Max Hernandez slumped on the examination table, his belly pale and tender against his leathery arms and neck. He had a bullet wound in his left shoulder. He’d been fighting alongside Manuel Urrandago. Now his eyes were fixed on the front door of Badinoe’s office, alert to new danger. In an instant he was racing out of the room. Badinoe turned, the disinfectant still in his hand. He expected a patrol, but instead he got Dolores raging toward him, a wave of black with balled-up fists. At first, he didn’t understand. Then he thought that she was mad about him helping Hernandez, who’d gotten shot fighting Scraperton’s men. He drew himself up dignified and righteous, inwardly reciting Hippocrates and the Rights of Man. But she didn’t give a damn about Hernandez. Her eyes blazed and her mouth curled into furious words. She called him a destroyer, a bitter drunk, a blathering snake. She tore off her hat—the first time he’d seen her remove it since her hair began to gray—and swiped it at his face as if she couldn’t stand to touch him directly.

He grabbed the hat. “What is all of this?”

She forgot about not wanting to touch him, and slapped him across the cheek. He cupped his palm over the sting.

“Dodo?” he whispered.

“Don’t call me that!” she screamed and punched him in the eye. She had on her engagement ring, a silver band on which was mounted a huge cinnabar crystal, sharp as a diamond. It broke open the skin of his lid. The blood blinded him and he felt her shaking him by the collar. “You drunken imbecile,” she moaned.

He detached her fingers from his shirt. “I have done nothing and I am quite sober.” He wiped the blood from his eye. She put on her hat. There was soot smeared on her neck and dress. She tied the hat string and marched out the door.

He staggered after her, but lost his balance and had to grab a porch post for support. She was the only person on the street, moving unsteadily with shreds of posters blowing at her ankles and bright broken glass sparkling in the sun.

The air was sour with lingering cordite and buildings still smoldering. Pristina had been at it for two days. The mercury market had bottomed out, along with production in general, the whole overinflated industrial promise popped like a punctured zeppelin. The entire country was at it. High-heeled telephone operators waving placards, Bolsheviks crawling out of basements, lone-wolf lumberjacks organizing. Pristina might have been able to avoid it if Owen could see straight, but he still imagined that the people trusted him, that he could do anything and everything without explaining why. Last week, he decided that they could no longer afford the subsidy on blasting powder, and cut it without telling anyone. When the miners went to Offitz & Carruthers, they discovered it cost twice as much as usual. All they would be eating for the next week was rice. Then he closed Shaft 8.

Still, he could have pulled it off. Still, he had the voice. But when he closed the shaft, he spoke only of the tragedy of boarding it up, the mythic grandeur of it, nothing of the men who’d worked it, some of them for over twenty years. It was perplexing how glaring his mistakes had been. When Manuel Urrandago and his committee marched to Casa Grande and asked what they were supposed to do, thirty men out of work and the rest barely able to buy the material they needed to keep working, all Owen could say was, “Do you think I control the price of mercury? You ought to be grateful!” He said other things too, but the men remembered You ought to be grateful and chanted it when they stormed Shaft 8.

Badinoe washed around his eye, the water warm and thick with sediment. The water supply had been poisoned, so now Pristina was back to the system they’d had when he first arrived: the water tanks hauled up from the river, filled with the mud of the Rio Grande. He examined his eye in the mirror. It hid behind a slit, the whole area a swollen mess of purple and red, but he could see out of the other. Blood on the floor, clumps of singed hair, medicine bottles overturned, scissors too hastily sterilized. He poured himself a drink.

A groan rose from the temporary clinic in the house next door. Another. No electricity meant no ice which meant no relief for pain and swellings. And warm whiskey too. But that was all right, he rarely took whiskey on the rocks. He swirled it around with his tongue. His clock chimed, some hour. Time streaked forward and backward, stale and ripe and festering. He hadn’t slept in days, but the moment a patient appeared in front of him, his mind straightened, and his fingers stopped trembling, and he knew what to do. Owen didn’t understand this. Owen had yelled at him. But he knew what to do. His mind straightened and his fingers stopped trembling. Yet he couldn’t do everything. They expected him to do everything. Why did they think he could even do anything? What could you do without medicine? He had none. Someone, the strikers he guessed, had attacked the last shipment. The cart lay twenty miles up the road, overturned, straw and purchase receipts scattered and pinned to cactus thorns.

