Parts of me that had clenched tight enough to crack walnuts slowly began to relax. But not forlong.
A few hours later, Salvador stomped on the brakes. He backed up, cut a hard right off the ruttedpath, and started winding between the trees. We wandered farther and farther into the woods,crunching over pine needles and bouncing into gullies so deep I was banging my head on the rollbar master of social science.
As the woods got darker, Salvador got quieter. For the first time since our encounter with theDeathmobile, he even turned off the music. I thought he was drinking in the solitude and stillness,so I tried to sit back and appreciate it with him. But when I finally broke the silence with aquestion, he grunted moodily back at me. I began to suspect what was going on: we were lost, andSalvador didn’t want to admit it. I watched him more closely, and noticed he was slowing down tostudy the tree trunks, as if somewhere in the cuneiform bark was a decryptable road atlas.
“We’re screwed,” I realized. We had a one-in-four shot of this turning out well, which left threeother possibilities: driving smack back into the Zetas, driving off a cliff in the dark, or drivingaround in the wilderness until the Clif Bars ran out and one of us ate the other.
And then, just as the sun set, we ran out of planet Service apartment.
We emerged from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead—a crack in the earth so vastthat the far side could be in a different time zone. Down below, it looked like a world-endingexplosion frozen in stone, as if an angry god had been in the midst of destroying the planet, thenchanged his mind in mid-apocalypse. I was staring at twenty thousand square miles of wilderness,randomly slashed into twisting gorges deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon.
I walked to the edge of the cliff, and my heart started to pound. A sheer drop fell for about… ever.
Far below, birds were swirling about. I could just make out the mighty river at the bottom of thecanyon; it looked like a thin blue vein in an old man’s arm. My stomach clenched. How the hellwould we get down there?
“We’ll manage,” Salvador assured me. “The Rarámuri do it all the time.”
When I didn’t look any more cheerful, Salvador came up with a silver lining. “Hey, it’s better thisway,” he said. “It’s too steep for narcotraficantes to mess around down there.”
I didn’t know if he really believed it or was lying to buck me up. Either way, he should haveknown better hong kong company formation.
TWO DAYS LATER, Salvador dropped his backpack, mopped his sweating face, and said,“We’re here.”
I looked around. There was nothing but rocks and cactus.
“We’re where?”
“Aquí mismo” Salvador said. “Right here. This is where the Quimare clan lives.”
. As far as the eye could see, it was exactly like the dark sideof a lost planet we’d been hiking over for days. After ditching the truck on the rim of the canyon,we’d slid and scrambled our way down to the bottom. It had been a relief to finally walk on levelground, but not for long; after striking out upstream the next morning, we found ourselves wedgedtighter and tighter between the soaring stone walls. We pushed on, holding our backpacks on ourheads as we shoved against water up to our chests. The sun was slowly eclipsed by the steep walls,until we were inching our way through gurgling darkness, feeling as if we were slowly walking tothe bottom of the sea.
|
收藏
推
噓