In Santa Cruz

In Santa Cruz, the border is only a breath away. On these burning summer nights, stormclouds gather after sunset and the road spins out snakebelly white between Tombstone and Nogales. Taking those empty curves through the grasslands you lean had on the gas because . . .

You’re looking for the Virgin with the cracked feet and the poppy smile. You saw her once, tucked back in a little hillside shrine above the riverbank: a child’s eyeblink glimpse from the back seat of a car bound for Mexico. She was framed in white stone and dead flowers, and offerings of broken dolls and stuffed animals filled the mouth of her cave.

You’d thought she vanished under the weight of the years between then and now. But this midnight squirms with nerves and heat lightning, and a roadside prayer might cool your fevered soul. So you drive, hands tight on the wheel and an empty tequila bottle rattling under the seat while the thunderheads gather on the mountaintops and the first scent of rain seeps in through your broken windshield.

She was somewhere along this two lane. You’ll know her when you see her.

South of Patagonia, bats drift against the stars like bits of burned paper. Borne on their bite, rabies simmers in the blood of the land dwellers. Cinder-eyed on the fringes of the light, deer and coatimundi watch as you pass by. They don’t have rabies yet. But there’s no Virgin in these parts.Maybe a mad bat bit her one of these glassy nights.

At Lochiel, bronze plaques declare the place a historical site, but you push on. You know the story anyway: doomed boys in blue, a regiment of cavalrymen dropped by cholera before the Apache ever got close. They never knew your Virgin anyway. She prays for sorefooted travelers begging with dime store candles and drifters with frayed hearts like you. Or maybe she prayed for the cholera too.

She has to be close now. You can trust a hill Maria. She won’t take her broken toes to Nogales where the music fills up the empty spaces in the night.

Up ahead, the trees get thicker and moths ride the headlights. You round a skinny curve and river smells rise up around you. Thunder rolls and your heart beats a little faster. This is it; she’s here. Cottonwood trees lean on their shadows as you pull over under her hill.

Crowned in white stone she waits in plaster silence while you climb the little path worn down by many feet. You breathe in the scents of her sanctuary: dying carnations and candlewax and dust. A ceramic pig and a one-legged doll lie inside her circle. With no other offering to make than your own fractured heart, you wait with them for the mercy she holds in that one chipped eye.

Behind the Scenes: When I was a child in the borderlands, people went to Mexico just like you'd go to the next town for lunch. On one of those trips, I saw a little shrine carved into the hillside with a weathered Madonna inside, just like the one in this story.

Many years later, this piece emerged - a mix of memory, dream and fantasy, seasoned by a song by Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers called "Nada."