with all this pain? Y’all got paid plenty, didn’t you, Jesus? Or do you need more?”

“It’s bastante.”

“Hugo gave you bastante to take care of the gringo. ‘Bastante’ means ‘enough,’ doesn’t it? How should I take that? Enough to do what? Sell me out? Maybe tell your priest about me?” Preacher’s eyes became hazy and amused.

Jesus’s hair was as black and shiny as paint, barbered like a matador’s, his skin pale, his hands small and his features frail, like those of a consumptive Spanish poet. He was not over thirty, but his daughter was at least ten and his overweight wife could have been his mother. Go figure, Preacher thought.

THAT EVENING THE power was back on, but Preacher could not shake either his funk or his misgivings about his environment and his caretakers. “Your name is a form of irreverence,” he said to Jesus.

“Is a what?”

“Try to speak in complete sentences. Don’t leave the subject out of your sentences. ‘Is’ is a verb, not a noun. Your parents gave you the Lord’s name, but you take money to hide a gringo and break the laws of your country.”

“I got to do what I got to do, boss.”

“Take me outside. Don’t put me downwind of those goats, either.”

Jesus set up the collapsible wheelchair by the bedside and worked Preacher into the seat, then wheeled him out the front door into the lee of the house, Preacher’s .45 resting on his lap. The view to the south was magnificent. The sky was lavender, the desert wastes bound not by earthy borders but by the arbitrary definitions of light and shadow. Few people would have found such a vista spiritually comforting, but Preacher did. The dry riverbeds were prehistoric, the flumes strewn with rocks the color of wizened apples and plums and apricots. Preacher saw wood that rain and wind and heat had carved and reshaped and hardened into bleached objects that could be mistaken for dinosaur bone. The desert was immutable, as encompassing as a deity, serene in its own magnitude, stretching into the past all the way back to Eden, a testimony to the predictability and design in all creation, a mistress beckoning to those who were unafraid to enter and conquer and use her.

“You ever hear of Herbert Spencer?” Preacher said.

“Who?” Jesus said.

“That’s what I thought. Ever hear of Charles Darwin?”

“Claro que sí.”

“It was Herbert Spencer who understood how society worked, not Darwin. Darwin wasn’t a sociologist or philosopher. Can you relate to that?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Why are you grinning?”

“I thought you was making a joke.”

“You think I need you to agree with me?”

“No, boss.”

“Because if you did, that would be an insult. But you’re not that kind of man, right?”

Jesus lowered his head and folded his arms, his face drawn with fatigue and his inability to deal with Preacher’s convoluted rhetoric. A purple haze was settling on the mesas and vast wasteland that lay to the south, the dust rising off the hardpan, the creosote brush darkening inside the gloom. Not far away, Jesus saw a coyote digging hard into a gopher’s burrow, flinging the dirt backward with its nails, darting its muzzle into the hole.

“You got any family, people who can help take care of you, boss?” Jesus said.

It was a question he shouldn’t have asked. Preacher lifted his head the way a fish might when feeding on the surface of a lake. There was an unexpected and unreadable bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. “I look like a man with no family?”

“I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.”

“A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we’ve got a father and a mother and a child. That’s a family. You’re saying I’m different somehow?”

“I didn’t mean nothing, boss.”

“Go back inside.”

“When it’s cool, the mosquitoes come out. They’ll pick you up and carry you off, boss.”

Preacher’s expression seemed to go out of joint.

“I got you, boss. When you’re ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,” Jesus said.

Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher flopping from its jaws. Jesus’s wife came to the window and stared at Preacher’s silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain,