In the dream, she is a young girl with bright eyes and soft hands. She turns and she is an old lady with grey hair and brown weathered skin. She turns and she is a young girl standing alone in the middle of the Mohave Desert. The dry land rolls for miles in every direction. Small clumps of yucca shimmer in the white heat. The air refuses to move. She is alone and she is filled with an incomprehensible sadness. Her parents are gone. Her sadness is deafening. She stands alone against the heat. In the distance, a man approaches on foot. He is far away and it takes him a long time. As he nears, she sees that he carries something in his hand. She cannot make out what it is. He closes in on her. He is a young man; he is an old man. He reminds her of Emilliano Santos de Jesus Parada, but it is not he. He wears an old blue shirt. His face is clear as water. She is not afraid. He carries an old burlap sugar bag. He approaches and stands in front of her. He empties the bag and stones of every variety fall at her feet. White chunks of quartz, black pieces of obsidian, rust colored meteorites. She drops to her knees and frantically tries to collect the stones. When she grabs one, two more appear and skitter away. She is frantic. She gathers a handful and drops them in the bag. Four more appear at her feet and roll away from her. The man in the blue shirt laughs.
“Hurry!” he whispers. “Hurry!”
***
Her hands moved gently across the top of the rust colored rock partially buried in the dirt. She watched her hands brush away the particles of course, dry sand. These are not my hands, she thought. These are my mother’s hands, or better, my grandmother’s hands. These brown, weathered hands with long thin fingers betray me. Out loud she whispered, “These are not the hands of Astrid Wagner. I know Astrid, and these are not her hands.”
The young girl named Astrid could not keep her hands from digging in the moist rich earth of her father’s vegetable garden. Even then, at six, she was a collector of things: marbles, feathers, small dried seed pods of mesquite and palo verde. Pennies inscribed with her birth year, 1944. The fuzzy grey balls on the creosote bush. Small lengths of thread from beneath her mother’s sewing machine. But mostly, Astrid collected rocks: fire agates, geodes, pieces of thin slivered mica, and sand rubies from the wash behind her home. And then there were the rocks of indeterminate origin, rocks that spoke to her, told her their stories. Stones that demanded that she pick them up and put them in her pocket.
At first she displayed each rock carefully among her books on the shelves in her bedroom. Soon there were more rocks than shelf space, and the books disappeared into the garage. When the rocks would grow beyond reason, they would eventually take over all of her bedroom floor save for pathways to the closet and the door. At that point her mother would pitch a fit, wave her arms frantically, and loudly wonder just what kind of a girl could live in a room that could be mistaken for a cave. Painfully and tearfully each rock would be carried outside to an area her father had set aside for her collection. The books would return. And with them, again, would return the rocks. New rocks. Magical rocks. White rocks with black specks. Smooth black ovals. Singularly at first, she would slip the rock quietly next to Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch. And again, the rocks would multiply beyond all hope and reason, the books would disappear, and it would just be a matter of time before her mother’s arms would begin to flail, and the stone migration would begin again.
As she gently scraped away the dirt with her right hand and brushed away the sand particles with her left, she noticed how lined and scarred her hands had become. These aren’t Twink’s hands, she thought. “I know Twink, and these are not her hands!”
“Twink! How’d you get a name like Twink?” Mrs. Rodee asked on the first day of third grade when she boldly announced that no one called her Astrid. She was lying, of course. Her mother called her Astrid when she wanted to press some point home about lady-like behavior such as talking with food in her mouth, or sitting on the couch in a dress with her legs wide apart and her bloomers, as her mother called them, hanging out so that even God himself could see what color they were. When asked the origin of her name, her answer was always the same.
“When I was little, she’d explain, I always sang “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” She would break into song so often and at such inopportune times that it just became natural to call her Twinkle and then Twink, the way some boys just naturally got called Junior or Buddy. “It is just who I am,” she’d explain. This was partially true. She was always watching the night sky for falling stars whether it was in the thick heat of August or the bone chill of January. The truth she never spoke was that in second grade, fat Jimmy Salazar called her a name in front of the whole class, much to her total humiliation.
