Guilt. It’s a passion more enduring than love or hate, more powerful than greed or lust. Other passions fade away after a while, becoming only memories, good or bad, but guilt carves canyons of the mind that last for geological ages. Juan Sanchez had already had to live with a bit of guilt in his short life. He had gone off to college in Los Angeles, moved in with his girlfriend Paula Garcia, was in fact in bed with her the night his mother committed suicide. Bev Sanchez had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and died quietly, alone. Would she have died, at that time, in that way, if her son Juan had been with her in Santa Fe instead of in Los Angeles? If he had even been by the phone to receive the call she had made that night to his apartment instead of her having to leave a brief phone message: “Have a good life. None of it has been your fault. You’re a good boy and I love you.” But of course it had been his fault, or at least he was sure it must have been, the fault of all he had done and not done, the unending sins of commission and omission that children inflict on their parents. Parents give and kids take. That’s the way of the world. At some point, in theory, the scales balance and kids begin to give back to their parents. But for many, like Juan, there is not enough time in the world for the scales to come into balance. Juan, like all sons, had been eager to devour life. His hunger was insatiable. Life was waiting. So he had ignored her pleas to stay home, cultivate his Hispanic roots and be only what his ancestors had been, workers in the vineyard of working-class Hispanic New Mexico, a member of a race whose roots ran back before the United States, before Mexico, to the impoverished 16th-century Spanish peasants and soldiers from Andalusia who had left Iberia to find a new world. Well, Juan sometimes reminded himself, he was doing only what his ancestors had done, leaving a world without a future for another that had one. Like all young men, the teenaged Juan had not had a clear vision of that world he was seeking, but he knew it had to be better, brighter than the sorry routine he was leaving behind, the small town where all buildings had to be mud and brown, the class system where East Coast artists and divorcées hired his friends to cook and clean and repair their cars and patch their roofs. There had to be a better world than that one, the one with the sorry schools that were bankrupt because the Anglo newcomers didn’t have kids and so didn’t see any need to pay taxes to support the schools; the world that had politics as its only outlet, but a corrupt politics where a patron could be called on to pay for a funeral or break the legs of a guy who attacked one of his loyalists but where programs to help the needy were nonexistent—except, of course, that most expensive of all welfare programs, prison, where the state gladly paid $50,000 or $60,000 a year to house a guy who could have been rescued for a tenth of that if anybody had had the wisdom and foresight and generosity to do so. But no one did, so Juan went to Los Angeles, and he slept at his girlfriend’s apartment and he was nowhere to be found when on her last night on Earth his mother called to bid him and her existence farewell. He knew the next day, and he had known everyday since, that it didn’t matter what was or was not his fault; he was guilty, and the guilt would never dissolve, and he knew, he swore, he dedicated himself to never again having to feel such guilt. And then, and then, what did he do, but run a guy off the road and almost kill him? And not just any guy but the first independent candidate for governor in the state’s history. That was something that would have to be paid for, something demanding recompense, and he knew he would have to give it, and give it gladly; and he did.