He walked Sands around the town the first day, starting at the house each time and taking him to the various places he might need to know. He would only have to do this once, he knew – the man was trained to gather information, and forgot nothing that might later be of use.
Spending a full two hours with Sands keeping every step behind him did nothing at all to reduce the level of crawling discomfort he felt in doing it. But every time he looked back, Sands was pure concentration, tilting his head to hear the sounds, raising his finger to feel how the breeze flowed around the buildings, reaching mentally for the landmarks El described to him.
He included the church on his list of locations, and when Sands worked out where he was, it earned him a fast punch to the ribs and some very pithy comments on religion, but the amusement was worth it.
By the end of those two hours, Sands was limping obviously again on his left leg, but it was still much more than he'd been capable of a week before in Culiacán.
El hadn't offered to stop when Sands began to limp. Sands wouldn't have appreciated the suggestion.
Over the following days, Sands retraced those paths - even to the church, El noted with some surprise. Slowly at first, increasingly hesitant as he neared the end of his route, feeling cautiously for the building ahead, but with growing confidence as he established more patterns and landmarks.
Sands wouldn't learn only the simplest way by counting steps, nothing so short-sighted that it would leave him equally lost the moment he left this place for somewhere else.
He spent a lot of time each day just sitting in the square. Often, he appeared to be asleep in the sun, but El watched him, saw the slight adjustments of his head, and knew him to be listening.
The people mostly avoided Sands; his warnings to Father Ríos had been spread and heeded. Sands had contact with them only when he bought things, usually his packs of cigarettes, and the conversation then was entirely polite, but minimal, each time El overheard. The children too kept away from him while he sat there, playing and staring at a distance.
They had finished eating on the third evening when Sands asked, his voice acid sweet. "Would you care to enlighten me on exactly what you've told these people about me, El?"
El didn't intend to deny it, sipping at too-hot coffee only to make Sands wait. "The truth," he said evenly.
Sands tipped his head, considering. "Well, I guess that would do it."
"I thought so."
Sands stirred at his drink, the spoon scraping rhythmically around the edge of the cup over and over. "Did you know the kids in this charming country haven of yours have me down as the local bogeyman?" His voice dropped and slowed a little. "You get to overhear the most interesting things from children."
His every muscle went still, dropping into that momentary relaxation before he moved.
Despite all his awareness of who Sands was, he had never seriously considered whether he should just put a bullet through the man's head.
Sands had killed for less than an insult, he knew. But he hadn't heard anything to suggest that Sands' unpredictable violence ever extended to children.
He remembered the boy at the house, thought of the desperate pleading it must have taken to convince his parents to harbour a bleeding, screaming madman. However Sands had spoken to the boy, he must have done something to inspire that loyalty.
El wondered what it was, and knew he would be left to wonder.
He closed his eyes briefly, clearing his thoughts. It was draining, always trying to twist his mind to fit with Sands', to predict him and his viciousness.
He didn't want to think like Sands.
"They make up stories to scare themselves," he said. "All children do."
"Mmmm." Sands' wordless reply was intentionally unrevealing, he was sure of it.
But he didn't think Sands would attack the children.
After those first few days, Sands began leaving the house at night.
El watched him sometimes when the moon allowed, simple curiosity stirring, as well as that driven need to better understand the danger he had brought to his home. Sands retraced those same routes of travel he walked during the day, beginning slowly again. The noises were fewer at night, and distinctive; the atmosphere changed, and sound travelled differently. Although the paths were the same, Sands would have to relearn them, the broader echoes, the absence of other voices to guide him, darkness altering his world almost as much as for a sighted man.
When he could move with equal confidence night and day, Sands began to change his nocturnal patterns.
It was a fascinating thing to watch, Sands using those painstakingly constructed mental maps to navigate between places without first returning to the house. He walked steadily, with utter concentration, the length of each stride precise and constant now that he no longer limped. El struggled to imagine the concentration and discipline involved, using sounds and vectors to establish a direction and step out into nothing, fighting the urge to waver and doubt.
He made errors, yes. He walked into buildings he should have passed, his lips moving with muttered curses El couldn't hear from the window where he sat and watched. But he would re-orientate himself each time, and set out again with the same measured determination. He learned with rapidly increasing speed, and he only had to get something right once to know it.
When Sands began using those new pathways in daytime, he was almost flawless.
