The Tortilla Curtain

1

AFTERWARD, HE TRIED TO REDUCE IT TO ABSTRACT terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces-the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye-but he wasn't very successful. This wasn't a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn't random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Piñon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of the mustache-they infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality. He saw his victim in a book of stamps at the post office, reflected in the blameless glass panels of the gently closing twin doors at Jordan's elementary school, staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio's in the shank of the evening.

The whole thing had happened so quickly. One minute he was winding his way up the canyon with a backseat full of newspapers, mayonnaise jars and Diet Coke cans for the recycler, thinking nothing, absolutely nothing, and the next thing he knew the car was skewed across the shoulder in a dissipating fan of dust. The man must have been crouching in the bushes like some feral thing, like a stray dog or bird-mauling cat, and at the last possible moment he'd flung himself across the road in a mad suicidal scramble. There was the astonished look, a flash of mustache, the collapsing mouth flung open in a mute cry, and then the brake, the impact, the marimba rattle of the stones beneath the car, and finally, the dust. The car had stalled, the air conditioner blowing full, the voice on the radio nattering on about import quotas and American jobs. The man was gone. Delaney opened his eyes and unclenched his teeth. The accident was over, already a moment in history.

To his shame, Delaney's first thought was for the car (was it marred, scratched, dented?), and then for his insurance rates (what was this going to do to his good-driver discount?), and finally, belatedly, for the victim. Who was he? Where had he gone? Was he all right? Was he hurt? Bleeding? Dying? Delaney's hands trembled on the wheel. He reached mechanically for the key and choked off the radio. It was then, still strapped in and rushing with adrenaline, that the reality of it began to hit him: he'd injured, possibly killed, another human being. It wasn't his fault, god knew-the man was obviously insane, demented, suicidal, no jury would convict him-but there it was, all the same. Heart pounding, he slipped out from under the seat belt, eased open the door and stepped tentatively onto the parched strip of naked stone and litter that constituted the shoulder of the road.

Immediately, before he could even catch his breath, he was brushed back by the tailwind of a string of cars racing bumper-to-bumper up the canyon like some snaking malignant train. He clung to the side of his car as the sun caught his head in a hammerlock and the un-air-conditioned heat rose from the pavement like a fist in the face, like a knockout punch. Two more cars shot by. He was dizzy. Sweating. He couldn't seem to control his hands. “I've had an accident,” he said to himself, repeating it over and over like a mantra, “I've had an accident.”

But where was the victim? Had he been flung clear, was that it? Delaney looked round him helplessly. Cars came down the canyon, burnished with light; cars went up it; cars turned into the lumberyard a hundred yards up on the right and into the side street beyond it, whining past him as if he didn't exist. One after another the faces of the drivers came at him, shadowy and indistinct behind the armor of their smoked-glass windshields. Not a head turned. No one stopped.

He walked round the front of the car first, scanning the mute unrevealing brush along the roadside-ceanothus, chamise, redshanks-for some sign of what had happened. Then he turned to the car. The plastic lens over the right headlight was cracked and the turn-signal housing had been knocked out of its track, but aside from that the car seemed undamaged. He threw an uneasy glance at the bushes, then worked his way along the passenger side to the rear, expecting the worst, the bleeding flesh and hammered bone, sure now that the man must have been trapped under the car. Stooping, palm flat, one knee in the dirt, he forced himself to look. Crescendo and then release: nothing there but dust and more dust.

The license plate-PILGRIM-caught the sun as he rose and clapped the grit from his hands, and he looked to the bushes yet again. “Hello!” he cried suddenly over the noise of the cars flashing by in either direction. “Is anybody there? Are you okay?”

He turned slowly round, once, twice, as if he'd forgotten something-a set of keys, his glasses, his wallet-then circled the car again. How could no one have seen what had happened? How could no one have stopped to help, bear witness, gape, jeer-anything? A hundred people must have passed by in the last five minutes and yet he might as well have been lost in the Great Painted Desert for all the good it did him. He looked off up the road to the bend by the lumberyard and the grocery beyond it, and saw the distant figure of a man climbing into a parked car, the hard hot light exploding round him. And then, fighting down the urge to run, to heave himself into the driver's seat and burn up the tires, to leave the idiot to his fate and deny everything-the date, the time, the place, his own identity and the sun in the sky-Detaney turned back to the bushes. “Hello?” he called again.

Nothing. The cars tore past. The sun beat at his shouldng A his shoers, his neck, the back of his head.