That night at supper Astrid announced to her parents, “I need a new name, immediately!” When pressed by her mother for a reason, Astrid composed herself. Then without skipping a beat, she shared with them the events of the morning. As today had been the first day of second grade, Mrs. Pawlik had made a big production out of calling roll. After calling Sylvia Vazquez’s name, which had afforded Mrs. Pawlik the opportunity to reminisce nostalgically about each of Sylvia’s four older brothers, Julio, Javier, Jaime, and Ivan, she bellowed, “Astrid Wagner!”
“What a pretty name,” Mrs. Pawlik proclaimed. “A name as beautiful as you, young lady!” she pointed out, before Astrid could even answer.
Fat Jimmy, who had a scar in the middle of his forehead where his brother had bashed him with a hatchet and who had been a constant annoyance to Astrid since before kindergarten, started laughing.
“Sounds like ASS-TURD,” he whispered to no one.
“He said it to the whole class,” Astrid cried. “In front of everyone!”
Shocked by Twink’s explicitness, her mother dropped both her jaw and simultaneously her spoon into the bowl of chicken soup, showering the dining room wall with carrots and noodles.
“What did Mrs. Pawlik say?” her father asked.
“Nothing…she made him stand outside and no one saw him again,” she answered.
By dessert and by consensus, Twink was the name that would carry her through the next 60 years of her life.
Her stiff fingers scraped away the loose dirt from the side of the partially buried rock. Fingernails scratched at the thick, coarse surface. Her fingers sensed that this was no ordinary rock. Each rock spoke to her, and this rock told a story very different from others she had heard. She took her iron pick from the clip on her belt. Although she had handled the tool thousands of times, today when she looked at it, she saw it for the first time. The old tool had a short wooden handle. The wood was stained black from sweat and linseed oil. The double-sided steel head had a short, squat hoe on one end and a long thin pick on the other. Her father always called it a hoedag. “Twink,” he’d yell as they loaded into his station wagon on one of their long rock collecting expeditions, “Twink, ya got your hoedag with you?”
Even without a calendar, Twink knew this was early August. The air, steaming thick and heavy with humidity, was oppressive. The air didn’t move, the lizards didn’t move, even the day seemed to hover unflinchingly at noon. It was much too hot to load up the family in the Chevy station wagon and crawl south from Tucson, through Benson and Tombstone to the mining town of Bisbee, just north of the border. Twink’s father was barking orders at Twink and her mother. When her father got it into his head that the family was traveling, no one argued, no matter what the weather. She would just pile into the back seat, roll the windows down as far as they would go, and stick her head in a book. This time it was The Hardy Boys, Hunting for Hidden Gold. When she looked up, her father was parking the car in a dirt lot behind the Copper Queen.
At ten, Twink had more freedom than most girls her age, and within an hour she had her knapsack on her back, her canteen at her waist, and the road through Brewery Gulch twisting before her.
“In the desert, you’ll be dead before you’re even thirsty!” her father proclaimed. As a result, Twink always had to have her canteen with her, even for the eight blocks she walked to school. A young girl alone in Bisbee, Arizona in 1955 was not an unusual sight. Even a white girl walking along Brewery Gulch during the day with a Boy Scout knapsack and an army canteen received hardly a second glance from the Chinese dishwasher, the cigarette-smoking woman relaxing in the sun, or the black-haired girl carrying groceries north from the company score. But Twink walked with such a determined pace, her body thrust forward at a 45-degree angle, that people took note when she bustled by them. So intent on what was immediately in front of her, Twink never acknowledged or greeted people she passed in the street. It was unusual then, after an hour of walking along the gulch that Twink suddenly stopped. Something to the right of her had caught her eye.
