Mauricio blinked, but didn’t respond. Donnally figured he was trying to decide what version of his past to tell, for he’d never told the same tale twice, or at least the same one twice in the same way.

Perched at Donnally’s counter before daybreak, sipping black coffee, looking out through scratched eyeglasses, he’d talk about when he first met Cesar Chavez outside the Gallo vineyard in Modesto-

Or was it during the pesticide protest in Delano?

Or maybe at the grape boycott march to the capitol?

For the first few months after Donnally moved up from San Francisco and bought the cafe, he’d look over at Mauricio and wonder what he was hiding. Back then, when Donnally was still steered by a detective’s habit of mind, he plumbed for the big truth beneath the little lies. In the end, he came to view Mauricio less as fact than fiction, as a poet of his own life, sometimes just following his words to their own destination, with truth somehow nestled in the sounds and rhythms.

Listening to Mauricio day after day, watching him nurse his coffee, Donnally often wondered whether there was any real difference between Mauricio’s poetic recreations of his past and his own father’s evasions and self-deceptions-except for the rage it generated in him.

Donnally slipped the gun back into his pocket.

“What do you mean?” Donnally asked. “Been there, done that. You shot somebody?”

Mauricio still didn’t answer. He just stared vacant-eyed at the ceiling as though his mind had moved on to something else.

Donnally settled back in his chair. There was no reason to press the issue. Mauricio’s kind of poetry couldn’t be created on demand. And Mauricio knew better than Donnally how much time he had left to compose it.