The Fare

La Pasajera

They had just taken their seats when the first drops of the season struck the pergola awning above the breezeway where Alexa and Virgilio took their afternoon coffee.  Clouds had built against the southern mountains over the past week, each day denser and lower on the mountain, the greys darkening in their descent upon the Central Valley.  Both of them knew the rains were coming.  But as was their custom, at least for the past quarter century, rather than talk about it they just waited it out, engaging the subject only in the measured looks sculpted from fifty-three years of marriage.  Just three days past Easter Sunday in this first week of April, loud drops betrayed the rain’s arrival a full month ahead of schedule, and when Virgilio would not look up from his stirring of tapa de dulce into his coffee to acknowledge this moment, Doña Alexa glanced upward to give the thing its due.  The first drops were oppressive and heavy and drew in their like to build bulbous drops of ground-seeking water until the sky opened up and broke finally beneath a torrent.  Through the green plastic roof, the drops were drawn to each other and converged in the corrugated troughs to charge the gutters and course down the spouts to pelt the pebble registers Virgilio had busied himself the first restless weeks of his retirement to create, a couple years before he found in its rhythm an escape from the obligation to produce and do and perform seared into the masculine brain.

The confluence of rivulets carried Alexa back to her Caldera childhood and her father’s shop out behind their house that looked out over the Nicoya Gulf.  She was drawn in by his bellows and forge as her sisters crowded the hearth beneath the tutelage in the female trades by a sere matriarch that bent only toward the will of the Lord and Savior.  Don Evaristo was widely admired and respected, despite siring only daughters, and she apprenticed in the manufacture and trade of fishing weights.  Today’s running water was the growing trickle of molten lead nursed from the surging crucible into the ceramic channels that fed the adobe molds.  Today’s rain had kept twenties-era fishermen all along that coast armed with the weight needed to get the live ballyhoos and sardines down into the depths where the dog-toothed pargo and gaping-mouthed meros and svelte gallos and all other manner of fish were hauled by callused hands and sun-beaten shoulders across the gunwales of pangas that set forth daily onto the murky water to feed their families and raise from the fish-mongers of Puntarenas and salting and smoke houses that sold to the Central Valley the money for rice, beans, and coffee to supplement the dining table and lunchboxes beyond what they could catch, harvest, hunt and forage.  The year before her quinceañera Alexa had walked into the first tentative rain of that year’s season to celebrate its arrival as wet as she could get.  She had in her keening adolescence imagined the tentative spray of hesitant early May rains as the nervous gibberish that eager boys sputtered to country maidens in their urgency to join in the orgy of plants and animals surrounding them that relished above all things water.  But today’s drops were brazen and large, violent and insistent, and they were like the very sinkers that emerged from the molds after cooling, falling weightily now from the sky to dissolve into water to mock humanity’s fumbling war against chaos.  In tomes of physics, they called it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In Sunday sermons it was bemoaned as the bane of man’s pride.  In the classics of Greek literature, it was the birthing bed of high tragedy.

She looked back to find her husband still monomaniacal in the stirring of his coffee, blowing now on its steaming surface, not even deigning to acknowledge the storm.  It was too loud yet to be heard, so she chewed the words that she longed to loosen upon the table.  The sweet bread sat between them, the sour cream reposing stilly around a readied serving spoon, and finally he took a long tentative slurp.  Though she could not hear it through the overhead din, she knew its sound well.  He licked the stiff hairs of his pencil-thin moustache and at last met her eyes, curling his lips northward.  He held her in his Giaconda smile and winked, turning his gaze finally onto the raging afternoon.

