Without glasses, his eyes saw all the night lights haloed by astigmatic mist. He felt drained, exhausted. If they hadn’t finally brought the man around, that man who used to live in Kerrville, he never would have understood what they were trying to tell him. Mamma would be kept there in San Fernando, and he had the undertaker’s card, and he would have to go to Brownsville and make the necessary arrangements with a Brownsville undertaker to send for the body and fix up her papers at the border. Mamma had always liked things done efficiently and just so, and this sort of thing would have driven her crazy. And the man who had lived in Kerrville had told him, in all seriousness, that in Mexico one could not transport a body past any cemetery without stopping and giving a sum of money to that cemetery. It was the custom. Who is to say, Señor, how much sense it makes? It is just a thing that is done here, and one cannot escape it.
