There was a small gallery at El Porton, a coffee house in Hermosillo Central, popular with the wives of American and Canadian geologists who spent twenty days in the city and ten away according to their husbands’ work schedules. Lucia showed her work there one Thursday late in winter and of the people who came out of adoration for the owner, a curly-haired man with glasses and bad teeth, not one bought a painting nor pretended to want to buy one when their money transfers went through.    

“These women won’t hang anything that doesn’t have a cactus or steer or pink sky,” she said.

“You’re right,” the owner said. “They know nothing. I’ll keep them up for an extra week. You’ll see. Someone will appreciate your work like I do.”

She was not ready for a relationship and she did not entertain his pass, though he kept his promise. She went back each day to see if any of the paintings had been marked with a red sticker, but none had.

She was taking down the paintings when David, an American with a big frame and sharp jaw line who worked at the consulate, came in for a late afternoon lunch and saw her struggling to carry all her paintings down the long, narrow hallway that led to the galleries and back patio.

“Would you like a hand?” he said.

“Yes, please,” she said.

She handed him some of the paintings.

“You don’t have to be careful,” she said. “They’re all shit.”

“They must be yours,” he said.

He put two in the back of her car and held one up, a landscape of a field of purple Lupine. There was no sun in the picture, though the sky was the bright blue of daytime and the field how it would look at night as if a shadow hung between heaven and earth.

“I think this is beautiful,” he said.

“The plant in Latin is called The Wolf.”

“And this one?” David said, holding up another painting.

“I painted that from remembering the way the sky looked in one of my dreams. It was no different than the ocean. I had this feeling that it would fall and I would drown, but I wasn’t scared.”

“I dream of knives,” he said. “Someone is always chasing me with a knife, but I can never see who it is, only the knife. I don’t know how I came to be so frightened of them, but I am. More frightened than anything else, even what might happen if the knife stabs my skin.”

“You’ll end up in the hospital,” she said. “Or worse.”

“I’m having lunch, will you have lunch with me?”

“Let me lock up the car.”

The owner showed them to a table and he apologized to her again and said that if she painted bucks or skulls or even the Mayo Indians in their horse costumes, they would go right out the door.

David ordered huevos rancheros and she yogurt with fresh strawberries. They ate in silence, respecting one another with manners taught to them by their parents and they knew that they could be companions because of these small gestures of respect.

She didn’t tell David about her husband who had died a year earlier in a helicopter crash over the desert. David wouldn’t discover she had had a husband until he had fallen in love with her by springtime. She was unwilling to marry him because she considered herself married and her husband’s presence still with her. She believed his presence allowed her to have a relationship with a man, but it would never let her marry another.

They agreed to a partnership and drove to Aconchi, two hours northeast of Hermosillo, where her family lived. The mission there was like many of the ones David had seen in Northern Mexico and the Southern United States, made of hard rock and stone with a single bell inside the gothic steeple; the stations of the cross painted on the walls in violent display necessary to convert the conquered so many years ago; to the right lain flat a statue of Francisco wrapped in a shimmering blanket adorned with crosses and rosaries and pictures of deceased wives and fathers and children; behind the altar hung a carved wooden statue of a black Jesus on the cross, his eyes were open and he was not hanging, but in the process of dying.

“How do we know he did not try to hold himself up?” the priest said as he walked in after hearing Lucia’s confession. “There’s no question he went insane.”

David watched Lucia walk out from behind the priest and the priest held David’s hand between his two, soft palms.

“You’re a lucky man,” he said.

The priest gave mass. Many of the churchgoers were thick-armed farmers who had spent their entire lives asking for only one thing, sometimes receiving it and sometimes not, and the priest, too, asked for the same.

There was a hot springs in Aconchi and Lucia and David drove a truck from the Mission to the spring, soaked in the springs a while and when they got out the air was cool on their bodies and there were three children and a mother and the water poured down into a basin where women washed clothes and hung them over a line of smoldering coals. They bought elotes and ate them in the square and she went back for more cream and a soda and they shared the soda and sat close to each other and thought about their futures.

