This is part two of If God Will Give Us License a story set in the rancho where my father grew up. If you haven't read part one, click here.

If God Will Give Us License, part II 

7.
    Neither David nor Benjamin had ever been tested. They had managed to get through their lives without ever having to make a decision that would change everything—how they would view their pasts and their futures, how and what they thought of themselves and each other. They had gotten off free.

8.
    David was driving a little faster than was safe, the truck bouncing hard over rain-made ruts in the hard-packed earth. He was carrying too much speed into some of the turns, the back end of the truck on the verge of sliding out behind them. David had the steering wheel for support, Benjamin, his door handle. Their uncle had nothing to hold on to, and he was being tossed from side to side and up and down. He wanted to reach out for the dashboard, but he was afraid that David would see this as some type of criticism, would use it as a reason to drive more unsafely.
    David looked over at his uncle being jostled in the cabin, and this made him angrier, that his father had put them all in this situation. He put the truck into a lower gear and they climbed over a steep part of the road. They knew that they were about fifty yards from where the asphalt started, and they were all relieved, although David was still going too fast.
    David made the left onto the asphalt and Benjamin was the first to see the boy on his bicycle. David started to make a noise, but no sound came out of his mouth, and then he felt his side of the truck rise a little, then rise again. Then he heard brakes and felt the truck sliding on the road. He was waiting for the truck to start rolling over, but it just slid, turned perpendicular to the road. The truck stopped twenty yards past the boy.
    Benjamin was the first out of the truck and he ran back to where the boy lay, on his stomach, unmoving. There was no blood because the boy was hemorrhaging internally, quickly heading toward death. Benjamin picked up the boy as David ran up next to him. Their uncle, dazed, slid out of the truck, squeezing his right forearm where it had banged against the dashboard.
    Benjamin started running back toward the truck and yelled for his uncle to open the truck's gate. Uncle Luis got into the back of the truck and grabbed the boy under his arms and pulled him into the back. Benjamin closed the gate and Uncle Luis stayed in the back, thinking he would ride there, sitting next to the boy, into Jerez, where there would be doctors.

    David was slowly walking back toward the truck, the mangled bicycle in his arms. He was running through the various scenarios of what was to come. In all of them, he saw that things would probably turn out badly for him. Yes, it had been an accident, but the black streaks of rubber on the road would be a clear sign that he had been driving fast, making it less of an accident. That they were going to get tires would be a part of it. That he had slept only three hours would be a part of it. He was an American, so that would also be a part of it, a big part, especially if the boy's parents were poor. They probably were. Just about everybody who was tied to the land in Zacatecas was poor.
    David had ended his own life, he thought. There would be a trial. He would most likely be stuck in Mexico for a long time. He would have to take a leave of absence and explain what was happening to the principal of his school. When he came back, if he was not found culpable, he would be marked as the counselor who had killed a boy. Everybody would assume that he had gotten off because he was an American, or because he had paid money to whomever it was one paid money to in order to walk away from one's misdeeds.
    Money. There might be money to be paid. And the fact of that payment, of David buying himself out of what he had done, would be seen as an admission of some type of guilt. Nobody would care that it would be impossible for him to be judged fairly, that paying off everybody who could help him would be the smart, the practical, the pragmatic thing to do.
    Or he would be found guilty of…what? It didn't matter. Something. Anything. Enough. He would lose years of his life in a Mexican jail. He would never work in his field again. All of his education would have been wasted. His colleagues, vanished. His friends, gone. They would look at him when he came back, if he came back, and think…child-killer.
    As he put the bicycle into the back of the truck, he tried to think of a way out of this. There was none. Or, there was one. Hide the body. That idea came so clearly to him, and it made such perfect sense. The voice that should have told him that this was abhorrent was silent, was being silenced by his need to save himself.

