The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Twenty-Four: Two If By Burro

As it turns out, the average donkey—or at least those found guarding a flock of sheep—is not as stubborn as the stereotype indicates. Mr. Steach still assumed (catching himself on the usage of that word as he thought about it) that mules were the stubborn ones but, thankfully, the beast that carried him and the girl over the fields outside of the village was actually pretty amenable. He felt a natural connection to horses and thought that it was this that the animal recognized as he had approached it.
The girl had been less sure of the animal and it had taken a fair amount of coaxing to get her to pull herself onto it's back. She rode in front of Mr. Steach, bringing them closer together than either of them would have preferred. Still, it allowed her to keep hold of the knife and to steer the burro in the direction of San Luis Amatlán. Having no bridle and no reins, the donkey might have gone anywhere it pleased, but as it trodded along, Steach knew they were going in the correct direction, at least. He could have gotten there himself (were he able to locate a vehicle) but after he arrived in San Luis, he needed the girl to show him where the statue had been taken. If the thief—and it disgusted him to think of anyone with either the knowledge of the statue in the first place or the skill to take it had beaten him to the statue—had taken the same route in and out and the girl had seen him.
"¿Quién es?" he had asked her back in the vault.
She had shaken her head and wouldn't name him. She'd only agreed, finally, to take him into the tunnel if he'd stop asking questions.
"¿Es peligroso?" he asked now.
"El burro es muy amable," she said after some hesitation.
Mr. Steach thought she was perhaps convincing herself, still, that the burro would not shuck them off its back.
"No. El ladrón."
The girl gave no answer. She shook her head and reached for the stiff row of hair that lined the burro's neck. This pulled her further away from her not-quite captor, not-quite accomplice, and made the burro pitch its head down to its chest and nearly stop. There was an opening in the fence ahead on the sheep trail they were following and a thin gate made of razor wire and tree branches kept the sheep inside and kept out whatever predators were lurking. With the donkey almost stopped anyway, its slow thudding steps faltering with stubbornness or exhaustion, the girl seized the moment to jump clear of the beast's back.
"Stop!" Mr. Steach shouted after her, unable to catch her or grab onto even the fabric of her shirt. He began to slide down the burro's side but saw, in the moonlight, that the girl was only running ahead to pull open the gate.
She stopped as she reached it and looked back at him. Although the light wasn't quite bright enough to catch her expression from the distance, Steach caught the air of teenaged irritation. To her, he must be just another old man who wanted to use her for his own gains. Absolutely true, in his case, but he was reminded that a normal human might first find fault with a child living alone and in a malnourished state on the streets of Mexico. Tunnels, he corrected, but the idea remained the same. A normal person he was not, so he turned his attention to the speed with which the girl opened the wire gate. He found it lacking.
When the gate was fully open and lay in the dirt haphazardly, the girl beckoned Mr. Steach and the burro through it. The knife had reappeared in her hand and she stowed it in her teeth as she reclaimed her place in front of Steach.
* * *
They'd come to several more crossings like the one before, through so many different types of field that he'd lost count. When they'd traveled south in what Mr. Steach believed to be twelve of the fourteen miles the girl had calculated and over a dozen or more small dirt tracks that passed for roads, they'd come the next crude gate that was made in a similar fashion as the others. Pieces of worn and sun-baked thin plastic clung to both the gate and the fence in ribbons and the sound of them flapping and cracking in the breeze was enough to make the giant fuzzy ears of the burro perk and swivel. Helpfully, the animal let out a bray in response to the sound, challenging the plastic pieces to cross him, if they dared. Mr. Steach fruitlessly attempted to quiet the animal with multiple swats to its rump, but it only caused the animal to sound-off longer and more animatedly.
The girl had jumped down like so many times before but instead of urging Steach to walk the braying burro forward, this time she indicated with an annoyed double-handed gesture that he needed to leave the animal behind—they'd walk the rest of the way. There were no lights of a big city to welcome him, but the occasional yellow globe of light attached to a ranch house dotted the hilly landscape around them. It wasn't quite sunrise, but the moon had set long before and the horizon to the east had taken on that familiar orange glow.
"We're still too far from San Luis," Steach complained. He thought of his feet that were jammed inside now-ruined oxfords and was at least thankful that he hadn't walked those twelve miles himself.
"San Luis," the girl said, pointing behind them and to the east where the sun was begging to rise.
It was hard to see her clearly, but Mr. Steach thought he caught the girl in another frightened grimace. But she wasn't looking behind them anymore and was instead staring at the path ahead. "Behind us? San Luis?" he asked her. "Then..."
"San Luis es en el cuevo," she said.
"¿El cuevo? You were talking about the statue this whole time, afterall? Not the village?"
She nodded. She pointed south again with a shaking finger.
Across a well-paved and oft-used road, the landscape rose slowly into a large and hulking feature that instantly recalled in Mr. Steach's memory. He'd hoped that it ultimately wouldn't come to this—cave exploring wasn't in his regular batch of skills. But when he'd pieced his scheme together, he'd known full-well about the hill to which the girl had taken him all under the guise of leading him to San Luis. He was sure to find the statue within the rock walls of Cerro Gordo, the girl was telling him without speaking the words.
"Home?" the girl asked. "San Luis es aquí."
Feeling tricked, Mr. Steach began to react in his usual violent manner, but the flutter of a paper pinned to a billboard-size sign that welcomed him to the village of Cerro Gordo caught his attention. The sun had finally peeked over the horizon and although in the dusk it was still difficult to see, he could tell that the girl's eyes were filling with tears and the grip on the knife she still carried tightened.
He snarled at the girl and crossed the pavement to the sign. Underneath the typical information a person would find on such a sign—the community name, when it was founded, and its documented population (all in Spanish, of course)—there was a makeshift bulletin board where a few sheets of paper had been tacked or hammered into the old plywood. All of the signs were in Spanish with an English translation listed secondarily and the posters all seemed to be from different times. Several of the older papers had been sun-washed until they were practically blank sheets again. All of them had curled edges and colors that had run with the spring's recent rainfall.
"El curso," the girl whispered loudly enough for the wind to catch her words.
Mr. Steach repeated her words with skepticism and rolled his eyes. He pushed down the edges of one of the more recent signs and read Desaparecida at the top. The picture was too faded and washed out from rain and sun but he could read the name of the missing girl and the date she had disappeared—she'd been missing for just about a year.
He flipped up the other posters and found one of the first that had been posted. It had been protected by the others and listed the name of a boy who had also gone missing around the same time as the girl. The photo of the boy was as clear as it could be under the circumstances and depicted a young man of sixteen in a American sports jersey—basketball, if Mr. Steach could be bothered to remember the name of the ball the boy held poised on his bent knee. There was a familiarity there in the boy's features and hair color. The eyes, too, Steach realized. He read the name at the top of the paper under Desaparecido.
"Declan Stirling," he read.
The girl had crossed the street and stood next to him, silently, at his elbow. He hadn't heard her, and later wondered if she might have something to teach him about sneaking up on people. As he read the name, she struck out the hand holding the knife and slammed the flat of the blade against the boy's picture.
"Home," the girl whispered. Her blonde hair, dirtied from months living in squalor, shined its true color for just a moment as the sunlight began to rise and the new day began.