Okay, it's been a while. Here's the truth: I ran out of funny stories, and I don't want to be the cause of nation-wide depression and/or suicides. So, if you're really depressed, don't start to read this story because it's gonna get bleak as hell and I can't be there to talk you down from the overpass. If you're just having a bad day, you'll probably be all right. If you've got the blues, that's going to have to be a judgment call on your part. Just how blue are you?

Here are the first few pages of If God Will Give Us License, a story that's set in Puerta De Chula, Zacatecas, Mexico, where my dad's from. I'll add more pages when I remember that I thought that it was a good idea to serialize a story on my website. I don't know, this might be too much commitment for me to handle. I'm no good at commitment. We'll see.

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If God Will Give Us License, part I

1.
    He came into the left turn with too much speed. He braked hard and turned the steering wheel, but the truck, with its balding tires, lost traction on the dusty and gravelly road and started to drift to the right, almost off of the asphalt and onto the powdery shoulder. A small boy, maybe seven-years-old, was pedaling his bicycle on the asphalt edge next to that shoulder, in the same direction in which the truck was headed. He had no chance to see what was quickly coming up on him.
    The center-right fender caught the bicycle just below the top of the tire, momentarily freezing the boy in place until the truck moved over him. The front and then the back wheel ran over his back, doing extensive damage to his internal organs and spine. He immediately lost consciousness and his pain was not great. His movement from unconsciousness into death was quick, without cognition or recognition or despair.

2.

    Traveling from Puerta De Chula—with its adobe houses, dirt roads, struggling farms, and a population of a few hundred people—north into Jerez was a thirty-minute trip by mule over hills and through cactus and brush when people could still take a mule from a village into a town and not be embarrassed. The trip could take just as long by truck. The roads, carved over time by rain and wind and overflowing rivers, when there had been rivers, moved west, away from both Puerta De Chula and Jerez, with its population of a little over 35,000, around impassable landscape and barely surviving farms.
    Nearly halfway down the road, one came to a left turn forced by a riverbed. It had been dry for so long that people had stopped thinking that it was possible for it to contain water. Some children had never seen it anything but dry. At this dead-end, one started moving south, away from Jerez, down the best part of the dirt road, relatively flat and straight, and along the riverbed. Further down the road, one would return to driving on switchbacks and steep inclines and declines before the road turned left onto an asphalt road that went for almost one-hundred yards. That road ended at another asphalt road, this one going south, toward the city of Zacatecas, which was the capitol of the state that shared one name, or north, straight into downtown Jerez.

3.
    Santiago Zapata had left Puerta De Chula in his middle-teens, during the 1950s, to work as a bracero in America. He had been sent by his labor contractor on three-day bus trips with a sandwich and a dollar to wherever cheap Mexican labor was needed. He had slept ten to a room, worked sixteen-hour days in Georgia, watched the men around him pass out in the humid heat. He had worked in Washington pruning cherry trees, checking his hands every fifteen minutes for frostbite by taking off his thin and soggy gloves to bite down on his numbed fingers. The men heated tortillas and beans over open fires and sent as much money back to their families in Mexico as was possible.
    Mr. Zapata, settled in California, got married, and came to visit Puerta De Chula, where almost all of his family had stayed, only a few times, when there was no work and he had enough money saved to afford the trip. In his late 60s, fourteen years after having last visited, he decided that his sons, David, 31, and his brother, Benjamin, 29, should finally see their father’s hometown, should finally meet their relatives back in Mexico. They flew in on an Air Mexicana flight to Zacatecas, and Nestor, a nephew of Mr. Zapata's, picked them up at the airport for the hour drive to Puerta De Chula.
    They arrived three days before New Year's Eve. David and Benjamin would be meeting aunts and uncles and first- and second- and third-cousins, and other barely understood or decipherable relations. David, who lived in Madera, the same town as his parents, was a high school counselor with master's degrees in educational counseling and in educational administration. Benjamin lived in Chowchilla, a town twenty minutes north of Madera, had a journalism degree, and was an associate editor at its small newspaper. They were worried that their Spanish, grown weak from underuse, would be found lacking, that they would have difficulty communicating with their family, that they were in for six days of boredom.