El had done enough observing to see that Sands was a little slower than when he truly knew, that he shifted and angled his head constantly as he reached to triangulate sound. Sands had learned the varying characteristics of dark and daylight, and he applied that knowledge now to the routes learned in darkness without fault.
The villagers stared openly at the blind man who now walked around their town with no guide, in absolute certainty of where he was.
It was astonishing to El, and he had anticipated that Sands would prove highly adaptable. To anyone who hadn't observed his rigid learning curve, it would have seemed impossible.
But Sands could also still be thrown into desperation.
El never knew what caused it - some unexpected sound he didn't catch, maybe, something Sands perhaps felt - but Sands suddenly twisted and dropped one night, rolling across the square with his gun drawn, before flattening himself motionless to listen.
He lay for long minutes, a black shadow on grey earth. El scanned his senses over everything fast, then again slower, third, fourth times, but heard and saw nothing to alert him.
When Sands rose back to his feet, in slow stages with more listening pauses between, he had lost his bearings. The confusion was instantly obvious as he turned on the spot, his head tilting for sound, reaching for something. He circled slowly several times, tapped his heel on the ground and listened for echoes from the buildings, but his posture remained one of uncertainty, hunched and defensive.
When he moved, his exact, measured strides were gone, his feet shuffling cautiously through the dirt, his hands feeling the air before him. The lengthy dedication and effort of several weeks meant nothing as Sands was once again completely disorientated, reduced to groping around with all his confidence leached down into the soil.
He watched, and resisted the urge to engineer some distinctive sound.
Sands would hate him for it.
He walked slowly, feeling for the ground with each step, his arms sweeping circles around him. His path stayed straight - he was lost, but not careless - following a slight diagonal across the square. He missed the last of the guitar stalls by metres, finally halting when his arm found the wall near the church. He ran his hands eagerly over the surface, but it was undistinctive, nothing to mark it from the others surrounding various parts of the square.
He stood slumped against the wall, his head resting on the stone.
He stayed that way, moments long enough to make El start to wonder if... but then he gathered and straightened, following the wall. He walked more confidently with a guide, one hand trailing over the wall, the other ahead of him.
He stopped the instant he reached the church grounds, his fingers marking the difference in the quality of the work. His left hand swept upwards over it, tracing the distinctive balustrade at its top. The change in him was fast, marked even at this distance, his body losing the forced stiffness to stand sure and natural.
El had expected Sands would return to the house after that, but he didn't. He stood a few moments, his hand against the curling stonework, then resumed his deliberate explorations, moving with steady grace once more.
It wasn't a mistake he saw him make again.
He wondered if Sands practiced that too, out of his sight - he had no doubt Sands suspected that he watched - twisting and diving through the blackness until he could do it without losing track of the rotations, until he could get back to his feet and still know where the world was around him.
It was something El would do, after that kind of experience, and he anticipated no less of Sands.
The other place Sands spent a lot of his daylight hours, once his legs were healed enough to take the stairs, was on the roof of the abandoned hacienda.
It annoyed El at first, that Sands would invade what he regarded as his place, the place he chose when he simply wanted to be alone with the music. But Sands kept the same pattern there as he did in the square, hour after hour locked in concentration, shifting his position from time to time and listening again.
He never asked El to stop playing, not even when the music fought him, when his left hand stiffened on the cooler evenings or it simply wasn't right, and it wasn't hard after a while to ignore him, to forget the silent man opposite, giving all his attention to the guitar as it demanded.
It took him longer than it should have to realise that Sands was using the music as something to listen through, a distraction to put aside while he sought out the other sounds that mattered beneath it, the sounds that drifted up from the town below, scattered and broken by gusting breezes.
The next time he needed to gain an advantage over Sands, the television wouldn't be such an ally.
The whole time that Sands was learning, El learned too.
Sands often spoke with his hands. Not when he was manipulating, probing with words; then he was all cool, interested detachment, feeling for the reactions he sought. But when he had something to say, a point to make, he stabbed at the air with his fingers, trailing smoke from the cigarette between them.
He hadn't done that in those days they travelled after leaving Culiacán. El recognised again just how much pain he'd been struggling to hide, and felt the guilt circling him. He'd been pleased to see Sands suffer, had in some small ways deliberately made it worse, and now it made him feel like a boy pulling wings from flies to watch them crawl.
