1But before the nurse, hear of a man who drove all night with a length of steel behind his seat.
2His name was Rafael, and he was a welder, fifty-one years old, with a shop of his own behind his house. He had a wife named Carmen and a son named Mateo, who was sixteen. He had had a daughter.
3Her name was Lucía. Six years before, when she was nineteen, she had been riding her bicycle home from an evening class along the river road. A man named Dean Hollis came down that road in a car, at twice the speed that was allowed, with the drink of a whole evening in him. He did not see her. He said so at the trial, and it was believed. He was twenty-five. The judge gave him seven years, and for good conduct they were letting him out after six.
4A letter had come to tell the family the day and the hour. Carmen read it and put it in the stove. But Rafael had seen it first. Tuesday, at seven in the morning, at the north gate.
5On Monday night he lay beside his wife until she slept. Then he got up and dressed in the dark, and went out to the shop. From the rack he took a length of steel pipe as long as his arm. He weighed it in his hand, as he had weighed ten thousand pieces of steel, and it was the right weight. He laid it behind the seat of the truck and drove north.
6It was five hours to the prison. He had six. He did not turn on the radio.
7Understand that he was not a violent man. He had never struck his children. He had struck another man only once in his life, when he was young. But for six years he had carried a coal in his chest, and he had fed it. He fed it on her empty chair. He fed it on the sight of girls on bicycles. It was the warmest thing he owned. On some days it was the only thing that told him he was still her father.
8And he had a picture. He had made it on the first night and polished it ever since, as a man polishes a tool he means to use one day. The gate opens. Hollis comes out laughing into the sun, with his whole life ahead of him. Then he sees who is standing there.
9The picture always stopped there. In six years Rafael had never once let it run on to the next minute.
10Somewhere in the second hour, on the empty road, he heard her voice. It was not a ghost. It was only memory, which is stranger. When Lucía was small she had a game that made the whole house mad. Whatever you told her, she asked, "And then?" We are going to the market. And then? We will buy fish. And then? She would follow a thing to its end like a dog on a rabbit, and she did not stop until you ran out of answers and said, "And then nothing. Then it is finished."
11She had never stopped doing it. At nineteen she did it to her teachers. She was going to be an engineer of bridges. She said a bridge was only a long answer to the question "And then?"
12So on the dark road, with nothing else to do with his mind, her father played her game. He had not meant to. It began by itself.
13He comes out of the gate, and I am standing there. And then?
14Then I hit him.
15And then?
16Then he is on the ground. Rafael's hands tightened on the wheel. That part was good. He stayed in it for some miles.
17And then, Papa?
18Then I hit him again. Then there are guards, there are cameras, it is the gate of a prison. Then I am on the ground beside him.
19And then?
20Then there is a trial, and it is mine. Carmen sits in the same seat in the same court. She has lost a daughter to a car and a husband to a pipe. Mateo is sixteen. He leaves school to run a welding shop that he is not ready to run, and it fails. For the rest of his life, when he thinks of his sister, he must also think of this.
21And then?
22He drove a long way before he answered that one.
23Then nothing. She is not there. At the end of it she is still not there. I have looked all the way down the road and she is not on it anywhere.
24He pulled the truck over onto the gravel. He sat with the engine running, and for the first time in six years he looked at the coal itself, and not at the things he fed it.
25He had believed it was his love for her. He had believed that if it ever went out, it would mean he had stopped being her father and she would truly be gone. He turned it over now, as he would turn over a weld to see if it had gone right through. It had not. The coal was not Lucía. Lucía had been a girl who asked questions and laughed at him and left bicycle oil on the towels. The coal had none of her in it. It was a thing that had moved into her room after she left, and it had been eating his house from the inside for six years, and he had been calling it by her name.
26His telephone lit on the seat beside him. It was Mateo. It was three in the morning.
27He let it ring out. It lit again. He answered.
28"Papa. Where are you?"
29"I could not sleep. I went for a drive."
30There was a silence. Then his son said, in a voice Rafael had not heard since the boy was small, "I went out to the shop. There is a pipe gone from the rack. The second one from the end. I know the rack, Papa. I sweep under it."
31Rafael shut his eyes.
32"I read the letter too," said Mateo. "Before Mama burned it. Papa, please. I do not remember her very well any more. I was ten. I am trying to keep what I have. Please do not make me lose you as well, for him. He is not worth both of you."
33"Go to bed," said Rafael. His voice was not steady. "I am only driving."
34"Are you coming back?"
