“Only the Past,” said Gomez.
“And the Past can’t hurt you.”
“It is always trying. Well.”
Gomez looked as if he might empty the wineglass. James Clayton took the glass and said, “Tequila?”
“What else would a man offer?”
“No man that I know. Gracias.”
“Let it shoot you. Put your head back—now!”
The young man did this, blushed and gasped. “I’m shot!”
“Let us kill you again.”
Gomez backed into the bar. James Clayton stepped out of the sun.
Inside was a long bar, not the longest bar in the world like that one in Tijuana where ninety men could share murders, bark laughs, order fusillades, and die but to wake, eyeing their strange selves in the flyspecked mirrors.
No, it was merely a bar of some seventy feet, well polished, and laid out with long stacks of newspapers from other years. Above these, glass chimes of crystal hung upside down, and against the mirrors stood squadrons of liquor, of all colors, waiting like soldiers, while beyond, filling the room, stood two dozen white-clothed tables on which lay bright cutlery and a few candles, lit though it was noon.
Behind the bar now, Gomez set out another assassin’s tequila, a slow or abrupt suicide, if the young man wished. The young man wished, staring at the empty tables and chairs, the shining silverware, the lit candles.
“You were expecting someone?”
“I do expect,” said Gomez. “Someday they will come. God says. He has never lied.”
“When was your last meal served? Excuse me,” said James Clayton.
“The menu will say.”
Sipping his tequila, Clayton picked up a menu and read:
“Cinco de Mayo, my God, May 1932! That was the last dinner?”
“Just so,” said Gomez. “After the funeral for this dead town, the last woman left. The women had waited for the last man to leave. With the men gone there was no profit in staying. The hotel rooms across the way are full of butterfly wings, dresses for late dinners or the opera.
Do you see that place across the plaza with golden gods and goddesses on top? Gilt, of course, or they would have been taken. In that opera the night before departure, Carmen sang, rolling cigars on her knee. When the music died, the town followed.”
“No one left by sea?”
“Ah, no. The sandbar. There is a rail track behind the opera house. The last train left there in the night, with the singers singing on the porch of the observation car. I ran down the track after them, throwing confetti.
I ran long after the porchful of half-fat beautiful ladies were lost in the jungle, then I sat on the rail and listened to the train vibrating the iron, my ear pressed down, tears running off my nose, estupido, but I stayed on. Late nights I still go to place my ear on the rail, shut my eyes, and listen, but the track is dumb. Just as stupid as ever, I come back to sit and drink and say to myself, mañana: yes. The arrival! And now, you.”
“A poor arrival.”
“You will do for now.” Gomez leaned to touch one old, yellowed newspaper. “Señor, can you really know the year?”
Clayton smiled at the newspaper. “1932!”
“1932! A better year. How can we know that other years exist? Do planes fill the sky? Do the roads fill with tourists? Do warships stand in the harbor? I see none. Does Hitler live? His name is not yet here. Is Mussolini evil? Here he seems good. Does the Depression stay? Look! It will die by Christmas! Mr. Hoover says! So each day I unfold another paper and reread 1932. Who says otherwise?”
“Not I, Señor Gomez.”
“Let us drink to that.”
They drank the tequila and Clayton wiped his mouth.
“Don’t you want me to tell you what’s happening out beyond today?”
“No, no. My newspapers stand ready. One a day. In ten years I will arrive in 1942. In sixteen years I will reach 1948, by then it cannot wound me. Friends bring these papers twice a year, I simply stack them on the bar, pour more tequila and read your Mr. Hoover.”
“Is he still alive?” Clayton smiled.
“Today he did something about foreign imports.”
“Shall I tell you what happened to him?”
“I will not listen!”
“I was joking.”
“Let us drink to that.”
They quietly drank their drinks.
“I suppose you wonder why I came?” said Clayton at last.
Gomez shrugged. “I slept well last night.”
“I like lonely places. They tell you more about life than cities. You can lift things and look under and no one watching so you feel self-conscious.”
“We have a saying,” said Gomez. “Where all is emptiness, there is room to move. Let us move.”
And before Clayton could speak, Gomez strode quietly with his long thick legs and his great body out to the Jeep, where he stared down at the great litter of bags and their labels.
His lips spelled out the words:
“Life.” He glanced at Clayton. “Even I have heard of that. In town I do not look left or right or listen to those radios in shops or the bar I know before my trip back with supplies. But I have seen that name on the big magazine. Life?”
Clayton nodded sheepishly.