To the left, across the road, was a wall of rock; to the right, the canyon fell off to the rusty sandstone bed of Topanga Creek, hundreds of feet below. Delaney could see nothing but brush and treetops, but he knew now where his man was-down there, down in the scrub oak and manzanita. The high-resin-compound bumper of the Acura had launched that sad bundle of bone and gristle over the side of the canyon like a Ping-Pong ball shot out of a cannon, and what chance was there to survive that? He felt sick suddenly, his brain mobbed with images from the eyewitness news-shootings, stabbings, auto wrecks, the unending parade of victims served up afresh each day-and something hot and sour rose in his throat. Why him? Why did this have to happen to him?

He was about to give it up and jog to the lumberyard for help, for the police, an ambulance-they'd know what to do-when a glint of light caught his eye through the scrim of brush. He staggered forward blindly, stupidly, like a fish to a lure-he wanted to do the right thing, wanted to help, he did. But almost as quickly, he caught himself. This glint wasn't what he'd expected-no coin or crucifix, no belt buckle, key chain, medal or steel-toed boot wrenched from the victim's foot-just a shopping cart, pocked with rust and concealed in the bushes beside a rough trail that plunged steeply down the hillside, vanishing round a right-angle bend no more than twenty feet away.

Delaney called out again. Cupped his hands and shouted. And then he straightened up, wary suddenly, catlike and alert. At five-foot-nine and a hundred and sixty-five pounds, he was compact, heavy in the shoulders and with a natural hunch that made him look as if he were perpetually in danger of pitching forward on his face, but he was in good shape and ready for anything. What startled him to alertness was the sudden certainty that the whole thing had been staged-he'd read about this sort of operation in the Metro section, gangs faking accidents and then preying on the unsuspecting, law-abiding, compliant and fully insured motorist… But then where was the gang? Down the path? Huddled round the bend waiting for him to take that first fatal step off the shoulder and out of sight of the road?

He might have gone on speculating for the rest of the afternoon, the vanishing victim a case for _Unsolved Mysteries__ or the Home Video Network, if he hadn't become aware of the faintest murmur from the clump of vegetation to his immediate right. But it was more than a murmur-it was a deep aching guttural moan that made something catch in his throat, an expression of the most primitive and elemental experience we know: pain. Delaney's gaze jumped from the shopping cart to the path and then to the bush at his right, and there he was, the man with the red-flecked eyes and graying mustache, the daredevil, the suicide, the jack-in-the-box who'd popped up in front of his bumper and ruined his afternoon. The man was on his back, limbs dangling, as loose-jointed as a doll flung in a corner by an imperious little girl. A trail of blood, thick as a finger, leaked from the corner of his mouth, and Delaney couldn't remember ever having seen anything so bright. Two eyes, dull with pain, locked on him like a set of jaws.

“Are you… are you okay?” Delaney heard himself say.

The man winced, tried to move his head. Delaney saw now that the left side of the man's face-the side that had been turned away from him-was raw, scraped and flensed like a piece of meat stripped from the hide. And then he noticed the man's left arm, the torn shirtsleeve and the skin beneath it stippled with blood and bits of dirt and leaf mold, and the blood-slick hand that clutched a deflated paper bag to his chest. Slivers of glass tore through the bag like clawt w Ag like cs and orange soda soaked the man's khaki shirt; a plastic package, through which. Delaney could make out a stack of _tortillas (Como Hechas a Mano),__ clung to the man's crotch as if fastened there.

“Can I help you?” Delaney breathed, gesturing futilely, wondering whether to reach down a hand or not-should he be moved? Could he? “I mean, I'm sorry, I-why did you run out like that? What possessed you? Didn't you see me?”

Flies hovered in the air. The canyon stretched out before them, slabs of upthrust stone and weathered tumbles of rock, light and shadow at war. The man tried to collect himself. He kicked out his legs like an insect pinned to a mounting board, and then his eyes seemed to sharpen, and with a groan he struggled to a sitting position. He said something then in a foreign language, a gargle and rattle in the throat, and Delaney didn't know what to do.

It wasn't French he was speaking, that was for sure. And it wasn't Norwegian. The United States didn't share a two-thousand-mile border with France-or with Norway either. The man was Mexican, Hispanic, that's what he was, and he was speaking Spanish, a hot crazed drumroll of a language to which Delaney's four years of high-school French gave him little access. _“Docteur?”__ he tried.

The man's face was a blank. Blood trickled steadily from the corner of his mouth, camouflaged by the mustache. He wasn't as young as Delaney had first thought, or as slight-the shirt was stretched tight across his shoulders and there was a visible swelling round his middle, just above the package of _tortillas.__ There was gray in his hair too. The man grimaced and sucked in his breath, displaying a mismatched row of teeth that were like pickets in a rotting fence. _“No quiero un matasanos,”__ he growled, wincing as he staggered to his feet in a cyclone of twigs, dust and crushed tumbleweed, _“no lo necesito.”__

For a long moment they stood there, examining each other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim, and then the man let the useless bag drop from his fingers with a tinkle of broken glass. It lay at his feet in the dirt, and they both stared at it, frozen in time, until he reached down absently to retrieve the _tortillas,__ which were still pinned to the crotch of his pants. He seemed to shake himself then, like a dog coming out of a bath, and as he clutched the _tortillas__ in his good hand, he bent forward woozily to hawk a gout of blood into the dirt.