35He did not know. That was the truth of it, and he would not lie to the boy. "I will call you at eight," he said. He put the telephone face down, and he drove on north. He had seen what the coal was, and still he was not finished with it. It is one thing to see a thing clearly and another to put it down.
36He came to the north gate at half past six. There was a wall, and a steel door in the wall, and a road, and frost on the road. He parked across from the door. No one else was waiting. He had thought there would be a family and a car, and somebody's mother. There was no one.
37At seven the door opened, and a man came out, and the door shut behind him.
38It was not the man in the picture. That one had been tall, with a red, careless face. This one was thin and grey at thirty-one and stooped in the shoulders. He wore a coat too light for the morning and carried everything he owned in a paper sack. He did not laugh into the sun. He stood on the pavement as if the ground were not quite to be trusted. He looked left, and he looked right, and no one had come for him. Then he began to walk toward the town.
39Rafael took the pipe from behind the seat and got out of the truck.
40He followed on foot, forty paces back. His boots were loud on the frost. The man must have heard, but he did not turn or hurry. After half a mile there was a bus shelter, with a bench, and no bus. The man sat down on the bench with the sack on his knees. Then he looked up, and he saw Rafael standing there with a pipe in his hand.
41He knew him at once. He had sat across a courtroom from that face for nine days. Rafael watched the knowledge come into him. He waited for the man to run, or to beg, or to sneer. Any of the three would have done. Any one of them would have swung the pipe for him.
42Hollis did none of them. He set the paper sack down on the bench beside him, carefully. He put his hands on his knees.
43"Mr. Ortega," he said. "I am not going to run."
44Rafael could not speak. The pipe was very heavy.
45"I have had six years to think what I would say to you," said Hollis. "There is nothing. I looked for it. Everything I could say is about me." He swallowed. "I will tell you one true thing, if you want it. People in there told me to say I remember her face, and that I see it every night. They said families want that. I do not remember her face. I was too drunk to see it. I remember a bicycle wheel turning in the headlamp, on its side, slowly. That is all I have. I would give you more if I had it. I will not make it up."
46The frost ticked on the roof of the shelter. A long way off, a bus changed gear.
47Rafael had prepared for six years to meet a liar or a coward. He had never once prepared to be told the truth. He found that he could not hit a man who had just handed him the only honest thing he had.
48"Her name," said Rafael. It came out like a stone from a well.
49"Lucía Ortega," said Hollis. "She was nineteen. She was going to build bridges. It was in the papers. I say it every morning. It is not a prayer. It is so that I do not get to forget."
50Rafael looked at him. He saw a man. It was not the man in the picture, and it was not a monster. It was one more poor fool who had closed a door he could never open again, and who knew it, and would wake to it each day until he died. The law had weighed him and given him seven years, and he had served what he was asked to serve. Whatever else was owed was a debt that nobody on earth could collect, whether with a pipe or with anything else.
51Then he heard himself ask it. He had not planned to. "And then?"
52Hollis blinked. "What?"
53"Now. You are out. And then? What will you do?"
54"I do not know," said Hollis. "I may not drive again, ever, and I would not. I learned to lay floors in there. There is a man in the town who will try me for a month." He looked at his hands. "I thought I would try not to waste it. The time. It seems the least I can do, since I took all of hers."
55Rafael stood a while longer. Then he bent, and he laid the pipe down on the frozen ground beside the shelter, slowly, the way a man sets down a thing that has been too long on his shoulder.
56"Lay them level," he said. "The floors. People will walk on them for fifty years."
57He did not shake the man's hand, and he did not say that he forgave him. He did not, on that day. It would be three more years before he could say her killer's name without his jaw going tight. All he did that morning was not kill him. But that left a road open, and on a road a person can go further in time.
58He picked the pipe up again, for it was good steel and it was his, and he walked back to the truck. The bus passed him going the other way. At eight o'clock exactly he called his son.
59"I am coming home," he said. "Put the coffee on. Tell your mother I went to look at a job."
60"Did you look at it?" asked Mateo carefully.
61"I looked at it all the way to the end," said Rafael. "It was not worth taking."
62He drove south with the sun coming up on his left hand. Somewhere on that road he found that he was thinking of her, and the coal was not in it. For the first time in six years he thought of her alone. She was eleven, and she was standing on a chair in the shop with his welding mask down over her whole head, asking what happens to the steel when it melts, and then what, and then what.
63He had to stop the truck again. But it was a different kind of stopping.
64That week he cut the pipe in four and welded it into the legs of a bench. He set the bench on the river road, at the place, under the tree. People sit on it now who never knew her. They watch the water, and the bicycles go by.