Brewery Gulch’s businesses had given way to smart green houses with gardens of flowers; those brightly colored houses gave way to miners’ clapboard brown houses, which gave way to run-down weathered shacks whose front yards were strewn with rusted metal gears and broken wooden barrels. Earlier the yards had been set back from the street behind freshly painted fences, but here rusted, twisted makeshift wire fences kept a brown wolf dog from leaping forward or a drunken miner from sleeping on a dilapidated front porch. In the barbed wire in front of her, Twink’s eyes fell on an odd, pick-like tool tangled in the fence. Before she could get the wooden handle free from the twisted wire, an old man with long grey whiskers sprouting from his chin wrapped his brown, weathered hand around Twink’s right wrist. Unnoticed, he had been watching her from inside the wire fence. Unaware that he was next to her, it wasn’t until she felt his hand on her arm that she realized she wasn’t alone.
Twink didn’t flinch. She looked up at him without the slightest sense of fear or even concern. His hair was long and dirty. She looked into his tired black eyes, then at his dark hand against her skin. His fingers were long and the nails yellowed with sulfur and nicotine. Scars crisscrossed the back of his hand like dirt roads on an old map. The frayed open end of a too-short blue flannel shirt revealed his thin wrist.
“Is this yours?” He asked the way parents often asked questions when they already knew the answer, she thought.
“No,” she countered, “but if someone was giving it away, I would love to have it.”
The old man was taken aback……. “Why would a little girl like you want an old miner’s pick?”
“To dig rocks, of course,” she explained.
“Rocks? What does a little girl like you know about rocks?”
“Probably not as much as you!” she answered. And she had him. He was disarmed, completely at her service.
She held out her hand to him the way she’d seen her father offer his handshake to strangers.
“My name is Emilliano Santos de Jesus Parada!”
“Emil…liano San…tos de Jesus….Para… da,” she stammered.
“But you can call me Sapo!” he said.
“I’m Twink,” she laughed and they shook hands.
“If you like rocks so much, you should see these,” he offered. She followed him to an opening in the fence and then around to the back of the property. She was in heaven. There were old ammo crates full of turquoise-studded stones. Green blue malachite in big tin buckets. Weathered cardboard boxes with chunks of agates and crystals spilling out onto the weedy ground. There was so much to look at. Boxes of broken Indian pottery. Mason jars full of broken colored glass. Piles of rusted railroad spikes. Purple amethyst glass telephone pole ornaments. Blue tailed lizards crawling over mounds of red onyx. She became lost in the wonder of it. She became lost in the afternoon.
While she touched and examined and felt and smelled and took in every new thing that she could in the back yard of Emilliano Santos de Jesus Parada, he was busy putting a little piece of everything into a stiff new burlap sugar bag . As the sun sneaked away from the gulch, the dark shadows caught Twink’s attention. She knew she had to leave and hurry back to the Copper Queen. She could be gone all day long, but if she was late for supper, she would hear about it. And she was so thrilled and full of herself that she wanted nothing, especially her mother’s “Astrid this” and “Astrid that” ruining this perfect day. She said goodbye to Sapo with a hug. His blue shirt smelled, she thought, of the 20 Mule Team Borax soap her mother used in the laundry. He gave her the bag of rocks. As she was slipping through the fence, he wrestled the miner’s pick from the wire and without a word handed it to her. As she took it from his hand, he held on to it.
“Come back and visit me, Twink,” he said.
“Of course, I will, Emilliano Santo de Jesus Parada!” But even as she said it, she knew somehow that she would never see him again.
“Sapo!” he yelled.
She yelled back, but she was already running down the gulch, outracing the evening. Her words, lost in the shadows.
It was too dark for Twink to dig anymore. This was a special rock, and if Twink didn’t take it now, it could slip beneath the ground and be lost forever. She knew it was special. Her hands told her that. She pried the rock loose, and its story became hers. She slid her pick into the strap on her belt, wrapped this last meteorite pulled from the ground today in a piece of old white t-shirt, and placed it carefully in the old burlap sugar bag. Where did I get this bag? She thought about it for a moment. “This doesn’t look like my bag,” she stated. “It is too old and too worn out to be my bag. My bag was much newer than this. Whose bag is this anyway?”
