He let that ride a minute, the almost-new tires hissing now on the wet road and the traffic falling away behind them as he tapped the accelerator and felt the big V-8 engine surge beneath him. Then, thinking of Tim, thinking of Peggy, thinking of tamales and white sand beaches stretching as far as you could see and whatever else they had down there, he said, “But we do—we sure do.”

Part II: Zihuatanejo/Millbrook, 1962–1963

Part II

Zihuatanejo/Millbrook, 1962–1963

Chapter 1

1.

The drive was an adventure, the adventure of her life, because she’d never been to the South or Texas or Mexico either, and they got through it with a minimum of trouble (if you except two blown tires and the six-hour delay in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, while a mechanic with an accent so thick he might as well have been speaking a foreign language replaced their water pump). She and Fitz took turns behind the wheel, with the intention of driving straight through so as to save on motels, one of them sleeping while the other drove in a fugue of radio static, blistering sun, inverted nights and sudden downpours, but in the end they wound up stopping twice out of sheer exhaustion—and for showers, merciful showers. When Corey wasn’t buried in his comic books, he kept up a nonstop monologue about all the tropical fish he was going to catch in the jungle streams—firemouths, platys, swordtails—and all for free when they cost like fifty cents apiece in Boston—and snakes too. Did she know they had coral snakes in Mexico? With poison so potent it paralyzed your lungs so you couldn’t breathe, which was like drowning on dry land? Neurotoxin, that was what it was called. And they had scorpions too, including one kind that was six inches long, and wasn’t that cool?