The groans from the clinic continued, one of them ascending, transforming into a ululating curse. Badinoe would have to use the telephone again. He hated that telephone, shouting at voices far away and indifferent, the static crackling in his ears. He’d used the telephone yesterday, and they’d promised him a new shipment of medicine which still hadn’t arrived, and today was their tomorrow. But he had to use it; he couldn’t get out of it. He poured himself a half an inch more. It’s true—he wouldn’t deny it, he never used to touch the stuff before six o’clock in the evening, and now he needed a shot to wake him up and a couple others to get him through the day. He had been forced back into being a war doctor, and he had sworn he’d never do that again. He only had one other doctor to help him, the other two gone, one in the influenza, the other, smart, packed his bags at the beginning of the slump.

Owen should have been grateful that he, Badinoe, remained, but no one in Pristina was grateful, least of all Owen. He had barged in. When was that? Only yesterday? Yes. Yesterday morning. Owen Sunday. Dolores Monday. Both of them barging in and pushing him around. But no, Owen hadn’t barged, that was Dolores. With Owen, the door had opened slowly and quietly. He had wavered in the doorway, so pale that Badinoe thought that he had come to him for an appointment. In the street behind him, patrols dragged a woman by her braids, and Badinoe felt for him then, his utopia reduced to a sobbing, hair-pulled Mexican. But that wasn’t Owen’s way. Owen welcomed the strike. It was a challenge! A vitalizer! A revitalizer! His words pounded out of the loudspeakers, oldfashioned words, such as he hadn’t used in years: Paychecks be damned! We are bridge-builders, connecting Nature to Man, Daylight to Underground, Metal to Flesh, Burro to Boy! He moved ceaselessly, manning the hoists, hauling ore, filling in gaps from mucker to miner to mule driver, showing off his stamina.

And then he stood in the doorway, blinking and pale. “Are you all right?” Badinoe asked. Owen licked his lips tentatively. Badinoe felt disoriented; he had never seen the man do anything tentative before. He stepped toward him, worrying that he had gotten shot. Owen lifted his hand, a strange light in his eyes. An appeal. Badinoe paused, wondering how best to help him, and then he hiccupped. It was not a good time to hiccup.

The look went out of Owen’s eyes. “You’re a weakling, Badinoe. You’re a weak, weak man.” His nostrils flared. He lunged into the room, found the whiskey bottle, and threw against the wall. “I was a fool to have ever hoped for you.”

If Owen wanted him out of Pristina, very well, he’d leave, but for now the groans were too ragged and demanding. He had to get at least one generator working. They needed ice. He changed his shirt and went to the clinic. The nurse made him coffee, and he visited his patients and gave out sugar pills. He needed to find Ralph Burton. Ralph Burton, who could repair almost anything with rubber bands and bent nails, would know how to fix the ice machine. He walked through town, looking for him. Snapped wires dangled from their poles, and trash swirled, and a bird sang. Another bird lay electrocuted by a wire. Badinoe kicked it into the gutter.

Burton’s house looked strangely unaffected, even welcoming. The morning glories nodded and the shutters were open, but no one answered when he knocked. He started to leave, then saw Mrs. Burton and her son. They looked as unlikely as their house. The boy wore striped shorts and a matching jacket and held hands with his mother. She had her hair in a pretty bun and carried a tin of Danish butter biscuits. When she saw Badinoe, she waved the tin.

“They’re giving them away free!” she called. “Down at O&C! A morale booster!”

Badinoe rubbed his spine. There was a mysterious soreness, not the normal ache—a swollen bump at the small of his back. And now Mrs. Burton gawked at him, reminding him that he also had a swollen eye.

“Who did that to you?” She shook her head in disgust. “Beating up an old man.”

“I’m not that old.”

