THE PINT was near empty. We stopped at the next village, Alameda, for refueling. The bar was called La Cantina Contenta. A number of locals sat on a bench in the shade by the open door, watching us climb from the car. Bob fell down but rose quickly, brushed his pants and led the way. Nobody laughed. The sunlight, bouncing off whitewashed adobe walls, burned our eyes. The locals muttered to each other in Spanish, avoiding stares. Fred and Bob were large fellows, bulky, and carried knives strapped to their belts.

Inside it was so dark we stumbled into each other, feeling our way toward the bar. Alan ordered four long-necked bottles of Lone Star, a fair regional beer from Dallas, Texas. Fred bought another bottle of bourbon, a full quart this time. Old Crow. He checked the seal. We all had money in our pockets. This was early in the month; our G.I. checks had arrived only two days before.

Bob found the jukebox and played our cantina theme, an old ranchero song: Adios, muchachos, compañeros de mi vida. A Zapatista song, but applicable to World War II. We liked it. We loved it. It was a big hit that year. I pulled out some greenbacks and ordered drinks for every fatherless biped in the house. A safe gesture; there seemed to be only four or five campesinos lounging about in the darkness. I could afford it. As soon as the bartender started pouring, however, the men outside heard the news and hurried in.

But I could afford it. I had sixty dollars in my pocket. Saludas! we greeted one another, all ten or eleven of them, the four of us. Everybody, everybody, joined the chorus. Good-bye boys, buddies of my life. Comrades. Pals. Brothers. Mates. Hadn’t Mexico also declared war on the Axis? Yes, I think it did. Maybe it didn’t, but Mexico, New Mexico, Anglo and Chicano, we were all in this cool dark stinking little barroom together, if only for the moment.

Outside, early afternoon, the white light poured down with pure, divine intensity, forced the green leaves of the cottonwoods to shake and rustle, made the street’s pale dust shimmer like a carpet of crystals, gave every shadow a hard edge and a deep absolute obscurity. Alan’s black car, outlined in auras of reflected heat, floated six inches above the ground. We could see it through the open doorway, baking in the sun. We could see the two little boys on the far side of the car, removing a hubcap with a big screwdriver. The bartender ran out and drove them off, waving his arms, shouting. He set the hubcap, open side up, like a plate, on the bar before us.

Fred explained his theory of irrational numbers, binary electives and organic equations. Would lead, he argued, when he found the key connection, to a kind of cybernetic thinking machine that could digest numerical data in such quantity and at such velocity that science itself would make a quantum leap into whole new dimensions of power over nature.