Chapter 24
TAPTAPTAPPITYTAP.
Dawn broke with frost on the window and a rapping at our door.
“Hey,” a voice outside whispered. “You guys up?”
I padded over to the door, shivering, wondering what the hell the Party Kids had done this time. Luis and Scott were outside, blowing into their cupped hands. It was so early, the sky was still a milky coffee color. The roosters hadn’t even started crowing.
“Want to sneak in a run?” Scott asked. “Caballo said we’re on the road by eight, so we’ve got to hit it now.”
“Uh, yeah. Okay,” I said. “Caballo took me on a great trail last time. Let me see if I can find him and—”
A window flew open in the cabin beside us. Jenn’s head popped out. “You guys going for a run? I’m in! Billy,” she called back over her shoulder. “Get your ass up, dude!”
I yanked on some shorts and a polypro top. Eric yawned and reached for running shoes. “Man, these guys are hard-core,” he said. “Where’s Caballo?”
“No idea. I’m going to look for him.”
I walked to the end of the row of adjoining cabins, guessing Caballo would be as far from us as he could get. I rapped on the door of the very last cabin. Nothing. It was a pretty stout door, though, so just to be sure, I gave it a good hammering with the side of my fist.
“WHAT!!!” a voice roared. The curtains ripped open and Caballo’s face appeared. His eyes were red and puffy.
“Sorry” I said. “You catch a cold or something?”
“No, man,” he said wearily. “I was just getting to sleep.” Barely twelve hours into this operation, Caballo was already so stressed that he’d spent the entire night tossing and turning with an anxiety headache. Being in Creel was enough to put him on edge in the first place. It’s actually a pleasant little town, but it represents the two things Caballo despises most: bullshit and bullies. It’s named for Enrique Creel, a land-raping kingpin of such dastardly magnificence that the Mexican Revolution was essentially thrown in his honor. Enrique not only engineered the land grab that ousted thousands of Chihuahua peasants from their farms, but personally made sure that any feisty farmers ended up in jail by moonlighting as the head of a spy network for the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz.
Enrique slithered into exile in El Paso when Pancho Villa’s rebels came thundering after him (leaving behind a son who had to be ransomed from the revolutionaries for a million dollars), but once Mexico went through its inevitable correction and reverted back to contented corruption, Enrique returned in all his scheming glory. In a fitting tribute to the region’s greatest human virus, Enrique Creel’s namesake was now the launching area for every pestilence afflicting the Copper Canyons: strip-mining, clear-cut logging, drug ranching, and big-bus tourism. Spending time there drove Caballo nuts; for him, it was like staying at a bed-and-breakfast on a working slave plantation.
Most of all, though, he wasn’t used to being responsible for anyone besides the guy inside his own sandals. Now that he’d had a look at us, his chest was squeezing tight with apprehension. He’d spent ten years building up the trust of the Tarahumara, and it could come crashing down in ten minutes. Caballo envisioned Barefoot Ted and Jenn yapping into the ears of the uncomprehending Tarahumara … Luis and his dad flashing cameras in their eyes … Eric and me pestering them with questions. What a nightmare.
“No, man, I ain’t going for a run,” he groaned. He snapped the curtains shut.
Soon, the seven of us—Scott, Luis, Eric, Jenn, Billy, Barefoot Ted, and I—were on the pine-needled trail that Caballo had taken me on before. We came out of the tree canopy just as the sun was breaking over the giant standing stones, making us squint as the world turned to gold. Mist and glittering droplets swirled around us.
“Gorgeous,” Luis said.
“I’ve never seen a place like this,” Billy said. “Caballo’s got the right idea. I’d love to live here, just living cheap and running trails.”
“He’s brainwashed you already!” Luis hooted. “The Cult of the White Horse.”
“It’s not him,” Billy protested. “It’s this place.”
“My Little Pony,” Jenn smirked. “You kinda look like Caballo.”
In the midst of this banter, Scott was busy watching Barefoot Ted. The trail was snaking through a rock field, but even though we had to hop from boulder to boulder, Ted wasn’t slowing down a bit.
“Dude, what are those things on your feet?” Jenn asked.
“Vibram FiveFingers,” Ted said. “Aren’t they great? I’m their first sponsored athlete!”
