Dobbs took a seat in the knotty pine booth. The country grain made him think of crudely shaped mallards, of lakes far from the likes of Sergio.
Constance came out to join him, two cups and a pot on her tray. “They sure did a number on you.”
She seemed to be in no hurry to pour, so Dobbs filled the cups himself. “It doesn’t hurt any more when I breathe.”
“What were you thinking?” she said. “This foolish business of yours …”
He shrugged. “I figured it was like swimming in cold water — you’ve just got to jump straight in.”
“Stupid,” she said.
“Maybe I should’ve just grown a garden.”
“Where do they come from?” she said.
He realized now what it was that seemed different: the dining room was brighter. Constance had managed to get some of those light fixtures hung. Now he could see all the spots where the new paint didn’t quite cover the old.
“Do you have any of that bread?”
“Where do they come from?” she said again.
“They’re just trying to survive,” he said, “like everyone else.”
“What do they do once they’re here?”
“Does it matter?”
“I live here,” Constance said.
“You could bring a thousand people every day,” Dobbs said. “The city would still be empty.”
“I want to see them.”
“They pay to come,” he said. “They want to come.”
“Now they’re here,” she said, “you’re sleeping soundly?”
“Look at me,” Dobbs said, framing his broken face for her.
“If you don’t take me,” Constance said, her gaze unwavering, “Clementine will.”
The buses had stopped running hours before, but it was a mild night, and there was a bright haze in the sky. The moon was like a lamp with a thin paper shade.
Constance followed him with a vigilance he’d never seen on her before. As she walked, she seemed to study each passing house, each vacant building, as if all of it were newly suspicious, as if somehow he’d tainted everything.
Since they’d started out from the restaurant, he’d felt more awake than he had in a long time. Longer than he could remember.
The warehouse door was locked. Dobbs knocked, and in response there was only silence.
“It’s me,” he said. That brought a stirring, what sounded like chair legs sliding across concrete.
A thick arm wrapped in flames held open the door just wide enough for Dobbs to see through.
“What do you want?” Mike said.
Dobbs could make out the shape of Tim sitting at the card table. Neither of them was smoking, but Dobbs could smell their cigarettes. The water and sewerage van was parked in the garage next to Mike and Tim’s gray pickup truck. Sergio was nowhere in sight.
Dobbs put his hand on the knob, but Mike held it in place.
Across the garage, Tim’s cell phone screen flashed yellowish green and then went dark. A message sent to Sergio.
Dobbs turned back around, but Constance wouldn’t meet his eye. She was looking past him, into the gap, trying to make out what lay beyond. The door started to close.
Dobbs felt his shoulder buckle on impact. But the door swung back open, and he stumbled in. Mike looked down on him in surprise as Dobbs slid to the floor, his shoulder a spiraling kaleidoscope of pain.
Both men were on him in an instant, but Mike was first, propping his boot on Dobbs’s head, pinning it in place. As if Dobbs had somewhere to go.
For good measure, they drew their guns, too, and they were so distracted, trying to decide whether to shoot him then and there or wait for Sergio, that they didn’t notice Constance come inside. Not until she stood beside them did Tim finally catch her shadow out of the corner of his eye.
“Who the fuck is she?” he said, shaking his gun in Dobbs’s face.
Though it felt like his ear was tearing against the cracked concrete, Dobbs tried to turn his head to see into the far room, where everyone — he hoped — was sleeping. But his eyes were going dim.
As she adjusted to the darkness, Constance noticed another room beyond the garage, a large space crammed with mattresses. There must have been a hundred, probably more. And here and there she saw movement, bodies large and small. Some of them appeared to be asleep. But it was hard to tell which lumps were people and which were bags and clothes. Along the far wall, in the faint moonlight, there was a silhouette resembling a woman with a baby at her breast.
Constance said, “I’m the one that’s going to feed them.”
Winter
Epilogue
The village was only two hundred miles from Mexico City, but to get there took eight hours on four different buses. With each transfer, the towns grew smaller. Each vehicle was worse than the last. The fourth and final bus was a metal skeleton stripped of anything soft — unpadded seats on unpaved roads. The windows were open to let in the breeze.
On that final stretch, all the other passengers were locals, peasants hefting cardboard suitcases secured with string. A few had even brought chickens, tough old birds, indifferent to the bumps. They were wiry and dusty and of no particular breed he could identify. Scavengers, able to survive anything.
Most of the time the bus seemed to be climbing uphill. But by the end of the trip, Michael Boni discovered he’d reached the coast after all.
Late in the afternoon, the bus dropped him off alone by the village square, a pale slab of cement sterilized by the sun. The place was empty; it looked as if it had always been empty. Adjacent to the square was the intersection where the town’s two roads met. One of them was the road he’d come in on. Finding no one to ask for directions, Michael Boni picked up his bag and started up the other street, following the dense, heady smell of the ocean.
The road was wide and vacant, lined with brightly painted concrete walls. Over the top of the walls spilled the occasional spindly vine and the arm of a dusty tree. At regular intervals, the walls gave way to iron gates. Beyond the gates Michael Boni caught glimpses of private courtyards. A few potted plants, a leaning broom, a cracked, faded chair.
“A sleepy seaside town” was what the guidebook had called it. The book was ten years out of date, the entire entry only a paragraph long. But Michael Boni had liked the idea of a place that could be so easily summarized, containing only the barest essentials.
Up ahead the road rose slightly and then crested. At the top of the hill, a second-story balcony stood out against the blue sky. He saw something moving up there, somebody swinging almost imperceptibly in a hammock. The sign on the facade said HOTEL.
Michael Boni stopped in the shade of an open doorway and rested for a moment. He’d had no idea it could be so hot, especially in mid-December.
The guidebook had claimed there was only one hotel in town, a fact that didn’t seem to have changed in the years since it was written. The town was too remote for foreign tourists, for anyone not looking to get away from everything.
The dining room was an open patio separated from the sidewalk by a low plastic fence. Even with the breeze pushing through, a sour perfume of fried fish hung in the air. Through the doorway into the kitchen, he saw a stooped old woman and a girl with long dark hair standing at a table, chopping tomatoes and onions. The older of the two saw Michael Boni and came out to greet him.
At first the old woman didn’t seem to understand he spoke no Spanish. The problem had been following him across the countryside. No one seemed to know what to make of a Mexican gringo.
But what he wanted now was easy enough to convey. The old woman pointed to a sign above the bar listing rates. There were two prices; the second floor, with its view of the ocean, was twice as much as the first. Michael Boni didn’t need to count his pesos to know which one he could afford.