Harry awakes in a blaze of heat, cooking, and he notices that the sun is in the wrong place. The motorcyclist is gone, too. He did not hear him leave. There is a pain in his head, like a headache, more than from just rough riding in the truck over washed out roads. He does not recall hitting his head. The pain is unrelenting. It is worse than a headache. It is like a small knot, compressed and digging at his scalp. Like a sharp metal bit is grinding away at the crown of his skull. He feels with his hand to where the blood has matted. His hand hurts it when he touches it. Disconcerting. He doesn’t remember the blow. He must have been asleep, a blessing and a curse.

He had caught a ride on a pickup at the town a few hours before. They had no room for him in the cab, so he held on to the roll bars on the back of the truck and was soon made numb and sore from the rattling over craters and through ditches, lashed from branches stinging his face as they plowed carelessly through the skein choked road. He wanted it to stop. They were rounding a bend, slowing, and he saw a motorcycle on its side by the road, and a young kid lying unusually in the ditch with his head obscured in the grass bank. Opportunity, he thought, as a drop of sweat trickled on his brow, into his eyes. He slapped his palm on the hot roof of the truck cab. Por favore. The driver craned his neck out and slowed down, calling out, Si? That kid, Harry said. Para ayudar? The truck driver skidded to a stop, and Harry hopped off. Before he had even let go of the roll bar, the driver gunned it and left him standing in a tan cloud of dust. Hasta luego, fuckers, Harry yelled out. He thought the kid was hurt. When he looked closer, he could see steady breathing, the barely noticeable rise and fall of his chest. Life affirming respiration. He didn’t know what he could do, anyway, just wait. He sat down nearby on the damp grass bank, in a patch of shade, waiting for the kid to awaken.

Harry fell asleep and the kid had knocked him on the head and left him for dead. His wallet was gone, too. With it, very little money, he remembers, thankfully. Not so thankfully, as the inconvenience will bother him soon enough. His watch, too, is gone. A twenty-five jewel movement that whirred like a tiny insect. Girard Perregeaux, worth how much he never considered. A gift from Janelle. It had to be expensive because it looked expensive, and, for whatever he questioned about her, Janelle had taste. What use is time to him, now, he thinks, wondering if the loss of blood has affected his reasoning; he realizes he cannot recall the position of the sun. When he jumped off the truck around mid-day, he probably faced a few more degrees east of north, rather than what his self-assured global positioning system miscalculation had led him to believe. He is surprised at the error and annoyed at himself. Or because he has been taken advantage of. He shouldn’t have worn the watch, of course.

He has to play through in his mind what this kid might have thought, naturally, awaking as he did seeing him lying there, nearby, and, asleep, perhaps, he must have been asleep, or otherwise dulled into a lethargic nap. He notices his pants are coated with a fine layer of talcum dirt that has been kicked up in the air from vehicles driving by. And to think no one stopped.

Harry thought of Basher on this same road, some twenty years earlier, with bloodshot militia eyes peering at him, ready to kill, through the foliage. He squints into the haze and can see the edge of the jungle. Basher had a mission, a selfless sense of purpose Harry had never known. Harry’s motives were always so self-centered. In search of the elusive. Love. Fame. Glory. Barring that, financial security. Why he had come down here after all. Maybe he could work for six months making decent money and live back there, near Malatesta’s, for one quarter the cost of living in L.A. Work three months out of the year, even. As if he had finally discovered the Basher way. He thought of Kate, not unexpectedly.

An hour might pass like this, deliberate, unhinged ruminations on their lives. Close to the scene of the crime. He’d recognize it, if he hadn’t already passed it, after the months of analyzing the video tape, reading and re-reading the State Department report. The map, hand drawn by the proprietor at the shop where he crossed the border, has creased and fallen into pieces in his damp pants pocket. Useless. The markings he could make out labeled this, or some similarly unknown road, fittingly, Camino Terminale, with an arrow toward the town, Santa Rosario de la something or other. Easy, around a bend, the shopkeeper had said in practiced English.

The impenetrable landscape was clotted with insecty plants in the stillness of the midday heat. Clouds of mosquitoes flitted over swamps covered with patches of bright green goo. He gazes down the gravel road. It snakes through the countryside, impassable for any long distance by any means other than a four wheel drive, alongside a ditch with fat-leafed tropical plants. These are dusted with the fine dirt that is kicked into the air with each rumbling vehicle that passes—now a panel truck, wrenching and creaking through the ruts, now a motor bike, popping and careening around the brodies and whoop-de-dos (what they called them when they rode their dirt bikes in the field as kids)—leading to God-knows-where.

He leans forward and the throbbing in his head amplifies, with each pump of his heart he feels the pain. He wonders if he will be able to walk. His mouth is dry.

Harry has absolutely no idea where he is. He decides to walk. Rather, he hobbles forward with a slight list, believing at least that he is going in his original direction. This he can only surmise. It will be evening soon. He is thirsty and hungry, imagining that the hunger kills the thirst or vice versa. Thirst trumps hunger, definitely. He reaches into the depths of his trouser pocket for the ziploc bag where he had the foresight to secrete a few vicodin leftover from his knee surgery last month. He acknowledges that he will have to get through the night this way, trying to keep the throbbing pain and the hunger at bay. He takes one of the vicodin and inspects it in his palm, rolls it between his dirty fingers and, making as big a gob of spit in his mouth as is possible, he tosses the yellow pill to the back in his throat and swallows hard. A mistake. The chalky pill sticks. He gags, coughs. He concentrates on swallowing. He pauses to let the retching reflex that convulses his upper body pass. He tightens his throat and swallows it down. A blush of heat touches him, a wave of self-defeat sends a damp chill down his back. He pops a second one, somehow much easier. Basher’s image overtakes him, his modus operandi, and he walks.

