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"You know," I said, "we didn't really accomplish much with this whole thing, did we?"
"We set out to find who killed Charlotte Barnes and we did. I have to contact Barnes and lay it out for him. Maybe with his co
"Do you really think it was the girl's ghost you saw in the glass?" I asked.
"I don't know. And at this point, it doesn't matter."
The next morning, Antony got me up early and took me out driving in the Cord. In broad daylight, the car looked pretty good, considering it had been in the middle of a shoot-out the night before. There were three bullet holes in the left side, a broken window, and the spare needed to be fixed. Antony said he'd take it later that day and get the work done.
"Kid, you drive like an old lady," he said when he finally deemed my driving abilities worthy of leaving the driveway and going out on the road.
I drove nervously, hunched over the steering wheel, eyes darting right and left. "I'm not used to it," I said.
"Takes time. This car knows the way to go, though. You just put it in gear and put your foot on the gas. Loosen up a little and let it roll."
By midday I was zipping along the roads of the North Shore.
"Okay," said Antony, "I'm bored. Take it back. You're not thrilling me with the short stops and gear crunching anymore."
"Antony," I said. "I'm leaving tomorrow for Mexico."
He took out a cigarette and lit it. "I know," he said.
"What am I going to do without you?" I asked.
"Fuck up, more than likely," he said.
"How am I going to contact you? Schell said you're going to California."
"Yeah," he said. "Before you go, I'm going to give you a phone number. If you ever need me, call it. An old woman will answer. Tell her who you are and leave a number and I'll get back to you."
"I'm going to miss you," I said.
"Don't worry, kid. You'll get over it." He said nothing else but just kept smoking his cigarette. When we pulled back in the driveway at the house, he got out without a word and went inside.
The next morning, the car was ready to go. Isabel and I packed it with blankets and food and whatever else we would need for the long journey. Schell suggested we cross the border in Texas in as remote a spot as possible. He handed me a huge wad of bills and told me it was my cut of all the jobs we had worked. I was dressed in one of Schell's best suits, and Morgan had given Isabel the paisley wrap to wear. We said our good-byes in the house. Morgan kissed us both and started to cry. Antony shook my hand and said, "Don't take any wooden nickels."
Schell followed us out to the Cord. He held the door for Isabel as she got in and kissed her through the open window. Then he came around to my side and said, "Once you get set up down there, I'll be in touch."
"How?" I asked.
"I have co
"I want to tell you-" I began, but he cut me off by saying, "Time to go." He backed away from the car, and I started it. Pulling out of the driveway, I almost hit a tree but managed to right the back end at the last second. Then we were in the road and driving away.
The Cord didn't make it all the way to Mexico but crapped out somewhere around Phoenix, where we boarded a bus for the remainder of the journey. The trip was an adventure, worthy of a book itself. Isabel helped me relearn Spanish as we traveled across the United States. We saw a lot of places hit hard by the Depression, a lot of people scrabbling to survive, and we felt lucky to have money and a destination, a home to return to.
Antony was right, I'd gotten over leaving him and Schell behind as I fell, every day, deeper in love with Isabel. Sometimes, on those open country roads, while the Cord was still ru
WAIT, THERE'S MORE
As Isabel had said, when she told me the story of the ghost in the silver mine and I thought it was just about over: "Wait, there's more."
We settled in Mexico City and got a small apartment in the Polanco section. It wasn't difficult to find work, as Isabel and I were bilingual, and we labored as translators for anything from business documents to minor literary works. Through relatives who still lived in the country, Isabel was able to locate her father, a mild-ma
Once we had established ourselves more securely, I took some of the money Schell had given me and whatever we could save and put it toward tuition at the University of Mexico. There I studied literature, and my early tutors would have been proud of my accomplishments. After many years of working and studying, with great support from Isabel, I managed to acquire a doctorate. Even better, I was offered a position at the university and wound up teaching all of those works I'd studied when I was younger and, even more satisfying, the great writings of my own people. It was a heady time for us, and life happened fast and happened faster. During these years Schell and Antony were never far from my mind, and sometimes I had the greatest longing to see them again, to know how they were, to tell them how happy I was. Every day when the post arrived, I'd search for a letter, even just a postcard, but nothing ever came.
World War II started. During those dark years and for many following Captain Pierce's words returned to me time and again. The Monster had risen. I knew, as many did not, that the grim protocols of Adolf Hitler, a horrifying program of genocide, had been germinated in the United States by "great men" the likes of Henry Ford and the disreputable, crackpot findings of the Eugenics Record Office. And as time progressed, I could see that even the scale of this atrocity would not satisfy the Monster, but that it would return time and again to haunt humanity.
In 1946, after Isabel herself had graduated university with a degree in mathematics, we had our first child, a boy we named Antonio, of course, after Mr. Cleopatra. Our second son, Diego, was born two years later. During this time of young parenthood, I'd wished to have some contact with Schell, as most people want to speak to their parents when they, themselves, become parents. I tried to locate him, but to no avail.
The years followed one after the other, like a string of scarves from the great Saldonica's breast pocket. One night in 1965, the year I turned fifty, the year my younger son was seventeen, the age I was when I'd left Schell, Diego was rummaging around our attic and found the suit Schell had given me to wear on the long-ago escape to Mexico.
He came downstairs and handed me a slip of paper folded in half, saying "I found this in the pocket." I opened the yellowed note and there was a phone number written out in Antony's oddly delicate hand. I remembered him saying, "Call it. An old woman will answer. Tell her who you are…and I'll get back to you." I smiled at the sight of it and had a halfhearted notion to dial until I realized that any woman who was old in '32 would now be long dead. Instead, I folded it and shoved it into my wallet behind a tattered and creased photograph of Schell and Antony standing beside the Cord, a lifetime ago.
Later that year, I was in California, at Berkeley, participating in a weeklong academic conference called Literature of the Americas. I spent the first evening drinking and gabbing with colleagues I'd not seen in a few years; by the second night I'd already begun to miss Isabel and our sons and stayed to myself in the hotel room, watching television and reviewing a paper I was to deliver the next morning. At one point I opened my wallet to retrieve my photo of her, clumsily knocking loose all of the photos, which scattered on the table. With them came that slip of paper. I don't know what got into me-curiosity? loneliness?-but I dialed the number. There were five rings, and I was about to hang up, when an old woman answered.