The tended fields of his youth blanketed the rolling flanks of Poás Volcano, neat and ordained, cane as far as the eye could see, cane that would sweeten coffee, fresco, cakes and other confections and feed the yeast for the mash that would become the guaro that rounded the rough edges of the wild and made a bit of civilization not just possible but perhaps even inevitable.  The great ordered rows that swayed raucously in the summer winds fell to the sway of man and his machete and hoe, but from his first day in the fields as wisps of hair sprouted from his upper lip Virgilio had been drawn to the corners and edges where the abandoned canebrakes tested the yoke of man’s dominion to recast in full rebellion against man’s presumption, however feebly, the wilderness of the greater upland forests, where dwarves, spirits and shape-shifters still wandered free.  He kept his reverence for such chaos quiet amid his fellows’ hatred of such abandoned patches and their open defiance of man’s industry.  “Where machetes dare not swing,” they used to joke about such wild corners of the fincas to which he was sent to work.  In those days on the eve of the world’s Great Depression—that in Costa Rica had passed them by with little difference from other years—Virgilio would have been able to set his pocket-watch—had he then been a foreman entitled to a pocket watch and not just a peon—by the seasons’ changes in early May and mid-December.  Six decades later after rising to lead field crews and then crush the cane as laborer then supervisor and to then tend the mash as a crew-boss and finally the stills themselves before being moved into management and given his gold-watch send-off at a retirement gala, the seasons had strayed a bit from their timeworn pattern but still hewed to the regularity of breathing:  in and out, up and down, outside and in, waking and dream.

The reverence for the change in seasons was universal among men, nothing unique to him, but this year’s rains were, as he had foreseen tending the gardens for the last two weeks, a full month early.  Some said the planet was changing, rebelling against the intrusions of man, that all that we knew would be soon washed away, murmurs of the fanatical that rose from time to time to preach the coming end of the world.  A glass-half-full man himself, Virgilio was sure the season’s earliness had to be an omen of good.  But Doña Alexa tended toward darker interpretations, and who was he to even aspire to convince his blushing bride otherwise?  Hardly a repository of truth, Virgilio was not an ambitious man.  He warred daily simply against the eventual night’s coming.  After all, what greater purpose was there than the daily renewal of life itself?

“I would prefer the knock this very minute,” she said.  “Let her come now; it’s the waiting I cannot…”

“And I can easily abide the waiting.”

Juan Carlos Obregón Quintero owned his taxicab outright.  He was 27 years old, and his father and father’s father before him and uncles and cousins, all of the Obregóns, nearly, were drivers.  His mother’s side was politicians, lawyers and mountebanks, and the Quinteros had mostly looked down on Pops as Juanca grew up, for driving a bus.  All that was a comical side-show, the obligatory embarrassment of family, and he pitied the pretentious who did not realize that the call was not in what you did, but in how you did it.  He had not yet in his life eaten an oyster from a half-shell but was quite sure the world was his own.  With the ink drying on the Central American Peace accords, peace lodged itself into the isthmus, and in the INF Treaty between the world’s superpowers, the threat of global annihilation was in open rout!  The Iran-Contra revelations roiling the United was proof that nefarious darkness could not be kept from the light of day, and less than five months earlier, the man that Juanca had voted for to lead his nation had been awarded the world’s greatest prize.   It was not just Juanca but the world itself that was on fire, and he, for one, could simply not sit still for the excitement and dreams that each day piled onto the growing stack.  He figured that ten years out he would own ten cabs and drive one and manage the rest, that or do something else altogether should the right opportunity present itself.  It did not matter; the thing to do was to do, and so he did, day in and day out, and he found himself on April 6^th 1988 a mere ten blocks from Hospital Calderón Guardia one hour before shift change at 01:59 PM when he was hailed at Morazán Park by a freaky-looking young couple, university students probably, anarchists for sure.

“La U,” said the peach-fuzz kid with biker boots and a Loverboy bandanna around his Metallica mullet.  He slid in behind and the girl oozed into the opposite rear seat.  From the fisheye she was all Hey-Nineteen Goth, spiked-hair, piercings, runny-black eyeliner, fish-nets, chains, Cuervo Gold and fine Colombian, the full Chrissie-Hynde wannabe package there to make tonight a wonderful thing . . .