He thinks about catching a ride from the next vehicle that comes down the road. Waiting for the right vehicle, who is he kidding. In the near horizon the Caribbean lapped at the muddy jungle, he believed, never seeing it. Never hearing it. The idea of water awaiting his discovery gives him peace of mind.

The houses look just as he had expected them to. There are huts of corrugated metal siding tied arbitrarily onto vertical posts. An occasional dog traipses along as if there were nothing more important than traipsing along. There are ranchos he recalled seeing while on the back of the truck, these on a slow rise above the roadway, of concrete columns and tan colored brick on a stone plinth with terra cotta roofs at a low slope. These are behind fences constructed of tree trunks regularly spaced with ribbons of barbed wire fencing strung between them. The trunks, once the roots are established, will create a wall of trees, a natural and physically symbolic property barrier. He noticed on closer inspection how the barbed wire embedded itself in the folds of the tree bark, as the tree grows around it.

He sees a hut through the brush. Clothing strung on a line flagging in an imperceptible breeze. In this direction he moves, away from the road, wading through a bank of deep wet grass. A hut made of mud and cinder blocks with a brown palm frond roof. All is still and thankfully empty. He sits down in the shade on the small cinderblock stoop that juts from what must be the front door. The hut is a strange combination of modern and primitive means with the barest regard for the integrity of materials. Mud. Concrete. The walls should disintegrate in a heavy storm, though they could possibly be reinforced. The small window, if this is what it is, is covered at an angle with a rust caked REO grate. He stops and listens. There are disorienting animal cries in the surrounding field, the sound of insects like the hum of distant machinery. He puts his ear to the door. No sound from within the hut. A shooting spasm from his knee makes him stumble and sends him down. He huddles to himself and slips off the cinder blocks onto the boot stomped dirt, curling up next to the wall. He fades in and out. Feeling a false sense of well being, the drug working, he wants to sleep. He considers going back or pushing forward. He doesn’t think he is up to asking for a ride if he happens to see a vehicle, afraid his condition has marked him an easy victim. He doesn’t want to think about what comes next just yet. Better to contemplate a fixed unknown than a series, in this state. Best to sleep off the rest of the day and deal with logistics in the morning. He recalls the extreme heat of the day will be freezing cold in the night. He laughs. His detachment from pain and unlikely ease with the world is the drug’s doing. He’s lost quantities of blood and he doesn’t know how long before he will have water. Mayor seems like hours ago. She returned to Malatesta’s place that night, a day’s drive, perhaps. He has come some distance. He doesn’t know if this is the same road, even, or if he would recognize it. The truck ride had been through jungle roads so blurred in his memory that he couldn’t hope to know a way out. His grandmother had said, watch yourself down there in that Mexico. He had to smile at this. Mexico had been hours ago. If he had to, if his life depended on it, which, he has the barest inkling that it just might, he will never be able to find his way back. Mayor had warned him, or tried to convince him, in the same way he imagined she had made the appeal to Basher years before, to come back with his group. Naturally she imagined him on an altruistic mission, some undertaking connected to Malatesta. To Mayor, Harry looked like every other gringo there, the same way she looked like every local to him. Well, not quite.

He awoke, hours or moments later, to the loud whistle of insects. The evening wasn’t as cold as he had expected, but then again, he had taken the vicodin and his head didn’t seem to hurt so much anymore, either. He registers a sensory numbness at the limits of his consciousness, the promise of pain when the drugs wear off. It could not be that late yet. A low crescent moon in the western sky, smeared with swift moving clouds, casts a dim glow through the grainy shadow of night. He feels again the side of his head, where the thing had conked him. He remembered the kid. He wasn’t that big. Maybe he used the bike helmet. He might have been afraid of killing him and had only wished to temporarily disarm him. Harry realized he must have fallen asleep, which had probably saved his life and prevented the kid from killing him, perhaps. If he would have been awake, he might have struggled with this unsuspecting kid. As it was he had terrified the kid who had an inclination toward the opportunistic crime. When he recalled his first impression, the kid probably hadn’t wiped out on the motorcycle at all. He was, however strangely, just taking a nap. The jarring ride on the back of that truck had been unendurable. Slammed around, he could not sit and so had to stand idiotically, whipped and lashed by low branches. He had wanted off. He had an excuse. In the back of his mind he expected he could get a ride from the kid, or would be able to drive the motorcycle, which at the time seemed a preferable option to the truck. He should have waited at least until the next village. When he asked the truck driver about the village, the man waved his hands as if he did not understand him. Comprenda? Harry said. Donde esta una cuidad? The truck driver looked at the immobile old man in the passenger seat, maybe his father, and he cracked a grin of yellow teeth and shrugged his shoulders. They had deliberately driven hard on that road, Harry thought, having their fun with him. Nobody had asked him to come down here.