One More for the Road by Ray Bradbury

dockyard in which stood silent buildings with broken windows and huge prehistoric-looking lifters and movers, frozen somewhere back in time. For now the iron limbs and pincers and chains shook in the wind and dropped rust on the empty dock timbers where no rats ran and no cats pursued.
    There was an emptiness to the entire scene that caused the young driver to slow his Jeep and gaze about at the motionless machinery and the shoreline on which not one wave arrived nor another followed.
    The sky was empty, too, for with no surf or creatures within the surf to be seized, the gulls had long since sailed north of this silence, the tombstone buildings, and the dead ironworks.
    The very silence of the place braked the Jeep still more so that it seemed underwater, drifting across a plaza where a population had left at dawn without disturbing the air or promising return.
    â€œMy God,” the young man in the Jeep whispered. “It’s really dead.”
    The Jeep stopped at last in front of a building on which a sign read GOMEZ/BAR. Some flags, with the colors of Mexico, rippled softly, the only motion.
    The young driver got out of the Jeep slowly and was moving toward the bar when a tall man of some few years stepped forth, his hair a great white bush over his black scowl, the huge bulk of his body clad in the all-white of a bartender, a clean white towel draped over his left arm, a wineglass in the other hand. He stood scowling at the Jeep as if it were an affront and then lifted his scowl to the young man and slowly held out the glass.
    â€œNo one ever comes here,” he said, in a deep guttural tone.
    â€œSo it seems,” said the young man uneasily.
    â€œNo one has come here in sixty years.”
    â€œI can see that.” The young man directed his gaze to the shoreline, the docks, the sea, and the air with no gulls.
    â€œYou did not expect to find anyone.” It was a statement, not a question.
    â€œNo one,” said the younger man. “But here you are.”
    â€œWhy not? Since 1932 the town is my town, the harbor my harbor. This plaza mine. This, this is my place. Why? Out there in the harbor, it happened, years ago.”
    â€œThe sandbar?”
    â€œIt came. It settled. Some ships did not escape. You see? They are rusting.”
    â€œCouldn’t they clear the sandbar away?”
    â€œThey tried. This was Mexico’s biggest port, with great dreams. They had an opera house. See the shops, the gilt and the tile. They all departed.”
    â€œSo sand has more value than gold,” said the young man.
    â€œYes. A little sand makes a great mountain.”
    â€œDoes no one live here?”
    â€œThis one.” The big man shrugged. “Gomez.”
    â€œSeñor Gomez.” The young man nodded.
    â€œJames Clayton.”
    â€œJames Clayton.”
    He motioned with the wineglass.
    James Clayton turned silently to scan the plaza, the town, the flat sea.
    â€œThis then is Santo Domingo?”
    â€œCall it what you will.”
    â€œEl Silencio says more. Abandonado, the world’s largest tomb. A place of ghosts.”
    â€œAll of those.”
    â€œThe Lonely Place. I have rarely known such loneliness. At the edge of town tears filled my eyes. I remembered an American graveyard in France years ago. I doubt ghosts, but I felt crushed. The air above the tombs took my breath. My heart almost stopped. I got out. This,” he nodded, “is the same. Except, none are buried here.”
    â€œOnly the Past,” said Gomez.
    â€œAnd the Past can’t hurt you.”
    â€œIt is always trying. Well.”
    Gomez looked as if he might empty the wineglass. James Clayton took the glass and said, “Tequila?”
    â€œWhat else would a man offer?”
    â€œNo man that I know. Gracias .”
    â€œLet it shoot you. Put your head back—now!”
    The young man did this, blushed and gasped. “I’m shot!”
    â€œLet us kill you