“Say it again,” Carlos said to the fisheye.

“La U,” the boy repeated.

“UCR San Pedro, roger that,” Carlos mouthed.  “Wouldn’t want the little missy to be late to her modern dance class, now, would we?”

“How could you possibly know that?” she leaned forward.

“Lucky guess, and you, my good sir,” he took in his side of the glass and gunned through a flashing yellow on Avenida Central to drift into the next lane, “political science or philosophy?”

“History.”

Juanca merged right and followed the flow around the rotonda beneath the Puente de la Hispanidad. 

“We’re making it all the time,” he told the fisheye.  “Now more so than ever.”

The fare and his girl turned to smirk at their driver.

“Who needs the scene in Greenwich Village and the East Side,” continued the fearlessly conversationalist cabbie.  “Left Bank and Amsterdam and all that when we’ve got the new Puente,” he waved into the fisheye, “the latest hallmark of Tiquicia!  Right?”

“Next you shall want us sinking our inheritance into the whole fascist Nobel Prize dogma,” the kid spoke into the fisheye.  “Use the words ‘Switzerland of Central America,’ or some such, right, cuz?  Costa Rica’s great spot in the global sun, is that it?  The savior of Central America?  Ringing a bell, mae?”

“Things could sure be worse,” Juanca pointed out, beating a yellow to turn north at the cathedral into the UCR campus.

“And they are getting that way, mae,” the kid declared, “worse every day.  In Europe and the United, Canada even.  England and its Iron Lady.  Tyranny is on the move.  Tiquicia as well, mae; you can bank on it!”

It was the third day of straight rains, and the spirited young couple sprinted as if made of sugar under the hard rain to cover.  Juanca pulled the fisheye inward and looked out at the sky and imagined the nurses released in all their glory onto the sidewalks at shift change, new ones pouring out of cars and buses toward their shifts into a rain that would fall till dark.

“You free, driver?  Museum of Contemporary Art and Design?”  The fare folded his umbrella and popped into the back.

“Right away my good Sir, a doctor surely in humanities or science if I may guess from your demeanor and apparel, just off from instructing the protean minds of our effervescent youth in the vastness of opportunity in this great world of today!  That about sum it up, Professor?”

“Uh, actually I’m a reporter, mae.  Hey so, since you brought it up, what’s your take on this turf thing going on?  I hear that the streets are caked in Noriega coke . . .”

“Don’t know much of anything about that, my dear Sir, but I read La Nación daily, La República when I lay my hands on it to see the conservatives’ take on things out there, yes sir, that I do.  I don’t cotton much to the commie take on things, though, no sir, I don’t, though I take the time as needed to hear the arguments from the better spoken among the nihilist set.  Call it data collection.”

“Oh, come on,” the reporter turned from his shotgun perch to smirk.  “You drive a cab.  The streets are your world, cuz!”

“Well, I will say that I don’t think it will go well for Mister Noriega, that there General, the President of Panama.  That man has got, if I may speak freely sir, all kinds of sinister things going on around him.  And now he’s poking the Colossus in the eye with a stick, thinks he can get away with it . . .”

“He’s getting away with more than poking fun at El Norte,” the fare insisted.  “You’re out here all the time; you hear the scuttlebutt.   He and Pablo Escobar are practically compadres, and El Patrón is tying up allies here as well—business associates.  But I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.”

“What I do know is that,” Carlos sighed, “Oscar Arias stood up to the gringos over Nicaragua and El Salvador because it was the right thing to do.  But ain’t nobody gonna never stand up for Cara de Piña and you can mark my words on that.  A gringo prison cell or a hail of bullets don’t make great trappings for a legacy, but they are the only choices left on his table!”

Give me your name, driver.  I’m gonna quote you on that.   Check out La Nación Sunday in the Focus Section.”