“Of course not. Do you want a morale booster?” She brandished her cookie tin and laughed. “But who says our morale needs to be boosted! We don’t need a morale booster! Our morale is soaring”—her voice had a hysterical tinge to it— “we’ve got an Opportunity with a capital O.”

“Do you know where your husband is?” Badinoe asked.

“Opportunity with a capital O,” she repeated.

She was referring to Owen’s latest speech. This one he had delivered in person, on the steps of the athenaeum with the windows broken behind him. The strike was an opportunity. They would root out the rot. They would begin again with hearts and minds tested and tempered by the struggle.

“He never takes responsibility for anything!” Mrs. Burton said fiercely. “Teach the greasers how to read, what do you think they’re going to read? He was a fool, we were all fools. He made a hero of that boy Ysidro.” She pried open her cookie tin. “Come on,” she commanded, “take one.”

“Do you know where your husband is?”

She held before him an array of sand-colored cookies partitioned by dainty white ruffles. “The horseshoe ones are the best,” she said, “or the jellies. Abraham prefers the jellies, don’t you, Abraham?”

But her boy wasn’t there. He had wandered down the street and was peering into the shell of a burned-out house. The walls slanted inward and the roof tiles had collapsed. Amidst the rubble were remnants. A bedspring. A ukulele. A wrinkled diaper hanging from a broomstick.

“Abraham!” Mrs. Burton shouted as he squirmed through a crack in the doorway. She shoved the cookie tin at Badinoe’s chest and took off after him. Soon she was back, dragging the boy by the ear. He straightened a wire hanger that he had taken from the house and turned it into a skinny cane that he tapped on the ground as if he were blind. Badinoe returned the cookie tin to the woman. “I’m looking for your husband,” he told her. “The ice machine’s down.” The boy stabbed the hanger through the shred of a Pristina Unite! poster and held it up proudly.

“Try the reduction works,” said Mrs. Burton. “And tell him to come home for supper.”

The road to the reduction works was hot and quiet. Badinoe watched his boots move one in front of another, but he did not feel as if he were going anywhere. His back hurt. Why was he saddled with these mysterious injuries? It was the suddenness of the violence throwing things off. Or lack of sleep. He rubbed the swelling, then slapped his thigh. It didn’t matter how he’d gotten the bump. Burton. He had to find Burton. That’s what was important, fixing the ice machine. But he hesitated once more, feeling as if the clouds in his mind might disband.

“Stop!” A young patrol raced toward him making an X with his skinny arms. There were snipers in the hills. No one was allowed on the road.

Badinoe waved him away.

“But sir,” the boy protested, “the road is closed!”

Badinoe walked through the emptiness, whistling a song that the strikers would recognize, a song the cave people loved called “El Sol Mojado.” It was about Ysidro. How he could slip in and out, how he had no boundaries. The strike could be traced to Ysidro. Or maybe not. It could be traced to anything: the end of the war, the slump, the veins sapped and spent. But Ysidro figured in there. He had brought people hope after Scraperton lost his appeal. A new flavor of hope that burst from his stories and pamphlets and songs and got into the imaginations of even the obedient ones. If you went to the hills, you could sit for a game of checkers and hear, along with the usual accounts of Mexican bandits, the latest on the general strike in Seattle, or community factories in Russia, or the certified miracles of socialist priests. The postal clerk confiscated what he found, but he couldn’t keep up with Ysidro’s ruses. He hid letters in seed packets or wadded articles up and used them to cushion glassware and china dolls and other curios that he could now somehow afford. And the mail that was confiscated only caused more rumors and excitement and was perhaps more effective than the material that actually got through.

Badinoe reached the fourteenth verse, an obscure verse that he’d learned in the caves. It told how Ysidro sailed to freedom in the hull of the Santa María. Badinoe had sung it for Victoria, and the color had drained out of her face, confirming his suspicions, suspicions that he’d had ever since Ysidro’s jail break, when a bottle of morphine had disappeared from his apothecary right during the time that Victoria had been tending it.

