He stopped the car by the cemetery, dew heavy in the morning chill, drops clinging and merging on his boots as he pushed through the grass along the wall.
He stood before the two crosses, sunlight edging them in water-glow and shadows stretching out towards his feet.
He wouldn't be back here again.
He listened to the birds glittering from the trees, untangling all the separate strands of song from the mass of notes, and he didn't know what to say.
He didn't know if he had the right to talk to her any more.
Carolina had walked this path with him briefly, but then she had called him back from it, and he had been so willing to go. Now he returned to it, just as willingly.
He wanted her to know why. He thought she would, because she was the one who had changed him the most, both in her life and in her death. She was the reason he had met Sands, and she was the reason he had seen Sands in Lázaro Cárdenas.
Loída wouldn't ever know. She was too young to know anything of who he was, who he had been, of the world that made him. And mostly it destroyed him that she would never know, but there were bitter flashes in time when he could almost be grateful, because some of the things he had seen were things that no-one should. What hope had he ever had of protecting his daughter from his world?
He placed a flower on each grave, taken from those that still grew around the hacienda, the hardy ones almost reverted to weeds that survived all that this country could do to them.
Father Ríos would tend to them. He would give Loída her toys on the Day of the Little Angels, as he had last year.
This time he wouldn't stop.
Sands wouldn't let him stop. He'd known he would break his vow to Carolina within minutes of meeting him, and if ever he started to question, to falter, Sands would do whatever it took to reach through him and drag out the rage.
It would be there to find, because it always was.
Before all this had started, before he ever killed a man, he used to believe he would die with his guitar in his hands. He had thought he understood years ago that it wouldn't be that way, but it had taken him until now to fully accept it.
"Goodbye, Carolina. I hope you understand."
He turned, walking back to the car, and the man and the guns waiting there.
Author's notes:
I'm sorry about Ramírez! I really like Ramírez. I had to have him in here, and I was planning on keeping him around. And then I had this horrified moment when I realised Sands was going to kill him, and I just didn't have an argument good enough to stop him...
Everything I know about the real Mexico comes from the internet. I've tried to make it fit with Rodriguez' Mexico where possible - where the two conflict, I've gone with the films. I've put the Guitar Town in Durango, because it doesn't seem to obviously contradict what little's on screen, and it works for distance and timing.