The Son

Chapter Seventy-one. Peter McCullough

After four days of driving he reached Guadalajara. He stopped in front of her house, a small adobe structure with peeling yellow paint and a tended garden.

That night, after she had fallen asleep, he put on his pants and shirt and went out to make sure the car was still there. It was dark and quiet; most of the lights in the neighborhood were out. He had been surprised that so many had electricity at all.

He wondered if he had stolen the money because he was a coward, because he was worried about changing his mind. He decided it didn’t matter. He went back inside to wake her up. They loaded the car and drove off into the darkness.

For a time they moved every few weeks, staying in hotels under different names. It was quieter in the south and they had one child in Mérida and a second near Oaxaca, but when the war ended he began to worry they would be found, and in 1920, after Carranza was deposed, they moved to Mexico City.

There was a new government and the city was overflowing. There were bankers and industrialists, exiles and artists, musicians and anarchists; there were cathedrals and sprawling markets and gaudy pulquerías, murals going up everywhere, streetcars running through the night. Motorcars jostled with donkeys and horsemen and barefoot peasants. He guessed it would drive him insane. It didn’t. He would lean over the edge of their apartment building and watch the street; he had never seen so many people in his life.

“You don’t like cities,” she said.

“It’s better for the children.”

It was not just that. He was losing his memory; Pedro and Lourdes Garcia seemed impossibly young, likewise his mother and father; he could barely remember his own childhood; he could barely remember last year. If there was anyone watching from the dark corners, he never knew it. Each night after the sun set he would go and stand over the street and put his hands to the warm stone, a million lives passing just beneath him, millions more yet to come, they were all just like him, they were all free, they would all be forgotten.