She was in a new dress and had come out to the porch to show it to him, turning in circles by firelight. It was a pretty thing, pink and lace. The sort of thing when she was older she would wear to her quince, and what a fine party that would be. He did not want to touch it with his hands and get it dirty. He’d found himself staring at his hands more and more lately—they sometimes shook on their own now—unable to get them clean no matter how much he washed and scrubbed at them. There was always dirt beneath his nails, thick and rich, worked into the creases of his old, leathery skin. Sometimes it even looked like sangre . . . blood. He did not know if he was imagining this, or if he truly was forever stained. Was it possible he still had the soil of his father’s fields ground into his skin, buried in his heart? Fields that had once grown marijuana, and now poppies? He had memories of long stretches of rolling green under a hot, hot sun, standing stripped to his waist and tanned as dark as cowhide, drinking water from a wooden bucket. But he wasn’t sure how real those were, either.

Maybe that was another boy, another place. Sometimes he wished that boy had never grown up to do the things he’d done.

He motioned to Luisa, who was not Zita’s mother, to take the young girl gently by the hand and lead her back into the main house. Moths circled them both, winging against the naked bulbs. When Luisa moved, a man with a gun moved behind her, a shadow on the ranch house’s simple walls. Wherever Luisa and little Zita went, men with guns followed. There were so many he did not know them anymore, and they all looked the same. Young, dark-skinned, thick-mustachioed. Their eyes were all flat, unreadable, like they were hand-painted on their skulls—blank and mirrored as the sunglasses they often hid them behind. They pretended to be like the great men who had come before them, the true narcos, but these buchon gangsters were nothing, replaceable as the money it took to buy them. No one would ever know their names, no one would sing narcocorridos about them, and their clothes were richer than they were. Here in Cuchillo Negro they wore jeans and boots and Stetson palm-leaf cowboy hats that had been sent down new from El Paso. But when they were in Mazatlán or Juárez or Mexico City they wore Z Zegna suits, like those his own son favored, although Martino himself never came to Cuchillo Negro anymore. He didn’t like the dirt, the smell, the sun. Martino had never worked fields the way he had, and said it wasn’t safe for them ever to be together anyway, and he was probably right.