I didn’t have a lot of time to consider those questions. There was a vague suggestion of light along the eastern horizon, the promise of dawn still an hour away. I returned to the pickup and left Cadiz to the last of its slumbering.
An hour later, I hit the truck stop south of Tucson where Rainy and Mondragón and I had stopped a couple days earlier. I gassed up and refilled the hydration pack with water. I still had the power bars and jerky I’d picked up the day before, but I bought four gallon jugs of water and the same medical supplies that Rainy had purchased. When I hit the road again, the sun was just about to bubble up over the horizon.
I had no idea if my speculation about the drone was correct and if I’d slipped away from Cadiz unnoticed. I decided it was best to skirt the Border Patrol checkpoint on the Magdalena Road, in case they’d been alerted to watch for me. I left the highway just shy of the turnoff and carefully maneuvered the pickup cross-country, between cactus and mesquite, until I came to the jeep trail that led to the Santa Margaritas.
I stopped when the GPS indicated I was three miles north of the coordinates for the Lulabelle, which was how far I’d gone the day before when I’d spotted the Jesus-shaped rock and then Sprangers had surprised me. I pulled the truck off the trail and parked in a little swale that gave it some cover should a Border Patrol vehicle or anyone else just happen along. I put the medical supplies I’d bought into the hydration pack, shouldered it, and walked fifty yards away to where I had a good 360-degree view of the desert. The air felt fresh and was still cool from the monsoon rains the day before, and it carried the faint, pleasant scent of sage. The only sound was the chatter of small desert birds. I used the binoculars to scan the sky. It was absolutely clear of clouds and, as nearly as I could tell, of drones. But I knew if one was up there, it was hovering so high my binoculars would never spot it.
I walked into the foothills of the Santa Margaritas, making my way up the slope. Every time I looked to the west, the dark shadow of the mountains had shrunk and more and more of the desert lay yellow under the rising sun. With the dawn, the air had begun to heat up quickly. I thought about Peter and the people who were with him. They’d been in the desert five days. Even if they’d had water when they began, it had to be gone by now. Once again, the desperation of the people Peter was trying to help, their willingness to risk everything in the hope of finding sanctuary, overwhelmed me.
As I climbed, I paused periodically to scan the mountains for what I’d begun thinking of as the Jesus Rock. In the vast wilderness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, unless you know the territory well, you absolutely need a map, since the many lakes and the terrain around them look so similar. It was the same in the desert, at least to me. This was alien country and I hadn’t learned how to read it. I used the GPS to guide me back to the coordinates where I’d ended my search the day before and where, moments before Sprangers had surprised me, I’d spotted the Jesus Rock glowing in the long, golden slant of the sun. The light was different now, everything in shadow, and I couldn’t distinguish it. The heavy rain had washed away any sign that I might have found to help me track Peter. I stood for a while, trying to decide on the best course of action.
I thought about the advice I’d given Pedro before he started barefoot on his journey through the desert, which was the advice Henry Meloux had once offered me. Wherever we lay our feet, each step of the journey is one we have always been meant to take. Trust. That was the message. I decided to put myself in the hands of the spirit of that place and to trust the journey, and I began in the general direction I believed the Jesus Rock to be.
I found the shoe half an hour later, a child’s canvas sneaker. There was so little of it left that I could understand why it had been discarded. Or maybe it had simply fallen off and the child was too tired or injured to care. The inside was stained with blood. As I knelt on one knee, holding that little piece of some child’s hope in my hand, I lifted my eyes, and there it was. The Jesus Rock. Catching the first gold rays as the sun mounted above the Santa Margaritas. I was no more than half a mile from it.
The rock might have been a guide, but the entrance to the Jesus Lode was a bitch to locate. Unlike the El Dorado, there was nothing in the area to indicate an old excavation. There was no clear flat in front of the entrance as there’d been at the Lulabelle. What gave the mine away was the child dipping her head to drink from rainwater gathered in the shallow depression of a stone shelf. She was so intent on drinking that she didn’t see me until I was almost upon her. Then her dark eyes grew huge and she turned and fled into the rocks at her back. I followed. And there in a small fold was the opening to the mine, so well hidden that you would have passed right by it unless you had a good sense of what you were looking for or were just incredibly lucky.
The girl was nowhere in sight, but I knew where she was, and I figured that whoever she was with, they were watching me from inside the black throat of the mine.
I called out, “Peter Bisonette, are you there?”
No sound at all came from the darkness.
“Peter, it’s Cork O’Connor.”
I heard something then, a very low murmur, and a moment later, the little girl appeared again, stepping carefully into the light. She was small, emaciated, dirty, no more than ten years old. Her hair was black and cut raggedly short. Her features looked more Native than Mexican. She wore khakis and a yellow T-shirt that, at the moment, looked as if they’d never been washed. She had canvas shoes on both her feet, so I figured she wasn’t the child who’d lost the sneaker. There were probably other children inside. She approached me slowly, and when she was very near, reached out for my hand. I gave it to her, and without a word, she led me into the mine.
The tunnel was a low, narrow dig, not nearly so well or artfully worked as the Lulabelle. The little girl still held my hand, but waited patiently for me as I paused to let my eyes adjust to the dim light inside. As the details began to emerge, I saw several women crowded together, and behind the protection of their bodies were the other children. As tired and beat up as I felt, these women and children looked to be in far worse shape. They were all so very thin, and the clothing that hung on them seemed held together only by threads. Like the little girl, they were Native in their features, and their eyes, when I could finally make them out, were dark wells of weariness and fear.
“Peter Bisonette?” I said to them quietly.
From behind them came a man’s voice speaking in a tongue I didn’t understand. The women parted, and the little girl guided me through.
“The last person on earth I expected to see,” Peter said from where he lay. “How in God’s name did you find us?”