good runs," Elena said, as if he'd said shit gold and piss rosewater. "When was the last time you had three or four good runs in a row? Did you ever?"
"I got some ideas," Ramon said, realizing as he did so that it was true. There was the struggling precursor of a plan at the back of his head. Maybe it had been there since the first time he'd had the dream of the Enye and understood what Maneck and its people were fleeing. He smiled to himself.
He knew what he was going to do.
"You should get a real job," Elena said. "Something steady."
"I don't need that. I'm a good prospector."
Elena raised her hand like a schoolgirl asking to speak. "Last time you went out, you came back three-quarters dead without any of your shit."
"It was bad luck. It won't happen again."
"Oh. You control luck now, eh?"
"It's the European," Ramon said, flipping the eggs. "He was after my ass. It was like a curse. It's gonna be fine next time."
"Sounds like you found God out there," Elena said, and then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was less surly. "Did you find God, mi hijo?"
"No," Ramon said. He crumbled a handful of cheese over the beans, then slid the tortillas onto plates. Coffee. He needed to heat up some water. He knew he'd forgotten something. "I figured some other stuff out though."
"Like what?" Elena asked.
Ramon was silent as he served up the eggs, spooned the beans and cheese over the top, got the coffee brewing. He could feel her gaze on him, neither accusing nor sympathetic. He wondered what was going on behind her eyes; what the world meant to her. She was more predictable, more familiar, but in some ways she'd always been as alien to him as Maneck. He didn't trust her because he wasn't stupid, and yet there was something, some other impulse, that prompted him to speak.
"Like why I killed the European in the first place," he said.
He explained to her as best he could, his memory still a thing of shadows and dream, something he remembered knowing more than something he had participated in firsthand. A reconstruction.
They'd been drunk, yes. Things got out of hand, yes. But it had happened for a reason. Ramon walked through it all again. He could explain what the cop had said; the woman, the laughter. He could guess from what his twin had and hadn't said, from what he knew about himself, about the sense of the whole bar turning against the European, and Ramon himself on the top of the swell.
He could tell with certainty what it had been like when, in the alleyway, they had all pulled back, all the people who'd been shouting him on. The sense of loss and betrayal. He'd been what they wanted him to be, and then they'd dropped him for it.
The European, the girl, the laughter. It hadn't really been about them at all. Ramon hadn't killed the man because the fucker needed to die or because the woman was one of their own and the man an outsider, or to protect her from getting mauled. Ramon had done it so that the other people in the bar would think well of him. He'd killed out of a need to be part of something.
Ramon shook his head, smiling. Elena hadn't touched her food. The coffee was warm, the beans cold as the table. Her eyes were locked on his, her expression unreadable. Ramon shrugged, waiting for her to speak.
"You were fighting over a fucking woman?" Elena breathed.
"No," Ramon said. "It wasn't like that. There was this lady he was with but - "
"And you didn't like how he was treating her, so you picked a fight. You drunk, selfish sonofabitch! And what the fuck was wrong with the woman you had waiting for you here? You had to go risk getting your ass killed for some puta because of what?"
Ramon felt the rage swelling up in his breast. He'd told her, he'd bared his soul to Elena, and all she could do was turn it into some kind of bullshit jealous fight. He'd been really talking to her, talking like real lovers are supposed to, and this was what he got for it. Another fucking bunch of accusations. Another load of shit. His face flushed, his fists clenched.
But then it faded, the bottom dropping out of the rage. Elena threw her plate at him, the food splattering against the wall,