“Whatcha got in the bag?” fat Jimmy teased. “A dead cat?” he howled.
“Your brain!” Twink responded unthinkingly. She held the burlap sugar bag in her left hand and her schoolbooks in her right. Jimmy didn’t scare her. She looked at the deep indentation in the middle of Jimmy’s forehead and for a moment, she felt sorry for him.
“Let me see!” he yelled and grabbed the bag so quickly that he snatched it from her hands. Her ever-present canteen popped off the belt at her waist. Her school books went flying into the air. Before she could grab her bag back, Jimmy had his back to her and had dumped the contents onto the dirt in front of the school.
“Give me my bag,” she yelled. But before she could grab him and spin him around and make him stop, thirty-one rocks of various shapes, sizes, and color bounced on the ground in front of her. Twenty-eight rocks, one for each classmate, one for her teacher, and two for the janitor that let her pick through the dirt when he planted new oleanders in the planter in the front of the school . “You jerk,” she yelled at him. “These are my rocks, and they are supposed to be a surprise for class today!” She fell to her knees grabbing at the loose stones.
“They’re just stupid rocks,” Jimmy screamed, kicking the bigger ones away from her outstretched hands and grinding the smaller ones into the ground. She grabbed at every stone she could while Jimmy’s brown oxfords smashed down on her hands. She clutched the bag back to her chest and skittered like a crab in the dirt, tears streaming down her cheeks, retrieving each rock until Jimmy, bored of this, wandered away.
“Stupid rock girl,” he muttered to himself.
Bags. Twink laughed to herself. Bags of rocks. These are not just rocks, she scoffed. These are meteorites. Chunks of iron and nickel strewn all over the ground. A piece of what remains of some million-year-old boulder crashing through the atmosphere. Twink smiled. She took the leather shoelace from her pocket. She twisted the top of the bag and then tried to tie the bag shut with a square knot. Her fingers betrayed her. They used to move so quickly and smoothly, she thought. Now she fumbled with the lace. She kept tying granny knots, imperfect square knots. In the dimming light, she struggled to tie the knot the correct way. She worked at it furiously. When finally she got it just so, she let out a deep breath. She brought her hands up to her face, placed her palms against her cheeks. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t know why.
“There, there,” her mother offered. “You were just dreaming. You were just having a bad dream.”
Twink’s eyes opened to the whiteness of her bedroom. Whenever she had a bad dream, which wasn’t that often, her mother would rush into her room turning on every light in the house on her way. She would always say it was to keep the devil away, but Twink was never sure what that really meant.
“There, sweetheart,” her mother soothed. “You were just dreaming. You’re safe now.” She patted Twink’s head.
“It didn’t seem like a dream,” Twink sobbed, wiping her face on her bed sheet. She rarely cried, and she buried her face in her hands. “I was really scared!” she confessed.
“You’ve got a big day, tomorrow,” she said. “It’s perfectly normal to be scared the night before you start your freshman year in high school. I bet there are kids having bad dreams all over town.”
“Fat Jimmy was chasing after me! He had a hatchet stuck in his head. There was blood everywhere.” Twink again buried her face in her hands. She was lying, but it still made her feel good to have her mother pat her head. Her father brought her a glass of water.
He started, “In the desert, you’ll be dead before…” but her mother stopped him before he could finish.
“Go back to sleep, dear,” her mother said. “You’ll be fine. We’re just down the hall. Sleep tight.”
“Good night,” she said to both of them as they left her room. Twink didn’t feel bad about lying about the dream. Actually it was a dream that she had so often that she thought it was funny. Fat Jimmy didn’t scare her, hatchet in his head or not. He just bugged her. But tonight’s dream was different. She had no desire to blurt it out now and be subjected to her father’s analysis tomorrow morning at breakfast. She closed her eyes, and the darkness came back.
