Juan had the keys to the truck stuffed in the front pocket of his jeans. It took a few seconds for him to pull them out—he was fishing for them with two fingers and his pants were tight—but the old man didn’t want to wait any longer.
“Hurry up or I’ll shoot you,” he threatened. “And don’t you try nothing stupid, stupid.”
“Oye, man, this is muy messed-up,” said Juan in protest of their treatment.
“Shut up. Give them keys to me or I’ll shoot both of you and leave you out here to die.” He pointed the gun at Willy and waved it around.
“Okay, man. Okay.” Juan dragged the keys out and held them toward the old man, all the while cursing.
The tattered robber managed to snatch the keys away from Juan and still keep the gun trained on them. Then he scrambled backwards with the gun on them in a crazy happy way like some chicken with a bread crust. He was practically kicking up his heels with joy at how he had fooled them.
“Goddamn,” he was saying happily, “Goddamn!”
When he got behind the wheel of their truck, he acted like he had not driven a car in a hell of a long time, and Willy was hoping the truck wouldn’t start—as it sometimes wouldn’t for them—but the robber was still pointing the gun at them out the window as the engine roared and he drove off. All their picks that they had left leaning against the truck collapsed on each other in a heap as the truck pulled away.
The old robber didn’t say anything as he left. He just smiled a toothless grin.
Juan, cursing and kicking rocks, ran after the truck. The man kept waving the gun lazily out the window, but not even turning to look; he used the rear-view mirror to see what Juan and Willy were doing. The relaxed way he waved the gun was like he was teasing a five-year-old, a five-year-old you kept passing over and over while you were enjoying yourself riding on a merry-go-round.
When Juan realized the truck was gone for good, he expelled energy in a last desperate burst of running and then fell to the dirt. Willy had never seen Juan so discouraged by their bad luck. Not in anything that had happened had he acted like this; B. Body attacking them, the rash he had suffered from the weed killer, or the smashed metal detector. Willy was shocked to think that Juan might even be crying.
Willy walked to where Juan had collapsed and talked to him. “Juanie, come on, you got to get up. We gotta think. You never let all those hives of yours get you down. Think of that. Think of all that you and I have been through.”
“Thank you so shitting much for reminding me,” said Juan, speaking into the dust.
“You can’t pout like this. It’s not like you. You’ve got to get up. You are strong, man. You can do it. We can’t let a set-back get us down. We have to keep our hopes alive.”
“I can’t. I can’t stand to see our truck go away after all the trouble we had finding it and all that work we did replacing the tranny,” was all Juan said. “I want to die. I know I am never going to get no chromed-over motorcycle. It’s killing me.”
Willy watched the dust from the truck’s progress rise over the mountains in little light puffs. That old devil seemed to be driving like there was no tomorrow.
“I think he’s going into Mexico,” Willy said, when Juan finally sat up.
“Yeah, Mexico is where he’s going with our truck, that’s pretty certain.” Juan sniffed and he pulled a clump of weeds out and threw it.
“I thought you said we weren’t very near to Mexico,” Willy said, catching Juan in another lie.
“Not very close,” said Juan, not missing a beat and not even upset at being accused of lying.
Juan and Willy watched the truck’s dust disappearing in a gap between the distant hills.
“Hope he knows the way out,” Willy said.
“Yes. Changos, I don’t want him back here with that gun.”
“No. I was thinking we could watch him leave and figure out the quickest way out,” Willy pointed out.
“Oye, that too.”
After a while both of them forgot to watch the dust from their truck as it drove away but it got dark more quickly than they thought it would anyway and the wind was blowing the dust this way and that, drifting it so far that the road the robber took with their truck couldn’t be seen.
“He looked like a nice old fogey. Nasty looking clothes, but a nice personality at first,” Willy said, when they went back to their tent. “Very friendly and stuff.”
“You Anglos are easily fooled, Wilhelmo.”
Willy didn’t want to get into it with Juan about Anglos right then so he ignored what he was saying. “Oye, you know something I just realized?” said Willy, “I think the truck bed had almost all our water. We forgot to unpack that last box and left it in the bed of the truck. That was so fucking stupid of us.”
“Oh, God! You’re right, pollo. We’re in deeper shit than I thought,” said Juan.
And they were. They checked around the camp and sure enough, almost all their water had gone with the truck and that wasn’t all. It turned out the truck had half of the food which hadn’t fallen off somewhere on the way in too, so now their food was nearly out. They might have gotten some water from some of the fruit cans, if those had been left, but they checked and they weren’t.
Try as they would to not let the situation panic them, that night they both became slightly hysterical. They thought their time on earth would be over if they had to stay out there by themselves without water. They were not guys who could live off the land when they were dropped by helicopter in the back of beyond. They were not the type that could find all sorts of things around them to eat and locate water. Juan almost drove Willy mad as he kept saying, “I sure wish I had those cans of peaches I packed.”
The next morning they had formed a plan. They laid out the remaining supplies under a tree and split them into two packs. They took their sleeping bags, camp stove, remaining water, and tent with them in backpacks. They decided to try and walk back to the tailings pond. Even though it was at least ten miles away, they thought it was possible they could get back to it and drink the water, if they boiled it first. With an effort, they started to walk toward the pond.
Having the truck stolen was sort of the last straw for them. It had deflated all their confidence.
“I don’t know how to get outta here,” said Juan.
“We went a long way in,” Willy pointed out, “And we never saw nobody.” At the time, that had seemed like a great thing, because they thought the gold would be easy to find. Now they were wishing the place had been full of people. All their thoughts of gold had disappeared and all they could wonder was why had people made so many roads into this place going off in all directions.