Good people, we are at the end of the line. I don't know when I'll have time to serialize another story (you have no idea), but here's the seventh part of "If God Will Give Us License." In case you haven't been keeping up, here are Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

 29.
    The plane's takeoff made Benjamin's bruises throb. He closed his eyes and recalled the taste of the earth, metallic and sweet, that had invaded his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He felt grit trapped deep in his nasal passages. He inhaled and he thought that he could again smell the land of his father. He felt grit trapped in the dark spaces between his teeth, could feel it grinding when he squeezed his mouth tight.
    He opened his eyes, looked out over the wing, watched Mexico get smaller, watched it go from a place to a landscape, from his present to his past, from an experience being lived to an experience to be recalled, from where he was losing himself to where he had lost himself.

Epilogue.
    Santiago Zapata came back to America happy, reconnected with his land and his people, closer to his sons. He had worn out his body in America's fields—had bent over to fill too many plastic buckets with tomatoes, had climbed too many ladders into pesticide-soaked trees, had been stung by too many vines whipping off of the wires around which he had tried to wrap them, had felt too much heat in summers, the sweat pouring out of him like rain, too much cold in winter, his fingers stiff, his lungs burning, his eyes stinging—but, now, he regretted it less. Age and what it was taking seemed less overwhelming now. He was glad that his sons had seen his land, which was also theirs. He learned to use the VCR David had bought him years ago and he viewed repeatedly the videotapes Benjamin had made in Mexico.
    He would think back to his childhood in Puerta De Chula, would compare what he could recall to what wavered on the television screen when he pressed the remote control's pause button. Hardly anything had changed. There were more houses, but they were built in the way that others had been built decades, perhaps even a century, earlier. There were fewer mules, a few more tractors, but farmers grew the same crops, still counted on rain that rarely came. The population was older now, there were more single people in their 20s and 30s and less children than he had expected, but the people looked like people from Puerta De Chula had always looked. Puerta De Chula seemed to be dying, but hadn't that always been the case? That had been why he had left. That was why people left now.
    But its death seemed to be closer than before. That was different. In another generation, perhaps two, only the old people would be left, the young having fled en masse, either to live near the American border where they could find work in maquilladoras, putting together cheap VCRs and low-end computers, or to Mexico City, where they would try but fail to find work, where they would end up living on its outskirts in shacks made of cardboard and scrap metal and wood held together with bits of wire. Puerta De Chula would become like the other towns that existed not as living entities, but as points on the maps of Zacatecas.
    For now, though, it was still alive and it was still his. He could recall it as it was when he lived there as a child and as it was when he had come back as an old man. All those years, more than half a century, gone, but he thought that it was bearable now.

    David went back to work the day their plane touched down. He drove to his office and worked on preparing class schedules for his students, concentrating on the seniors one semester away from graduating.
    School started and he went about his regular duties. He talked to seniors who had let their grades drop to the point where they wouldn't graduate in June. He handed them Kleenex, listened to their tortured excuses, told them about summer school and night classes at the junior college. He found alternate universities and junior colleges for the frantic seniors who had ignored his advice, who had overestimated themselves, who hadn't applied to enough schools and had failed to get into the ones to which they had applied. He steered juniors away from Advanced Placement classes that they were sure to fail. He talked others into challenging themselves with more difficult courses. He went to district curriculum meetings and made PowerPoint presentations on which courses to add or drop for the upcoming year, on truancy prevention, on recognizing the latest gang insignia.

    David was clearly marked for success, had made sure of that marking, had done or said nothing that would ever hurt his advancement. He knew that he was talked about, that he would eventually move into the upper-levels of district, then county, then perhaps even state educational administration. He thought of himself as a success.
    But he did not put the boy into the context of how he thought about himself. It was a discreet event that did not alter the past and the future, the present. He could still think of himself as a good person, as still doing good in the world. He was like a man who had cheated on his wife and been caught, who makes the argument to her that it wasn't the real me, when his real self had been hidden all along.
    But he hadn't been caught and he made that argument only to himself, and then only rarely, when he momentarily failed to be vigilant in his self-defense. He determinedly set about moving forward. He cut himself off from himself, succeeded at that amputation, and lived a happy and useful life.