Now Victoria avoided him; he’d only seen her once since the strike began. A crowd had been rushing to put out one of the fires and she’d been walking in the opposite direction, studying her clipboard, so focused on her task that she didn’t, or pretended not to, notice the people. They surged forward, but as they were about to crash into her, they hit some invisible wall of will or rank and streamed by on either side. She reappeared at the other end, still studying her clipboard. He shouted to her, but she passed right by.

His eye pulsed. Ice. He had to find Burton. A new wire fence surrounded the reduction works. At the gate, guards leaned on rifles. “Another fight?” one asked, indicating his eye.

“A stray fist,” said Badinoe. “An unintelligible occurrence.” He had to find Dolores too. She owed him an explanation.

Inside, Badinoe paused. Whistles sounded, dust rose, men and mules moved from station to station. Except for the soldiers guarding the gate, there was no sign of unrest. He unscrewed his flask. He felt like he was dreaming, or he had been dreaming, and now he’d woken up. This was real, this undaunted industry. He walked by the condensers and the jaw crusher. No Burton, but maybe he didn’t need him. Maybe it really had been a dream and the ice machine wasn’t broken and there were no men groaning in his clinic. A man with an orange bandanna tied over his nose opened the bottom of the furnace, and heat blasted forth. The man hoed out the burned slag then slammed the door shut. As he finished, another man on the upper walkway opened the loading door and began to shovel in new ore. Badinoe frowned—to protect themselves from the fumes, the furnace men had been ordered to wear coveralls and bandannas, but the man loading ore wore neither. He didn’t even have a shirt. He worked like a demon, his muscles flexing in the sun. He hurled the last shovelful into the furnace and pulled the door shut, the screech of the metal painfully loud. Only when he turned and wiped his face did Badinoe recognize him.

He had never seen Scraperton without a shirt before. He’d only seen him in his suit, or in the checked shirt he had on that evening at Casa Grande. Even during the ladder races, when Scraperton competed against loinclothed tanateros in 110-degree shafts, he wore a suit. Now he wore nothing; his chest rose and fell with perfect arrogance and strength and rhythm. Sixty-six years old. Unjust to have a chest like that. Scraperton saw him, and Badinoe moved back, looking for a shadow, but there were none. He stopped, uncertain why he was trying to hide.

His back hurt and he rubbed the bump. Owen had given him the bump. Yesterday. After Owen had smashed the whiskey bottle, he hadn’t left. Badinoe, still moved by that thing he’d seen in Owen’s eyes, that appeal, had mastered his hiccups. He didn’t see Owen’s strength and vitality then, he saw the lines crisscrossing his face, the hair still black but sprouting from his ears instead of his head, skin visible through the course strands. He’d put his hand on Owen’s shoulder. He should have learned from Victoria never to put his hand on a Scraperton shoulder. Owen pushed him away, his face closed and blunt, his skin tight with judgment. He pushed him hard, and Badinoe’s back cracked against the examination table.

“Gene!” Scraperton called now from the furnace. “I’m glad you’re here. I owe you an apology.”

The hauling and crushing and sorting and braying stopped. A last load of rocks tumbled down a chute and crashed in a dusty heap. The yard was silent, stunned. Scraperton didn’t apologize, at least not to stumble-drunk doctors. Badinoe watched along with everyone else as the man descended the furnace steps and came toward him. His footsteps were precise and unvarying, his boots the same old boots, cracked and red with dust, his pants the trousers of his black suit. His chest, on closer inspection, was matted with white hair and mottled with various spots and splotches, the rib of an ancient mountain. Badinoe forced his eyes up past the corded neck. The face, familiar, flushed and sooty, was fixed on his.

“Gene,” Scraperton said and pulled Badinoe toward him. There were no whites in Owen’s eyes, only red and black, and his smell was overpowering. “I misjudged you,” he whispered, “I misjudged you and I apologize.”

Badinoe reeled back, so red were Scraperton’s eyes, so foul his breath. Scraperton walked in a wide arc, his arms raised, his ribs showing through his skin, his eyes shining. The men watched, their hands hanging by their sides, their mouths open. Behind them, thick, dark smoke rolled out of the stack.