He didn't like to think those things of himself, but they were there. They were always there.
And Sands knew it too.
He asked him about the coup, carefully choosing one of the quiet moments in the evening after they ate when Sands seemed almost settled, the rare time when he wasn't pushing. "How much of it was you?"
"Why does it matter? It doesn't change anything." He didn't sound surprised to be asked, only bored.
"It matters because so many people died, and I want to know what you were responsible for."
Sands only shrugged. "You killed a few people yourself, El. I heard you left quite a trail from the market, and I wouldn't care to guess what you got up to during the coup. Whether Barillo killed them, I killed them, you killed them, it's not so different."
El breathed in air still laced with spice and onion from his cooking, let it drift down through his lungs, swallowing that first angry response with it - he'd become practiced at that now, too aware that when he yelled and spat his words, Sands took it as instant victory. He held his voice bound to a colder level of hatred that Sands respected, the accusation still clear, but controlled. "I'm nothing like you, or him," he said. "You kill because you want to. I kill because I have to."
Sands finally turned towards him then, and El felt the illusion of shiftless stare from behind the sunglasses. "Really, El, if you must try to bullshit me, then you go right ahead, but it's a sad thing to see a man lying to himself. We both know how much you liked killing Marquez, and Barillo. Hell, you probably even enjoyed killing your own brother. You may as well just accept it and get over it."
El said nothing. Sands was wrong about César – that had needed to be done, but he hadn't ever wanted to do it – but the others... That moment when the gun went off in his hand, as they looked at him and they knew, it felt like justice, hot and good. In that moment, he wanted to do it again and again, to clean his country of every last scrap of filth that walked within it and have them know why.
It was only later, when he sat alone, all his weapons cleaned of the blood and gunpowder, that he started to question. Not what he had done, he never questioned that. If he had, he would have perhaps stayed away from the killing, instead of always going back. He questioned instead the way it made him feel, and those perfect moments became edged and tainted with guilt.
"The men I kill deserve to die," he said finally. "All of them. You kill at random."
"No. I don't." Sands' face was still fixed towards him, unsmiling now, unmocking. "I always have a reason."
El believed him, oddly. Or he believed that Sands believed it, which was truthfully one of the more disturbing aspects of the man. "Making a point isn't a good enough reason."
Sands shadowed his thoughts easily, never needing to question his meaning. "I knew you'd check," he said. "If I hadn't killed him after that little speech, I don't think you would have quite taken me seriously."
"You're wrong," he said slowly. "I already did." He had met enough dangerous men. He knew them when he saw them.
"Oh, well," Sands said, no change in his tone. "It was still a great metaphor, wouldn't you say?" He was half-smiling again, complete unconcern. "I was making it up on the spot, you know - I had this whole speech ready in my head about how it would be good for Mexico, and then when I watched you sitting there, so determined to ignore me, I just knew you were the kind of man who'd appreciate the more direct approach."
He didn't hide his disgust, his bitterness. "You truly did think I was so stupid."
"It really wasn't anything personal, El, I just find it's easiest to assume that about everyone."
He didn't bother to ask whether Sands had changed his mind.
"So was it you?" he persisted.
Sands looked mildly amused. "The coup? Hell, no, Barillo came up with that idea all by himself."
"And you just took it and used it."
He shrugged, uninterested. "Why not? It was there."
He still didn't know if 'you' was the CIA or just Sands.
He wasn't sure he wanted to. He didn't know what he would do with the answer.
He set up wind chimes made of spoons and cans in the trees outside town, and Sands shot them down day after day. He was surprisingly accurate when he began, but he improved still further, and Sands wouldn't stop until he could hit every one with the first bullet, from a draw.
It was an impressive skill, as so many things about Sands were turning out to be, but it was very different with moving targets and distractions, with no time to aim except for instinct. El held out little hope for Sands in a gunfight. He would only win with the aid of surprise.
El knew Sands had been able to kill Barillo's people because they were stupid enough to think a blind man was no threat. They could have killed Sands easily many times, but they'd chosen to play with him instead. It was an advantage of a kind, but he wondered if it still existed, or if the stories of the Day of the Dead had already spread too far for that.
That was something Sands would discover when they left this place.
He wondered when that would be. Neither of them had mentioned the deal they had struck that had brought them here, and the cheap paper colours that draped the village through Christmas were already weeks gone.