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  When he opens his eyes, they’re too dry. Everything is a blur. That’s his first impression of San Miguel—an impressionist painting. One color bleeding into the next bleeding into the next. The bus is empty except for Uli and an older woman sitting across the aisle from him, back by the engine compartment. She snores so soft and shallow that for a second Uli thinks she might be dead. He thinks to shake her but decides against it.

  He collects himself and walks, sleep-drunk, toward the front of the bus.

  In the rearview mirror over the driver’s seat, the driver’s shiny temples pulse in the morning sunlight, his jaws working over a piece of gum. “Suerte,” he says to Uli as he descends the stairs onto the asphalt of the bus station. Luck.

  In the bus station, the ceiling buzzes with fluorescent lights and fans. There’s no one else to be seen but the bored ticket vendors and teenagers working their concession stands. They all blend in with the white walls and laminate counters and concrete floors.

  There’s a Carl’s Jr. at the far end of the station with a red neon sign and an eating area off to the right. Scuffed yellow chairs are bolted to the ground. There’s a Pepsi machine and a Paletas Solera stand. There’s an arcade next to that with a coin-operated Ninja Turtles game and a horse that goes up-down-stop, up-down-stop. There’s a bike chained to the horse, and the chain rattles against the horse’s fiberglass body when it moves. The sound echoes across the tiles of the bus station, but nobody seems to mind. Ticket counter after ticket counter, there are clerks dressed in beige sweaters and cheap, light blue-collared shirts, their lapels starched straight and stiff and dry. The clerks stare idly into their glowing screens, their eyes unmoving as if spacing out. Not one word read. Not a shred of work being done. Everything an act.

  The taxi dispatch is on the opposite side of the bus station. There’s a girl in a cheap blue uniform sitting in the dispatch booth. She’s reading a book and sucking on a red lollipop. She lays the lollipop on the laminate counter in front of her as Uli approaches. She smiles at him in a way that makes it seem as if it hurts her to smile, her eyes like upside down crescents, her candy-stained lips curled over her puffy gums that make her teeth look too small.

  “Buenas,” she says with the smallest voice.

  “Buenas,” Uli says.

  “Twenty pesos for the regular taxi. Fifty pesos for the Radio Taxi,” she says, launching into her spiel.

  “What’s the difference?” Uli asks, cutting her short.

  “The Radio Taxi will get you there,” she says matter-offactly.

  “The regular taxi won’t?”

  The girl pretends she doesn’t hear the question. She lifts the lollipop from the laminate and puts it in her mouth, leaving a red dot of spit behind.

  “Luggage?” she says.

  “Just me,” says Uli.

  “No luggage?” she says.

  “No.”

  She sighs and prints out a ticket. She slaps it on the counter, right next to the red dot, and says, “Take this outside to the taxi in the front of the line. The driver will know what to do.”

  On Calle Ocotepec, the houses are all close to each other. They all look the same. Block after block of beige single-story boxes with square concrete façades and haloed arches above the doors like miniature Spanish missions. Adobe, cement, plaster and wrought iron. There’s splayed rebar where the concrete’s been knocked away from a shifty foundation. Everything is overgrown with weeds and unruly magnolia trees never meant to have grown that large. Everyone is missing. The roads are full of sand and concrete barricades and boulders that look like they were dug up from the guts of the earth.

  The boulders are strewn pell-mell in the road so that the taxi has to expertly navigate around them, the Nissan’s suspension creaking and buckling at every turn. A wheezing noise oozes from the air conditioner. A blast of Freon-cooled air fills the cabin. It smells like cigarette smoke and floral air freshener.

  The driver scrapes his fender on a boulder as he moves between it and another boulder. The frame of his car shakes as his tires slip over the sandy road. The engine idles and then dies. He shoves the clutch in and starts the car again.

  “What’s with the rocks?” asks Uli.

  The driver says nothing. He knows, like everyone in San Miguel knows, that the boulders were put there on purpose. The west end of San Miguel is, after all, nothing but a small grouping of cartel safe houses. Immediately after the cartel arrived, everyone else left. Everything was abandoned. But the boulders stayed. The boulders kept the police out of the neighborhood. And then the autodefensas after that.