Twink moved quickly through the low brush. Meteorites. Patiently waiting. Their stories were much more interesting than rocks, though Twink didn’t mean to disparage rocks in any way by this. Rocks were common, she thought, reminding herself of how her mother had referred to anyone she didn’t know or understand. It was just that Twink had progressed to this. Meteorites held more interesting stories. That was a simple truth. This is my job now, Twink thought as she clambered up out of the steep wash and over the hill to the road before it became too dark to see and too dangerous to walk. She heard something rustle in the brush as she hurried passed. A rabbit, probably, she thought. “I am the gatherer of stones,” she said to herself. “This is my job and I’m good at it. I was a good daughter. I was a good wife.” As she moved briskly through the brush, Twink glanced at her left hand. She twirled the grey ring with the small diamonds with her thumb.
“My poor girl,” her mother sighed. She held Twink’s young hands in her own and bemoaned the dark scars, the fresh cuts, the chipped and very un-ladylike fingernails. “My poor child….these could be the hands of a West Virginia coal miner rather than a beautiful 17-year-old young lady headed to her first prom.”
Twink’s mother was a smart woman, and she found a lovely pair of yellow gloves at Jacome’s department store downtown that perfectly matched her yellow prom dress. There were times like this in Twink’s life where she acquiesced. She was excited that Billy Mason had asked her to the senior prom. She could have cared less about the dress, or gloves or shoes….she would have been comfortable in her jeans and work boots. But she acquiesced. Her mother took so much joy in the minutiae of frilly things that Twink kept her mouth shut.
She wore the yellow gloves, and it made her feel like she had a catcher’s mitt on each hand. But she acquiesced. And the gloves and the silence and the acquiescing gave way to Billy’s romantic overtures, and prom night acquiesced into a gray ring with small diamonds and a beautiful daughter named Emma and mornings full of housework, and before she knew it, forty years later, Twink was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. She looked at her clean hands beneath the faucet. Whose hands do these soft pink fingers belong to? She wondered. Whose manicured nails are these? And she didn’t know the answer.
It became easier not to answer questions, and still easier not even to ask them. Twink became lost in acquiescence, and the only thing worse than being lost for her was that she didn’t know that she was lost. Weeks slipped into months, and whole years vanished in a breath. Her rocks became silent. They took their places on the borders of driveways. They were used to hold down picnic table cloths. They slipped silently into the trash and disappeared forever.
Her thighs burned. Her calves were on fire. She had made a mistake. She knew better than to stay out too long. She knew that it was not safe to move through the desert at night, especially on nights like this when there was no moon. She moved quickly, but to move quickly meant she ran the risk of a misstep. Out here, a badly sprained ankle could mean death. To be lost in the desert at night was terrible enough, but not to be able to move in the darkness was a thought Twink refused to entertain. She felt the rocks beneath her feet begin to shift, as if they were directing each step. She moved with an ease and quickness she hadn’t known since she was in grade school and won the hundred yard dash on field day. She floated. Soon, her boots felt the rough uneven ground give way. The rocks beneath her feet had found the road. It was a quick jaunt to her truck.
After so many years of silence, the stones began to move again. At first it was innocuous. A small piece of white quartz appeared in the middle of the kitchen floor. Mindful of the people in and out of her house, Twink passed it off. It must be the maid, she thought. Perhaps the dog carried it in. She placed the rock on her bookshelf, next to “T” is for Trespass.
The next day, a small slice of iron pyrite, fool’s gold, appeared beside the soap dish in the back bathroom. Later, a piece of blue azurite appeared on the kitchen counter. And so it began. Rocks slipped onto the front porch. Stones took refuge in the dishwasher. Chunks of granite rested on the dashboard of her car. She would turn to grab a loaf of bread at the market, and a slab of sandstone waited for her in her shopping cart. Until the day his heart surrendered to a stillness deeper than stones, her husband always believed that the arrival of the rocks was all Twink’s doing.
“I know you bring these in from outside!” he proclaimed. “Just admit it!”
“I would if I could,” she’d explain. “But I’ve never seen these rocks before. I know rocks, and these are not my rocks!”