Yes, it was true; Ted had become America’s first professional barefoot runner of the modern era. FiveFingers were designed as a deck shoe for yacht racers; the idea was to give better grip on slippery surfaces while maintaining the feeling of shoelessness. You had to look closely just to spot them; they conformed so perfectly around his soles and each toe, it looked as if Ted had dipped the bottoms of his feet in greenish ink. Shortly before the Copper Canyon trip, he’d come across a photo of the FiveFingers on the Web and immediately grabbed the phone. Somehow, he connived his way through the thicket of switchboard operators and secretaries and got on the line with the CEO of Vibram USA, who turned out to be none other than …
Tony Post! The onetime Rockport exec who’d sponsored the Tarahumara at Leadville!
Tony heard Ted out, but was extremely doubtful. Not that he didn’t love the idea of relying on foot strength instead of super cushioning and motion control; once, Tony even ran the Boston Marathon in a pair of Rockport dress shoes to demonstrate that comfort and good construction were all you needed, not all that Shox/anti-pronation/gel-support jazz. But at least Rockport dress shoes had arches and a cushioned sole; the FiveFingers were nothing but a sliver of rubber with a velcro strap. Still, Tony was intrigued and decided to try it out for himself. “I went for an easy little one-mile jog,” he says. “I ended up doing seven. I’d never thought of the FiveFinger as a running shoe, but after that, I never thought of anything else as a running shoe.” When he got home, he wrote a check to cover Barefoot Ted’s trip to the Boston Marathon.
We’d run six miles along the mesa top and were heading back into Creel when, in the distance, a thin black shadow broke from the trees and started moving toward us.
“Is that Caballo?” Scott asked.
Jenn and Billy peered, then shot toward him like hounds off the leash. Barefoot Ted and Luis went after them. Scott stayed with us, but his racehorse instincts were making him itchy. He glanced apologetically at Eric and me. “You mind if I…?” he asked.
“No problem,” I said. “Run ’em down.”
“Cool.” By the time the “-ool” was out of his mouth, he was a good half-dozen yards away, his hair bouncing like streamers on a kid’s handlebars.
“Shit,” I muttered. Watching Scott surge off suddenly reminded me of Marcelino. Scott would have gotten such a kick out of that kid. Jenn and Billy, too; they would have loved mixing it up with their teenage Tarahumara triplet. I could even imagine what Manuel Luna was feeling. No, that wasn’t true; I was just trying hard not to. Evil had followed the Tarahumara here, to the bottom of the earth where there was no place left to run. Even while mourning his magnificent son, Manuel had to be wondering which of his children would be next.
“You need a break?” Eric asked. “How are you doing?”
“No, I’m good. Something on my mind.”
Caballo was approaching; after meeting the others, he’d kept on running toward Eric and me while the others took a breather and posed for Luis’s camera. It was a good thing Caballo had changed his mind and decided to come for a run; for the first time since we’d gotten off the bus, he was smiling. The sparkling sunrise and the old familiar pleasure of feeling his body warm from the inside out seemed to have eased his anxiety. And man, was it great to see him in action again! Just watching him, I felt my back straightening and my feet quickening, as if someone had just switched on the Chariots of Fire soundtrack.
Apparently, the admiration was sort of mutual. “Look at you!” Caballo shouted. “You’re a whole new bear.” A while back, Caballo had decided on a spirit animal for me; while he was a sleek white horse, I was Oso—the lumbering bear. But at least he took the sting out of it with his reaction to the way I looked now, a year since I’d gasped and winced pathetically behind him.
“You’re nothing like the guy I had up here before,” Caballo said.
“Thanks to the man here,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Eric. Nine months of Eric’s Tarahumara-style training had worked wonders: I was twenty-five pounds lighter and running with ease on a trail that had killed me before. Despite all the miles I’d put in—up to eighty a week—I still felt light and loose and eager for more. Most of all, for the first time in a decade I wasn’t nursing some kind of injury. “This guy is a miracle worker.”
“Must be,” Caballo grinned. “I saw what he had to work with. So what’s the secret?”
“It’s a pretty wild story—,” I began, but by then we’d reached Scott and the others, who were listening to Barefoot Ted hold court. “Tell you later,” I promised Caballo.
Barefoot Ted had slipped off his FiveFingers and was demonstrating the perfect shoeless foot strike. “Barefoot running really appealed to my artistic eye,” Ted was saying. “This concept of bricolage—that less is more, the best solution is the most elegant. Why add something if you’re born with everything you need?”
“You better add something to your feet when we cross the canyons,” Caballo said. “You brought some other shoes, right?”