  The taxi driver pulls over on the corner of Juárez and Valle de Palmas, five blocks from his father’s home.

  “We must be in the wrong neighborhood,” he tells the cab driver.

  The cab driver is not hearing it. “This is the only Calle Ocotepec in San Miguel. You’re in Colonia Rivera del Bravo. This is it, compa.”

  Uli looks out the window again. An endless horizon of homes crumbling in the wind.

  “This can’t be,” he says.

  “It’s the only Ocotepec I know,” says the driver before hitting the clutch again and shifting the car into neutral as if to settle the issue. “This is going to sound shitty, but are you sure you’re in the right San Miguel? There are seven of them in Mexico—cities I mean.”

  That thought had never occurred to Uli before. He simply went to the Estrella Roja ticket counter and said, “San Miguel.” Thirty-eight dollars on the nose.

  The driver looks at his watch. “That’ll be fifty, compa,” he says.

  Uli reaches into his pocket to produce a handful of ten peso coins. “You can’t drop me off at the door?” Uli asks, a quiver in his voice.

  “You think this is ‘Back to the Future,’ compa? Flying car? Fly over all these boulders? No way, compa. Five blocks. Fifty pesos.”

  Uli hands over his fistful of coins and hops out of the car.

  “Be careful,” says the driver, counting the coins in his palm.

  Before Uli can put the remaining coins back in his pocket, the white Nissan turns the corner on Juárez. Gone.

  Above all other sounds in Rivera del Bravo, there is no sound louder than the dogs, because they are everywhere. Their paws scrape asphalt louder than litter in the wind, louder than the plastic bags caught up in the barbed wire, razor wire and telephone wire lines that cut up the sky. The barks come from everywhere. First one dog and then the call and response of a dozen others nearby.

  He walks down the dusty road, his broken, painful gait shaking the coins in his hand. He closes his fist around them to keep them from jangling, stuffs them, one at a time, into his jeans pocket like he’s feeding them into a machine. He counts forty-three pesos at his fingertips. A buzzing, bright pain beneath his nails as he scrapes them along the ridges of the coins. Since his casts were removed at the hospital, everything feels too heavy, too sensitive in his fingertips, his nerves bright and hot with blood. It took two weeks for his sprain to heal. No compound fractures. It was the week they took the cast off that he escaped from the hospital. He guesses he’s been here three weeks total, give or take some days.

  In the near-distance, he sees a house resembling the one he used to live in. A small, adobe structure—like all the others—but with a black door (not a brown one) and a heavily pruned tree not unlike the lusher orange tree from his childhood. He remembers the large branches stronger than he sees them now. He recalls him and his friend Ernesto used to climb that tree and throw citrus at passing cars. One day a car stopped. A man came out and pulled Ernesto by the leg and hit him so hard in the head that his eyes wouldn’t stop shaking. Uli passes the tree and looks at how faded it’s become. His eyes fall to the scarred trunk where that same man tried to shake Uli from the branches by ramming his car into the tree. That was Uli’s first encounter with insanity. Uli hung on for hours. He survived that day. He’ll survive this, he thinks. He looks for fruit on the remaining branches, but finds nothing—just a wi
thered version of what once was.

  From the outside, the house looks mostly intact. He remembers his father left it in impeccable shape. The house had never been cleaner than the day his family left it eight years ago. As if preparing for his eventual deportation and return to Mexico, his father had covered the furniture in plastic to be clean for when they’d need it again. He’d left a change of cotton sheets in the bedroom closet, a bottle of dish soap next to the kitchen sink and a bottle of aspirin and a razor in the bathroom. In his bedroom, he left his jazz records, his fender amplifier and a snare drum that he never learned to play among other things. His father was the only one in the family who took nothing with him to Texas. He remembers that before he left, his father rigged the home’s utility box to connect with the street lamp outside so as to keep the refrigerator running, fully stocked with Coke. A kind of peace offering to anyone who’d break in and steal his possessions. Take the Coke, not my stuff. He knocks with two dry rasps on the wooden door, his busted knuckles stinging. The pain swells and before it subsides he’s knocking again, ready to be let in, ready to drink the tallest glass of water in the world.

