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portrait of our Lady of Guadalupe Jennifer loved—at the center of our luggage where it would be most protected if the driver happened to be a little rough.
    Charter bus or not, we went off a cliff.
    It was an area called Tepic, a jungle region, and night, and the road was full of sharp curves. The driver had driven it before many times, but when lightning struck the road right in front of him, while the passengers slept, experience didn’t matter. He was blinded, and, though he tried to stop, lost control.
    *   *   *
    I woke in the flashing darkness, in the rain coming down in sheets. I was twenty feet or so from the bus, which had rolled down and down and finally stopped. I was lying on a bus window, which had been thrown free, too. I got up on the broken safety glass, stood, and began, like a frantic foghorn, to call Jennifer’s name. I couldn’t see except when the lightning flashed. People were screaming and moaning, their voices lost in the thunder.
    I looked all around, kept looking, tried to see, was blind, then saw when the lightning fired again. I went to a body. It was moaning, but it wasn’t Jennifer.
    â€œAre you all right?” I asked in Spanish
    â€œI don’t know,” the man answered
    â€œI have to find my wife. I’m sorry.”
    â€œI understand,” he said.
    There were people caught in the roof of the bus, which had separated into layers as the bus rolled and rolled and passengers had gotten caught in them. I pulled a woman from the roof in darkness, but knew by the touch of her hair, which was coarse, that it wasn’t Jennifer. I laid her on the ground and tried to ask her whether she could walk. The Spanish wouldn’t come.
    I was still calling to Jennifer without knowing it, and a voice was answering in the distance. It was hers, but it was somehow on the other side of the bus. I made my way around the wreckage, and there, in the flashing darkness, Jennifer was sitting in the mud.
    Lighting flashed again. There was a terrible smell, the same one we’d smelled near the dog’s carcass in the gutter, but strong enough now to make you gag. Something moved just beyond her in the glistening brush. I blinked, not sure I’d seen anything at all; but the light came again, and there they were, looking at us, shadows with eyes like coins. Coyotes , I thought. What else would they be? But they looked more like pigs— javalinas —the kind we’d seen in pictures. Black, round, slick and scuttling in the darkness. Why were they so near us? Why were they so close to her ?
    Pigs eat anything, don’t they?
    It was a horrible thought. Had the smell of blood brought them? Was someone bleeding nearby? How could they smell blood when the other terrible smell was everywhere even in the rain and wind?
    It made no sense. Wild animals—even coyotes or wolves—didn’t rush in at accidents, with people screaming and moaning. They felt fear, didn’t they?
    â€œCan you stand up, honey?”
    â€œI think so.”
    It was the worst thing I could have suggested.
    As she stood up, there was a sucking sound and in the next lightning flash I saw her leg, the tibia bone protruding as she tried to stand, and felt only numbness from the shock.
    I started to say “Sit back down!” but the forms were moving around us. It wasn’t my imagination, my own shock. The lightning didn’t lie. They were real.
    What were they?
    At the next flash I found a small tree branch broken off by the bus’s roll. Jennifer began shrieking. A shadow had darted in toward her leg, grabbed it, was pulling at the protruding bone.
    I swung, connected, and the thing darted away, but three others arrived and pulled at her bare leg. I kept swinging the branch, sometimes hitting them, sometimes hitting Jennifer. They weren’t interested in me. I swung again, and one whose teeth—long things flashing yellow and red in the