Delaney felt the relief wash over him-the man wasn't going to die, he wasn't going to sue, he was all right and it was over. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked, feeling charitable now. “I mean, give you a ride someplace or something?” Delaney pointed to the car. He held his fists up in front of his face and pantomimed the act of driving. _“Dans la voiture?”__

The man spat again. The left side of his face glistened in the harsh sunlight, ugly and wet with fluid, grit, pills of flesh and crushed vegetation. He looked at Delaney as if he were an escaped lunatic. “Dooo?” he echoed.

Delaney shuffled his feet. The heat was getting to him. He pushed the glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He gave it one more try: “You know-_help.__ Can I help you?”

And then the man grinned, or tried to. A film of blood clung to the jagged teeth and he licked it away with a flick of his tongue. “Monee?” he whispered, and he rubbed the fingers of his free hand together.

“Money,” Delaney repeated, “okay, yes, money,” and he reached for his wallet as the sun drilled the canyon and the cars sifted by and a vulture, high overhead, rode the hot air rising from below.

Delaney didn't remember getting back into the car, but somehow he found himself steering, braking and applying gas as he followed a set of taillights up the canyon, sealed in and impervious once again. He drove in a daze, hardly conscious of the air conditioner blasting in his face, so wound up in his thoughts that he went five blocks past the recycling center before realizing his error, and then, after making a questionable U-turn against two lanes of oncoming traffic, he forgot himself again and drove past the place in the opposite direction. It was over. Money had changed hands, there were no witnesses, and the man was gone, out of his life forever. And yet, no matter how hard he tried, Delaney couldn't shake the image of him.

He'd given the man twenty dollars-it seemed the least he could do-and the man had stuffed the bill quickly into the pocket of his cheap stained pants, sucked in his breath and turned away without so much as a nod or gesture of thanks. Of course, he was probably in shock. Delaney was no doctor, but the guy had looked pretty shaky-and his face was a mess, a real mess. Leaning forward to hold out the bill, Delaney had watched, transfixed, as a fly danced away from the abraded flesh along the line of the man's jaw, and another, fat-bodied and black, settled in to take its place. In that moment the strange face before him was transformed, annealed in the brilliant merciless light, a hard cold wedge of a face that looked strangely loose in its coppery skin, the left cheekbone swollen and misaligned-was it bruised? Broken? Or was that the way it was supposed to look? Before Delaney could decide, the man had turned abruptly away, limping off down the path with an exaggerated stride that would have seemed comical under other circumstances-Delaney could think of nothing so much as Charlie Chaplin walking off some imaginary hurt-and then he'd vanished round the bend and the afternoon wore on like a tattered fabric of used and borrowed moments.

Somber, his hands shaking even yet, Delaney unloaded his cans and glass-green, brown and clear, all neatly separated-into the appropriate bins, then drove his car onto the big industrial scales in front of the business office to weigh it, loaded, for the newspaper. While the woman behind the window totted up the figure on his receipt, he found himself thinking about the injured man and whether his cheekbone would knit properly if it was, in fact, broken-you couldn't put a splint on it, could you? And where was he going to bathe and disinfect his wounds? In the creek? At a gas station?

It was crazy to refuse treatment like that, just crazy. But he had. And that meant he was iilega! — go to the doctor, get deported. There was a desperation in that, a gulf of sadness that took Delaney out of himself for a long moment, and he just stood there in front of the office, receipt in hand, staring into space.

He. tried to picture the man's life-the cramped room, the bag of second-rate oranges on the streetcorner, the spade and the hoe. and the cold mashed beans dug out of the forty-nine-cent can. Unrefriger- ated _tortillas.__ Orange soda. That oom-pah music with the accordions and the tinny harmonies. But what was he doing on Topanga Canyon Boulevard at one-thirty in the afternoon, out there in the middle of nowhere? Working? Taking a lunch break?

And then all at once Delaney knew, and the understanding hit him with a jolt: the shopping cart, the _tortillas,__ the trail beaten into the dirt-he was camping down there, that's what he was doing. Camping. Living. Dwelling. Making the trees and bushes and the natural habitat of Topanga State Park into his own private domicile, crapping in the chaparral, dumping his trash behind rocks, polluting the stream and ru? I Aream andining it for everyone else. That was state property down there, rescued from the developers and their bulldozers and set aside for the use of the public, for nature, not for some outdoor ghetto. And what about fire danger? The canyon was a tinderbox this time of year, everyone knew that.