4.
    Benjamin, in his spare time, had started to write a book about ethics. He already had seventy pages and a title, "The Soul in Play," but it wasn't going to be jargon-heavy or obscure or religious. He had moved from the Catholic faith into which he had been born to atheism in his last years of high school, and everything that he had read and learned since then had pushed him even further from any belief in God.
    He had borrowed the idea of being in play from chess. When a player moved a piece out of its starting position, it was said to now be in play, to be at risk. His central argument was that, even like pieces that have yet to be moved, the soul is always in play because one is always in danger, because not moving is also a decision.
    He had gotten the idea for his book from his work as a newspaper editor. One of his duties was to read newswire and in-house stories and help to decide which ones would run. He saw that all the stories—from those on school-board meetings, to car accidents, to state- and federal welfare reform, to defense spending—grew out of people's having made decisions, wittingly or unwittingly, that put their ethical selves in play. One had to take responsibility for every decision made because every decision was an action that had to be taken into account. Without this accounting, without having to take seriously that one of the consequences of decision-making was that you changed yourself, no matter how minutely, you could deceive yourself, intentionally or not, about who you were.

5.
    December 31st. Most of the aunts and their daughters had spent the day making tamales and empanadas for New Year's Eve dinner while the men sat drinking in front of the small adobe store. They talked about who was where in America and for how long, who had given up and come back, and, inevitably, about who was dead and for how long.
    The house at which they were staying had been inherited by Mr. Zapata's younger sister, Christina, who had given up on any chance of marriage in order to take care of her parents. The house was really a series of freestanding rooms. Each room had been built as enough money was saved to pay for its construction.
    There was the large original room, against the left side of the high adobe fence, that extended length-wise into the middle of the property. That room had doubled as a living room and a bedroom that had slept Santiago, Christina, their middle brother Luis, and their parents. There was also a room at the back of the property that had become Mr. Zapata's bedroom in his teens and which was being used by David and Benjamin now. Three rooms next to that room formed an "L," a storage room, next to that, a kitchen, and then another long bedroom that was being used by Mr. Zapata. A small bathroom with a hot-water shower was the most recent addition. The property was surrounded by the six-foot tall fence, with a shorter fence creating a pen in front where a horse could be kept.
    That night, they all sat in the courtyard and drank a punch made of apples and cinnamon, the men adding Cuervo to their cups, except for David and Benjamin, who did not drink. Benjamin was moved and at the same time embarrassed by how much effort everyone was making in order to feed them and make them happy. He used David’s camcorder to film everything, narrating for their mother back in California.
    At midnight, some of the men fired guns and rifles into the air. Gunshots and the sounds of firecrackers were also coming from the courtyards of the surrounding houses. The entire family stayed up until the early morning. Mr. Zapata and Luis—his brother younger by six years who had stayed in Puerta De Chula to take care of their parents and sister—sat next to each other silently, Luis patting his brother's back occasionally as Mr. Zapata cried a little to be back on his ancestral land with his people and his sons.
    And David and Benjamin had never felt so connected to their family or to their own father. Seeing how their Puerta De Chula relatives were so kind, so honest with each other, they understood better why their father had kept asking for them to come back with him, even when they had first been noncommittal about and then openly dismissive of going.