Juanca ducked a young man waving him down to backtrack a couple blocks and swing by Calderón Guardia instead.  He took a deep breath as he rounded the block and downshifted.  He slowed to a crawl out front and hugged the curb with his sidewalls, inching along beside a phalanx of white nurse-fits and black umbrellas scuttling about, buses gorging and disgorging, the afternoon traffic honking along, the sound of tires whistling on rain-slicked tarmac, a night at the opera, a production of Aréndira at the National Theater; a finals featuring La Liga and Saprissa in Saprissa Stadium, the odd tsunami or revolution and cheap death falling like molten lead from the sky.  He cruised the bus lane slowly and tried to cajole any one of them out of line and into his cab, to no avail.  Hey, so he liked nurses, so what?  Anything wrong with that?  It wasn’t like he was perverted or had bad intentions or anything.  He just thought they were hot, all of them, and was fond of admiring them in their nurse’s garb, their form-fitting blouses and the way they sewed the garments tight against billowing breasts and birthing hips, the straightness of the seam of the hose up the backs of marvelously endless legs, that overall insouciance so specific to a trade steeped in superior anatomical concupiscence.  Perhaps it was a fetish.  So what?  What harm was he doing?  He could not harvest so much as a glance from the bus line and inched forward about to turn dejectedly into traffic when she popped onto his radar.  There she was, all of a sudden, standing alone beneath her umbrella a half a block down, clearly waiting, but not on a bus.

He sped up lest some lucky bastard slide in to scoop him.  From thirty meters away she was clearly voluptuous, all cloaked in her secular habit, and surely had some dude dialed in on when to pick her up and when to drop her off and when to bring her ice cream and when to stay away.  Yeah, a girl like that would certainly not be out here roaming around unclaimed, that was for sure.  Juanca was not a bad-looking guy and no dunce.  Okay, so he was only a taxi driver, but he was young, smart, handsome and good with his money; hell, he owned his cab outright.  And he had plans.  Why shouldn’t he be able to date gorgeous babes?

Lo and behold, no special other beat him to the punch.  He pulled up beside her just as casual as the next breath of air, and she reached for the back-seat door handle.  From the fisheye her uniform was different from the rest, a bit less white, and cut differently, looser, though she still looked to move around inside it like a couple jerengas in a rice sack.  There was something else, though, and he was not sure what it was.  She rested her right hand on her belly and worried her chin with the fingers of her left hand, that elbow anchored on the arm rest as she shifted her glance between me in the fisheye and the world outside her window.  The cap she wore was a different style and shape and sat back on top of her head, where the way it sat made it look like it was pinned there.  This was 1988, though, and even in the nursing profession, Juanca doubted you could find many of today’s modern women willing to pin a cap to their hair as part of a daily uniform.  Well, that was his guess, but what the hell did he know about the habits of women’s cap-pinning anyway?

“Where to, Miss?”

“You know Brisas del Tiribí?”

“Circumvalación or San Martín to Calle 20?”

“San Martín; please drive carefully.  The rain makes the tarmac slippery.  It can be dangerous.”

“Security is my first concern, dear miss, and trust you me; you shall never again find a driver more sensitive to the hazards that the rains bevisit upon these awesome streets of our utopian capital!  So, lovely Señorita, how’s about that scoundrel Manuel Noriega, all puffed up after Daniel Ortega got let off light last year in Esquipulas?”

“Be careful,” she replied, “of the tracks just a block ahead, the Atlantic line.  You never know when a train might come along.”

Juanca slowed down for form and took long looks up and down the tracks and inched across as he edged the volume up on Radio Dos for the new Wang Chung and snuck a peak at the fare, who looked through her glass into the rain.  Few were the times people living them could embrace the tumult of history sweeping round.  Beyond the world events still echoing in New Switzerland, three days ago winter had returned—early this year—with heavy rains, many dancing in the streets in the barrios, some pulperías running out of guaro even.

“STOP!”

Carlos pulled to the side in a safe place and wrapped his arm around the shotgun seat to twist himself backward.  “What is it?”