    Benjamin moved far away, to Chicago. He got a job writing ad copy for an advertising firm. "The Soul In Play" was still on his hard drive, though he hadn't looked at it since getting back from Puerta De Chula. He had tried to delete it more than once, but he couldn't bring himself to drag it to the trashcan in the lower-right corner of his monitor. The draft of his abandoned book was an accusation, his old life condemning his new one, his better self, a self he had betrayed, looking coolly, looking clearly, at his new, or his actual, his revealed self. To delete it would mean that he had completely lost his false self, a self he missed, he grieved for, like a lover who has gone, or like his own lost child. Keeping it meant that there was some of that version of himself left. And Benjamin knew that keeping his book on his hard drive was a form of self-punishment, and that punishment gave him some comfort. And that comfort made him sick. What a fraud he had turned out to be.
    He would ask himself what he would have done if he'd been the one to run over Cesario. Before, he would have been sure about the answer. He would have loaded him into the back of the truck and driven into Jerez. When a doctor or a nurse asked what had happened, he would have gathered his strength and spoken clearly. I hit him with my uncle's truck. Now, he wasn't sure. He would want to do the right thing, but would he? He knew about himself, now, that he could not be sure.
    Benjamin would think of that boy and he would try to pray—to make the sign of the cross as he had as a child, to plead his case to God, to see if He could be convinced that Benjamin was worth saving, when he knew that he himself was not—but he was beyond prayer, couldn't use that to delude himself when he would have welcomed delusion.
    He would remember the weight of the boy in his arms, the warmth of his skin, how unbroken he had looked. He couldn't remember the color of his eyes. Had they been closed the entire time?
    He would weep for Cesario, and for his poor uncle, who had had the misfortune of being with David and himself when their characters were revealed, when everything that they had used to deceive themselves was stripped or fallen or thrown away. Benjamin had tried to strip himself of all self-delusion, but he had not been prepared for what he would find. It would have been better to not know. He would welcome not knowing. He remembered what Aristotle had written that "we are what we repeatedly do," but, he thought, you could also be what you do once, just once. But then he thought, no, what he had repeatedly done was to not do, to not speak up, to not act, to not try to save all that could have been saved. He was doing it now. He was still failing.
    Benjamin moved like a ghost through his own life. He avoided anything that might give him happiness. Happiness would be a crime. He lived alone, dated no one, did not try. He would come back to his house in Pilsen, on the South Side of Chicago, down the street from the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, and try not to think. He would go into the Museum and look at the artifacts and art of his land and his people. He had never considered Mexico his, but now that he could not go back, now that it was another one of his losses, he longed for it.
    He heard the language of his people every day as he went to the corner store, or sat in one of the Mexican restaurants that lined the streets. Occasionally, he thought he heard the voice of Uncle Luis, whom he had betrayed, whose life he had taken part in in ruining, or the voice of Aunt Christina, the aunt he loved and whom he would never again see. When his ache at missing her became too sharp, he would go home and take the shawl she had given him out of his nightstand and press it to his face. He thought he could still smell her perfume deep in its fibers. He would look at its shades of green and blue and recall how she seemed to be shrinking as the truck pulled away from her house on the day that they had left, how she had started to disappear into the dust and the mist, how she had finished disappearing when the truck had turned the corner past Rigo's store.
    His parents were hurt by the distance he kept between them, by how he had stopped calling. David sent him willfully cheerful Christmas and birthday cards, updating him on how their parents were doing, how he was doing as he moved into the hierarchy of district and then county school administration, but Benjamin did not write back. He did not see how he could. He was in his early thirties, everything was behind him now, he was in the epilogue of his life, and there were still so many years to get through.

    Uncle Luis worked his land, trying to get the peach trees to give fruit without irrigation. In the mornings, when he was out in his orchard and there were no other men tending to their own parched fields, he would sit under one of his poor, his struggling trees, its lack of leaves letting the sun burn into him, and pray, though he was no great man of God, that his own soul, if he had one, still had a chance, that the boy—whose body was found, nearly a decade later, by men who had been collecting dried cactus, who gathered around it, who found only a few scattered bones, bones that they thought had belonged to an animal, bones from which they walked away—that his soul was set free, that it hovered above him, that it took some solace in how much he suffered.