Delaney felt his guilt turn to anger, to outrage.

God, how he hated that sort of thing-the litter alone was enough to set him off. How many times had he gone down one trail or another with a group of volunteers, with the rakes and shovels and black plastic bags? And how many times had he come back, sometimes just days later, to find the whole thing trashed again? There wasn't a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains that didn't have its crushed beer cans, its carpet of glass, its candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and it was people like this Mexican or whatever he was who were responsible, thoughtless people, stupid people, people who wanted to turn the whole world into a garbage dump, a little Tijuana…

Delaney was seething, ready to write his congressman, call the sheriff, anything-but then he checked himself. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Who knew who this man was or what he was doing? Just because he spoke Spanish didn't make him a criminal. Maybe he was a picnicker, a bird-watcher, a fisherman; maybe he was some naturalist from South of the Border studying the gnatcatcher or the canyon wren…

Yeah, sure. And Delaney was the King of Siam.

When he came back to himself, he saw that he'd managed to reenter the car, drive past the glass and aluminum receptacles and into the enormous littered warehouse with its mountains of cardboard and paper and the dark intense men scrabbling through the drifts of yesterday's news-men, he saw with a shock of recognition, who were exactly like the jack-in-the-box on the canyon road, right down to the twin pits of their eyes and the harsh black strokes of their mustaches. They were even wearing the same khaki workshirts and sacklike trousers. He'd been in Los Angeles nearly two years now, and he'd never really thought about it before, but they were everywhere, these men, ubiquitous, silently going about their business, whether it be mopping up the floors at McDonald's, inverting trash cans in the alley out back of Emilio's or moving purposively behind the rakes and blowers that combed the pristine lawns of Arroyo Blanco Estates twice a week. Where had they all come from? What did they want? And why did they have to throw themselves under the wheels' of his car?

He had the back door open and was shifting his tightly bound bundles of paper from the car to the nearest pile, when a shrill truncated whistle cut through the din of machinery, idling engines, slamming doors and trunks. Delaney looked up. A forklift had wheeled up beside him and the man driving it, his features inscrutable beneath the brim of his yellow hard hat, was gesturing to him. The man said something Delaney couldn't quite catch. “What?” he called out over the noise of the place: A hot wind surged through the warehouse doors, flinging dust. Ads and supplements shot into the air, _Parade, Holiday, Ten Great Escapes for the Weekend.__ Engines idled, men shouted, forklifts beeped and stuttered. The man looked down on him from his perch, the bright work-polished arms of the vehicle sagging beneath its load of newsprint, as if it were inadequate to the task, as if even sheet metal and steel couldn't help but buckle under the weight of all that news.

_“Ponlos allá,”__ he said, pointing to the far corner of the building.

Delaney stared up at him, his arms burdened with paper. “What?” he repeated.

For a long moment, the man simply sat there, returning his gaze. Another car pulled in. A pigeon dove from the rafters and Delaney saw that there were dozens of them there, caught against the high open two-story drift of the roof. The man in the hard hat bent forward and spat carefully on the pavement. And then suddenly, without warning, the forklift lurched back, swung round, and vanished in the drifts of printed waste.

“So what'd you hit-a deer? Coyote?”

Delaney was in the showroom of the Acura dealership, a great ugly crenellated box of a building he'd always hated-it didn't blend with the surrounding hills, didn't begin to, not at all-but somehow, today, he felt strangely comforted by it. Driving up with his cracked lens and disarranged signal housing, he'd seen it as a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets. There were desks, telephones, the air was cool, the floors buffed to brilliance. And the cars themselves, hard and unassailable, so new they smelled of wax, rubber and plastic only, were healing presences arranged like heavy furniture throughout the cavern of the room. He was sitting on the edge of Kenny Grissom's desk, and Kenny Grissom, the enthusiastic moon-faced thirty-five-year-old boy who'd sold him the car, was trying to look concerned.

Delaney shrugged, already reaching for the phone. “A dog, I think it was. Might have been a coyote, but kind of big for a coyote. Must have been a dog. Sure it was. Yeah. A dog.”

Why was he lying? Why did he keep thinking of shadowy black-and-white movies, men in creased hats leaning forward to light cigarettes, the hit-and-run driver tracked down over a few chips of paint-or a cracked headlight? Because he was covering himself, that's why. Because he'd just left the poor son of a bitch there alongside the road, abandoned him, and because he'd been glad of it, relieved to buy him off with his twenty dollars' blood money. And how did that square with his liberal-humanist ideals?