“There is a crossing just ahead.  It is very dangerous, especially when it is raining.  You must be very careful.”

“The Pacific line doesn’t run anymore,” Juanca objected.  “And the promised trams are years yet from threatening my livelihood.  But you’re right:  safety first!”  He inched into the intersection, wondering what had become of the nation’s rail lines, pleased that nobody laid on the horn behind him—how he hated honkers—and inched across safe and sound and picked up speed as he neared the destination.

“Driver,” the fare called out.  “The next left then 200 west and 50 north, green portón on the right.”

“Could it be this white one, miss?  I don’t see any green ones.”

She looked out the glass, Juanca docked and idled against the curb.

“That’s my house,” she told the fisheye.  “Make a note of it.”

“Why yes ma’am, note taken.  That will be 50 colones, Miss.”

“No, driver, just make note of it.  I need you to take me now to the Desamparados Cemetery.  Do you know where it is?  I can give you directions.”

“Desamparados Cemetery it is.  Of COURSE I know where it is.”

“Wait here,” she told him.

Carlos cut the ignition and thought it over, fuck it, and locked her down and loped off across the burial grounds. It was late afternoon, dusk gathering, and it was an odd destination in a rough part of town.  Wouldn’t want her to come to no harm, that’s for sure, out paying her respects, so lovely and professional and devoted to the baby she seemed to carry without yet showing.  He slowed up beneath a cedar and watched her in the vale below before the relevant tombstone. She knew he was watching and that he meant well.  She would not be threatened by him, an obliged guardian as it were, the things you do when your humanity rose up and forbad you courses of action other than the decent and proper ones.  Yet after pacing a bit as she stood there he looked back down after a distraction to find her gone.  He straightened to look around and called out after a few minutes and headed back to the car where he waited for a good half hour and started the motor and sat a good ten minutes more before easing back into traffic to drive away, back to the house he was to “make a note of.”

He parked out front and shouted “upe” from the portón, speaking finally into the intercom after ringing the bell to be buzzed in.  Indirect lighting appeared behind boulders that lined the concrete path from the gate to the front door.  It was weirdly pretty from what the light allowed him to see, preening ornamentals and groomed hedges, little boulders and rocks strewn around as accents.  There was a little pond even with a miniature fountain now lit in garish colors, goldfish swimming around.  He cocked his head at the mushroom lawn ornament at the base of the steps that rose to the front door, red dome with little cream highlights painted on top.  The face on the other side of the door was that of an elderly gentleman with thick Vincent Price hair that both belied and corroborated his Pre-Cambrian origins.  He had it slicked back and a neatly-groomed pencil-thin moustache.  His eyes were kind, and he seemed relaxed but at the same time unsure.  He opened the door and stepped forward to shake Juanca’s hand and pull him across the threshold, and Juanca shuddered at the gentleness and at something else, interest or curiosity, something that he could not tease out.

You must be the driver,” the gentleman gestured into the hallway to invite him inside.

“My cab probably gives me away,” Carlos giggled, jerking his thumb back out to the street.  “I certainly hate to disturb you this evening.”

“Do come in, son.  Do come in.”

He walked in on a blue-haired maven with skeptical eyes and a furrow she tried to keep off her brow.  She clutched her hands, revealing the age spots on the back of one, against an ample bosom to appraise him in a way that could not escape an appearance of criticism, though not in an unfriendly way, more like condescending wisdom gaging the effrontery of dazzling youth and boundless virility.

“How much is the fare, my good man,” she asked, unwinding her hands.

“Half a teja only.  I feel terrible intruding like this; it’s just that the fare, your grand-daughter, I presume, well, she vanished on me and took me here first.”

The old man pulled out a rojo.  “Keep the change, son, for your trouble.”

“Oh, but I could not possibly . . . it’s a full day’s wage!”

“Don’t be silly,” insisted the old man.  “You’ve earned it.”

“Did she say anything to you,” asked the woman.

