Several times in her slumber Yolanda floated up to reality, breaking the surface with a great gasping snort before slipping under again.
"Javier!" she shouted, in her sleep. "Carlos!"
Javier was cold and spent and the last of his water was gone. For four days the border patrol sat camped below him.
The smell of pork grease fried with beans came up through the night and he missed his home and his wife. Clinking of tin cups and the strong scent of hot coffee teased him. Starving, his tongue swollen with thirst, eyes cracked open with fear, he dare not light a fire even to warm himself.
Javier fell asleep to their singing, the flickering campfire lighting their stage. He dreamed of his sweet plump Yolanda, safely under the care of his amigo.
The ghosts that walk the desert often perish in the baking sun, or twirl away like tumbleweeds in dust storms, their skeletal hold on the living fragile in the wind. Yolanda was not afraid of these. She would cross herself against them.
What drew him there he couldn't tell you. It was an instinct beyond rational argument. He crossed the road because he was an armadillo.
His father had been run down by a cart laden with chicken feed. His brother had been lost in a race with Coyote. The pleadings of his wife fell useless as he set out that night, confident in his God-given armor.
But what God has time for trivial decisions and stubbornly brave armadillos? Some time past midnight he became roadkill, bleeding into the full moon.
It was the nightmares that threatened her dreams.