“I hit a dog once,” Kenny Grissom offered, “when I was living out in Arizona? It was this big gray shaggy thing, a sheepdog, I guess it was. I was driving a pickup at the time, Ford half-ton with a four-sixty in it, and my girlfriend was with me. I never even seen the thing-one minute I'm cruising, and the next minute my girlfriend's all in tears and there's this thing that looks like an old rug in the middle of the road in back of me. I don't know. So I back up and the dog like lurches to his feet, but he's only got three legs and I thought like holy shit I blew his leg right off, but then Kim gets out and we kind of look and there's no blood or anything, just a stump.”

Kenny's face was working, as if there were something trapped under the skin trying to get out. “Friggin' thing only _had__ three legs to begin with,” he suddenly shouted, “no wonder he couldn't get out of the way!” His laugh reverberated through, the vast hollow spaces of the room, a salesman's laugh, too sharpedged and pleased with itself. And then his face came back to the moment, sober suddenly, composed round the pale tawny bristle of his mustache. “But it's a bitch, I know it is,” he observed in a sort of yodel. “And don't you worry, we'll have your car for you any minute now, good as new. Feel free to use the phone.”

Delaney just nodded. He'd dialed Kyra at work and was listening to the number ring through.

“Hello?” Her voice was bright, amplified, right there with him.

“It's me, honey.”

“What's wrong? Is it Jordan? Something's happened to Jordan?”

Delaney took a deep breath. Suddenly he felt hurt, put-upon, ready to let it all spill out of him. “I had an accident.”

Now it was her turn-the sharp insuck of breath, the voice gone dead in her throat. “Jordan's hurt, isn't he? Tell me, tell me the worst. Quick! I can't stand it!”

“Nobody's hurt, honey, everybody's okay. I haven't even gone to pick Jordan up yet.”

A numb silence, counters clicking, synapses flashing. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

“The Acura dealer. I'm getting the headlight fixed.” He glanced up, lowered his voice, Kenny Grissom nowhere in sight: “I hit a man.”

_“Hit__ a _man?”__ There was a flare of anger in her voice. “What are you talking about?”

“A Mexican. At least I think he was a Mexican. Out on the canyon road. I was on my way to the recycler.”

“My god. Did you call Jack?”

Jack was Jack Jardine, their friend, neighbor, adviser and lawyer, who also happened to be the president of the Arroyo Blanco Estates Property Owners' Association. “No”-Delaney sighed-“I just got here and I wanted to tell you, to let you know-”

“What are you thinking? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what one of these shyster personal-injury lawyers would do to get hold of something like this? You _hit__ a man? Was he hurt? Did you take him to the hospital? Did you call the insurance?”

Delaney tried to gather it all in. She was excitable, Kyra, explosive, her circuits so high-wired she was always on the verge of overload, even when she was asleep. There were no minor issues in her life. “No, listen, Kyra: the guy's okay. I mean, he was just… bruised, that was all. He's gone, he went away. I gave him twenty bucks.”

“Twenty-?”

And then, before the words could turn to ash in his mouth, it was out: “I told you-he was _Mexican.”__

2

HE'D HAD HEADACHES BEFORE-HIS WHOLE LIFE was a headache, his whole stinking worthless _pinche vida__-but never like this. It felt as if a bomb had gone off inside his head, one of those big atomic ones like they dropped on the Japanese, the black roiling clouds pushing and pressing at his skull, no place to go, no release, on and on and on. But that wasn't all-the throb was in his stomach too, and he had to go down on his hands and knees and vomit in the bushes before he'd even got halfway to the camp in the ravine. He felt his breakfast come up-two hard-cooked eggs, half a cup of that weak reheated piss that passed for coffee and a tortilla he'd involuntarily blackened on a stick held over the fire-all of it, every lump and fleck, and then he vomited again. His stomach heaved till he could taste the bile in the back of his throat, and yet he couldn't move, that uncontainable pressure fighting to punch through his ears, and he crouched there for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by a single strand of saliva that dangled endlessly from his lips.

When he got to his feet again, everything had shifted. The shadows had leapt the ravine, the sun was caught in the trees and the indefatigable vulture had been joined by two others. “Yes, sure, come and get me,” he muttered, spitting and wincing at the same time, “that's all I am-a worn-out carcass, a walking slab of meat.” But Christ in Heaven, how it hurt! He raised a hand to the side nevd a han†of his face and the flesh was stiff and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head. What had happened to him? He was crossing the road, coming back from the grocery after the labor exchange closed-the far grocery, the cheaper one, and what did it matter if it was on the other side of the road? The old man there at the checkout-a _paisano,__ he called himself, from Italy-he didn't look at you like you were dirt, like you were going to steal, like you couldn't keep your hands off all the shiny bright packages of this and that, beef jerky and _nachos__ and shampoo, little gray-and-black batteries in a plastic sleeve. He'd bought an orange soda, Nehi, and a package of _tortillas__ to go with the pinto beans burned into the bottom of the pot… and then what? Then he crossed the road.

