The House of the Scorpion (31 page)

I'll ask Esperanza to help her escape
, he thought.

Now that the moment for departure had come, Matt found himself dawdling. He double-checked the supplies. He added a book, tested the weight of his pack, and took it out again. The sun was already high, although the valley was still in shadow.
I could spend another night here
, he thought. But the oasis might not be safe now that El Patrón was gone.

Matt shouldered the backpack, tied extra water bottles to his belt, and set off through the grape arbor. He would go on, as Tam Lin had, without looking back.

The first part of the trail was easy. Matt had been over it many times. Soon, however, he came to a canyon choked with bushes. He had to break his way through. The dust of the leaves covered him from head to toe and found its way into his lungs. He had to rest in a dry gully to regain his breath. Only an hour had passed. If the rest of the journey went like this, he wouldn't reach Aztlán for a month.

Matt went through the backpack. In an inside pocket he found an inhaler. The relief it brought his tortured lungs was pure heaven. He also found a wicked-looking machete in a leather sheath.
I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd looked earlier
, he thought.

After a rest Matt hacked his way through the bushes. It gave him a savage pleasure to get even with the plants that had scratched his arms and face all morning.

When he reached the end of the valley, he was confronted
by a high granite cliff. Matt checked the map. There it was, with a red line going straight to the top. It was higher than anything he'd ever attempted to climb. Matt looked for another way to proceed, but the map was firm on this point:
Onlee way out. Yu can do it
, said Tam Lin's note. Matt stared up at the impossibly distant bushes peeking over the top of the cliff until he was dizzy. The only good thing was that he didn't have to boost Celia ahead of him.

Matt inched from crevice to crevice until his legs began to tremble with fatigue. Halfway up he thought he couldn't move another inch. He hugged the granite face and wondered how long he could stay there before exhaustion forced him to let go. He'd fall onto jagged rocks. He'd die there. He might as well have let his heart be harvested by doctors. A shadow passed briefly over him, and after a moment it came back.

Only one thing cast a shadow on a cliff in such a deserted place. Matt was suddenly filled with rage. It was as though it came from some deep place, like lava in a volcano. He no longer felt exhausted or discouraged or anything else except a towering fury to survive. He pulled himself up, foothold by foothold, crag by crag, until he wriggled over the top and lay panting and surprised by his feat.

Matt looked up into the blinding, blue sky and heard the leathery flap of wings as the bird turned in the air.
I win, you ugly, good-for-nothing buzzard
, thought Matt. He smiled. He sounded just like El Patrón.

Matt celebrated with a bottle of water and a package of cookies. He threw a rock at the turkey buzzard. The map showed he'd come about five miles and there were five more to go. The sun was bending to the west, so he might not make it to the border before dark. Matt wasn't particularly worried. He
had plenty of food, and he felt enormously good after his battle with the cliff.

He traveled on to the top of a ridge. The going was much easier and the view was spectacular. Tam Lin had included small binoculars among the supplies, so Matt stopped frequently to look back at Opium. The land toward Aztlán was still blocked by the mountains.

He could see the long, flat poppy fields and even a brown smudge that might have been a group of eejits. He saw the water purification plant and storehouses for food and fertilizer. The red tile roofs of the mansion spread out in a patch of intense green. Matt felt a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach. It was, he realized, sorrow.

There, on the high ridge of the Ajo Mountains, Matt gave himself over to grief. He wept for Celia trapped in the stables and for Tam Lin, who was trapped in a different way. He wasted no tears on the Alacráns or their slaves Felicia, Fani, and Emilia. But he wept for El Patrón, who deserved pity less than anyone but who was closer to Matt than anyone in the world.

In an odd way it felt as though El Patrón were still alive, and in one sense he was. For Matt still existed. As long as he survived, El Patrón had not vanished from the world.

•   •   •

Matt camped at the top of the ridge. The recent rains had filled hollows in the rocks, and the little folds of the mountain were green with bear grass. Desert mallow spread out peach-colored blooms in pockets of soil, and everywhere late-blooming cliff roses swarmed with bees. Matt wasn't afraid, although he saw more animals than he had ever observed on his travels with Tam Lin.

White-tailed deer fed on bushes in the late-afternoon sun.
He saw a buck rub his antlers on a tree, perhaps to sharpen them or perhaps simply because they itched. Matt didn't know. He saw a group of coatis running with their tails in the air and their long noses pointed along the ground.

Everything seemed alive. Everything scurried, flew, dug, nibbled, or chattered. Frogs cheeped from an unseen water hole, a rock squirrel whistled when a red-tailed hawk drifted by, a mockingbird sat on the topmost branch of a mesquite and performed every song Matt had ever heard, plus a few extra the bird must have composed himself.

Most of all, it was the wild music that impressed Matt. It did the same thing that playing the piano had done when he was frightened and lonely. It took him into another world where only beauty existed and where he was safe from hatred and disappointment and death.

He stayed up a long time, watching the distant lights of Opium. There weren't many. The mansion sat by itself in a sea of dark. The factories, storehouses, and eejit pens were all hidden. The air was so still, the eejits had probably been driven into the fields to sleep. Matt heard no sound from the far plain. It might have been a painting instead of a real place. Nearby he heard the hoot of a great horned owl and the incessant chirp of crickets. The mountain was darker than the plain, but it was alive and it was real.

Matt slept well, and he felt strong and confident in the morning. Opium was covered by a ground fog, as it often was in the fall. He couldn't see anything but a white haze stretching from horizon to horizon.

With a last look at the map, Matt started along the trail. It dipped up and down, gradually leading up to a pass between two hills. He heard a noise from one of the high meadows, like
someone hitting a baseball. It happened again and again. It couldn't really be people playing baseball up there, he knew, with only the hawks and turkey buzzards to watch.