“Sure,” Ted said. “I’ve got my flip-flops.”
Caballo smiled, waiting for Barefoot Ted to smile back and show he was joking. Barefoot Ted didn’t, and wasn’t.
“You don’t have shoes?” Caballo said. “You’re going into the Barrancas in flip-flops?”
“Don’t worry about me. I hiked the San Gabriels in bare feet. People kept looking at me like, ‘Is this guy out of his mind,’ and I’d say—”
“These ain’t no San Gay-Bree-All Mountains!” Caballo spat, mocking the California range with all the gringo butchery he could muster. “The cactus thorns out here are razor blades. You get one in your foot, we’re all f*cked. Those trails are dangerous enough without carrying you on our backs.”
“Whoa, whoa, you guys,” Scott said, getting a shoulder in and pushing them both back a step. “Caballo, Ted’s probably been hearing ‘Ted, go put some shoes on!’ for years. But if he knows what he’s doing, he knows what he’s doing.”
“He don’t know shit about the Barrancas.”
“I know this,” Ted shot back. “If someone gets in trouble out there, I guarantee you it won’t be me!”
“Yeah?” Caballo snarled. “We’ll see, amigo.” He turned and stalked down the trail.
“Hooo mama!” Jenn said. “Who’s the troublemaker now, Ted?”
We followed Caballo toward the cabins, while Barefoot Ted loudly and persistently continued arguing his case to us, Caballo’s back, and the awakening town of Creel. I glanced at my watch; I was tempted to tell Barefoot Ted to just shut up and buy a cheap pair of sneaks to keep Caballo happy, but there wasn’t time. Only one bus a day made the ten-hour trip down into the canyons, and it would be pulling out before any shops opened.
Back at the cabins, we began jamming clothes into our backpacks. I told the others where they could scare up some breakfast, then I went to check Caballo’s cabin. He wasn’t there. Neither was his pack.
“Maybe he’s cooling off on his own,” I told myself. Maybe. But I had a sick feeling that he’d decided to hell with us and was gone for good. After a long night of worrying whether he’d made a colossal mistake, I was pretty sure he’d gotten his answer.
I decided not to tell anyone and hope for the best. One way or the other, we’d know in about thirty minutes if this operation was dead or hanging on life support. I shouldered my pack and walked back across the footbridge over the sewage ditch where we’d taken our oath the night before. I found the rest of the crew in a little restaurant down the block from the bus stop, loading up on bean and chicken burritos. I wolfed down two, then packed a few in my pack for later. When we got to the bus, it had already rumbled to life and was ready to go. The driver was tossing the last bags onto the roof rack, and signaled for ours.
“Espera,” I said. Hang on a sec. Caballo wasn’t anywhere in sight. I shoved my head inside the bus and scanned the full rows of seats. No Caballo. Damn. I got out to break the news to everyone else, but they’d all disappeared. I walked around the back, and found Scott climbing the rungs to the roof.
“C’mon up, Oso!” Caballo was on top of the bus, catching bags for the driver. Jenn and Billy were already beside him, lounging in a cushy pile of baggage. “You’ll never get a ride like this again.”
No wonder the Tarahumara thought Caballo was a ghost. There was no telling what this guy would do, or where he’d turn up. “Forget it,” I said. “I’ve seen this road. I’m getting in the crash-ready position inside between the two fattest guys I can find.”
Barefoot Ted grabbed the rungs behind Scott.
“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you ride inside with me?”
“No, thanks. I’m going roof surfing.”
“Look,” I said, spelling it out. “Maybe you should give Caballo a little space. Push him too far, and this race is over.”
“Nah, we’re cool,” Ted said. “He just needs to get to know me.”
Yeah. That’s exactly what he needs. The driver was settling behind the wheel, so Eric and I hustled aboard and squeezed into the back row. The bus misfired, stalled, then grumbled back to life. Soon, we were winding through the forest, heading toward the old mining town of La Bufa and from there, to the end of the road in the canyon-bottom village of Batopilas. After that, we’d strike out on foot.
“I’m waiting to hear a scream and see Barefoot Ted getting heaved off the roof,” Eric said.
“You ain’t kidding.” Caballo’s last words before storming off were still ringing in my ears: We’ll see, amigo!
Caballo, as it turned out, had decided that before Barefoot Ted got us all in trouble, he was going to teach him a lesson. Unfortunately, it was a lesson that would have all of us running for our lives.