  He waits. He waits. Nothing.

  “Apá!” he shouts into the door. He peers out to the side, looks in the window. “Apá!” he shouts again. Silence.

  He tries for the doorknob but it doesn’t turn so much as it jiggles off its socket. The door swings open. Inside, the air is spiced with the smell of sulfur and mold and creosote. The ceiling is speckled, dull and yellow. The tiled floor is covered in sand.

  At the back of the house, the wind pushes through a broken window. Uli shuts the door behind him. A low whistle as the air passes through the saw hole where the knob has fallen off. The dusty curtains by the window flow out and drop inside the pane. He rips them from the curtain rod to plug up the saw hole and make the whistling stop.

  On the walls, there’s a varnished piece of wood with a picture of George Strait glazed into it. From the door, Uli is maybe two steps from the living room and fifteen steps to the kitchen beyond. There’s a bedroom just off the side of the kitchen and a backyard too, out the door by the stove.

  Uli makes his way to the fridge, hoping for a drink of water. But inside he finds a half used bottle of Valentina, a stack of congealed, processed meat, a quarter of an onion and about forty bottles of Coke, the bottles completely pristine, untouched.

  He quickly pulls a Coke from the shelf and slams the edge of the cap down on the corner of the sink. A carbonated spray shoots from the glassy neck and, before it can even clear, Uli tilts his head back and drinks, trading breath for Coke. His blood goes chill, his head goes numb, the carbonation working its way through his sinuses. His teeth ache from the sugar and cold.

  He walks to the living room, light headed, and eases into the greasy maroon sofa, locking eyes with George Strait on the wall. Amarillo by morning, he sings to himself. Uli will take any part of Texas by now, even Amarillo, which is officially the worst part outside of Dallas (which is actually officially the worst).

  He feels a breeze coming in from the busted window to the right of his face. He looks out into the backyard filled with shit: emptied sun-bleached bottles of dot 3 steering fluid; cellophane bags half-opened and filled with trapped and condensed rain water; discarded shoes (none of them matching); a red Chicago

  Bulls jersey, number 23, Pérez written in sharpie across the back; dusty Lala brand milkboxes crumpled and bloated with desert rain; shredded cigarette butts browning with oil and spit and dust. The filters all shimmer in the sun like so many tiny slivers of unspooled fiberglass. There’s a pile of fluorescent tubes busted and dusting in the wind. Next to that there’s a stack of computer monitors. Next to that there’s a stack of televisions. Next to that there’s a stack of radios with their speakers ripped out and their soldered wires splayed wild in the air. Tied to an oak tree is a single, barking dog. Uli assumes it’s a girl because of its puffy teats.

  There are scars all over the dog’s face and ears and neck. The fresh ones are bright red. The old ones are blistery gray, puckered and pale. For every new blister there are twelve old ones. They bulge up and then fade back into the dog’s jet-black fur. Her eyes glow a deep, dark brown. Her tongue is blood red. It hangs sloppy from her watery jowls, jutting in and out of her head between sharp, filed, yellow teeth that are exposed as the dog picks up on her haunches and lets out a fierce bark. It’s almost as if she does it out of duty more than anything, a habitual kind of vigilance. Tensing her back, she summons another bark, lazy but fierce to show Uli she means business.

  Uli pulls two Cokes from the fridge and snaps their tops off on the counter. He pours one out into a plastic container, his peace offering, and carries it outside with the heavy reverence of a priest, inching slowly toward the dog.

  She jumps up on all fours and bolts forward at the sight of him. The rope that holds her to the tree snaps taut with a dry rasp that sends powdered dust smoking into the air.

  It’s an eternity before Uli builds up enough guts to place the Coke in front of her. Now that he’s closer, he pegs her for a Labmix. Maybe some Rottweiler in there.

  The dog sniffs at the container. She looks up at Uli. Down at the Coke. Up at Uli again. Her red tongue pours from her head. She laps slowly at first, then wildly, insatiably like she hasn’t drunk anything in days.

  “There you go,” Uli whispers to her and tilts the pale, green bottle to his own lips. Uli keeps his own Coke bottle between his legs as he sits down in the dirt. A sip for him, a sip for her.