Lucia’s father owned land that dated back to the revolution and through two major droughts and her father was proud to have survived one of them and proud to have had a father who survived everything but the inevitable. They had a meal of tortillas and beef stew and chiles and the father sang before the meal. He had brown teeth and his nails were jagged and dirty and his hands were like worn gloves. Lucia loved her father and touched his arm over the course of the meal when he told stories that went off on tangents to Veracruz and Boston, Massachusetts and told of a famous doctor who saved his mother’s leg and the heart of Francisco Madero, and of a lightning storm that lasted three weeks and ran everyone from the town, some as far as Arizona, and the solemn night he spent on a hillside before he ran off to Guadalajara to see a girl who had stayed on the ranch during the summer of his eighteenth year and when he went to the train station she was there and he knew she would be his wife.

David looked at Lucia’s mother and she nodded her head.

“She doesn’t speak,” Lucia’s father said. “Ever since she saw one of our men trampled by a horse. It scared her so bad.”

Lucia’s mother served chocolate pudding and they ate their dessert quietly.

“Is all of it true?” David asked Lucia before bed.

“Of course not,” she said. “His life is full of sadness.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“The insecticides poisoned her tongue. It had to be removed.”

“Was there a man trampled by a horse?”

“Maybe. It’s not uncommon.”

David slept in a guest room and there was a picture of Lucia’s father holding a pellet gun in one hand and two jackrabbits in the other. He was looking forward blankly as if he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be where he was. Lucia’s mother knocked on the door and gave him another blanket and held her cheek forward and he kissed her and said goodnight and she nodded and shut the door. He opened the window and the smell of wet soil drifted in with wind that had dragged across miles of land. The howl of a coyote beckoned through and when the howl was gone he heard nothing.

David and Lucia purchased a house outside the city of Hermosillo, close to San Pedro. They told the man who sold it to them that they were married and he saw the ring Lucia’s first husband had given her and smiled and said it wasn’t too late to begin a family though David was thirty years old and Lucia thirty-three. The house came with furniture: an old stuffed couch, dirty rugs, a leather chair with a rip down the center, and bed with the imprint of a fat man on the left side of the mattress.

“What happened to the man who lived here before?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “One day he was gone.”

Later, Lucia said the man must have known what happened and it was strange because usually Mexicans are not afraid to talk about death so maybe he thinks it was worse than death what happened to that man.

“What’s considered worse than death?”

“Nothing,” Lucia said.

David went to buy new furniture in a store that advertised it was going out of business. The store was not in the downtown district, but a few blocks up and was difficult to find. By the time he found the place it was dark and the lights were off. He saw smoke billowing up inside the window and noticed a man with his hat pulled down over his eyes, lying on a couch smoking a cigarette. David tapped on the window and the man lifted his hat and looked at David and put the cigarette in a tin ashtray. He flipped on the lights and let David inside.

“Are you closed?”

“This is the last day,” he said. “Everything’s for sale.”

“I always wondered what someone did with all their stuff when they were going out of business? Do you give it away, burn it, what do you do?”

“I imagine I’ll drag it out to the street and sell it, and if the police tell me to leave, I’ll drag it somewhere else and sell it.”

David bought a sofa and a mattress and two lamps and a desk and a small kitchen table. The man had a young son and the two drove out to David and Lucia’s house the next morning and carried the furniture inside and were very careful and unafraid and David asked to hire the father and son to build a studio on the house, a studio for Lucia to paint in. The father and son accepted the offer and they worked hard and erected in only a day a small area with a roof to sleep under even though David and Lucia offered them a room in the house.

“The house is too small for four people,” the father said. “My boy needs to get used to having less now that the store is gone.”

They had a fire outside where the shadows of saguaro cactuses loomed in moonlight and they worked until the summer when the crickets started chirping and piling up in the sawdust, dead and overturned, and the boy swept them out. David helped them paint and Lucia bought plants for the inside and begonias for outside and soon the home became a home and the father and son wished them a happy life and were gone.

