Cortez

Nighttime in the desert is different from nighttime anywhere else. Darkness stretches form horizon to horizon as though it’s been pasted there. Any light beneath it is somewhat miraculous. If there weren’t other miracles in the desert, ones more influential than luminosity, people might make speculations about light in the desert. But the real miracles were loitering around an enormous box truck, looking up at the starts, or ahead at the mountains, or down at the thin layer of dust that the wind sometimes kicked up. The stars were interesting because they had been shifting for the last hour- shifting was not the right word. Showering sounded better, but it was not right either. They looked like raindrops running into each other on a pane of glass.

The mountains were interesting because they were high, alpine creations and somehow still radio waves and waves of other sorts strained over their peaks. They were formidable and unmovable and no match for the tiny antenna on the tiny radio they’d taken from the oldest girl’s mother’s kitchen.

The dust was not as interesting, but it wasn’t the dust that was being looked at. The girl with her eyes on the dust was truly looking at a narrative in her own mind, in which she climbed into the box truck and drew gratuitously large and circuitous lines all over the desert floor with its wheels, and then turned those wheels toward the mountains and together she and the truck gallivanted into the sunset, away. The narrative stopped there, because she has no use for anything that came after that. Away was the best outcome in this scenario, so away was the happy ending.

The box truck had once been more box truck than it was now. It had been decked out with parts of other cars that the girls had owned, fixed, scrapped, or just come across. Only one or two pieces had been liberated illegally for the express purpose of making the box truck look a little less like a box truck. This was Camila’s fault. The box truck currently resided on the flattest piece of desert Camila could find, surrounded by scrub, far from town. It was faded, though Camila would have liked to put another coat of paint on it. It was high off the ground, though Camila would have preferred there was only an inch of breath between it and the sand. The seats were not leather, though Camila would have preferred to burn herself sitting in them on a hot day.

The truck had a single fracture in the windshield, which was weathering it valiantly. A pair of miniature boxing gloves were strung up on the rearview mirror. The truck had license plates from California, but it had spent so much time in Colorado that no one remembered that it’s native state was not Colorado.

The radio was not broken, but the entire box truck was having issues constantly. It had a tempestuous relationship with the heat, with the sand, with its own rusting insides, and with its age, so the radio played intermittently and moodily. The radio that played was in the cargo area. It almost disappeared in the dark, because it was made of a dark red that matched the countertop it had been taken from. It played a radio station from town, one that was owned by Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend. It broadcasted rock and roll. It broadcasted Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s voice. It broadcasted songs that made Camila think that if the radio had muscles, they would all be straining at once to push these songs out.

The radio had been taken from Sofia’s mother’s kitchen, but the truck was Camila’s. Though this story belongs to every one of the Cortez sisters, it belongs more to Camila than either of the other two. Camila was not in love with the radio station, but it was her heart powering the truck, allowing the AM radio waves in. She and the box truck shared the same calculating expression. If someone were to slash one of the slightly deflated tires of the box truck, Camila would bleed.

“Here’s another one to soothe you into that lazy summer night feel,” the DJ said. “This song is made for the PM. No daylight songs now.”

Piper tilted her head toward the radio, as she always did when the DJ spoke, like an attentive animal hearing the call of its own. Piper was selectively attentive. She was the youngest of the Cortez sisters, and her name was not actually Cortez. But she did not care for her name. She cared for being left alone when she wanted to be alone, and approached and kept around when she wanted to hover. She had hair pulled strictly away from her face, and eyes downcast from the weight of her thinking brain behind them. The lantern in the bed of the box truck was behind her, which meant her freckles disappeared. She was wearing a thin blouse, which meant she was thinking hard; when so much of her thought was devoted to something specific, there was too little to inform her that she was cold. There were several beaded and tasseled bracelets around her right wrist, because she wrote and fiddled with her left hand.

In the daytime, she did not lean against the box truck and think. In the day, she learned how to drive in her father’s Dodge truck, and read and pondered the many places outside Colorado. She looked at pictures of places that bore no resemblance to the high alpine desert. This curiosity worried her mother and her father and her grandmother. It worried her a little. Only because she feared she might never see those places herself. She felt a thrill of danger in her father’s truck each time she put her hands on the wheel. She believed, superstitiously, that the truck might lead her where she was meant to go.

