Don Francsico (October 1, 1970) Page 5 Continuing...

Again I pointed in the direction of the signs.  Pat was nodding her head in agreement.  He took the lantern he had been carrying and pointed to the ground below:

"Aren't these your tracks?  Look here."  I looked and shook my head no.  Look again.  These have to be your prints.  Here are the prints of you and your senora and here are the tracks of your dog."  After that pronouncement, he was off again.

It was difficult to deny such irrefutable evidence because our present prints looked exactly like those he had just shown us. Soon we were in the arroyo; there was the bottle we left for a signpost but no beacon of light emanated from the flashlight.  We turned off to our right, up the narrower path and sure enough, the car was not more than fifty yards ahead.  The flashlight batteries had already burned out.  He examined the submerged tires and started uttering a strange medley of imprecations and importuning: "Hija de puta. Hija de la chingada madre." He paused. “Virgen. Virgen santisisma!”

Don Francisco had sized up the situation. I was about to ask him if he thought we had any chance of extricating ourselves when he asked for the shovel.  He motioned me to man the yaqui, so I dutifully dragged it over to the side of the car and sat down.

"The chains won't serve.  We have to take them off. And there is too much air in your tires.  We better let some of the air out." We did.

"First we have to fill these holes so we can put the laminas underneath. You jack and I'll fill the holes."

Once again I found the seam of the chassis, fit the clamp on it and began to crank the jack.  As I jacked, Francisco shoveled sand into the pits.  Leaning on the long handle of the shovel, he actually lifted the car out of the hole.  The sand fell down into the cavity and the cavities began to fill.  At first I could not lift the wheel high enough for Francisco to push the lamina underneath because the holes were so deep; so he shoveled more sand around the wheel, lifting it and packing the sand down all in one continuous motion.  Then he grabbed a hold of the long lamina, got down on his knees behind the back of the car and shoved as hard as he could the metal laminas underneath the tire.  The tire resisted.

 Whir. Whoomphh. Crunch. Whoomph.

The metal scraped along the sand and thudded into the rubber tire.  The way he was whacking away at the tire I thought he was preparing a filet of rubber for dinner tonight.  Surely, the tire would be sliced open before he got that lamina beneath.  No, to be sure he was making headway and with a few more powerful shoves, the tire was resting halfway on the metal. He jumped up and ran to the other side.  I knew my orders instinctively, wound down the jack handle and followed to the other side.