Yes. And then that pink-faced _gabacho__ ran him down with his flaming _gabacho__ nose and the little lawyer glasses clenched over the bridge of it. All that steel, that glass, that chrome, that big hot iron engine-it was like a tank coming at him, and his only armor was a cotton shirt and pants and a pair of worn-out _huaraches.__ He stared stupidly round him-at the fine tracery of the brush, at the birds lighting in the branches and the treetops below him, at the vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky. America would help him when she got back, she'd brew some tea from manzanita berries to combat the pain, bathe his wounds, cluck her tongue and fuss over him. But he needed to go down the path now, and his hip was bothering him all of a sudden, and the left knee, there, where the trousers were torn.

It hurt. Every step of the way. But he thought of the penitents at Chalma, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh, and he went on. Twice he fell. The first time he caught himself with his good arm, but the second time he tasted dust and his eyes refused to focus, the whole hot blazing world gone cool and dark all of a sudden, as if he'd been transposed to the bottom of the ocean. He heard a mockingbird then, a whistle and trill in the void, and it was as if it had drowned in sunlight too, and then he was dreaming.

His dreams were real. He wasn't flying through the air or talking with the ghost of his mother or vanquishing his enemies-he was stalled in the garbage dump in Tijuana, stalled at the wire, and America was sick with the _gastro__ and he didn't have a cent in the world after the _cholos__ and the _coyotes__ had got done with him. Sticks and cardboard over his head. The stink of burning dogs in the air. Low man in the pecking order, even at the _dompe. Life is poor here,__ an old man-a garbage picker-had told him. Yes, he'd said, and he was saying it now, the words on his lips somewhere between the two worlds, _but at least you have garbage.__

America found him at the bottom of the path, bundled in the twilight like a heap of rags. She'd walked nearly eight miles already, down out of the canyon to the highway along the ocean where she could catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized, and then back again, and she was like death on two feet. Two dollars and twenty cents down the drain and nothing to show for it. In the morning, at first light, she'd walked along the Coast Highway, and that made her feel good, made her feel like a girl again-the salt smell, people jogging on the beach, the amazing narrow-shouldered houses of the millionaires growing up like mushrooms out of the sand-but the address the Guatemalan woman had given her was worth nothing. All the way there, all, the way out in the alien world, a bad neighborhood, drunks in the street, and the building was boarded up, deserted, no back entrance, no sewing machines, no hard-faced boss to stand over her and watch her sw Th Qatch hereat at three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, no nothing. She checked the address twice, three times, and then she turned round to retrace her steps and found that the streets had shuffled themselves in the interim, and she knew she was lost.

By lunchtime, she could taste the panic in the back of her throat. For the first time in four months, for the first time since they'd left the South and her village and everything she knew in the world, she was separated from Cándido. She walked in circles. and everything looked strange, even when she'd seen it twice, three times over. She didn't speak the language. Black people sauntered up the street with plastic grocery bags dangling from their wrists. She stepped in dog excrement. A _gabacho__ sat on the sidewalk with his long hair and begged for change and the sight of him struck her with unholy terror: if he had to beg in his own country, what chance was there for her? But she held on to her six little silvery coins and finally a woman with the _chilango__ accent of Mexico City helped her find the bus.

She had to walk back up the canyon in the bleak light of the declining day while the cars swished by her in a lethal hissing chain, and in every one a pair of eyes that screamed, _Get out, get out of here and go back where you belong!__-and how long before one of them tore up the dirt in front of her and the police were standing there demanding her papers? She hurried along, head down, shoulders thrust forward, and when the strip of pavement at the side of the road narrowed to six inches she had to climb over the guardrail and plow through the brush.

Sweat stung her eyes. Burrs and thorns and the smooth hard daggers of the foxtails bit into every step. She couldn't see where she was going. She worried about snakes, spiders, turning her ankle in a ditch. And then the cars began to switch on their lights and she was alone on a terrible howling stage, caught there for everyone to see. Her clothes were soaked through by the time the entrance to the path came into sight, and she ran the last hundred yards, ran for the cover of the brush while the cold beams of light hunted her down, and she had to crouch there in the bushes till her breath came back to her.

The shadows deepened. Birds called to one another. Swish, swish, swish, the cars shot by, no more than ten feet away. Any one of them could stop, any one. She listened to the cars and to the air rasping through her lips, to the hiss of the tires and the metallic whine of the engines straining against the grade. It went on for a long time, forever, and the sky grew darker. Finally, when she was sure no one was following her, she started down the path, letting the trees and the shrubs and the warm breath of the night calm her, hungry now-ravenous-and so thirsty she could drink up the whole streambed, whether Cándido thought the water was safe or not.

