At the end of it, when B.J. rides away on his motorcycle and Hawkeye looks down from the helicopter and sees GOODBYE spelled out in stones on the ground, my mother put her hand over her mouth. Hank said, "Well, hell," and got up and turned the set off before anybody could see his face. My grandfather was asleep. Ingot wasn't. She was looking at me with her head tipped over to the right.
I would like to tell you everything turned out perfectly. It didn't, quite, or not right away. Corrine Esquibel was in Denver for nine days, and the first time I saw her afterward, in April, out on the porch of the Gurulé house in the sun, she walked slowly and held the rail and had a way of stopping in the middle of a sentence and looking for the end of it that I recognized, that reminded me of somebody in my own house. Her husband, Abrán, had driven up from Hobbs, New Mexico, the night of the accident, eleven hours without stopping, and he stayed. He got on at the Safeway warehouse unloading trucks at night. Inés turned four in May and had her party in the bay of Station 4, with a sheet cake from the Safeway that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY INÉS AND INGOT in red icing, because she had decided the dog's birthday was the same as hers and nobody had the nerve to tell her otherwise. Chispa came too. Ingot let Chispa eat out of her bowl. Nobody had ever seen her do that, either.
My father called that Sunday. I told him everything, every bit of it, the promise and the month and the backpack and the monitor and the dog and the chimney and Inés in the snow with the mask over her whole face. It took a long time and the operator came on twice and he fed her quarters both times without saying anything. When I was done he didn't say anything for so long I thought we'd been cut off, and then he said, "I'm coming home." I asked when. He said he didn't know yet. He said it might be a while, the rigs were laying off up there too now, and there was nothing in Pueblo, and there was a man in Denver who might know a man. He said, "But I'm coming home, Eloy. You hear me? I'm coming home." And I said I heard him, and I did, and I still didn't know when, and I hung up the phone and went in the front room and sat down with my grandfather, who was awake, and watched the chimneys along Evans with him until it got dark. All of them were smoking.
Hank Dolezal fixed my backpack. He took it home on his forty-eight off, and when he brought it back the strap was sewn up with heavy waxed thread, the kind they used to repair the canvas on the hose covers, in tight black stitches that went all the way around in a square with an X through the middle, and he'd put a patch inside the front pocket so the antenna wouldn't wear a hole in it. "In case you ever need to listen to anything again," he said, and then he gave me a box of Lemonheads and went to check the oil on the engine, which did not need checking.
The monitor went back on my mother's nightstand. It's on mine now, as a matter of fact, or one like it. I have a daughter. I've been a firefighter in this city for twenty-six years, a captain for nine, and I have stood in a lot of kitchens since then with a lot of people who didn't know yet what had happened to them, and I have taken the two seconds every time, and set it on the shelf, and gone back for it later. I still don't know if I'm doing it right. I don't think Salvador Ulibarri knew either.
The last time I wore that red backpack was the first Friday in June of 1983, the last day of the sixth grade. I wore it to school with nothing in it at all. At three o'clock I stood out at the edge of the playground near the fence, by myself, away from the other kids, where you could see down the hill to Northern Avenue and the traffic coming off the interstate. I stood there for a long time. I knew he wasn't coming that day. He'd said so on the phone. He'd said a few more weeks. But I stood there anyway, out in the open, in the sun, because I had promised myself I would, and because I'd learned something that winter about keeping a thing switched on and listening for it, even when you don't know what's going to come through. I stood there and waited to be found. I was the red dot. You could have seen me from anywhere.