“Well,” he looked up to recall, “she said the portón would be green, but it’s actually white, and that seemed odd, but she said this was her home.  She is your granddaughter, isn’t she?”

“She said that?”

“Well, actually, she said ‘house,’ not ‘home.’”

“It was green,” the maven conceded.  “Don Virgilio,” she glanced at the man, “painted it white a few years ago.  1982, wasn’t it, Virgilio?  My name is Alexa,” she turned to take the cabbie’s two hands between her own to properly introduce herself.

“There’s entirely too much green in this country as it is,” the man said.  “Wouldn’t you agree?  Did she criticize your driving,” he asked.

“Funny, Don Virgilio, that you should mention it,” Carlos smiled.  “I am a third-generation driver and quite talented at my trade.  Even if that sounds like bragging it’s actually true.”

“But?”

“Most folks figure that out right away.  But your granddaughter was a real back-seat driver,” he chuckled; “yes sir, that she was, for sure.  Worried over the rain of all things, said it was dangerous.  And she did not care much for railroad crossings, no sir, that she did not at all.  We hit both the Atlantic and Pacific lines between Calderon Guardia and here, and she got a little nervy at both crossings.”

“Go on,” the woman said.

“She said you never know when a train might come along.”

The couple came together in an embrace, the woman’s chest heaving with muted sobs, the man rubbing the top of her back, his fingers straying beneath her hair to cradle her head.  Carlos looked down and clutched his hands in front of him and looked away.  The man put his hands on his wife’s shoulders and gentled her back to look her in the eyes before breaking away to walk down the hall.  He retrieved from the bookshelf a photo portrait in an old-timey gilded frame that he placed in Juanca’s hands, one eyebrow crooking upward.

“High school portrait, surely,” Juanca said, “though I am surprised that in these fast days they still take the time to do such a good job.”  The fare looked up at him through a broad smile on the sepia portrait.  She was bedecked in a gown and mortarboard, a suffused gentle sheen jumping off her smooth high forehead, everything softened and diffuse, the old movie-star treatment it seemed to Juanca, the work of a professional with a studio.  “That is really clever how they have made this to appear like an antique,” he said, unsure what was expected of him.  “I am sure there is money in this sort of thing.  It’s really very clever,” he looked up to hand the frame back to the man.

“The picture was taken in 1961,” the man said with a humorless smile filled somehow with a generosity that Carlos could only hope to himself muster should he live long enough to become a gently doting grandfather himself, some decades into the next millennium.

“She has not aged a single day,” Juanca frowned.  “Nineteen sixty-one, you say?  Why, that was the year I was born.”

“Come, young man.”  The woman stepped forward and took his arm in hers to amble down the hall and into and across the living room and around furniture to its opposite corner, where she stopped with him before what was clearly a shrine, images of the fare adorning the wall, a yellowed newspaper clipping behind glass in the lower right-hand corner.

“Orielma was our second daughter, just 22 years of age,” she patted his hand and looked at him through swollen eyes.  “She would be forty-nine in July.  Had things been different, her children might well have had children of their own and now pine for my tres leches.  Who knows what might have been?”

“Wait a minute,” he said, turning around to cross his arms.  “I have done nothing to you.  Why would you play this joke on me?  It’s not funny!”

“It happened on the first rain of that year’s season,” she reached out to take his hands again in hers.

“You know how it is,” the man explained.  “Oils and greases get smeared onto the streets during the summer months and get caked on, so the first rain makes them unusually slick, dangerous even.”

“It was before cross-bars and flashing lights,” Doña Alexa explained.

“Perhaps he was distracted,” the husband said.  “Listening to the radio or something. Or maybe not; perhaps the cabbie simply misjudged the conditions…”

“You mean to tell me that a driver figures into this?”

“Not just one,” said the woman

“You are the 29^th,” Don Virgilio smiled.

“It’s no one’s fault,” Alexa pointed out.