  As he tilts his green bottle over the container to keep it full she lunges at him. He waits for the bite but it never comes. Something else instead. A lick, her sloppy tongue over his salty hands, full of sweat. The meaty scar tissue of her face gently brushes along the hairs on the back of Uli’s hands. He grows suddenly aware of his own scars.

  She stretches the rope so that it grinds along the serrated, wooden groove rubbed into the base of the tree. Underfoot, the cloying smell of dried shit strewn about the radius. The closer Uli gets to the tree, the stronger the smell of urine grows. He decides he’ll let her off for a while. He’ll give her a bath tonight. For all he knows it’s his father’s dog. He decides then that he’ll treat her like his own.

  Uli wobbles around to the base of the tree where he unties the small knots of vinyl rope. Before he knows it, the rope zips hot in his palms, his skin on fire. He lets go as the dog’s eyes go wild with aggression, the whites rolling and rolling, anxious for a prison break.

  Uli can only watch her as she darts through a curled hole in the bottom of the backyard’s chain-link fence. The dog slaps her paws against the pavement at the front of the house and then keeps slapping them until the tic-tack-tic of her claws pounding concrete are swallowed up in the sound of the wind.

  He waits and she never comes back. But he hears her everywhere, those paws still slapping and that dry, haunting bark all around him.

  At first, Uli hates himself for losing the dog. But then he wonders if he hates himself for loving the dog too much in the first place. Of course, he had to love the dog—it was a piece of his father. He gets to thinking about hate, which is to say he gets to thinking about the way hate is always tied to one anxiety or another.

  In his mind, he goes through his list of hates: He hates that he’s alone. He hates that he’s destroyed his family over a plane ride that was never worth it to begin with. His hates the ache he carries for his mother. He imagines her waking up to no one. The plane gone. Sampson, the grove boss, yet to come back. Of course, she’s on the run right now. There’s no other way for her to be. Uli would call her if he could get hold of her, but no telling where she is now. Not in the groves, not anywhere he’d know. She has no e-mail. She has no Mexican cell phone. He hates that she’s always been unreachable. He hates that he knows she’s coming here to San Miguel. Nobody should be coming here to San Miguel. He thinks, if he’s honest with himself that this place could be easy to hate, and he barely k
nows it yet. San Miguel, he feels, is the end of the world. The last place on earth he wants to be. But she’s coming here, Uli thinks. That’s the only place she’d be—on the road to here. This house. This desperate patch of broken land, which is the only thing in the world that his family owns. He hates that simple fact, though he also banks on it. This is where she’s coming. This is where you need to be.

  From there he starts thinking about things he misses. Like Blue Bell ice cream (vanilla). And the humid heat of Harlingen. And the sound of English—God, what he’d give to speak English to anyone about now, to read something in English, write anything in English to anybody who also speaks English. A love letter. A hate letter.

  He misses Whataburger (the A1 thick and hearty burger with a small Coke which is always a liter). And he misses school. And he misses his brother. He misses the flat of his head. That crooked smile that only comes out when he’s drunk or eating his favorite breakfast. Bacon and eggs with Tony’s seasoning on top. Uli imagines his brother right here in front of him. A big heaping plate of bacon and eggs and Tony’s with a steaming cup of coffee. He misses the fleeting memory of that cheap, crooked grin. He hates that this image doesn’t even feel like a real memory anymore, but rather just some hope of a possibility constructed from the fabric of a former life that he’s trying so desperately to reconstruct. Uli hates that he feels like he’s losing his mind. He hates that he imagines his brother and himself right now, right here among their father’s other cast off things. He hates his father for having left their family. This is his fault, really, he thinks. He hates that he thinks that. He hates this busted house, which he’s still figuring out how to live in. More than anything, he hates the fact that the dog left him like everything else has left him. He hates the dog for shattering his world twice. And it’s in this vein of thought that Uli gets to wondering if he might salvage just the tiniest bit of dignity if he doesn’t find that dog. That thought gives him some hope. That task gives him a job. A mission. It’s worth a try, he thinks. Isn’t that really just life? A series of tiny missions? Tiny tasks? One foot in front of the other?