Because Piper believed this: she was meant to go elsewhere. Beyond Oro Vada. Outisde Colorado.

Piper flinched when Camila nudged her shoulder. She turned so Camila’s knee was pressed against her ear instead. She could see Camila’s raised eyebrow in her mind if not with her eyes.

Camila did not notice the flinch. No one noticed the flinching anymore. “Did you hear that?” she asked, knowing Piper had not. Piper’s hearing was as selective as her attention. “Your non-relative just said the station covers the entire desert. I don’t think he knows how large the desert actually is.”

Sofia raised both her brows, because she shared Camila’s skepticism. There was a lot of desert to cover, and the station was too small and insignificant to go much farther from Oro Vada than the box truck.

Camila sat up in the bed of the truck. Her feet dangled over the edges of the bed, the bottoms the colour of the desert. Because Sofia was in the truck with her, she got a rib full of knee. Together they jostled, together they upset one of the snake eggs that sat on top of a magazine and had never hatched. They watched it roll on the floor of the bed, as if escaping. Disaster flicked its eyes their way, briefly. Sofia reached for the egg and returned it to the magazine pile.

“It won’t hatch anyway,” Camila said.

“But we don’t want it to just break open on the bed,” Sofia said. “It’s still got that new car smell.”

It had no such smell. This was a joke as the expense of all three Cortez sisters, who had rehabilitated the car to the best of their abilities after it had been brutally neglected. Before it belonged to Camila Cortez, it belonged to Nicolas Cortez, Camila’s cousin, who vanished to San Francisco and returned with a box truck that made his parents proud and a wife that did not. The truck stuck around longer than the wife, and when Nicolas swore never to bring home another woman, or himself, he abandoned the truck on the Cortez’s land. The truck was used briefly to carry feed between ranches, and to transport relatives from carpentry jobs to paint jobs to landscaping jobs to bars. When the truck grew weary and threw a tantrum, the Cortez’s developed suddenly great skill at walking. The truck was left to stew in its bitter feelings. Then the rain came and it stewed in the rain. Then the animals and the wind came and seeds stewed in it, and animals sewed in the crops that rose out of it. Sedges climbed over the hood and roof and absorbed noisy frogs and attracted sand hill cranes. When the trout moved in, delivered by storms or monsoon rain or their own desperation, coyotes followed. The cranes hardly stood a chance. The sounds of cranes being devoured messily in the middle of the night was enough to drive the Cortez’s to action.

Camila had volunteered her services, mostly because she felt that denuding the truck of sedges and swamp timothy would be like pulling the wrapping off a gift. She worked steadily and cruelly to evict the animals. The plants took less notice of her efforts, because she was more gentle and slow evicting sedge. She found plant life more charming than bloody-muzzled coyotes. The truck was slow to trust her, but eventually even it seemed to forget the trauma. The only reminder was the snake egg that had never hatched, found under the passenger’s seat when she was chasing a leopard frog toward the door. The egg was heavy enough to contain fetal snake, but still enough that it was unlikely the fetal snake was destined to emerge. It had stayed in a rolled up sock in the glove compartment for a while, and now it sat on top of a stack of magazines where Sofia occasionally glanced at it and suggested they paint it and make an ornament of it.

The radio crooned something new and dubious. The Cortez sisters held their breaths briefly to acknowledge this, and to pay it some attention. They were all enamored with pirate radio, which they collectively saw as an embodiment of American youth and its hunger for terrible music, revolution, and jail time. Only one of these things did not appeal to them, and as Camila has once pointed out, they would none of them go to jail for listening to pirate radio. Piper knew firsthand that the broadcasts were pre-taped, and that the DJ used a false name over the radio. Revolution was good; avoiding fine while revolutionizing was best.

“Maybe he’ll get caught this summer,” Sofia said. She did not want to see any relative, or friend, or friend of a relative of Piper’s go to jail, but she was curious to see what would happen, and she had a healthy amount of concern about the Federal Communications Commission that meant she assumed that it was inevitable.

“He won’t,” Camila answered, because when a question was open to any of the Cortez sisters, it was Camila that answered first. Camila seemed often as rapt in her own imagination as Piper, but Sofia thought some of that might be a lie. She was almost always ready to respond.

Art by Gabriele Crow

Text by Lucie MacAulay