Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick Page A

to follow. Keep north, everybody told us. Keep the idea of the ocean, the ocean air on your left.
    So far, so good, we thought. We hadn’t even used much water. So we spent one more night in the rocks and got a lift on a farm truck the next morning, hauling watermelon. We were dropped at the seafront, as the fish stalls were opening. Juan bought fruit and bread and we ate it with the pelicans, the fishing boats all coming back with the night catch. Hey, you listening Larry? You listening?
    But it’s impossible to tell if Larry’s listening. Maria decides he is.
    There was a man we were supposed to meet. He was called Vincente and he was right on time. He bought us coffee. But we were all surprised by Penasco. There were Americans in the street and tall cranes across Cholla Point. They were building apartments all over the peninsulas.
    Why not stay here? I asked. There’s work. But Juan was for pushing on, as we’d organised with Vincente. Juanita said we could even catch the bus to Sonoita, and cross there, but that’s the free trade area and it’s full of army and police. So we had to do what Vincente said. It was like a pledge. As if we’d signed a paper. Oh we were good Mexicans. Good Mexicans always do what they’re told. We had to go across El Gran Desierto del Altar.
    Below them the Goliath laundry truck is delivering. Bags of dirty linen are stacked at the sides, waiting to be hefted on. All those pissy sheets, she thinks. Those bloody, shitty sheets.
    She shuts her eyes and lets the sun press her down. Her mother used to scatter camomile flowers in their washing at home. As a girl she had pressed her clean underwear to her face and discovered a garden. Here, the cottonwood bark is rough and grey, its dead leaves at their feet. She sits with a dying man, telling her story. Telling her story in the country of Goliath.
    Vincente drove us north-west. Into the Pinacate and the volcanoes. There were eight of us now, but we stayed together. Our little group. I was with Juan. Juanita was coming too. Vincente looked at us as if he had something important to say. Then he turned away. We never saw him again.
    They had told us to walk at night but that was crazy. Yes, any fool can read the stars but no one can walk that country in darkness. There’s lava sharp as glass. There are craters that cut your shoes and are hard to climb down, climb up. And that darkness is total darkness. Juanita was terrified. Los Indios , she kept saying. She thought we’d meet indians who would scalp us. Now that scared the others. Only Juan laughed and put his arm around her. Chucked her chin. There’s nobody out there in the Altar, he laughed. Only the ghosts. But that scared everyone too. Country people believe in ghosts.
    But we also knew the stories. About the people who died trying to cross the border. About the fools who were looking for gold. Everybody talked about that big nugget someone had found. The biggest nugget ever. So there was gold in the desert. There were old mines we could explore. One man with us had even brought a shovel. He didn’t carry it long.
    Yet Juan was determined to go and where Juan went, I did. We were together. At night we’d lie rolled up in the same blanket. One dawn I remember, I woke and Juan wasn’t there. He was standing on the crest of the dune, looking west. The sand was smoking around him. He called us to come and see the Pacific Ocean. We all stood there and gazed out. From that dune, pink in the first light. Pink sand all around. Shadows behind the rocks like pools of ink.
    Juan said not even Cortez had seen such a sight. Not even Cortez and his horses and his iron army had glimpsed what we did then. Juan was our hero now. Juan was our conquistador with cracked lips on a sand dune red as fire. Juan pointed with the ocotillo stave he’d fashioned with his machete. And we all looked where that stick pointed. Where Juan told us to look. We did