    Uncle Luis said, "Let's go!"
    "Wait a minute. I have to think," David said. Where to dump the body? The boy was a body to him now. They couldn't dump him anywhere near here, and not going toward Jerez. In the opposite direction. In the foothills. As cold as the weather was, and as difficult the terrain, the body wouldn't be found for months, if ever.
    Uncle Luis could tell by looking at David, so calm and somehow outside of the situation that they were all in, that he was going to ask or expect of them to do…things, incomprehensible things, unspeakable things.
    Uncle Luis thought of the boy's parents, how they would wait until the evening to go house to house to ask if anyone had seen their son. The father would walk all of the roads looking for his son's bicycle, then into the fields, calling out his son's name. The mother would sit in the kitchen, waiting. The father would come back in the morning and they would find a way to get to Jerez to look for him on its streets. There would be another day of searching. At the end of the day, they would go to the police, who would tell them that they should try to find him themselves. They would look at each other, then at the officer. They would be silent. They would stand up and thank him. They would call the store, which had the rancho's only telephone. Rigo, the owner, would say, No.
    They would look for the cheapest hotel, where the mother would sleep, or try to, while the father continued searching. In the morning, they would look again. That evening, they would call Puerta De Chula, hear no again, then take a bus and walk for two hours until they got back home, turning to the slightest sound or movement, hoping to see their boy. They would enter their house. Family and neighbors would come over, offering encouragement, offering solace, telling them to put their faith in God. Then the family and neighbors would be gone. Over time, people would avoid this couple as if their tragedy were contagious. The parents would wait. They would wait some more. They would keep waiting. Time would strip their hope down to an ache. Time would take their hope.
    Uncle Luis saw all of this, and he wept for them. "We're taking him to Jerez, to a doctor." He stopped to catch his breath. "If he is dead, we will come back and find his parents."
    "We need to think clearly here," David said, "to see what is best." He could see that he and his brother and his uncle were breathing out vapor, but that no vapor was coming from the boy's mouth. There was no doubt the boy was already dead. He looked up from the boy at Benjamin, trying to communicate something with his eyes, trying to get Benjamin to say what David was thinking.
    Benjamin felt his brother's stare, but did not look up to acknowledge it. Neither did he look at his uncle. Benjamin knew what was happening, and he was starting to panic. The boy was lying in the back of the truck and he needed help, if he weren't already dead. He started crying in frustration.
    "The boy is dying," Uncle Luis said. He stood up, but he didn't know why. He had the momentary sense that he might have to fight David for the keys if he had them, to get into the driver's seat himself and drive.
    Benjamin looked up at his backlit uncle, who was saying everything that David should be saying, that he, himself, should be saying. But then, he thought, none of this needed to be said. He didn't understand what there was to be said, what there was to debate. And he knew that they were in the middle of a debate, that there were decisions to be made, that were being made.
    "Sit down, Uncle Luis," David said. "Please," he added after too long a pause, but there was no request in his voice.
    Uncle Luis, by virtue of being older than David and Benjamin, by being their uncle, had the authority to take charge, to make one his nephews get in and drive the truck and try to save the boy, or to drive away with the boy himself and leave his nephews behind. But, he thought, they were his American nephews, his college-educated American nephews, his nephews who knew much more than he, a farmer who had only gotten through the third-grade because, in their small schoolhouse, there was no grade higher. He wanted to say to David…he didn't know what he wanted to say. He looked to Benjamin, but he was staring down at the truck's bumper.
    Benjamin was going to let it happen, whatever it was. He was slightly in shock, had stepped out of himself, could think, I am letting this happen, understand what it said about him, how poisoned his life would be, and still let it happen.
    Benjamin got into the back with his uncle. He couldn't sit up front with his brother, did not want to hear David's voice or his own, the conversation that they might have. He sat down with his back against the cab. His uncle also sat against the cab. Benjamin dropped his head between his legs, covered his eyes, cried. So did his uncle. They would look up at the boy, then quickly down again.
    David started up the truck. There was still time for him to save them. They were still about ninety yards from where the road turned either toward Jerez or toward Zacatecas. Benjamin and his uncle were both waiting, hoping that David was not going to turn left, away from Jerez. Where the road separated, they felt the truck's momentum move them to their lefts. They were headed away from Jerez. They both reached over their side of the truck to steady themselves as the truck turned. They heard the sound of metal against metal as the bicycle shifted in the truck's bed. The boy jostled a little, his cheek lifting away from the corrugated bottom of the truck before coming to rest again. Neither Uncle Luis nor Benjamin said anything as they each took turns looking up at Jerez, which they could see, as they moved away from it, becoming smaller, blending into the surrounding landscape.

9.
    They drove for almost ten minutes before David turned off of the asphalt and onto a narrow dirt road that obviously did not get much traffic. The farms that surrounded the road were untended, abandoned long ago. Past the farms, the road started to climb and descend over little, gently sloped hills. Eventually, the road dead-ended at the foot of some cactus and bush-covered hills. This would be a difficult climb in any type of weather, but especially now. David was a runner who also lifted weights, and he was in very good shape. David climbed into the back of the truck and put the boy over his shoulder. He climbed out and started up what looked to be the tallest and steepest of the hills, the one least likely to be climbed.

10.
    "What are we going to do?" Uncle Luis said, looking at David becoming smaller as he carefully worked his way up the hill.
    "I don't know," Benjamin said, although he knew that that was a lie. He had already thought of getting into the cab and driving off to find help.
    "We can go. We just go."
    "And then?"
    Uncle Luis thought about what would happen if they drove away. If David hadn't been in trouble before, he might be now. And what would Santiago think? Would he hate his little brother for turning in his own nephew, his brother's son? Would he be hated by his entire family, even if they knew that what he had done was the only thing to do? And how could Uncle Luis continue to live in Puerta De Chula, the uncle of the American who had killed one of their own? He would be alone, ostracized by everybody. "I don't know," he said, "but we have to do something."
    "There's nothing to do, Uncle Luis. We're fucked." Benjamin paused to absorb the truth of that. "Whatever David decides. This is his thing"
    "What we're doing, it's…it's…it's…" Uncle Luis couldn't find the right words. He gave up speaking.
    "He probably took the keys, Uncle Luis," Benjamin said, but neither of them looked behind them to see, did not want to have that extra information on which to act or not act.
    After half an hour, David came back for the bicycle. They did not acknowledge each other's presence or say a word. David started up a different hill, coming back twenty minutes later, his hands a little torn and dirty from what must have been digging. David started the truck and they got back to the main road, heading toward Jerez.

11.
    Benjamin thought that David had done a good job of hiding the boy and the bicycle. Later, having been able to see what David had done as good planning, as good strategy, would be cause for great despair for Benjamin. It would be another sign of his fallen state, of his betrayal of himself.

12.
    David was driving and trying not to think of everything all at once, was trying to break up what had happened and was happening into manageable units. Uncle Luis would need to be handled. So, apparently, would Benjamin. That was a surprise to him, that Benjamin hadn't backed his actions. But he had days to do that, three days, counting the rest of today, to get Benjamin and their uncle in line.
    They needed to buy the tires, to be seen in Jerez, but not to be seen as if they were wanting to be seen. That meant that they would have to shop, they would have to accumulate enough purchases in a number of stores to account for the hour-and-a-half that they had lost, although shopping had not been part of the itinerary. Souvenirs. They would buy souvenirs. That was normal, and they needed to fake normalcy.
    It had all taken ninety minutes, David thought, just ninety minutes, and his life was now on the verge of collapse. And there were too many people who could help it to collapse.