As he got closer, the sound became more like someone smacking a pair of ripe watermelons together. Matt cautiously peered around a bush and saw two bighorn sheep thunder at each other like a pair of farm trucks. They crashed head-on, reeled away, and trotted off. After a few moments they repeated the performance. A group of ewes grazed among the rocks as though they couldn't be bothered to watch. Matt was so delighted, he laughed out loud. Then, of course, the sheep skittered to safety, making huge leaps as they bounded from rock to rock.

As Matt approached the cleft at the top of the mountains, he began to hear another puzzling noise. It was like the roar of fire in Celia's stove. It got louder and louder, and now Matt could pick out individual sounds: the grinding of machinery, the blast of horns, even—incredibly—music.

He stepped through the pass into another world. The same quiet hills lay below him, with hawks patrolling wooded valleys between shoulders of rock. But beyond them lay a seething mass of factories and skyscrapers. He saw roadways not only on the ground, but also going up in wide spirals among the buildings. A sea of hovercrafts restlessly prowled the air. The buildings stretched on as far as Matt could see, which wasn't far because a smudgy brown haze covered everything. It was from here that the booming, clanking, thundering noises came, and it surprised Matt so much, he sat down on the trail to think.

The sun was directly overhead. Matt fished out the hat Tam Lin had provided. So this was Aztlán. In all Matt's imaginings it had been nothing like this. He had taken Celia's tales about the
maquiladoras
and El Patrón's stories about Durango and mixed them with episodes of El Látigo Negro. What came out was a hodgepodge of factories, primitive huts, and fabulous ranches owned by evil tycoons who had pretty daughters.

How could people live in all that noise?
he thought.
How could they breathe the air?
There wasn't a fence for as far as he could see, but there was a line of poles that could have supported a fence. The land on the Opium side of the border was deserted. It was as though someone had put up a big sign saying
DANGER! RADIOACTIVE!

Matt went back over the mountain pass to the meadow where the bighorn sheep had tried to brain each other. He ate a small lunch of beef jerky and dry cheese. He couldn't stay here. The rainy season in the Ajo Mountains was brief, and Matt had a very clear idea of how soon the little frog ponds and hidden grottoes would dry out.

Equally, he couldn't return to the mansion. The only way out was the border of Aztlán.
You can do it
, he imagined Tam Lin saying.
I guess I have to
, thought Matt, turning to look one last time at the quiet meadow, the white plumes of bear grass, and the black-throated sparrows flitting through the trees.

•   •   •

He slid down parts of the hill where the ground was steep and sandy. He arrived at the bottom, hot and dusty and itching from dozens of spines he had collected from a cholla cactus on the way down. He crouched in the shade of a rock to drink the last of his water.

Matt found the spines impossible to remove. They seemed to burrow deeper into his skin when he tried to pinch them out. And somewhere along the way he'd torn his pants and one of the straps on the backpack.

Matt observed the border through binoculars. What he saw was every bit as ugly as it sounded. A row of factories chugged smoke into the air. Behind them, on the border itself, was a tangle of cast-off machinery and tanks that seeped a black liquid onto the ground. Pools of the stuff dotted the narrow space between the buildings and the line of poles. Then something much closer moved across Matt's field of view.

He adjusted the lenses. It was a man on a horse.
It was a member of the Farm Patrol!
Moving the glasses around, he saw more of them.

Matt shrank back into the rocks. The Farm Patrol must have gone back to work after the wake. Had they seen him come slipping and sliding down the mountain? He was afraid to move. He was afraid not to. Fortunately, the hollow where Matt was hiding was deep. After a tense half hour or so he guessed the Farm Patrol had seen nothing. Or perhaps they were merely waiting for him to get thirsty and come out. Matt did get thirsty, horribly so, as the hours went by.

He counted six men. They rode slowly back and forth. At no time was the border deserted, and at no time was it possible for Matt to run the remaining few hundred yards to freedom. The sun dipped to the west. Shadows lengthened. Matt sucked on a stone to keep from feeling thirsty.

The sun set. The shadow of night rose, dividing the eastern sky into pale blue above and gray below, with a rosy border where the sunlight still shone on a haze of dust in the air. Suddenly a commotion broke out. A group of men burst from one of the junkyards and ran across the border. The instant they passed the line of poles, sirens went off. The Farm Patrol galloped to intercept them.

At once Matt was off in the other direction. It hadn't taken
him a second to react. This was his chance. He raced across the ground. To his left he heard shouts and a loud crack accompanied by a flash of light. Matt had seen this weapon at El Patrón's birthday party. It was a super stun gun that fried the hair on an Illegal's head and stopped his heart cold. Most of the time the Illegal's heart started again, so he could be turned into an eejit.

Matt heard horse's hooves pounding. He didn't try to see how many men had turned to follow him. His only chance was to reach the border, and he bounded with an agility that would have impressed a bighorn sheep. He saw the body of a horse approaching. Matt swung the binoculars at the animal's head and sent it veering to one side. The rider pulled it up and forced it to turn.

The poles were close. Matt saw the ground ahead change from dirt to cement. He put on an extra burst of speed, but the Farm Patroller grabbed Matt's backpack and reined in his horse. Matt undid the snap holding the waistband and slid out of the straps. The change in speed sent him stumbling across the border into one of the oily black pools, where he fell on his stomach and skidded out the other side in a plume of goo.

Matt sat up, frantically wiping his eyes. He saw the Farm Patroller ride away and looked down to see he would have no trouble convincing the Aztlános he was a refugee. He had no backpack, no money, and he was covered from head to toe in black slime.