You run? I run.
Far? Far.
Alone? Yes.
Not here.
Before dawn in summertime, the cornfields of Sinaloa were pitch-black. I gauged the accuracy of my course by the density of gnats that swam in my eyes and colonized my neck. The bugs preferred the air above the irrigation canals, whose walls offered the longest uninterrupted paths to run on.
Ahead of me, my Mexican host father teetered to and fro on a rusty bicycle that squeaked. He had borrowed it from his friend, the local sheriff, for the sole purpose of protecting me from livid dogs and strange men while I ran every morning. He brandished a stick to scare them off, but hummed as he pedaled to music that spurted from a small radio he hung around his neck. He always turned home before I was ready. This was in June.
By July, I had persuaded him to venture farther. We left the canals to visit a small cemetery nestled in the fields. My host father visited the graves, unfamiliar to me, while I ran laps around them until the sun rose completely and it was time to run home again. Soon after we went far into the fields, open, barren and waiting.
July brought storms, too. I remember one storm-washed morning, my host father and I stepped through the white gate outside the house and he stopped me and pointed to the ground. Mud, he said. Had I ever seen it before, he asked.
Miles into the fields, when my feet strained to keep my shoes from being sucked into the mud, I recanted. No, I had never seen mud quite like this before.
With the nightly thunder and rain came black-armored crickets that drowned in piles in the corners of the shower basin. And if the crickets didn’t drown in the shower, I listened as they unwaveringly flung themselves against faded family portraits hanging on the living room walls, above the stiff and proper couches where I sipped water and read on Sunday mornings. Sundays were for Mass and for sitting, not running, my host father said. So I read, counted the miles I thought I had run each week and wrote out lesson plans for the summer English classes I was giving to the town children.
Then, one Saturday, my host father fell.
That morning, in early August, the town doctor stitched my host father’s lip back together at the kitchen table. The mangled bicycle slumped against the garden wall, and the scaring-stick still lay splintered on the road that cut through town. My host father had gotten it stuck in the spokes of his front wheel as he pedaled. No more fields, he sputtered through his stitched lip, his moustache crusty with dirt and blood. Outside the house, he pointed out a small dirt-packed playing field I could safely run around. Five hundred times, I thought.
Stubbornly, I insisted on running in the fields. I ran too far, at first getting lost. Then came the trouble with the dogs, which left me screaming in the street as a neighbor’s yipping dog bolted from its cage toward my calf.
The solution my host family found was short-lived: I quickly lost the neighbor we persuaded to accompany me on the first morning. So I stayed close, running short loops, bored and tired.
On the last Sunday morning, I walked with a book in hand, intent upon finding a spot in the fields to sit down and read. As the paved road I took began to shrink into a packed-dirt path, I heard the creak of a bicycle behind me. Over my shoulder I watched an itinerant fieldworker dressed in old black pants and a dark flannel shirt pedal towards me through the dawn.
Where are you going? he asked, circling around me rather than passing by. I’m walking, I said, spinning on the spot to keep him in sight. His circles became tighter, his questions more prying: Where are you from? And how old? Round and round he went until he stopped, his front wheel just missing my toe.
You shouldn’t be alone. Go home.
He refused to move. The sun got hotter and the fields grew larger. So I turned back, to sit and listen to crickets.
I went to El Burrión to teach English. And what do I remember best? The cornfields.
