood up and pulled me around by the hair. I knelt before him in a puddle of water and soapsuds. We were still in the washroom. Somewhere, drops fell into a bucket. The man at the door had his teeth bared. His face was like an ugly mask. The captain let go of my hair.
“If you do it well, you can go,” he said.
He began to unbutton his pants, and I drowned in his laugh echoing around the shower.
“Boy,” said the man, “what are you doing here?”
I was lying in the road in the middle of the night. A pickup truck’s headlights blinded me.
The man helped me sit up.
“Is that your dog over there?” he asked.
I looked in the direction he was pointing. There lay the dog on the edge of the road. He peered across, his half-ear raised. I was so happy to see him again, I wanted to get up and hug him.
“Can you speak at all?”
I nodded.
“And you hear me?”
“Yes.”
The man laughed. Then he just smiled.
“I am on my way home. Nobody else travels on this road. Not at this hour.”
He gestured in the direction the headlights were pointing. The road was not a road. There were only long, deep wheel ruts with grass on either side. The grass stood knee high in the headlights, every stalk a curved line against the night sky.