moved when her fingers push the last number into the sand, a shaky one thousand. Gloria turns her head slowly back and forth, and understanding that it is her silence as much as anything else that’s keeping her alive, she wordlessly considers the pieces of her body as they appear to her. Arm. Here is an arm, a foot. The foot bone’s connected to the heel bone, she thinks, and the heel bone’s connected to the anklebone. And over there, on the ground next to the wooden drill platform, her heart. She turns her head this way and that, gathering the body, covering it with clothes that lie torn and strewn around the site, as if they are trash, disregarded and cast aside, instead of her favorite black T-shirt, the blue jeans her mother gave her for Christmas, the matching bra and panties she stole from Sears.
She knows she shouldn’t, but when it is time to go Gloria cannot help looking at the roughneck. Thin wisps of blond hair crawl out from under the felt edge of his cowboy hat. Skinny and gristle tough, he is just a few years older than Gloria, who will be fifteen next fall, if she survives this day. Now his chest rises and falls regular, just like anybody else’s, but otherwise he is still. Still asleep, or pretending to be.
Gloria’s mind skitters into this thought like a horse into a hidden skein of barbed wire. Her mouth falls open then jerks itself closed. She is oxygen starved and gasping, a fish torn from a lake. She imagines her own limbs disconnected, fleeing into the desert to be picked clean by the coyotes she heard calling to each other all through the night. She imagines her bones blanched and worn smooth by the wind—a desert filled with them—and this makes her want to shriek, to open her mouth and howl. Instead, she swallows hard and sits back down in the sand, shutting her eyes tight against both the roughneck and the sun brightening, interminable sky.
She must not panic. To panic is the worst possible thing, her uncle would say. When Tío tells a war story—and since he came home last year, every story is a war story—he begins the same way. Know what you call a soldier who panics, Gloria? KIA, that’s what. He ends his stories the same way, too. Listen, an army man never panics. Don’t you ever panic, Gloria. You panic and—he forms his index finger into a pistol, presses it against his heart, and pulls the trigger—bang. And if there is only one thing she knows for sure on this morning, it is that she doesn’t want to die, so she jams two fists hard against her mouth and she tells herself to stand back up. Try not to make a sound. Move.
Then Gloria Ramírez—for years to come, her name will hover like a swarm of yellow jackets over the local girls, a warning about what not to do, what never to do—stands up. She does not go back for her shoes, when she thinks of them, or the rabbit fur jacket she was wearing last night when the young man pulled into the parking lot at the Sonic, his forearm hanging out the open window, sparse freckles and golden hair glistening beneath the drive-in’s fluorescent lights.
Hey there, Valentine. His words took the ugly right out of the drive-in, his soft drawl marking him as not from here, but not that far away either. Gloria’s mouth went dry as a stick of chalk. She was standing next to the lone picnic table, a shaky wooden hub in the midst of a few cars and trucks, doing what she always did on a Saturday night. Hanging around, drinking limeades and begging smokes, waiting for something to happen, which it never did, not in this piss-ant town.
He parked close enough that Gloria could see the oil patch on him, even through the windshield. His cheeks and neck were wind-burned, his fingers stained black. Maps and invoices covered his dashboard, and a hard hat hung on a rack above the seat. Empty beer cans lay crushed and scattered across the truck’s bed, along with crowbars and jugs of water. All of it added up to a pretty good picture of the warnings Gloria had been hearing her whole life. And now he was telling her his name—Dale Strickland—and asking for hers.