“I have not known my friends from my enemies,” Scraperton said. “I thought I did, but I was deceived. I took the doctor for an enemy but he proved himself a friend.”

Badinoe panicked. He had to get out of there. But Scraperton’s voice rooted him to the ground. He accused his men of spying on him, of perjury, of blindfolding him with their cowardice. His voice rose, louder than the loudspeakers, louder than the jaw crusher and the dynamite blasts. He lunged toward a frightened worker, licked his lips, and spoke, his voice now low and controlled.

“Or is it I, you think I am a coward?” The worker shook his head. Scraperton laughed and poked him in the chest. “You think I have no backbone?”

“No, sir,” the worker said, his face twitching.

Scraperton didn’t hear. He glared into the next man’s face. “Well?”

“You’re no coward, sir,” the next man said.

“Then why didn’t any of you—not one!—indicate to me that I harbored a traitor under my very own roof?” His words echoed off the steel water tanks. When Badinoe stepped back, Scraperton leapt over and grabbed his arm. “Gene,” he whispered. There was a white crust in the corners of his mouth.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Badinoe said, trying shake his grip.

Scraperton squeezed tighter. “Don’t you go at it too!”

“I didn’t tell you anything. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”

Scraperton moved closer. “Don’t you understand? It’s for the best, a natural corrective. You get too closely involved, forget about the vastness of the scope. The family unit, the family unit becomes bloated, and you see everything in it, when indeed we are threads in a big hemp rope, some are strong and some are snappable. It doesn’t matter which thread is where, it is the quantity, the quality. There are all kinds of families, voluntary and involuntary, natural and artificial, airborne and limited to land.”

Badinoe backed away. Scraperton smiled. Then he swung around, his arms waving like a conductor. The men sprung back into action, and a load clattered down the chute. Badinoe bolted out the gate. The warehouse roofs glared, and his collar was soaked through with perspiration.

The door creaked as Badinoe let himself into the schoolhouse, looking for some shade and solitude. A spiderweb stretched thick and dusty in the corner. The blackboard was filled with children’s drawings of forbidden anatomical parts. He unscrewed his flask and leaned against the windowsill. He had to find to Dolores. He’d sing her “El Sol Mojado,” the fourteenth verse. He didn’t make it up. The cave people knew— they had written it. Owen must have heard it; Dolores must have heard it too. Yes, she had. Badinoe had already sung it to her. But maybe he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember. He emptied his flask; it clattered to the floor and spun around twice. He stepped over it to the slit of outdoors, the sky horribly blue. He had to find Dolores. He hadn’t said anything that Owen couldn’t have figured out. It was all in the song. He could see Owen’s expression, pure judgment and disgust. All he’d done was put his hand on his shoulder. Owen had pushed him against the examination table. “A man’s duty is to keep a tight ship.” Him, with the Santa María in his stables. Wouldn’t anybody have said, And what about yours? “And what about your ship, Owen?” But Owen hadn’t believed him. He had roared that he was lying.

Badinoe circumvented the town watching his shadow shift on the sand. His throat thickened with thirst and his head spun like the flask spinning on the floor. If only Victoria hadn’t stolen the morphine, then the song wouldn’t have meant anything to him either. The assertiveness wouldn’t have entered his voice. If that indeed was what got through to Owen. Owen shouldn’t have pushed him. He only wanted to help.

He shuddered and stumbled up the driveway. The curtains were drawn. He knocked. He waited. He shouted Dolores’s name. A pot-bellied patrol came around the side yard, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“No one’s home.”

“Where’s Dolores?”

“Not here.”

Badinoe slumped against the door wanting to sneak in and see if she still kept mescal in the china closet, but the patrol eyed him suspiciously. In any case he needed to be sober. He didn’t know what he would say, but he had to explain. He stumbled off the porch. In the driveway he found a ripped sheet of a canvas with a Spanish cross emblazoned on it. It was from the float. Now he saw the bits of hull and mast strewn across the yard. The place looked like it had been hit by a nor’easter.

And there was a pile of ashes where the pagoda had been.