Yeah, I told Beck, that’s my story, or part of it, but the paper didn’t use my name, so again, how’d you find me? I asked around, Beck says. Lot of trouble to go to, I say. Yeah, he says, but the thing is, Mr. Dowd, I believe you.

Well, there really wasn’t much in that newspaper column to believe, it seemed to me. The column told how I’d said there were Martians living in South America, which I didn’t. It even had a punch line. Like this: “I asked my newfound acquaintance whether his Martians were green, as in the comic books. ‘Yes,’ he confided, ‘green as grass—but only on the inside!’”

Fucking humiliating.

Beck saw the expression on my face and said, Look, Mr. Dowd, I’m serious about this. I know all about people who are green on the inside. And one thing I know is, they don’t think twice about committing murder. They killed a bunch of my friends. They tried to kill me.

Which made me realize he was serious. I said, How do I know you’re not one of them?

He told me that was a smart question and he loosened his belt and lifted up his shirt and showed me a scar where he had his appendix out. I asked him what that was supposed to prove. He said the hospital where he was treated would’ve noticed if he’d been bleeding green. Then he says, How about you?

I didn’t feel like showing him any scars, but he said that was okay, he’d take me at my word. At least for now. The word he used was “provisionally.”

Then we got down to business. Given what he’d already said, I asked him what he wanted. I want to hear your story, he says. And then I’ll tell you mine.

Once he had sanded the original paint Dowd washed the car with soapy water, dried it, and rinsed it again with a solution of mineral spirits. Then he taped off the parts he wanted to protect—windows, bumpers, trim. In the occasional silences, when Dowd wasn’t talking or operating power tools, Cassie heard wind rattling the corners and hollows of Dowd’s garage. Winter coming. She wasn’t sure what winter meant in this part of the country—probably not what it meant in Buffalo, where snow sometimes shut down the city for days.

Dowd broke for lunch as soon as the car was prepped for spraying. Lunch today was a rerun of lunch yesterday: convenience-store sandwiches. Cassie watched Dowd as he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, crumbs collecting in his moustache. He caught her looking and gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely friendly. Werner Beck trusts this man, Cassie reminded herself. But how much did she really know about Leo’s father?

“Had enough to eat?” Dowd asked, still gazing at Cassie.

She nodded.

Leo said, “You were going to tell us what you told my father.”

“Yeah.” Dowd wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “I guess I was.”

I was sick of Texas and I wanted to travel, which is how I ended up on the Trans-American Highway—parts of it brand new in those days, all those tunnels and bridges through the Darien Gap—working my way south from the Canal Zone picking up odd jobs. Mostly construction and electrical, like I said. Or what ever came to hand. I slept rough from time to time but I was young and that was all right with me as long as I could move on when I felt like it. Just heading south, like some kind of migrating bird.

I was in Antofagasta, that’s in Chile, when I hooked up with a Dutch company that was doing some work out in the Atacama desert. Building and running a supply depot for a copper mine, supposedly. Crew was mostly local but the company had an arrangement with the unions that let them hire a few foreigners, a handful of Ecuadorian and Colombian guest workers and one American, me—the crew boss liked that I had a U.S. electrician’s certificate, which is pretty much the gold standard. So they bused us over the Coast Range and up the Antofagasta Road, then along one of those old roads that used to service nitrate mines, to a flat place where a little spur of the Ferrocarril ran out—the real high desert, dry as glass and air so thin you could see the moon by daylight.

In a couple of months we had four air-conditioned buildings up and running. More like ware houses than anything else. And it was all kind of a mystery. There was no copper mine in sight, far as I could see. The Dutch crew boss spoke Spanish and a little German but he liked to practice his English on me in the off-hours, so I asked him about that one time. Get a little Jenever into him and he was pretty friendly. But he didn’t have much to say. He’d been told the site was a depot to store supplies on their way from the railhead or the road to the mine—the mine itself being a ways east. And no, he said, you couldn’t see the mine from here, but some nights you could see a light, like a spotlight or what do you call it, one of those lights they shine at movie theaters, know what I’m talking about? A shaft of light going up into the desert air. What kind of mine has a light like that, I asked him. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know.

We, I mean the work crew, slept in temporary shelters, plywood bunkhouses with canvas roofs and the wind for ventilation. Some nights when I couldn’t sleep I went out to look for that light the crew boss talked about. I saw it once, a shaft of light coming up from the horizon, almost too faint to see. Straight-up vertical. It lasted about three minutes. Not real impressive, but it had no business being there.

Anyway, I stayed on after the construction was finished. The Dutch company’d been contracted to operate the depot once they’d built it, and they needed hands for cartage and security. And I didn’t have anything better to do and actually, strange as it sounds, I kind of liked it out there in the high desert. At least at first. It felt like time went slower there. Cities sort of rush you along, if you know what I mean. Whereas in the desert an hour goes by and nothing happens but maybe the wind blows a few grains of sand across the salares. The salt basins.

I made friends with a guy named Bastián. Bastián was a forklift driver from the south of the country, spoke English, claimed to have a grandmother who spoke Quechua, which meant fuck-all to me. Skinny little guy but strong for his size. Dark-haired. He had a sense of humor, which I appreciated. When I told him about the light on the horizon he grinned and said, Shit, Eugene, that’s the alicanto.

We were off behind the depot buildings in the shade, sharing a smoke where the crew boss wouldn’t see us. I said, Well, what’s an alicanto?

It’s a bird, he says. It’s got metal wings and it lives in caves and eats gold and silver. Its wings light up at night, all different colors.

Bullshit, I say.

Yeah, obviously, Bastián says. Or no, not bullshit exactly but a myth. A legend. The alicanto’s good luck for miners. Follow it to find silver or gold. But if it sees you, it leads you nowhere. It lets you die in the desert.

I’m no miner, I tell him. And I don’t believe in any fucking alicanto.

Fair enough, he says. I don’t believe in your light.

So I told him, next time I saw it I’d wake him up and show him.

But we got pretty busy about then. There were big shipments coming through. How it worked was, goods were trucked in from the railhead. Some of it was food but most of it was hardware. Electronics: integrated circuits, transformers, microwave generators. And some large-scale stuff. Machines for working metal. Aluminum parts. Tubes and piping. Crates listed on the manifest as powdered silicon carbide. Pressurized hydrogen. Mirrors, huge ones. Graphite. I mean, what the fuck? I’m no expert, but why does a copper mine need mirrors and graphite?

And it was a strange arrangement all around. These shipments were delivered from the Ferrocarril and the crates would sit in our store house for a couple of days, then a fleet of trucks would come down the road from the east and we’d load ’em up. It made no sense. Why not just deliver it all straight to the mine? Also, the guys who drove those trucks—copper miners, supposedly—never talked to us. They’d nod if you said hello, but they were all about their manifests. They didn’t socialize. They never even stepped out back of the shed for a smoke—none of them smoked. Guys in white shirts and jeans, neat and clean as fucking Mormons. Eyes on the clipboard at all times.