“It’s just the way it is,” Virgilio shrugged.

You’re telling me that my fare was a ghost?  The ghost of your daughter?  That was what he wanted to ask.  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.  The words would simply not form themselves.  But Juanca was a talking man that talked things out; it was what he did.  He chewed over the confluence of words to wind his way out of this particular crux but came up blank and looked back and forth between the two of them, who seemed now to be younger than when he walked in, contemporaries nearly, despite the five decades or so separating them.

“Was the driver killed,” he asked at last.

“He walked away without a scratch,” she replied.  “He passed in 1977.  Natural causes.”

“. . .and . . .”

“Orielma was killed instantly,” she said.  “She’s buried at Desamparados Cemetery. You were there tonight, but I’ll bet you’ll return after leaving here to check the name on the headstone.”

She took him by the arm to amble back down the hallway toward the door.  “Come back and see us if you feel a need to talk.”

“She was pregnant?”

The woman looked back over her shoulders, but Virgilio had set out for an umbrella to walk the driver to his car and had not heard the question.

“He doesn’t know,” she touched her finger to her lips.  “Though what difference it can possibly make at this point is beyond me.”

Yesterday he would not have strayed into this—or any—cemetery after dark, or probably any other time, except under familial duress.  In the Extra they were trying on a new moniker for Desamparados:  the “Cradle of Crime,” they were calling it, mostly due to those hemispheric ties with Colombia, Panama, and Los Angeles that that professorial journo was pushing in the cab today.  ‘Orielma Gutiérrez Saavedra,’ the headstone read:  ‘1939-1961.  The end of one journey; the beginning of another.’  The Nobel Peace Prize and the Central American Peace accords and the INF and everything else seemed a bit quaint on the heels of the afternoon’s adventure.  Take that reporter; would he change the text of his Sunday focus feature if he had lived Juanca’s afternoon instead of his own?  His editors would have him pee in a cup and then cut him loose anyway when he came up clean.  Pops had told lots of stories through the years, some perhaps getting up within spitting distance of what Juanca had just lived.  His favorite was the UFO that had hovered above the Panamericana on the Cerro de la Muerte when Pops was hauling freight from Canoas to Peñas, Juanca still swaddling, before he signed on with CoopeTransportes to drive the bus lines.  The details were tricky to tease apart, and nobody would call Pops a liar, though even Juanca had never really fully believed.  He had embraced the family lore instead and told it second-hand, Vaudeville writ small.  But maybe Pops had seen that UFO after all.  Juanca was not dreaming that’s for sure.  He was chosen for this experience, somehow, one he would constrain his inner impulses to keep to himself until he understood it better.  He was a driver meant to drive; a doer meant to do.  He would drive and do tomorrow, as he had yesterday and today.

Had anything actually changed?

Don Virgilio brought her the sherry, and she smiled.  The bottle in the back of the fridge dated to 1982 and nearing its dregs, but tonight she would have two glasses if a zarpe remained in the bottle, one for Ori, and a second for that unborn grandchild.

“Your poison,” he proclaimed, handing it to her.  It was like Orielma’s ghost itself, a mystery that neither acknowledged understanding.  She had never had a drop to drink in all her life until 1962, the first visitation, and she had sent him to the licorera that night to fetch sherry.  Why sherry?  It was the fraud of alchemy; only gold was gold.  Lead was just lead.  If you must drink something, her reading had lent her to think, then sherry was the least undignified choice.  At least she constrained it to one little glass a year.  After a lifetime career in the trade of distilling liquor, Virgilio was a teetotaler with a dim view of the imbibing class.

“We can sell and move,” he said, begrudgingly.  “We don’t have to do this all over again next year.”

“We could,” she said.  “But we won’t.  And we shouldn’t.”

“This is our life,” Don Virgilio reasoned.  “It’s mostly good.”

“No,” she said, handing up the empty glass.  “It’s all good!’

“‘Now bring me a little zarpe.”

La Pasajera