Lucia could only work at night and so she would set dinner for David and sit with him while he ate and he told her about his day. He told her about a man stranded with a flat who had lost his tourist visa and when the federales stopped behind his broken down car they decided he was the type of man they could take from and they towed his car. He said how he suspected the man had something else going on but he couldn’t tell what and the story was left at that because there was not much he could do but question the man and let the Mexican authorities charge him eight hundred pesos for a new visa and two thousand to get his car back. The man vowed never to return to Mexico, which was not uncommon among disgruntled tourists. David’s work was to recover lost things and most of the time he was unsuccessful. He never wanted something terrible to happen because when something terrible happened there was usually nothing to investigate.

Lucia collected the plates and set them in the sink and showered and put on her black pants and shirt and went outside to the room the father and son had built for her. She thought that when she had finished something with her hands there was still more work to be done and she had nothing to do with that work. When she was nearly finished with a painting, she let the desert air blow in through the open windows.

There were more failures than successes. She wondered if the studio had been built on the wrong side of their property, if maybe they should have used adobe instead of concrete blocks, if the house itself were shielding an invisible hand from taking her work to the next level. She thought maybe her life was too easy now. She had suffered after her husband’s death, but now there was no suffering. David had a decent job and money in a bank in the U.S. that he used for the house and for trips south to Michaocan to see the mariposa sanctuary and the beach in Acapulco Diamante and once to Taxco where he bought her silver earrings, a necklace and bracelet. He slept peacefully when Lucia couldn’t sleep. He had told her he loved her and had never loved anyone before. His parents lived comfortably near Miami Beach and when they called their voices were full of a life with little pain. He was interested in hiking the desert and knew the land well and he enjoyed playing cards and reading. He never cried and never laughed. He had few secrets and the ones he shared were petty boyhood crimes that weren’t worth confessing on Sundays.

In September a young man was brought to the consulate by two federales who claimed his wife was missing. They had been camping and hunting whitetail deer in the desert. In the morning he had woken up later than usual and she was gone. Tracks had been scuffed but because they had been scuffed he knew she’d been kidnapped and the man said they loved each other and David understood.

He went to where the man’s camping equipment was still set. He looked out at vast desert and there were two hills in the distance and mountains beyond that.

“You came without a guide?” he asked.

“We’ve been hunting out here for years,” the man said.

The man was sobbing and David decided not to turn around. When he did, the man was taking down the tent and David yelled for him to stop.

They never found the woman. There were search parties and officers from Nogales drove their Ford trucks through the fields and farms and over sand and rock. Gas became an issue and then murmurings of how nothing could be done about a woman who no longer loved her man started. David didn’t take part in the joke and knew it was about money and knew it was important such information about the missing didn’t reach the border and beyond or else tourists wouldn’t come to the state and though it didn’t affect him directly, it affected those people he had come to love in the place where he lived.

The man spent a month in the Colonial Hotel. He had money sent from his wife’s family and his father-in-law spent two weeks in the room with him before they were both drained and exhausted and the father-in-law went back home. The man stayed and David visited him when he got off work and they had coffee and he kept him up to date and told him they thought they had a sighting in San Carlos, but it wasn’t her.

“The Mexicans think blonde hair is any hair not dark,” he told the man.

His name was Alex and he was a contractor back in Sacramento. He’d been coming to the Sonora Desert for the last ten years since his studies at the University of Arizona because in no other place did he feel peace like he felt in the desert at night and now that was gone.

“I’m in a bad place in my head,” he told David.

David invited him to the house and Lucia made dinner for the three of them and they listened to music and played Gin and drank beer into the early morning. The man slept on the sofa and left for Sacramento in the afternoon.

A year later, Alex returned. He spent a night in the desert among the cactuses and coyotes and once in a while he thought he heard the clopping of horses pass by. He stayed awake in his tent and cried and then went silent and tried to listen for her voice but couldn’t hear it. When the federales found him, he was digging a hole and had gone three feet deep and he was sunburned and his water bottles were empty and they looked in his eyes and conferred he was crazy and took him to a Cruz Roja in the city.