6.
    David and Benjamin were awakened by their father early the next morning. He wanted them to drive their Uncle Luis into Jerez so that they could surprise him by buying new tires for his truck. Both were used to their father involving them in his settled plans without first asking, having to come to his house to plant lemon trees he had already brought and that must be planted before they die, having them barbecue for him and his friend's houses on a morning's notice, receiving an afternoon call that men have come to install a wood-burning stove and he needs one of them to supervise. They knew better than to protest; he was one of those Mexican fathers who expected his sons to do what he asked of them.
    This morning, though, they were tired, had been up much later than their father, had slept for only three hours. David said that they would go later, but their father stood in their doorway and said that the wood-burning water heater was lit and that they needed to get into the shower so that they wouldn't waste any cactus. Tree wood was used for heat and cooking in Puerta De Chula, but there were only a few trees in the area that weren't part of an orchard and firewood could only be bought in Jerez and was too expensive. Instead, at the end of summer, when some of the cactus in the surrounding hills had died, people would take a machete with them and harvest sacks full of the dried cactus to use for winter fuel.
    "But, dad, we're tired," David said in Spanish, the only language his father knew well and the only language anyone in Puerta De Chula understood.
    "Your Aunt Christina is already making breakfast."
    David frowned, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and said nothing. Their father had been especially demanding of them on this trip, showing off for his friends and family how respectful and responsible his sons were. David, being the oldest, took more of this burden than did his brother. David waited for Benjamin to say something, but Benjamin was pretending to sleep.
    Benjamin, as was his tendency whenever there was conflict, stayed silent, did not take sides, and waited for things to play themselves out. Benjamin knew about himself that he was no good at confrontation, even when he or his side was clearly in the right. He also knew that their father had no real conception of how much he expected of them, how little gratitude he had ever shown, how Benjamin could say that they were exhausted and that the tires could wait a few hours and how his father would not understand.
    David, angry with his father and with Benjamin, violently turned over onto his back, looked up at the ceiling, and threw the blankets onto the corner of the bed. He got up silently and grabbed his toiletry bag and a towel out of his travel bag. He walked past his father without looking at him. Benjamin sat up at the side of the bed and shook his head. He went to the warm kitchen in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms to sit with his Aunt Christina and eat homegrown scrambled eggs with tortillas and beans while his brother showered.

    Mr. Santiago came into the kitchen and gave Benjamin the money for the tires, saying, "When your uncle goes to pay, give the man this money."
    Benjamin looked up from his plate, "What do you mean?"
    "It's going to be a surprise."
    Benjamin stopped eating, a piece of forked egg suspended between the plate and his mouth, and thought of his uncle humiliated with his money out as his nephew from America took over at the transaction's end. There would be awkward silence, the tire shop owner would exchange glances with Uncle Luis, and Uncle Luis, because he was a poor farmer on drought-stricken land, would put his money back in his pocket and stand away from his nephews and look out at the street as the tires were put on his truck. There would be a painful ride home and he would never be comfortable around them again, even if they all knew that this had been Mr. Santiago's doing.
    Surely, Benjamin thought, his father had to see this, how he was about to embarrass his sons and especially his younger brother. His Aunt Christina was standing still in front of the stove. She also knew what was going to happen, but she had been raised never to question a man's decisions, especially those of a husband, father, or brother. Benjamin said, "You don't think that he's going to feel bad?"
    "Why would he feel bad?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. Mr. Zapata couldn't see why Luis would. Luis needed tires desperately. His farm was struggling, as all the local farms were, because there was no rain. In Mr. Santiago's mind, feelings didn't matter. He held out the money and Benjamin put it in his pocket.

    When Benjamin heard the bathroom door open, he got up and followed David into their room. "Dad's paying for the tires, but Uncle Luis doesn't know."
    David looked up from his bag, grimacing. "You're joking, right?"
    "I'm supposed to hand the guy the money at the last second," Benjamin said, getting a towel and heading for the shower.

    David stabbed at his breakfast, shaking his head at the upcoming embarrassment that they would all have to endure. He was not a patient person by nature, though, through his studies and his job, he had trained himself to be. He was trying to not resent his father, to not be tired of him, but this was too much. He felt himself becoming angry. He took deep breaths and squeezed one of his fists into the bridge of his nose.
    "What's wrong, mijo?" his aunt said.
    "Your brother is screwing up."
    "You know how he is. He doesn't understand."
    David sat in the kitchen after he finished eating, avoiding his father, who was outside pestering Benjamin to hurry. The four men went to the truck together, Mr. Zapata giving David instructions on how to drive on the difficult roads between Puerta De Chula and Jerez, even though it had been David who had had to do all the driving since they had gotten into Mexico, even though his father had already given him those instructions a number of times.
    "I know. I know," David said, putting the truck into gear.
    They drove in silence, Uncle Luis sitting between David and Benjamin, Uncle Luis sensing that there was something bothering his nephews. He thought that they were perhaps upset with having to go with him into Jerez, and so early in the morning. David and Benjamin both sensed that their uncle thought that they were upset with him, and this made them both angrier with their father.

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Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that a kid gets killed by a car in the first section. Sorry. If, for some reason, that kind of stuff gets to you, you probably shouldn't read this story.