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gave her uncle a happy hug, then made the introductions. Gideon liked him right away. A lanky, loose-limbed man, perhaps an inch shorter than Gideon’s six-two, he was in denims and scuffed boots and carried a hat in his hand; not the ubiquitous straw campesino ’s sombrero that was on just about every male head in rural Mexico, but a genuine cowboy’s ten-gallon Stetson (although Gideon had read somewhere that a ten-gallon hat would hold only three gallons of water), convincingly sweat-stained and curled.
    Gideon saw right away why he reminded Julie of Gary Cooper. He was appealing in the same lean, rawboned way, graceful and awkward at the same time, with a weathered, wise, kind/stern face and a reserve that somehow managed to convey both shyness and a serene self-assurance. He even had a lazy Western twang to go along with all this; Montana, Gideon thought, or the Dakotas. The only off-note was the sharply delineated fish-belly-white expanse of skin from just above his eyebrows to his thinning widow’s peak. Clearly, the hat he was holding in his hand was rarely off his head in the outdoors.
    His daughter Annie, for whom Julie would be filling in, was waiting at the curb outside, beside a dusty red Ford Explorer SUV with the Hacienda logo, a photographic blowup of a man and a woman on horseback on the side. Annie, like Julie in her mid-thirties, was plump and pretty (in a squirrel-faced kind of way) and as voluble and feisty as her father was strong and silent. Her welcoming hug of Julie involved emphatic, bilateral cheek-to-cheek air kisses, during which her steady stream of chatter never missed a word.
    “Dorotea’s making a late breakfast snack for you,” she was chirping as they got into the van. “ Quesadillas de queso; she makes them with epazote and green chiles… yum! I wasn’t going to join you-I’ve already had breakfast, but I’m making myself hungry. Maybe I’ll have just one…”
    Gideon sat in front with Carl, so that Julie and Annie could catch up more easily, and the two women gabbed happily away about people he’d never met, with names either unknown to him or only hazily familiar. He had grown a little sleepy again-it was just after eight o’clock in the morning; they had taken a red-eye from Mexico City rather than staying the night at an airport hotel-so he was content to sit quietly and watch the scrub-dotted countryside slide by, so starkly different from the green, cool ambience of the Olympic Peninsula. And Carl was the sort of man who was just as happy, or probably more so, to be sitting in companionable silence as he would be to making conversation.
    The airport was on the south side of the city, on the way to Teotitlan, so in no more than ten minutes they were free of the bustle of city traffic and the scrawled political graffiti, and out in a wide, flat valley checkered with the same small, rectangular farms he had seen from the air. Most were communally owned, he’d read, a result of the sweeping nineteenth-century reforms of Benito Juarez. Here in Oaxaca, Juarez’s home, virtually all of the old haciendas and large ranchos had been broken up. There were alfalfa plots, corn, garbanzos, maguey (for making mezcal), cereal crops for animal feeds… not that he could tell one from the other, of course, but so he’d read and so he believed.
    There were small communities on the flanks of the distant dun-colored hills on either side, but buildings in the center of the valley, along the highway, were scarce. There was an occasional isolated roadside tourist shop-weavings, mezcal, crafts-but no businesses geared to the locals. And those few scattered dwellings that existed near the highway were in small family compounds enclosed within high whitewashed walls, although every now and then one in brilliant tangerine orange, or canary yellow, or chartreuse green would bring him suddenly awake.
    When, after a while, he was awake enough to tune in to the conversation behind him, Annie was