Gomez scowled as he stared hard down at many black shiny metal objects.
“Cameras?”
Clayton nodded.
“Just lying there, open. You did not drive with them so, surely?”
“I opened them outside town,” said Clayton. “To take pictures.”
“Of what?” said Gomez. “Why would a young man leave all things to come where there is nothing, nada, to take pictures of a graveyard? You’re here to see more than this place,” said Gomez.
“Why do you say that?”
“The way you slap at flies that are not there. You cannot stand quietly. You watch the sky. Señor, the sun will go down without your help. Do you have an appointment? You have a camera but have not used it. Are you waiting for something better than my tequila?”
“I …” said Clayton
And then it happened.
Gomez froze. He listened and turned his head toward the hills. “What’s that?”
Clayton said nothing.
“Do you hear? Something?” said Gomez, and leaped to the bottom of an outside staircase that rose to the top of a low building, where he scowled off at the hills, shielding his eyes.
“On the road, there, where no cars have been in years. What?”
Clayton’s face colored. He hesitated.
Gomez yelled down at him. “Your friends?”
Clayton shook his head.
“Your enemies?” said Gomez.
Clayton nodded.
“With cameras?” Gomez exclaimed.
“Yes.”
“Speak up!”
“Yes!” Clayton said.
“Coming for the same reason you have come, yet have not told me why?” Gomez cried, staring at the hills and hearing the sound of motors that rose and fell in the wind.
“I got a head start on them,” said Clayton. “I—”
At which moment with a great razor of sound that cut the sky in half, a squadron of jets shrieked over Santo Domingo. From them, great clouds of white paper fell in blizzards. Gomez, with a maniac stare, swayed at the bottom of the steps.
“Wait!” he cried. “What the hell!”
Like a white dove, one of the pamphlets fell into his hands, which he dropped, repelled. Clayton stared at the litter at his feet.
“Read!” said Gomez.
Clayton hesitated. “It’s in both languages,” he said.
“Read!” Gomez ordered.
Clayton retrieved one of the pamphlets. And the words were these:
SECOND NOTICE
THE TOWN OF SANTO DOMINGO WILL BE PHOTO-
ATTACKED SHORTLY AFTER NOON JULY 13TH. WE
HAVE GOVERNMENT ASSURANCE THAT THE TOWN IS
EVACUATED. THAT BEING SO, AT ONE FORTY-FIVE
PROMPTLY, THE FILMING OF PANCHO! BEGINS.
STERLING HUNT
DIRECTOR
“Attacked?” said Gomez, stunned. “Pancho? A director of films? California, a Hispanic state, dares bomb Santo Domingo? Gah!” Gomez ripped the pamphlet in half and then quarters. “There will be no attack! Manuel Ortiz Gonzales Gomez tells you this. Come back and see.”
Gomez shook long after the thunders left the sky. Then he struck a glare at Clayton and lurched into action. He lumbered across the plaza with Clayton in pursuit. Inside, in the sudden midnight darkness at noon, he floundered along to the top of the bar, feeling rather than seeing, the newspapers in neat piles riffling under his clutch. He reached the far end of the bar.
“This should be it? Yes, yes?”
Clayton looked down at the stack of newspapers and bent close.
“What, what?” said Gomez.
“A month ago,” said Clayton. “The first notice. If you had bothered to read the papers as they came, maybe—”
“Read, read!” cried Gomez.
“It says …” Clayton squinted, took the paper, held it up to the light. “July first, 1998. The government of Mexico has sold …”
“Sold? Sold what?”
“The town of Santo Domingo.” Clayton’s eyes roved along the line. “Sold the town of Santo Domingo to—”
“To who, what?”
“To Crossroads Films, Hollywood, California.”
“Films!” Gomez shouted. “California?”
“Jesus.” Clayton held the paper higher. “For the sum …”
“Name the sum!”
“Christ!” Clayton shut his eyes. “One million two hundred thousand pesos.”
“One million two hundred thousand pesos? Food for chickens!”
“Chicken shit, yes.”
Gomez blinked at the newspapers “Once I bought glasses in Mexico City, but they were broken. I did not buy them again. What for? With only one paper a day to read. So I stayed in my empty place, my country, free to walk that way to this, across and back, meeting no one, making it mine. And now this, this.” He rattled the paper. “More words? What?”
Clayton translated. “A Hollywood film company, Crossroads, it says. They are remaking Viva Villa, the life of your rebel or whatever he was, this time titled just Pancho! Pamphlets have been