At first, the thing in the path wasn't anything to concern her-a shape, a concert of shades, light and dark-and then it was a rock, a pile of laundry, and finally, a man, her man, sleeping there in the dirt. Her first thought was that he was drunk-he'd got work and he'd been drinking, drinking cold beer and wine while she struggled through the nine circles of Hell-and she felt the rage come up in her. No lunch-she hadn't had a bite since dawn, and then it was only a burned tortilla and an egg-and nothing to drink even, not so much as a sip of water. What did he think she was? But then she bent and touched him and she knew that she was in the worst trouble of her life.

The fire was a little thing, twigs mostly, a few knots the size of a fist, nothing to attract attention. Candido lay on a blanket in the sand beside it, and the flames were like a magic shoe g Qa magic w, snapping and leaping and throwing the tiniest red rockets into the air round a coil of smoke. He was dreaming still, dreaming with his eyes open, images shuffled like cards in a deck till he didn't know what was real and what wasn't. At the moment he was replaying the past, when he was a boy in Tepoztlán, in the south of Mexico, and his father caught an opossum in among the chickens and he hit it with a stick-_zas!__-just above the eyes. The opossum collapsed like a sack of cloth and it lay there, white in the face and with the naked feet and tail of a giant rat, stunned and twitching. That was how he felt now, just like that opossum. The pressure in his head had spread to his chest, his groin, his limbs-to every last flayed fiber of his body-and he had to close his eyes against the agonizing snap and roar of the fire. They skinned the opossum and they ate it in a stew with hominy and onions. He could taste it even now, even here in the North with his body crushed and bleeding and the fire roaring in his ears-rat, that's what it tasted like, wet rat.

América was cooking something over the fire. Broth. Meat broth. She'd laid him here on the blanket and he'd given her the crumpled bill he'd earned in the hardest way any man could imagine, in the way that would kill him, and she'd gone up the hill to the near store, the one run by the suspicious Chinamen or Koreans or whatever they were, and she'd bought a stew bone with a ragged collar of beef on it, a big plastic bottle of aspirin, rubbing alcohol, a can of _gabacho-__colored Band-Aids and, best of all, a pint of brandy, E & J, to deaden the pain and keep the dreams at bay.

It wasn't working.

The pain was like the central core of that fire, radiating out in every direction, and the dreams-well, now he saw his mother, dead of something, dead of whatever. He was six years old and he thought he'd killed her himself-because he wasn't good enough, because he didn't say his “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” and because he fell asleep in church and didn't help with the housework. There was no refrigeration in Tepoztlán, no draining of the blood and pumping in of chemicals, just meat, dead meat. They sealed the coffin in glass because of the smell. He remembered it, huge and awful, like some ship from an ancient sea, set up on two chairs in the middle of the room. And he remembered how he sat up with her long after his father and his sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and their _compadres__ had fallen asleep, and how he'd talked to her through the glass. Her face was like something chipped out of stone. She was in her best dress and her crucifix hung limp at her throat. _Mamá,__ he whispered, _I want you to take me with you, I don't want to stay here without you, I want to die and go to the angels too,__ and then her dead eyes flashed open on him and her dead lips said, _Go to the devil,__ mijo.

“Can you drink this?”

America was kneeling beside him and she held an old styrofoam coffee cup to his lips. The smell of meat was strong in his nostrils. It nauseated him and he pushed her hand away.

“You need a doctor. Your face… and here”-she pointed to his hip, then his arm, a gentle touch, the rag soaked in alcohol-“and here.”

He didn't need a doctor. He didn't need to put himself in their hands-his bones would knit, his flesh would heal. What would he say to them? How would he pay? And then when they were done with him, the man from _La Migra__-the Immigration-would be standing there with his twenty questions and his clipboard. No, he didn't need a doctor.

The firelight took hold of America's face and she looked old suddenly, older than the girl she was, the girl who'd come to the North wout Qthe Nortith him though she'd never in her life been farther than the next village over, older than his grandmother and her grandmother and any woman that had ever lived in this country or any other. “You have to go to the doctor,” she whispered, and the fire snapped and the stars howled over the roof of the canyon. “I'm afraid.”

“Afraid?” he echoed, and he reached out to stroke her hand. “Of what? I'm not going to die,” he said, but even as he said it, he wasn't so sure.

In the morning, he felt worse-if that was possible. He woke to fog and the inquisition of the birds, and he didn't know where he was. He had no recollection of what had happened to him-nothing, not a glimmer-but he knew that he hurt, hurt all over. He staggered up from the damp blanket and pissed weakly against a rock, and that hurt too. His face was crusted. His urine was red. He stood there a long while, shaking his prick and watching the leaves of the tree above him emerge incrementally from the mist. Then he felt dizzy and went back to lay himself down on the blanket in the sand.

