Sisters and brothers, here's the fifth part of "If God Will Give Us License." After this installment, we'll be about three-fourths of the way through the story. In case you haven't been keeping up, here are Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

21.
    "What happened to him?" their father asked when he heard their footsteps, looked up from the ground, and saw the state that Benjamin was in.
    "He fell down the Perron," David said over Benjamin's shoulder. The Perron was a set of hundred-foot high nearly vertical steps used to reach the second and third levels on the east side of Chicomostoc. Tourists occasionally lost their footing as they looked out at the surrounding flatlands and tumbled down until they managed to stop themselves.
    Benjamin looked at his uncle and slightly nodded his head no.
    "Are you okay?" Uncle Luis asked, and Benjamin closed his eyes and nodded that he was.
    Standing up, their father said, "You need to be more careful."

22.
    They walked to the truck and Benjamin climbed into the back. They headed back toward Puerta De Chula and this time Benjamin didn't look for the spot where the truck had hit the boy.
    It was almost two o'clock. Fifteen hours. That was how long before Nestor would drive them to Morelia for the flight back to America. There was a last round of visits to be made back in Puerta De Chula, and then dinner and then a party planned for that evening. There was nearly no time left. There was no time left. Benjamin had failed to convince David, and David was not trying to convince himself, didn't seem to be struggling with his morals, his beliefs, in a way that might drive him toward confession.
    They were going to fly out. It was inevitable now. It probably had been from the moment the truck moved over Cesario and his bicycle. Benjamin imagined Cesario's parents walking from town to town, in all the seasons of the year, wearing their loss, their grief, like a shroud. They would move among people but not be of them. He saw the steam rise from their mouths in winter as they described Cesario to a stranger walking in Jomulco or Cienegas or Tetillas as they went further and further out from where they lived.
    They would have memorized how they described their boy, all the urgency gone out of their voices. In a few years, they would stop mentioning his bicycle because he would have outgrown it. Then they would not be able to describe his clothes and this would cause them pain. His features would have changed, so they would not be able to describe his face, only what he had looked like as a child. They would feel, they would be, helpless.
    If they were religious, they would put it in the hands of God, would ask him to get Cesario home. Over time, as the unimaginable stopped being so, as the unimaginable became the possible, as the unimaginable became the probable, they would ask Him to just let them know.
    He imagined them in some type of hell in which they searched forever, not knowing that their boy was dead. But it was not hell and it would not be for forever. What had happened to their boy and was happening to them now was of this world and no other. One of Cesario's parents would die, and then the next. And then the search would be done. No, not done, just over. Abandoned. What a dark and broken world into which they had been forced, a dark and broken world that would be their only world, their last world.

23.
    After dinner, party guests began arriving. Most of Puerta De Chula was in the courtyard, some of the men spilling out onto the dirt path that ran in front of the house. Most of the young women were in their best clothes, as were the men. There were not many opportunities left in Puerta De Chula for young people to socialize because there was no money and because there was almost no point.
    There was no work, so the men couldn't afford to buy the adobe bricks necessary to constructing a house for their beloveds to move into after marriage. The men and women were marrying later and later, were staying with their parents in overcrowded houses, sometimes into their early-thirties and beyond. Some would never marry.
    The single people of Puerta De Chula understood that love had become futile, and they carried with them the sadness of that knowledge. But, still, some fell in love. Couples would meet at night in the surrounding land and make love on a blanket, stifling their cries and declaring their love for each other until the man pulled out and ejaculated into the dust. They would hold each other and talk about a hoped-for future neither of them was sure would ever exist, not without work or money or a house.

    Occasionally, a call would come into Rigo's store that a contractor needed one or two tons of rock. Some of the men would take a truck up into the hills and sledgehammer away at a hill that had been found to contain the type of rock used for construction in Zacatecas. The men would fill the truck bed and two of them would drive into Jerez, while the rest kept hammering. In three days, working from dawn until dusk, their shirts tied around their waists, their muscles tearing from strain, they would earn the equivalent of fifteen American dollars each. They would save that money in their rooms, calculating how close they were to being able to start building a house. But the calls for rock were infrequent; they could go months without working.
    Before, a man could have found work on a farm, but the years of drought had forced the farmers to do all of the work themselves. They used every minute of available light to try to coax their trees or plants into growing with not enough water, but there was not enough time. Farmers would prune their trees or plant their seeds into the earth, trying to ignore the pointlessness of their efforts without the benefit of rain.

    But here was a party, paid for by Mr. Santiago and his sons, in which they could forget the facts of their daily existence. The men could have a beer without calculating how many bricks of adobe they were drinking down. The women could forget that they were trapped in their parents' houses with nothing to do with all of their waking hours.
    Mr. Santiago was moving through the crowds, shaking hands and receiving hugs. He thought that this might be the happiest he had ever been since having left for America. All of the people on his side of the family were here. He could see all the generations of his family. He was the oldest and thoughts of his death had become more frequent with the passing years. His parents had died and there had not been enough money for him to come back either time. Now, he had seen their graves, had lowered his failing body slowly to the ground and touched his forehead to the earth above them. Death still frightened him, but his land and his people had been a type of solace, would ease his transition to a heaven that he knew waited for him.
    He looked at his sons talking to some of their cousins, his sons who hadn't spoken a word of English until they had entered elementary school, his sons who had worked in the fields with him, in winters, pruning fruit trees and tying grapevines, in summers, picking tomatoes in Huron, olives in Fresno, grapes in Bakersfield, peaches in Chowchilla, his sons who had gone to college and made lives for themselves beyond any for which he could have hoped.

24.
    David sat on a chair and counted the hours until Nestor drove them to the airport. He couldn't tell about himself if he was having a good time or pretending to, or if there was a difference.
    All that he had believed about himself was no longer true, but he kept pushing that thought away. If he believed that he was the same person, then that would mean that he was. Belief. Belief would save him. Belief in himself. Belief when the facts were to the contrary. Belief when actions did not correspond to principles. Belief when unbelief meant the end of one life, a life that he loved, and the start of another, a life to be survived, endured.
    Seven hours until they drove away. Ten hours until their plane lifted off of Mexican soil and he was free. The plane would cross into America and his life would be restored.