Back safely at the truck, Twink tagged each meteorite by the light of the Coleman lantern. She transferred them to a box marked the Golden Basin. She would build a fire, eat a can of chili con carne and drink plenty of water. “In the desert, you’ll be dead before you’re even thirsty!” her father predicted. Twink thought of that now as she drank water from the warm milk carton. Later, Twink would transfer her field notes of each meteorite’s location to the large topo map she carried with her. Due to the heavy concentration in the basin, Twink began to believe that she was in the middle of a meteorite field. A field was that wonderful and rare occasion where a large cascading meteorite would break up inside the earth’s atmosphere and litter several square miles with thousand of fragments. She wouldn’t know until she met with a geologist from the university. But she was sure. This was going to be something big, she thought. Physically exhausted but emotionally exhilarated, she turned off the lantern when her mapping was done and lay awake for a long time in the back of her camper listening to the movement of the stones.
The return of the stones brought her to meteorites, and the meteorites brought her back to herself. Alone now, she would often leave the big, rambling house on the golf course and travel west to Mohave. She spent days living out of her camper searching the basins and flatlands for meteorites. At first, she had bought the expensive metal detectors that would chirp frantically when she danced them above the ground. Their pitched beeps indicated the presence of the iron in meteorites. But the sound had become distracting. They blocked out the stones’ voices. Even the magnet attached to her pick had seemed a blasphemy. She came to use only her bare hands. She trained her fingertips to feel the presence of special stones. She became a conjuror of meteorites, of otherworldly fragments. She could even feel their presence eight inches under the dry ground. Some days she would fill the burlap sugar bag four or five times, lugging the heavy sack back to the truck on each trip.
In the morning, Twink woke to the sound of distant thunder. To the west, thick, dark clouds roiled in on each other. “Something’s coming our way,” she called to the boxes of rocks surrounding her truck. She loaded each crate carefully into the back of her camper. She ate another can of chili, broke down her campsite, and spread the ashes of her fire out to cool. The old burlap sugar bag beckoned. “All right, all right,” she answered. “One more trip, but I can’t stay out too long, or the washes will start running, and we’ll be here for another three days!”
She moved quickly over the hills. She stopped for a minute, dropped to her knees, and pulled two meteorites out of the ground. Sometimes, she didn’t even have to dig. They just whistled at her, her fingers would tingle, and she’d scoop them up and place them gently in her sack. In several hours, her bag was full. “Enough!” she said, eyeing the eastern storm inching slowly toward the west. “I’ve got to move,” she sang.
She circled around the last stand of yucca and climbed back up to the road. She headed back to her truck, but turned to check on the approaching storm. “Slow down!” she shouted over her shoulder. “I’m moving as fast as I can!” She turned and something rustled in the brush to her right. Distracted, she missed a step; her feet became tangled. She tried to catch herself, but she went sprawling forward, flinging the burlap bag and its contents into the dirt in front of her. “Oh, my gosh!” she exclaimed, and frantically crawled forward, collecting each loose meteorite. “Stay right where you are; do not move,” she ordered. She gathered up each rock. One piece refused to budge. She shifted all of her attention to the large red oxide meteorite partially buried in sand. This is different from the others, she thought. “I have never seen you before!” she shouted. Her heart raced.
She reached for it and felt something brush against her hand. A brown, dried hand wrapped around her right wrist. Unaware that he was next to her, it wasn’t until she felt his hand on her arm that she realized she wasn’t alone. A young Mexican boy, probably no more than sixteen, crouched next to her. Twink didn’t flinch. She looked over at him without the slightest sense of fear or even concern. He had black peach fuzz on his chin. His hair was long and matted. She looked into his young black eyes, then at his dark hand against her skin. His fingers were long and the nails broken and dirty. The frayed open end of a too-short blue cotton shirt revealed his thin wrist.
“Perdoneme, Senora,” the young man said. “Pardon me.”
Twink stood up. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Agua?” he asked, “I am so thirsty.”
