Did he pay? she wanted to know. Did he pay for what he did?

Victor listened as the man in the room next door flushed the toilet and turned on the shower. Yes, he lied, Dale Strickland’s gonna pay for this every day for the rest of his life.

Now it is early September, and Victor has returned from a meeting at the district attorney’s office when Glory asks again if Dale Strickland paid for what he did. He pats the front pocket of his pants where five thousand dollars, most of it in Benjamin Franklins, is held together with a rubber band. This is her money, but she doesn’t know it yet. When they get to Puerto ángel, he will give it to Alma. Here, he will tell his sister, for a nicer place to live and a few pieces of furniture, and school tuition for Glory. He looks away from the small shape huddled under the bedcovers and lets his gaze fall on the single heroic ray of sunlight that has pushed its way through a thumb-sized gap in the curtains. He will let her keep on believing that Strickland is at the state prison in Fort Worth, that he’ll be farting dust by the time he gets out. They’ll have to roll him out the gate in a wheelchair, Victor says, with a new set of false teeth and a bag full of extra underwear.

I hope he dies there, she says and hunkers a little deeper into Alma’s sheets. The heat broke early this year, and although Glory still turns on the air conditioner in the afternoons when she comes in from the pool, it is only for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to drive the stuffiness from her room. The recent storms settled the dust and smashed records for precipitation. On the street where Glory and her mother used to live, the Muskingum Draw flooded. Little kids floated on old tires from one end of town to the other, and when the water grew shallow and sprawling, when they could see the buffalo wallow ahead, now thick with mud and water moccasins, they stood and wrested their tires out of the water. Outside town, the flash floods eventually settled into ravines and gulches and cattle crossings. If Glory looks closely when they drive through the desert this afternoon, Victor says, she will see flowers she’s never seen before—butterfly daisies and buffalo bur and cactus blossoms the color of fresh snow.

When she was little, maybe four or five, a rare snowstorm passed through Odessa overnight. At dawn, Alma woke her daughter, and they went outside to see the ice crystals that covered the ground and sidewalks and car windows. It was the first time either of them had seen snow, and they stood in front of their apartment, mouths agape. When the morning sun cleared the roof of their complex, the ice began to sparkle and shimmer in the light. Make it stay, Glory begged her mother, but by noon, the snow had turned to red mud and soggy grass, and Glory blamed Alma—as if her mother could have stopped the sun from rising and the day from growing warmer, if only she had tried harder.

Glory rises from her bed and starts packing. I hope he suffers, she tells her uncle again. Victor nods and curls his fingers around the money in his pocket. Take it, you lazy wetback, Scooter Clemens had said, pissed off that Strickland hadn’t shown up to do his own dirty work. He slapped the bills on Keith Taylor’s desk while Keith sat frowning and looking out the window, saying nothing. After everyone had signed the agreement, Victor stood with his hat in his hands and imagined his large thumbs pressed against the man’s throat. But of all the things Victor learned during the war—that living to see another day is almost always a matter of stupid luck, that men who know they might die any minute can learn not to give a shit about who’s the All-Star and who’s the Mexican, or that heroism is most often small and accidental but it still means the world—the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance. And Victor has no taste for it, not even as the sole witness to his niece’s suffering.

He picks up an empty suitcase and sets it on the bed. Phoebe, he says again, that son of a bitch is going to pay for this every day until he’s dead. Believe it.

And maybe he will pay, one way or another, Victor thinks, but that’s got nothing to do with him, or Glory. The cops and lawyers and teachers and churches, the judge and jury, the people who raised that boy and then sent him out into the world, to this town—every one of them is guilty.

They load their suitcases and boxes into the back of El Tiburón, covering everything with a tarp weighed down by red bricks. It is just after four o’clock when they walk over to the motel office, and the desk clerk is counting his drawer when they hand over the keys to their rooms, first the young man, then the girl who comes downstairs every day around noon wearing the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt, towel in one hand, bottle of Dr Pepper in the other, and lately, a portable cassette player slung over one shoulder. In a few hours, the boy will wish he’d stopped what he was doing for a minute and thanked them for always paying their bill on time, wished them good luck wherever they were headed next.

*

The road map, when Victor lays it across the steering wheel, is two feet wide and three feet long. He folds it in half, then quarters, and then again until it fits easily in Glory’s hands. He points to the bottom edge of the fold, his index finger lightly tracing the border, a pale blue line that wanders between the two countries, its gentle bends and turns becoming sharper and more complicated as it meanders toward the gulf. It is a line that grows thinner each time the map is revised, Victor has noticed, the river diminished by dredging and fences and dams. It’s been at least a hundred years since old ladies sat on their porches just a few feet from the river’s edge and watched steamboats carry passengers to and from the Gulf while live jazz or country or Tejano drifted across the water, the music lingering long after the boats had passed by.

Two hours south of Laredo, there’s a ferry at Los Ebanos, Victor tells his niece. It can carry a dozen people and two cars on each trip across the river. Victor runs his index finger along a series of state highways and back roads marked by black lines wending their way across the desert and through the Chisos Mountains, stopping at Lake Amistad and picking up again on the other side only to spend another six hundred miles wandering back and forth across the border. Victor fetches the map from his niece’s hand, flips it over, and points at the jagged edge of land hugging the sea. And then we drive down to Oaxaca and Puerto ángel, he says, fifteen hundred miles and roads so bumpy your nalgas will hurt for a week. He glances at his watch and looks toward the western sky. He does not want to be driving through this part of West Texas at night with Glory in the car, if he can help it. If we hurry, he says, we can be in Del Rio before dark.

*

On a two-lane highway somewhere between Ozona and Comstock, along a stretch of road so remote that they haven’t seen another car for nearly an hour, the El Camino starts hesitating on accelerations. When Victor swears and pumps the gas, the engine coughs and sputters like an old man, but they press on for another fifty miles. The sun is hovering just above the horizon when he mutters something about a clogged fuel filter and starts looking for a wide spot where he can ease the car off the road. Glory is half-dozing in the passenger seat with her cheek pressed against the warm window, trying to imagine what her mother’s hometown might look like, whether it will be much different from the old photos Alma keeps in a cigar box. Her hair has grown out enough to look like she means for it to be that way, and there is a fine sheen of sweat on her neck, even as the coming night threatens to send temperatures plummeting.

While her uncle curses and fiddles under the hood of El Tiburón, Glory steps outside and stands on her toes until she loses her balance. She’d love a cigarette, but Victor says a girl her age has no business smoking. Instead, she walks to the back of the truck and lowers the tailgate. She pulls a pack of gum out of her pocket and stuffs three pieces in her mouth. When she sits down, the metal is warm against the backs of her legs. Sweat gathers along her bra line and waistband, and she rubs hard at her eyes. ?Pedazo de mierda! Victor tells the car. You’ll never be a classic.