“Before or after you go back with me?” I asked.

“Uh, go back with you. Before. It’d have to be before. But, so, that’s my plan, those are they, so help me. Loyola.”

“How long will all this take?”

“Don’t ask me that, Paige.”

From the elementary school next to the Catholic convent came sixty Mexican girls—in box-pleated skirts and white uniform blouses—who moved, holding hands, in a two-by-two line.

Raf took more bangs of bourbon from his silver flask; offered it to me. His glass eye was closed while the other feasted on the summer schoolers.

“You don’t know quit,” I said to him.

“I was just trying to imagine you decked out like that.”

“Twelve idiot years of my life.”

“With the ribbon-in-the-hair deal?”

“Sure, the ribbon.”

“Turn at the corner. There’s something you gotta see,” Raf said.

“Is it a museum, Raffles? Or a gallery? I know Houston has like the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel. And fine-arts museums with couches and guides and gift shops.”

He was punishing the radio again, shoving in its buttons with a knuckle, twisting its dials. He tuned in a Caribbean station, a show featuring the Rastafarian Brigadier Gerry the General, and kept ahead of Gerry singing “Hafta Get a Beatin’.”

I nibbled a red licorice stick from a bag that had ridden on the car’s back seat since being plucked from a wire carousel at Hobby Airport.

Now Raf was directing me along avenues of shanties and weed lots, up Jessamine, Delphine, El Camino.

We paused at the railway crossing for seven passing blue-and-yellow Santa Fe switch engines. I said, “Don’t laugh, but I sort of like watching trains. I and every other American.”

“I don’t think being normal’s your worry,” Raf said.

My window was down. The air felt sticky, as before a hard rain. The sky had purpled up in the rearview, readying for a storm burst.

“Don’t let this get to you, this last. You don’t ever have to come back here,” Raf said.

We were into a Hispanic neighborhood. “Clinica, Albierto Todos Los Dias Del Anos,” I read from a sign.

“Turn up there—not quite a road,” he said.

It was more of a trail, jagged, with plates of old blacktop and asphalt that rocked the car and bounced us as we crossed. One pothole was like a Ferris wheel drop. It jerked the radio song out of a phrase or so.

“Slow up. This whole section’s one of the worst wards,” Raf said.

There was a gathering of little girls with thick hair braids, baggy clothes, white anklets and huaraches who shouted something in Spanish as we passed.

“See that shack?” Raf said, turning in his seat. He meant a cinderblock hut. Its bubble-gum-pink paint was sun-faded. Kids’ bikes with banana-shaped seats were angled around the shack, lying down or leaning on their kickstands.