LUZ HELD HERSELF, SUDDENLY COLD. FELIPO WAS QUIET. “I’M SO sorry,” Luz whispered.
Felipo lifted his face, ghostly and eyeless in the dark. A small shrug.
“No,” Luz said, hoarsely. “I’m sorry you found me on the road. That it was you, not somebody else.”
Felipo sighed. “I am glad we can help. That’s all.”
But Luz saw the dying man in the desert so long ago, felt the heavy sloshing of the water jug in her hand. A regret like poison for the rest of her life. The horrible paradox of one’s duty to survive and the choices God still made you make.
“Thank you for this,” she said. “No,” she said when Felipo tried to wave her gratitude away. “Thank you.”
After a while Felipo went on. “Ignacio and I, we moved to my grandmother’s after that. It is not hard to imagine what became of the ranch.”
Luz imagined the sweltering shed where they held her, the packages of narcotics stacked against the walls. “Your cousin doesn’t work for them anymore, does he?”
Felipo shook his head. “I heard sometime he’d become a sicario for them. A, you know, assassin. But then he fell out of their favor. There were different stories.”
“What are the stories?”
Felipo grumbled. “They aren’t pleasant.”
Luz said, “I don’t care.”
The boy sighed again. “One story says the Zetas bought him and paid him to kill his own boss, but he failed.” Felipo drew a finger across his face to explain the scar—punishment. He began to say something else, trailed off.
“What.”
“I don’t want to use some of these words in front of you.”
It was a ridiculous notion. “It’s fine,” she said.
“I heard,” Felipo continued slowly, “that my cousin likes boys instead of girls. One day his boss, who considered himself a righteous man, caught Juan Luis with another man’s cock in his mouth, and so—” He paused. “I heard this from some other guys, you know? Not my grandmother.”
“It’s okay,” Luz told him.
“So his boss killed the other man, but first he measured the man’s cock across Juan Luis’s face with a knife.” Again, he drew his finger across his face. “Cicatriz.”
There was quiet on the mountain. The deep sky, the apprehended universe. “Why didn’t his boss kill him, too?” Luz asked. Then she clarified: “Why let him live, I mean, if either story is true? He’s like a renegade now, he robs them, right?”
Felipo shrugged. “Like I said. They are just stories. The stories are everywhere, about everyone.” He lay down on his blanket and exhaled. “Who can say what is the truth?”
Luz thought about stories. About stories and what they could do, and of course it was only what they could do that mattered. She wondered whether Cicatriz would keep looking for her. As if Felipo read her mind, he spoke up.
“I think you’ll be safe now. It was probably easy enough for him, a short drive, once he saw the knife in the road. But now. I don’t know. He’ll have other concerns.”
“I hope,” Luz said, “he left your family alone.” Her imagination ran with the thought. A septic guilt.
“Don’t worry,” Felipo said.
“I hope your grandmother just told him we ran up the mountain. I hope she just told him what he wanted to know and he decided to give up.”
“I know,” Felipo said.
“I’m sorry for getting you and your family into this. I’m sorry.”
“Stop.”
“But I am. I worry for Ignacio.”
Felipo didn’t say anything at first. He shifted on his blanket. Then he answered:
“I worry for my brother, too, but not because of this. I worry for him because he will grow up and be unsurprised that things like this happen, and happen all the time. That is not your fault.”