David was sent to pick him up. He took him back to the Colonial Hotel, but later that night, the concierge called and said the consulate could not put crazy men in the hotel and expect not to pay more than the average guest. They paid more for one night and then David told Alex to go back home.

“But you’ve done nothing more to find her,” Alex said.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I thought so at first.”

“I’m sorry to say we’re not looking anymore. Her photo’s posted in the municipal buildings in all the major tourist areas of the country, but in a year many people go missing.”

“What about the places where travelers don’t go?”

“I can’t say anything about those places except there’s a reason why they don’t go there.”

“Maybe that’s where she is.”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you know what it feels like?”

“No.”

David gave Alex his card and told him that he could call whenever he liked. The next day the Colonial Hotel confirmed that Alex had checked out at seven in the morning.

Lucia’s father was very sick and by winter he had lost both his legs and was confined to a wheelchair. Lucia drove to Aconchi every weekend and sometimes would stay the week to help her mother. David only went up once. The father felt disgraced and did not tell any more stories and asked everyone present not to remember how he lived these last years. The mother cried at night and there was no peace in the house as there had been when David visited earlier.

When Lucia came home, she didn’t cook or look after the house. She slept during the day and went to her studio at night. She hadn’t painted anything in the last few months and when she wet her brush the only thing that came to her mind was her dead husband. But each time she tried to paint him, the result was a stranger. She began a collection of portraits of people she had never met or seen and their stories were in their eyes: sadness, loneliness, desperation, lust, hatred, want. David no longer asked her about the work she did and she no longer hung the paintings in El Porton; she stacked them against the walls of her studio, one after another, until she was surrounded by the faces of people she had begun to love. Though, she felt she could not paint another one; this was where they lived and she was an intruder. She asked David to build her another studio and he said he would.

David looked for the father and son who had built the first studio. He went where the furniture store had been and now it was a shoe store and the owner said she didn’t know where they had moved to though she knew they were sleeping on the beds in the store so they must not have had a home. He drove along the edge of the city where the road ended and there was only desert. He went into San Pedro and searched the carne asada stands and asked about the father and son, describing their sun-patched faces and matching leather boots. One woman knew of a man who had lost his son and said he was living with a family who owned property past San Pedro.

David found the father at the El Rodeo Cattle Ranch. The father was sleeping in a bunkhouse and looked healthy and surprised to see David. He asked the father if he could come back to his job on the ranch if he left for a while and the father asked the owner and said he could.

The father worked from early in the morning until late in the evening, dragging concrete bricks past the first studio to the spot David sketched for the second, further out where Lucia decided was the best place for a studio. It took him a month longer than with his son and he slept in a tent saying he didn’t want to intrude on a marriage and that he was fine sleeping outside because it was at night during the quiet that he spoke with his son. David never asked him what had happened to his son and the father never told him.

When the studio was finished, David paid the man more than they first agreed, but the man refused and handed the extra money back to David. They drove to El Rodeo and the man walked stiffly up the hill to the bunkhouse and David watched him open the door and walk in as if he had always lived there.

The following September, Alex called the house and Lucia answered.

“The man whose wife went missing, right?”

“Yes, I guess you can say this is what I am down here.”

“Are you in Hermosillo?”

“At the Colonial, as always.”

“Come out to the house tonight and we’ll have dinner. David will like to hear that you’re well. He likes to know that people he worked with are doing better than when they first met him.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m doing better.”

“You have your legs don’t you?”

Lucia made a dinner of beef and potatoes and kept a plate warm for David. The food was no good, the meat rough and potatoes undercooked. Alex didn’t eat much and neither did Lucia.

“I haven’t cooked in a while,” she said. “I’m very sorry for this.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s better than nothing.”

