He smiles and keeps his eyes on the road ahead, lightly scanning the narrow shoulders for armadillos and coyotes, maybe the occasional bobcat. A set of headlights appears on the horizon, and he watches it grow brighter and larger as it draws near. When a cop passes them, Victor looks in his rearview mirror to see if the car has pulled onto the shoulder and begun to turn around. Victor won’t be coming back to this beautiful place, Texas. For him, it is a diseased limb, to be quickly removed before the rot reaches his heart—something he had managed to forget in the years after coming home from Vietnam and finding work and keeping an eye on Alma and Glory. Although, he muses now, his homecoming from Southeast Asia should have been a good reminder. He had stepped off a Greyhound bus in downtown Odessa expecting to be met by his sister and instead came face-to-face with his old boss from the gas station.

The man wore his work overalls and a Shell cap, and to Victor, it seemed like no time at all had passed while he was overseas. Old Kirby Lee hadn’t changed a bit. On seeing the younger man, he pulled Victor into a big bear hug, his icy blue eyes flashing with pleasure. Well shit, Ramírez, you lucky spic. Looks like you’ll live to drink another Tecate, or three. And there was Victor breathing in the scent of gasoline on the man’s gray overalls, hugging his old boss back tight, tight, so tight the man began to squirm in his arms, and all the while Victor was thinking, He don’t mean anything by it, he don’t mean it, he don’t mean it. I made it home alive.

Victor drives on, the lump in his throat large enough to insist on silence. He is thinking about a summer when he picked grapes in Northern California. His fingers bled every night, and the hours were long, but he loved the country, and the woman who drove him into the city one Sunday to eat chocolate at the pier and walk through the park at dusk. He will miss thinking that he might run into her again, sometime. He will miss movie theaters and Blue Bell ice cream and brisket. He will miss a steady paycheck and the sun setting over the sand hills in Monahans, and he will miss hearing the odd, ugly cries of the cranes when he is sitting on the bank of the skinny and shallow Pecos River, a cold beer in one hand, his bird book in the other. The birds in Mexico will be more or less the same, but the river will be different. He will miss it.

Why don’t you tell me one of your war stories? Glory looks worried, and for an instant, Victor wonders if he has been talking out loud. Maybe in a little while, he tells her.

Are we still in Texas? she asks when they drive through El Indio, a village without a stoplight, gas station, or a single sign written in English. Yes, Victor nods. This is Texas.

Tell me a story about Texas, she says, or Mexico.

There are a dozen stories Victor could tell his niece. So many! But tonight he can only think of the sad ones. Ancestors hanged from posts in downtown Brownsville, their wives and children fleeing to Matamoros to spend the rest of their lives looking across the river at land that had been in their families for six generations. Texas Rangers shooting Mexican farmers in the backs as the men harvested sugar cane, or tying men to mesquite trees and setting them on fire, or forcing broken beer bottles down their throats.

They did it for fun, Victor could tell her. They did it on a bet. They did it because they were drunk, or they hated Mexicans, or they heard a rumor that the Mexicans were teaming up with some freedmen or what was left of the Comanche, and they were all coming for the white settlers’ land, their wives and their daughters. And maybe sometimes they did it because they knew they were guilty, and having already traveled so far down the path of their own iniquity, they figured they might as well see it through. But mostly, they did it because they could. Río Bravo, Victor’s papi had called it—furious river, river of villains and desperadoes—and Papi hadn’t meant him and his. He meant whatever lost souls lynched hundreds of men, and a few women, in the years between 1910 and 1920. He meant the Texas Rangers who in the summer of 1956 loaded two of Victor’s uncles onto a cattle car, along with twenty other men, and dropped them off in the Sierra Madres with a single jug of water and a one-liner—Y’all fight it out amongst yourselves, boys. Look in any ravine within fifty miles of the border, Victor could tell his niece, in any small wash or depression, look under any skinny mesquite that might bring some small relief from the hot sun, and you will find us there. You could build a house with the skeletons of our ancestors, a cathedral from our bones and skulls.

Instead, he tells her about her mother’s village, and how the sea is so crowded with red snapper, they jump into fishing boats just to get a little elbow room.

Unimpressed, Glory again pops her gum and blows a bubble so large that when it eventually pops, she has to peel it off her face. Tell me a good story, she says.

An opossum meanders off the shoulder and steps in front of the car. Victor taps the brake and swerves gently, relieved not to feel the thud beneath his tire. Okay, he says, here’s one that my abuela used to tell us kids. I’ll take you to her gravesite when we get to Puerto ángel. It’s a sad story, he warns.

Is it a Texas story?

Yes.

Then tell it.

Near the end of the Red River War, when the Comanche and Kiowa had already lost but nobody was willing to admit it, a group of warriors came upon a rancher’s house. They broke down the door and found the rancher and his wife gone, but a baby sleeping in a basket next to the bed. They thought about stealing the baby, but it was late in the day and they were tired, and while they would take women and small children, babies were more trouble than they were worth. So they carried the basket out into the yard and filled the baby with arrows. Poor thing looked like a porcupine when they were done—Victor pauses and glances at his niece who stares at him with a look of delighted horror on her face—that’s how your abuela described it, not me.

Pues, the rancher and his wife came home—they’d only been down at the creek washing some bed linens—and discovered their baby. The poor thing was so thoroughly shot through with arrows that they had to bury her basket and all. A regiment of Texas Rangers heard about this. Half the regiment was old Confederates and the other half was old Blues, but they were one hundred percent in agreement that there was a score to settle, so they rode around the Panhandle until they found an Arapahoe woman with her baby. They figured they’d riddle the child with bullets and call it even. But some of the men didn’t feel right about this. Filling a baby with bullets was barbaric, they decided, and these men were not barbarians. Instead, they decided, they would deliver a single shot to the baby’s forehead. But they didn’t account for how large the cartridge, or how small the baby, and they were shocked when the baby’s head split like a melon—again Victor pauses—that too was your abuela’s phrase, not mine.

Now the two groups of men were even, but the whole affair had been much uglier and messier than anybody expected and no one was really surprised when both babies began to haunt the men. Every town they rode into, every camp they set up—there were the babies. The men would spend their days killing each other and dragging their wounded off the field, and there would be the babies hovering at the edge of things, watching them. When night fell, the babies would begin to cry—an ungodly, agonizing wail that didn’t stop until the sun came up the next morning.

And the mothers must have died not long after their babies, because suddenly there were two young women hanging around the campfire and they weren’t nearly as peaceful as the babies had been. They shrieked and howled, their skirts rustling when they jerked men out of their tents and pulled them by their feet into the campfire. They untied horses and sent them flying across the plains, leaving the men stranded. Some of the men killed themselves, but most of them wandered around out there until they died from thirst or choked to death in one of the dust storms the mothers had wrought. When the women hurled lightning at the men, prairie fires spread so quickly they couldn’t outrun them. When rain and ice came down on the men’s heads, they drowned in flash floods or froze to death. Within five years, every man on either side was dead, and the mothers, having settled the score, took their babies and returned to the grave.

And this is where your abuela would lean forward and shake her finger at your mother and me and say, No matarás. Glory, you better start cracking those Spanish books if you’re going to live in Mexico. Victor leans forward and peers at a small group of lights ahead. Laredo, he says. You want to stop for a bite to eat?

But Glory doesn’t answer. What kind of woman, she wonders, would tell such a story to little kids? The kind Glory wishes she had known.