Okay, loyal readers, all one of you, here's the fourth part of "If God Will Give Us License." If you haven't been keeping up, you lazy bastards, here are Parts One, Two, and Three.

 18.
    The next morning, the four of them got into the truck, with David again driving, and headed toward Chicomostoc, an abandoned city that dated from between 900 and 500 AD. Who had lived there and why had yet to be decided by archeologists. The site was not similar to other abandoned ancient cities in Zacatecas. It was a city, and a culture and a people, whose precedents and antecedents could not be placed into the greater context of Mexico, a city whose echoes had long ago died.
    To get to Chicomostoc, they drove on the same road they had taken on the day they had bought the tires. They made the left onto the first asphalt road. Benjamin was riding in the back by himself and he looked for the spot where they had struck the boy, but that spot was indistinguishable from the rest of the road. There weren't even any fragments of the bicycle. David had probably thought to gather them or throw them into the weed-choked dry ditch that ran alongside the road.
    David had surprised Benjamin. David had always been responsible, had gone into a field where he could help other children who had grown up poor like them. David excelled at his job, was quickly working his way up into a high-level position within his school district. Benjamin tried but could not recall ever thinking that David had the capacity to do something so reprehensible, so clearly cruel.
    Benjamin remembered the boy's, Cesario's, parents. They would be searching in Encino Mocho, or Benito Juarez, or Alvaro Obregon, or one of the other towns that existed along the road between Jerez and Zacatecas. Perhaps they had already gone to the bigger cities, assuming he had run away to join the other boys who had found ways to feed themselves and not be burdens to their families.

19.
    Uncle Luis and his brother sat on the cement steps outside The Museum of the Quemada, Quemada being the other name for Chicomostoc. Santiago was smoking a cigarette and talking about their dead father, how he wished his sons had met him before he died.
    Luis was barely listening, nodding his head in assent at the end of his brother's sentences. How would he tell his brother? Santiago had looked out for Luis and the rest of his family from across a border and thousands of miles without ever having asked for or expecting anything in return. Luis' farm would have failed long ago if it weren't for his brother.
Now Luis was going to tell his brother that David was…what? A killer? No, not exactly, although he had acted like one in the aftermath. That the three of them had loaded a boy into a truck and driven up into the hills to hide him? That the only thing to do was for them to go with David and a lawyer to the police station in Jerez? Why involve his brother in this madness? He had played no part. He was back on his land after fourteen years, had wept at being back.
    But going to the police station was not the only thing, Luis knew. David had made him understand that. What if Santiago wanted to go along with David's deception? What would Luis do then? How could he write him letters telling him how everyone was doing, who had had a child and who had died? It was too much. Santiago would hate Luis for having been told, no matter what Santiago chose to do. They would not be able to look at each other, and neither one had many years left. One of them would die and the other would have to live with, would deeply regret, would torture himself about their estrangement.

20.
    David and Benjamin were crossing Chicomostoc's Hall of Columns, a flat piece of raised land where eleven mysterious columns stood. A high adobe wall surrounded the columns that had once held up a roof that had burned down. The hall's purpose was unknown, though some anthropologists had conjectured that it was a hall for human sacrifice. Nobody else was in the hall on an early weekday morning, and, from the outside, David and Benjamin were hidden from view.
    In his mind, David was building a wall around the accident. That was how he thought of it. He had taken the first part, which had been an accident, and had made it into everything. He had found a way to excuse his immediate and continuing actions. It had not been that hard. Self-preservation was driving him, had made it easy. They would fly out the next morning and he would go back to his life.

    "Look, we have to tell somebody," Benjamin said. Since talking to his uncle the night before, he had been trying to work out an argument in his head that would convince David to do what was right. But he could construct no argument because there was no argument to be made. They weren't trying to find the hazy and thin line where an action went from being right to being wrong. There was no great debate to be had. Everything was wrong.
    "If we do, I'm fucked."
    "The road was a mess. The tires sucked. It wasn't necessarily reck—"
    "You're fucked, too," David interrupted, "and Uncle Luis." He stopped walking. He looked at Benjamin. "Everybody's exposed." The idea of exposure was something that David had learned in his studies of school administration, and he understood clearly that, if exposure couldn't be prevented, then shared exposure was as effective a defense because then everyone had a stake in keeping things quiet, hidden.
    Benjamin looked at his brother, confused, unable to deal with the implications of that…that threat. He had been threatened by his brother. He felt himself starting to hyperventilate. "If I'm exposed," he said, struggling for air, "it's because I didn't say anything when you made your play with Uncle Luis."
    "You didn't say anything, that makes you complicit, you dumb-fuck. The minute I got out of the truck and carried that boy up into the hills, you were all the way in."
    "David, we're trading too much of ourselves—"
    "Oh, God, shut up with that self-righteous crap. Fuck!"
    "Wait a minute—"
    "Nobody ever gets off because they kept their chickenshit mouth shut, you stupid motherfucker," David said, instinctively shoving Benjamin down into the dirt.
    Benjamin looked up at his brother. They hadn't fought since grade school and Benjamin had not done well. But he sensed now that his own life could come apart, that his brother could make it come apart because Benjamin was complicit. He saw now how easily he had let himself become complicit, how, by not acting immediately when his brother would not, he had put himself and Uncle Luis in play.
    He could have made a call from the tire shop in the time immediately after it had happened. He could have run into the center of Jerez, where the police station must be, or flagged down a car and gotten a ride from somebody who knew. In the time after, he could have used Rigo's telephone at his store to call someone. Benjamin, through his inaction, and David, through his action, had devastated Uncle Luis, who had played no part, whose only mistake was to wait for his American nephews to do what they should have recognized was the only thing to be done. The thought of Uncle Luis sent waves of despair and hopelessness through him.
    From the ground, Benjamin lunged at his brother's legs, and David went down on his back. David got a leg free and started kicking Benjamin on the top of his head with the heel of his shoe. He kicked until he felt Benjamin go slack.
    Getting to his feet, David looked down at his brother and said, "Benjamin, are you alright?"
    Benjamin's nostrils and mouth were full of dirt, as were his eyes. He had let go because he knew that it was over. He lied there and cried like a child, grief-stricken and uncontrolled. Mud was forming in his eyes, and it burned. David tried to pick him up from around the waist, but Benjamin only got up to his hands and knees, coughing out dirt-streaked saliva. The top of his head throbbed from the kicks. He ran his right hand through his hair, tried to look at his fingers for blood, but could not see. He rubbed mud out of his eyes and could make out David's feet as he stepped in front of him. Benjamin closed his eyes and waited for the kicks he thought were coming. He didn't care if his brother was going to kill him now. He would welcome it.
    Benjamin felt two hands go under his arms and lift. Benjamin was on his feet and he felt David patting the dust off of his clothes. David ran his hands back and forth through Benjamin's hair. David could feel the growing bruises. He lifted the front of Benjamin's shirt to his mouth and told him to spit. When Benjamin did not, David used his own saliva to moisten the shirt and wipe the mud out of Benjamin's eyes, and then to clean the dirt off of his face.
    "You need to calm down, Benjamin," David said, snapping Benjamin's shirt against him, little clouds of dust rising and getting caught in the sunlight.
    "Fuck you," Benjamin whispered. He hadn't cursed at his brother since they were both children experimenting with the language, and never in anger or hatred, but he thought that he might hate his brother now, hate him for who he had turned out to be and for what David had shown Benjamin that he himself had turned out to be. Benjamin hated himself. "Fuck you, David."
    Benjamin stopped himself from crying and walked back toward The Museum of the Quemada. David caught up and walked a little bit behind him.