“Where did you come from?” she asked. Then, “Water, yes. I have plenty of water!”
Twink offered the man her canteen. She had heard stories from other prospectors who had run onto immigrants, usually Mexicans, traveling on foot through the desert.
“Drink more,” she said. Dead before you know it, she thought. She looked up at the storm which had arrived much too soon. “Quick! She barked. “Help me get these rocks in the bag. Twink looked up at the dark clouds which were overhead now. The wind had picked up. The yucca and small sage brush rattled.
And then the storm hit. Big drops of rain, slowly at first and just a few at a time, slammed into the parched earth. Small clouds of dust kicked up as each drop hit.
“Quick!” Twink shouted, “I’ve got the bag! Quick, run to my truck!” A loud crack of lightening split open the sky. A torrent of rain tumbled down. “Vamonos!” she shouted.
Twink wasn’t sure how much English the stranger spoke, but she figured her hand gestures and shouting would provide the desired results. They did. The two of them ran full out to her truck. She motioned to the stranger and opened the rear door on the passenger side and motioned with her head for the stranger to get it. She slammed the door behind him, then opened the door next to it and tossed the burlap bag on the passenger seat. She ran around and opened the driver’s side door. The rain was deafening now. It pounded down on the ground, on the parked truck and stung her back and arms. Twink dove into the truck and pulled the door shut. The truck muffled the storm, but rain still pounded down on the top and on hood.
“Whew,” Twink sighed. The truck was silent. She breathed in and she smelled his musk. He smelled like every man she knew who had spent more than a few days in the desert without a bath. He had such a young face, she thought. Such a scared young face.
Finally, she spoke. “My name is Twink.” She offered him her hand over the back seat. He learned forward.
“My name is Carlos.”
“Adonde va,” she asked. “Where are you going and how did you get here?”
“Los Angeles,” he answered. “You don’t have to speak Spanish to me; I speak English.” He was quiet. He looked anxious. He tried to hand her back the canteen, but Twink pushed it back at him.
Carlos was silent. He was nervous, but Twink wasn’t afraid. “I’m an old lady,” Twink confessed, “and I’m all alone out here. You’re not going to knock me over the head and steal all of my old, dirty rocks, are you?” she asked.
He looked away.
“I’m so old and I forget so much these days, that if someone asked me if I saw a young man alone walking through the desert I wouldn’t be able to remember anything!” She smiled.
He returned her smile, and she had him. He relaxed. The tension lifted from his face. He spoke up. “What is an old woman doing out here all by herself?” he asked.
“It’s the rocks,” she answered exuberantly. “I collect rocks. Well, meteorites actually. Right now I’m collecting meteorites. But tomorrow, who knows.”
“Why?” he asked. Crazy white woman collecting desert rocks, he thought.
“It’s a calling,” she answered, laughing.
He looked puzzled. He didn’t get it.
“You know some people collect cars, some people collect baseball cards. I just collect rocks.”
“I have an uncle who has a ’64 Chevy Impala. All original. It’s cool,” he offered.
Twink hadn’t had a real conversation with another person in a long time. She peppered him with questions.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“I slid under,” he answered.
She didn’t understand. “What?”
“The fence. The fence at the border. It is much too high to climb. Someone had dug a hole in the dirt under the fence. I just slid under. The hole was in the same place as the first time I came over.”
She looked confused.
“When I was eight, I slid under the border fence in Nogales. I had relatives on the American side. I had to leave. I slid under and waited in a store for an hour, but no one came to take me back.”
“Eight? That’s pretty young. Who were you with?” she asked.
“I was alone.” He replied.
“Why did you want to leave your parents? You were only eight.”
“I had to. I wanted a better life. Even at eight I knew my life was bad. I carried a gun. They made me cross the border with drugs in my underwear. I saw people shot and worse. I knew if I could get away, I’d have a better life, “ he explained.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“I stayed with my relatives in Nogales, and then I went to live with my uncle in Los Angeles. The one with the Impala.”
Twink nodded. “Is that where you are going?”
He nodded. “I’ll be a junior in high school. I had to return to Mexico because my father died. I have no papers. I got in okay, but I had to slide under to get out. I hitched a ride and was okay until Yuma. It is more dangerous to be on the highway. I caught a ride…” A huge clap of thunder shook the truck. They were silent, vulnerable.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Wherever the rocks take me,” she laughed.
It rained for most of the afternoon. They talked beneath the drone of the rain on the truck. She about rocks, and stones, and a little girl named Astrid. He talked about drawing, music, and Ashley, his girlfriend. By late afternoon, the storm tapered off enough that Twink could open a couple of cans of chili con carne. She ended up opening two more cans because Carlos hadn’t eaten much of anything in the last few days. She built a fire with wood she had in the back of the camper. They talked late into the night. When Twink couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, she made a bed for Carlos in the back of the truck.
“I’ll make us a good breakfast tomorrow,” she offered. “And I’ll drive you back to the highway.”
Carlos thanked her for everything and shook her hand.
Twink fell asleep quickly.
***
In the dream, she is an old lady. She is alone on a dirt road in the desert. The air is cool and swift. Her tired hands are wet from rain. She is not lonely. In the distance, a man approaches on foot. He is far away and it takes him a long time. As he slowly nears, she can begin to make out his face. She has seen this man before. He reminds her of Emilliano Santos de Jesus Parada. He wears an old blue shirt. His face is clear as water. She is not afraid. He approaches and stands in front of her. He reaches out his right hand to her. The frayed open end of a too-short blue flannel shirt reveals his thin wrist. His dark hand flutters in front of her. His fingers are long and the nails yellowed with sulfur and nicotine. Scars crisscross the back of his hand like dirt roads on an old map. His hand slips into her hand.
“Twink,” he says.
“Sapo!”
“I knew you would come back to see me,” he laughs. And then, looking down at the ground, he says, “What’s in the bag?”
She follows his eyes and there, between her feet, is the old burlap sugar bag. She bends to lift it, but it is heavy with stones. The bag tips and rocks tumble out onto the ground between them. For a moment, she panics.
“I can see you’ve been a busy girl,” Sapo laughs. It puts her at ease. He kneels and puts the stones back into the bag. “You’ve been very, very busy.”
***
In the morning she awoke alone. Carlos was gone. The blankets were neatly piled in the back of the truck. She laughed.
For the second time in two days, she broke camp. She retrieved the damp burlap sugar bag of stones from the truck. Something was wrong. Something was missing. She looked under the bag, under the seat. She even looked under the truck. “Where is the hoedag?” she asked out loud. “Who’s got the hoedag? Twink, you got your hoedag with you?”
Twink’s first thought was that Carlos had taken it. She was flushed with anger, but it quickly subsided. She remembered the chaos of yesterday’s storm. I know where it is, she thought. In the middle of the road where I left it! “I’m comin’!” she called out. She dumped the meteorites out of the damp bag on the ground beside the truck.
Twink hiked back down the road. She saw the hoedag in the dirt yards before she got there. She bent and picked it up. She loved how it felt in her hand, like it was an extension of her self. Then the stone caught her eye. She remembered the large oxide covered meteorite partially buried in the dirt. She had forgotten all about it amid the confusion of yesterday’s storm.
She heard a skittering in the brush off the road. As she stepped toward it, she felt the stones beneath her feet. They began to move. Each one began to shift.
“I see,” she said. “And just where are we going?”
The stones, the rocks, the meteorites, all of them began to migrate. They rolled, and tumbled, and vibrated, and skipped, and bounced and danced themselves across the dry desert ground. Twink followed them. She carried her empty burlap sugar bag. Just in case, she thought. Astrid Wagner followed the stones also, her work boots kicking up a cloud of dust. “Just where are we going?” Twink asked emphatically. But for now the stones were silent. “Okay,” she countered. “Have it your way.”
She moved silently along with them, as if she too were rock or stone.
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