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Pancho Vasallo responded to the threat with an oath: “From now on, as long as I live, you will never set foot on my property.”

“I don’t have to come here to be with Amalia.”

“Then I’ll have to go to your home and let Rosario know the kind of husband she has.”

“Amalia is your daughter, not your mistress.”

“She won’t be yours, either, you son of a—”

Suddenly they were struggling. The dancers managed to separate them. Since no blows had been struck, they glared at each other, hurling curses.

“I’m going to settle this with you. And soon!” was the last thing Antonio said before going for his horse. At least, that was what the witnesses recalled.

Belen clapped his hands together over his head and announced that the party was not over, that the night was still young. He called to the musicians to play a lively guaracha. The people returned to the dance floor. It was soon after that the gunshot was heard. The men came running out of the dance hall, looking in all directions. They saw Antonio riding off at a trot. They recognized his Stetson hat. They called out to Pancho Vasallo, but he did not answer. They found him sprawled on the paving stones, gravely wounded. Lorenzo ran for his jeep, brought it around, and many arms helped lift the dying man. Lorenzo drove recklessly down a long and winding muddy road. It took almost an hour before he reached the doctor, who, after one glance, said:

“This man is dead.”

The bullet had struck him in the chest and had not exited. Lorenzo, in time, took charge of everything, assumed all the expenses, saying that he did not hold a grudge and that Vasallo’s death had put an end to any resentment. Back at the El Paraiso, one of the ranch hands said to Belen:

“It was Antonio.”

Someone claimed to have seen him escaping at a gallop. Everyone set out to look for him. The first to arrive, in his jeep, was Lorenzo.

Antonio was prepared to continue their fight, but Lorenzo cut him short.

“They’re coming for you. They think you killed Vasallo. But I know you’re innocent.”

Antonio’s first urge was to flee, to go into hiding until the incident could be cleared up. Lorenzo pointed out to him how slow and ineffective justice was, that he couldn’t desert his family. What would they live on?

“Unless you could leave them enough money.”

“Where would I get money?”

Lorenzo said he could provide it, that he would pay generously for what Antonio gave him, if he was willing to make a sacrifice for his family.

Antonio protested that he was innocent, that it would be just a matter of time before the truth would come out. Lorenzo pointed out that it was a time when justice was hard to come by. Antonio would be dealing with the police and with judges, which was difficult without having money and the type of connections that he himself happened to have.

“I want to make you a proposition.”

“Well, I suppose I can listen.” Antonio began to adjust his horse’s saddle. “But you’d better talk fast.”

“It’s simple. I’ll take on all of your family’s problems and you’ll confess to the murder.”

In case he hadn’t understood, Lorenzo added: “I’m paying you a lot for the only thing you have, your freedom.”

Antonio thought about his sick mother, his children, the debts and the deprivations of his family.

“And what if you don’t do what you promise?”

“Then all you would have to do is tell what you know.”

The deal was sealed.

Lorenzo returned home and described to his wife the enormous tragedy.

Antonio resigned himself to being arrested, and understood that it would be a long time before things would be as they had been.

Now the arrangement had ended. Death had put an end to his wait. The train began to slow down. After it rounded a curve, Antonio could see the train platform. There was only a small group gathered there, but they were among them. Rosario and Chela were weeping. Ivan stood quietly, his arms crossed.

The train came to a stop. Antonio moved with deliberate slowness. Now every second held profound meaning. He let two old people laden with packages get off, and a couple with two noisy children. Then he helped several nuns with their baggage.

Finally, his feet were on the ground. He breathed a deep sigh and began walking toward his family. They, too, were moving forward to the encounter. Two steps away from their embrace, someone stepped out from behind a pile of boxes and fired. Celso Vasallo had come from far away to fulfill an unjust promise on his father’s soul when there was no way to avenge his death, and now his bullet found its mark.

Since it was raining the gravediggers had had a lot to drink and were having problems with their footing and the job at hand. Rosario, Ivan, and Chela, their weeping behind them, stood huddled at the graveside. Few people had come to the funeral service.

Vicente, the agronomer, gave the eulogy. He took only one or two minutes to state that the man whom they were covering with earth had been, in spite of everything, a family man.

The Fruit Cellar

by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates has distinguished herself as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet; and even within prose fiction, her range extends from the literary to several entertainment genres. Readers interested in Ms. Oates’s most recent work should look for the novel The Tattooed Girl (Ecco Press/’03), the novella, Rape: A Love Story (Carroll & Graf/’04), and the short story collection I Am No One You Know (Ecco Press ’04).

* * *

“ ‘Peery.’ Does the name mean anything to you?”

“ ‘Perry’? I don’t think so.”

“ ‘Peery.’ ‘Lisa Peery.’ ”

The voice, which was the telephone voice of Shannon’s older brother Mark, sounded carefully neutral. So often had Shannon and her brother spoken on the phone during the past eight months — monitoring their father’s illness, rapid decline, and death, the funeral arrangements, the funeral, and now the aftermath, in Shannon’s numbed imagination a high-piled sludge like the muddy debris following a flood — it took her a moment to realize that Mark’s voice was different this morning, somehow. For this was not one of their shared emotions, it was Mark’s own, mysterious to her.

“ ‘Lisa Peery.’ Now I remember, I think — that little girl? The abducted girl? From the park. I was in high school, my junior year.” Shannon had begun to speak rapidly, nervously. She heard her voice with dismay and dislike yet could not restrain herself. “It was in — nineteen eighty-nine? Around this time of year. June.”

In a rush of blurred images the banner headlines, the photographs of the ten-year-old child came to her. Memory underlaid with a sense of dread, an obscure shame. In that early summer thirteen years before posters and fliers had blossomed everywhere Shannon had looked, glaring-yellow borders and tall black captions like shouts.

MISSING MISSING MISSING

It had been a nightmare season. No child had ever been abducted from Strykersville. Not in the known history of the small city south of Lake On-tario. No child had ever “vanished” from Myrtle Park, a stretch of hilly, partly wooded municipal land through which a deep ravine ran, abutting the rear of the large old properties along Highland Avenue where Shannon and Mark had grown up in the Leigh family house.