LUZ AND FELIPO HALTED IN THE LEE OF AN OLD STONE WALL. IT had been something once, but this L-shaped corner was all that remained. Luz unrolled their sleeping bags while Felipo tended to the horses. He wanted a fire but there was no wood to be found. With a lighter he lit handfuls of dry grass that flared brief and oily then shriveled to ash.
Luz sat, thinking of a good day, when she had walked with Jonah to a small park near his house. They carried baseball gloves he’d pulled from a closet. Hers was a soft and supple thing, dark leather. Along the thumb she saw his brother’s name, Dexter, written in faded permanent marker. She lifted the glove to her face, examined the pocket, sniffed the leather. She liked the smell; she liked the feel. She had never worn one before, but it slipped easy and snug and comfortable onto her hand. Jonah slapped the pocket of his and said he wished their school had a team.
He positioned her in the park where the grass had been worn nearly to dust, backed away, and lobbed her the baseball. She caught it, took it from her glove, and fired it back. Whoa! he cried. You’re a natural! She laughed. They settled into a rhythm, and the silence and the proficiency with which they received and returned held her mind steady.
They were sweating when they left the park. He told her how he had wanted to play baseball for his first high school, but he hadn’t been there long enough, and he’d not been allowed to play at his next one. By the time he was old enough to have a serious catch with his brothers, Bill was gone and Dex had moved to the swamp. His father played with him back then, but that faded, too. Luz reached and squeezed his shoulder, and he looked at her, a reflective smile on his face, and she understood what they had shared, tossing the rawhide baseball back and forth. I can be this for you, she thought. I will be this for you. She believed it right then, had faith in it.
Luz wiped a tear from her cheek. How the moment makes us forget what we know of providence. The horses snuffled. Crickets sang in the chaparral. The stars were thick enough to seem like a net strained with sky.
“Do you think,” Felipo suddenly asked, “it has always been like this?”
Luz cleared her throat. “What do you mean?”
“El Narco.”
Luz searched her memory but found only blank spots. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what it was like when I was a girl.”
“I forgot that you grew up here.”
“Do I seem different?”
“A little, yes.”
“Sometimes,” Luz said, “I think the world has always been one way and I never noticed. Other times I think I do know the world, but moments make me forget.”
Felipo tapped a stick against the weathered stone wall. “My grandmother tells a story that several years ago she drove to Monterrey with a friend, and along the way they came to a barricade. An old truck pulled across the road. Robbers came to the car and took a silver bracelet and some money. That was all they had. One of the thieves, she says, bent to the window and she saw herself in his sunglasses like mirrors, and he smiled and had a gold tooth. Here.” Felipo tapped his canine.
“They go on to Monterrey and stay with a friend for a day or two and then start back for San Cristóbal. They come to a municipal police checkpoint, where the policemen check all the cars for contraband. And my grandmother says that as they pulled even with the sandbags, one of the police smiled at her, and he was the robber, wearing a uniform, holding a rifle. The same gold tooth. She saw it.”
Luz asked if his grandmother ever told anyone, or tried to.
“Who to tell?” Felipo answered. “The good and the bad, there is no such thing. They all do what they want.” He sighed and tossed the stick off into the night. “How can one person fight any of it? There are too many men like my cousin. They set so many evils into motion that you can only find a seam to hide in. But eventually that closes up, too.”
He grew quiet. He was thinking of San Cristóbal, perhaps, of his grandmother and his brother, and of seams closing.