Free Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos

included, scrambling inside for cover. Tía Pepa recalls a peaceful daylong ride to Piedras Negras, staying overnight with cousins in Villa Union, where they cooked a dinner of chicken with mole sauce and calabazas.
    Once they were all in Texas, without even thinking about it, they began to cast their spells of forgetting across the new landscape. Many of them would not see Mexico again for many years. Others never returned again. The land of their birth, the nacimiento, seemed to become a memory of a dream of a lost world.
    Mexico, to which some of us would later return and return, was gradually engulfed by the Inframundo.
     
     
    Old Abuelo Jacobo’s instructions had been simple. As my father remembers, they were to follow a small road north out of Jiménez, Coahuila, until you could not miss a big cliff on the right side that had the shape of an old man’s face. Then you leave the road there, walking to the left onto what looked like a boundless sierra plain, following the river for about an hour and a half, all the way back to the foothills, until you come to the place called la Loma de los Muertos, “the Hill of the Dead.” There was gold in that hill, Abuelo Jacobo had said. Lots of it.
    “¡Esa fregada loma está bien llenita de oro!” he had told them often back in San Antonio. “That damn hill is full of gold.”
    Great-grandfather Jacobo and his twin brother, Abrán, were perpetually prospecting for gold, whether following legends of buried Spanish treasure and digging secretly in the middle of the night under the plaza in Palaú, or prospecting for the raw ore itself, using divining rods, seeking telltale “golden mirages” that were said to emanate from a deposit, or, in one case, an old swoop-backed hound from Palaú named Pipo, who was known to have a nose for the precious metal. It was with Pipo’s help that they had actually seen those veins of gold, as thick as rope, running through the stony outcroppings in la Loma de los Muertos. Without picks, they had left markers, but somehow, over the years, they never returned to prospect for the ore. Or so they said.
    Now, decades later, Uncles Raul and Rudy and my father were back in Mexico, looking for the treasure. They were traveling in a new beige 1947 Hudson, with a massive glistening chrome grille and a pair of fenders that were polished like platinum, immaculate and inspiring awe from the Mexican onlookers. In one neighborhood in la Villa de Juárez, they had to park the metallic behemoth on a side street because it was wider than the pavement on the block of the aunt they were visiting.
    Once they left the highway, the car’s oversized whitewalls handled the hardscrabble Norteño terrain well enough, occasionally scraping the oil pan on the lip of a gully, or scratching the enamel finish on the passenger’s side with low-hanging branches of thorny huisache. Cactus and mesquite dotted the otherwise wide open plain, which seemed flat in all directions. After an hour of untroubled roaming with the river in sight, with the afternoon growing late, the Hudson and its trio of would-be prospectors stalled in the middle of some railroad tracks. The only railroad tracks for two hundred miles. Since the invention of railroads, it has been like a supernatural curse. Mexicans walking, sleeping, or in their stalled cars are perpetually getting hit by trains after being unable to get off the tracks.
    A solitary hill off in the distance might just be la Loma de los Muertos, but the Hudson would not turn over, and the machine was so heavy the three together could not push it off the tracks. El Dorado was in reach, and their engine was flooded. Then, just before nightfall, when Uncle Rudy and my father walked off a mile and dug a few holes looking for gold, they found a giant geode. When they cracked it open, it took their breath away. It looked like a bowl full of light blue stars, glowing in the crimson sunset.
    They ended up camping there for the night, eating