Alex helped to clean the plates and Lucia offered him coffee and they took their coffee out to her second studio where she had begun a series of desert landscapes, sparse and beautiful, the desert at dawn and noon and dusk and the pitch-black night of 3 a.m. Alex knew the flora of the desert. He named the butterweed and monkey flower and desert plume. The smoke tree and scorpion weed and the prickly pear. She kissed him lightly on the neck and he grabbed her by the arms, folded her arms up against her chest and pulled her toward him. She moved her head to the side and he pushed her away. They made love in the studio, intense and quick, and when David returned he greeted Alex and saw brightness in his eyes he had not seen before and saw Lucia’s mussed hair and blown pupils and he knew.

For a while, David took a room at the Colonial Hotel, using the consulate’s discretionary fund, eating only two meals a day and trying to sleep even when he wasn’t tired. When he returned home, he took everything that was Lucia’s and gave it to the Cruz Roja or wrapped for presents to give to the orphanage. He sometimes drove out to the desert and walked until he could no longer see his truck and then walked back. He missed Lucia and tried to call the number Alex had given the consulate two years earlier, but the number was no longer the same. He made dinner for himself and ate and looked out the window to the two studios he had had built for her and imagined her inside them painting and the pain was like someone shredding his chest with sharp fingernails.

He drove to the El Rodeo Cattle Ranch, which had been built up some from the last time he had been there. There was new fencing for the cattle and a pair of stallions. He asked the owner if the father was still living in the bunkhouse and the owner said he was and that he was a good worker and didn’t think he could let him go for as long as the last time David needed him for.

“Only a day or two is necessary for the work I want him to do,” David said.

The man agreed and David went to the bunkhouse and told the father he had work for him and how much he would pay and the father agreed to leave with him. It was night and so David asked the father to please take one of the beds in the house.

“It’s lonely here without Lucia,” he said. “There’s plenty of room and I’d appreciate the company.”

The father nodded and David prepared his room and gave him a fresh towel and a bar of soap and the father took a hot shower. They ate carne asada and rice and tomato.

“Tomato, you know is a Nahuatl word. An Indian word. When you speak this you speak the native language.”

“I’m surprised at how little I know sometimes,” David said.

“My people are the Tarahumaras, and the Spanish, of course. A Mestizo. There was a time when the Mestizos thought poised to be the dominant race. Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez days. These are people who let their histories be told by others.”

David cleared the plates from the table and ran water over them. They drank their coffee on the terrace.

“I want you to know it means a great deal to me that you agreed to stay in the house.”

The father wondered if he was here just to keep David company.

“Once in a while a man likes a hot meal and a hot shower,” he said.

In the morning David drove to the hardware store and then to a tienda and panaderia. He made coffee and put fresh juice and pan dulce on the table and the two men ate and were silent.

David showed the father out to the studios before noon. Two sledgehammers rested against the concrete. He said he wanted them taken down. The father stared at him with a puzzled look. David picked up one of the sledgehammers and busted through the first brick.

“Like this,” he said. “Then we can fill the truck.”

The father didn’t move.

David swung the sledgehammer again. He looked at the father who was lean and had a ruddy, wrinkled face, and deep-set eyes with no end. David swung again and the father went inside the house to get his things and he left without saying goodbye.

“Where are you going?” David said.

David watched him head out to the road, take off his shirt and tie it around his head. His skin wrapped around his bones like a dead cornhusk.

The studios lay in two hills of rubble and the dust hung in the air and moved across the sky. In the morning, David shoveled the rubble into his truck and drove it out into the desert and dumped it not far from where he had first met Alex.        

He swept his truck-bed clean and sat on the gate. He looked out at the pale sky and felt the sun warm the side of his face. A truck kicked up dust heading toward him. The windows were tinted, but in the truck-bed he could see three young men with bandanas tied around their mouths to protect them from the dust. The truck slowed when it reached David. The men stared at him and he figured whoever was inside the truck cab was also staring at him. The truck stopped and the man in the driver’s seat rolled down the window.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked David.

“I’m lost,” David said.

“Lost?”

All the men began to laugh.

With a sweep of his hand, the man in the driver’s seat said, “How the hell would you know if you were lost out here?”