His clipboard has my number on it, and tonight there's a line through it in a different pen.
Rafa doesn't log. Chuy won't go down. It's late, and I'm bleeding on their shoes.
Where do they think I'm going?
Rafa lets go of my arm to open the stairwell door.
One hand. One.
And Chuy is holding a hundred and four pounds of dead-limp woman with his arm straight out, his face turned away and his fingers slick with somebody else's blood.
I don't fight him. I don't pull.
I fall.
Straight down, all of it at once, no warning, the way a body goes when it's finally done—and his grip is wrong, it's up high on my bicep, it's greased, and I go through it like water and hit the gravel, and I don't make a sound.
"Jesus—" Chuy says.
I'm already rolling.
Not running. Rolling, under the stock trailer, into the black of it, into the space between the flat tire and the axle where there's eleven inches of clearance.
The rocks tear into my back and open every line Rafa put there, and I bite down so hard I taste enamel.
"She fell," Rafa says. Bored.
Boots on gravel.
"So pick her up."
"You pick her—where is she?"
A pause.
I've built a map with no paper since I started trying to get out of this hellhole.
There are a few places on this property where a person could hide.
I picked the one nobody would look under, because nobody looks under.
I'm not going away. Not yet.
Men look out. Men look at the road, at the fence line, at the horizon, because a woman who runs is runningaway, and away is a direction.
I go under.
Two hours and eleven minutes.
That's how long they look for me.
I know because the mercury light goes out at nine and comes back at nine-fifteen.
It does it once while they're shouting and once while they're not.
Here's what two hours is when your back is open on gravel: it’s every single second of it.
It’s Rafa's boots coming past me at a distance of four feet, and stopping, and my whole body screaming to hold still while the blood pools in the small of my back and runs down into the rocks and I think about how he’ll see the wet gravel, but he doesn't, because it's dark and it's dirt and men don't look down.
