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Baca, his wild son, and two daughters lived in Regal, and the dead of 2:00 AM that Saturday morning seemed like a perfect time to idle through the tiny village to see who was still burning the candle at both ends. When times are dull, it’s easy to start inventing tasks like that, easy to think they might be productive.
    There was always the off chance that Matt would be trudging down the state highway, no doubt sobered by his mountain romp. But State 56 was quiet. I crested the pass and started down the long, serpentine curves toward the intersection with what locals called “the Douglas Road,” the state highway into Arizona—and beyond that, the village of Regal.
    Regal was no more than a dark spot out of range of the arc lights that blasted the days-only border crossing gate a mile south of the Catholic mission, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora.
    The town settled on the humps and bumps where the southern feet of the San Cristóbal range rose out of the prairie. Maybe sixty people lived there, depending on how many illegals were napping in the church at any given moment. Once or twice, we’d made the gentle suggestion to Father Bertrand Anselmo or various church elders that locking the church at night might be a modern thing to do, and make our job a little easier. An eyebrow or two was raised at such a suggestion, and that was that. I didn’t pursue the matter, since a modern lock on an ax-hewn door would have been its own form of sacrilege.
    West of the church, a number of arroyos cut through the village, and the dirt streets dipped down into them as they wound from property to property, around shacks and woodpiles and clotheslines and derelict trucks.
    If a modern community planner had tried to make sense of Regal, the first thing he probably would have done would be to straighten out lot lines and establish street right-of-ways. And then developers could hang cute street names—picturesque, tourist-pleasing tags like
Palo Verde Lane, Riñcon del Sol
, or
Calle Encantada
.
    But such was not the case. If any community planner had ever lingered within the boundaries of Regal, he was probably buried behind someone’s doghouse with a rude juniper cross marking the spot.
    The village had gradually grown into a wonderful hodgepodge as the families grew. The scuff in the dirt that led from house to shed had deepened and widened with the years, and when a son wanted to build his own home, the foot trail between generations had taken on the formality of a two-track. And that had been extended babies later, winding around this barn or that house until Regal’s maze of lanes and byways held the village together like a fisherman’s net.
    I suppose most of the kids who lived there held the place in contempt, champing at the bit, eager to get out into the real world—a place far dirtier, noisier, and uncaring than their quiet Regal homes, despite any shortcomings.
    A hundred yards before the driveway to the church, I turned right onto a lane where a small wooden sign proclaimed SANCHEZ with a little black arrow. Victor had lived in Regal once, now preferring the mobile home that was tucked behind the Broken Spur Saloon. His brother Edgar still called Regal home…along with half a dozen other Sanchez relatives.
    I knew roughly where Sosimo Baca lived, and I idled the county car along as the dirt lane meandered westward, sometimes passing so close to the front of a house that I could have reached out a hand and streaked the living-room window.
    Driving no more than two or three miles an hour, I rounded the corner of a rambling adobe whose front porch corner post had been nicked a time or two by careless bumpers, and damn near ran into a dark figure trudging along the road. He carried a wooden walking stick and had already begun the process of seeking higher ground, but by narrowly missing a mailbox on the left, I was able to swing around him.
    I didn’t know Sosimo Baca well, but I recognized his face in the glare of the