Put her in your car, Henry said. She’s naked as a snake, take her home.

Can’t, Roggoway said. He pointed to his Chevy convertible crouching nose-down in the weeds, both its front wheels stolen. The ragtop smoked with fire.

Yeah…well…. Henry checked his pickup truck. It too seemed incomplete. Both rear wheels were gone. They got us, he thought. La Raza strikes again. He unzipped the twin sleeping bags, gave one to the painted girl. There seemed nothing more to do. He and his friends backed off a piece and sat down to enjoy the fire.

Church bells rang for early mass.

The Los Lunas Fire Department arrived sometime after sunrise—around eleven o’clock—and hosed the contents of their pumper unit over the flaming store, the smoking wreckage of the house. The local population watched with interest. The water created dazzling clouds of steam but did little to discourage the fire. When their 250-gallon tank ran dry the crew turned the truck around and raced back to the Rio Grande, five miles off at the nearest access point, to refill.

There were no fire hydrants in El Culito de San Pedro Mártir. There was no public water system. The fire continued as the peaked roof and attic of the building, supporting beams burned through, collapsed with a spectacular turmoil, like a sinking ship, into the inferno within the adobe walls. A sigh of satisfaction mingled with awe and pleasure rose en masse from the spectators.

The fire department—el cuerpo de los bomberos—returned and again plied the conflagration with jets of water, futile but earnest, dampening but scarcely slowing the consummation of Henry Lightcap’s new home. Grinning happily, the men returned the shouts of the crowd.

An insurance adjuster, investigating a claim from the Mather Realty Company, arrived at 2:00 P.M. He found Henry and Roggoway trying to mount the two remaining wheels from the Chevy convertible onto the rear of Henry’s pickup.

What’s your name again, young man? Henry H. Lightcap, sir. And what were you doing here? I’m the caretaker of this property; Mrs. Mather hired me herself. I see, I see—you didn’t quite do the job, did you, Lightcap? I did my best, sir. Your best is none too good. Well sir, it won’t happen again. No it won’t—the building is a total loss, Lightcap, as any fool can plainly see. Well you see it plainer than I do, mister. I beg your pardon? Them walls are solid adobe brick, mister, two feet thick—they’ll last for five hundred years.

But Henry was wrong about that too. With the lintels burned out above every window and doorway, ridgepole, frames, sills, rafters and crossbeams gone, no roof for shelter, the massive walls began to crumble like cookies. Within a year, vulnerable to frost and snow, wind and rain, they would be no more than eroded remnants of their former selves, silent and dwindling monuments to the vanity of human aspiration.

Henry Lightcap revised and refined his old plans, made new plans. He conceded nothing to fate.