When he woke again, the mist had burned off and the sun stood directly overhead. There was a woman beside him, black eyes bleeding through a wide Indian face framed in blacker hair, and she looked familiar, terrifically familiar, as familiar as the _huaraches__ on his feet. “What's my name?” she asked, her face leaning anxiously into his. “Who are you? Do you know where you are?”

He knew the language and the voice, its rhythms and inflections, and he understood the questions perfectly. The only problem was, he couldn't answer them. Who was she? He knew her, of course he did, but no name came readily to his lips. And what was even stranger was the question of his own identity-how could he not know himself? He began to speak, began to feel the shape of the words on his lips-_Yo soy,__ I am-but it was as if a cloud had suddenly obscured the sun and the words were hidden in darkness. _Where are you?__ That one he could answer, that was easy. “Abroad in the wide world,” he said, grinning suddenly.

America told him later that he'd been out of his senses for three hours and more, gibbering and raving like one of the inmates of the asylum on Hidalgo Street. He gave a speech to the President of the United States, shouted out snatches of songs popular twenty years ago, spoke in a whisper to his dead mother. He chanted, snarled, sobbed, screeched like a pullet with five fingers clamped round its throat; and finally, exhausted, he'd fallen into a deep trancelike sleep. América was mortified. She cried when he couldn't say her name, cried when he wouldn't wake up, cried through the long morning, the interminable afternoon and the eternal night. He slept on, inanimate as a corpse but for the breath scratching through his ruined nostrils.

But then, in the heat of the afternoon on the second day, when she'd lost all hope and could think only of forcing her head under the surface of the creek till she drowned herself or leaping from one of the high crags and smashing her body on the rocks below, he surprised her. “América,” he called suddenly-from out of nowhere, from sleep, from the husk he'd become-“are there any of those beans left?”

And that was that. The fever was gone. He was lucid. He remembered the accident, the _tortillas,__ the twenty dollars the _gabacho__ had given him. And when she came to him with wet cheeks and threw her arms round his neck and sobbed her heart out, he knew everything about her: she was seventeen years old and as perfect and beautiful as an egg in its shell; she was America, hope of the future, his wife, his love, mother-to-be of his first child, the son who was even now taking shape in ts c Q shape ihat secret place inside of her.

She had to help him to his feet so he could find a spot to relieve himself, and he needed her shoulder to make his way to the blanket again, but at least he was back among the living. After that, he ate-_tortillas__ out of the package, pinto beans, the broth she'd been simmering for two days to keep it from going bad. He ate slowly, thoughtfully, one spoonful at a time, but he kept it down and that was a good sign. Still, the pain never left him-it was sharp and unremitting, like a nerve rubbed raw-and he fought it down with the chalky little tablets of aspirin, chewing them by the handful, his jaws working ruminatively beneath his battered cheekbone.

For the rest of the afternoon he sat in the shade on the blanket and considered the situation, while America, exhausted from her vigil, slept with her head in his lap. He'd suffered a concussion, that much was clear, and his left cheekbone was crushed, staved in like the flesh of a rotting pumpkin. He couldn't see himself-there was no mirror out here in their crude camp-but his fingers told him how ugly his face was. A hard crusted scab ran from his jaw to his hairline, his left eye was swollen shut and his nose was tender to the touch-he must have looked like a fighter on the losing end of a fifteen-round bout or one of those monsters that crawl out of moonlit graves in the movies. But that was all right. He would live. And who cared how ugly he was as long as he could work?

No, his face was nothing-it was the rest of him he was worried about. His left arm didn't seem to want to do anything-it just hung there uselessly in the sling America had made from his shirt-and his hip was bothering him, drilling him with pain every time he got to his feet. He wondered if there was a fracture somewhere in the socket or the ridge of bone above it. Or if he'd torn a ligament or something. Any way you looked at it, he couldn't work, not for the time being-hell; he could barely stand, and that was his bad luck, his stinking _mala suerte__ that had got him robbed at the border and thrown up against the bumper of some rich man's car. But if he couldn't work, how would they eat?

And then the thing happened that he didn't want to happen, the thing he'd been dreading: America got up at first light on the fourth day after the accident and tried to slip off up the hill before he'd aroused himself. It was some sixth sense that made him wake when he did-she was silent as a cat, so he couldn't have heard her. She stood off a bit in the mist, insubstantial in the pale rinsed-out light, and he saw her arms go up over her head as she shrugged into her dress, the good one, the one with the blue flowers against the beige background that she wore when she wanted to make a good impression. But oh, she was silent, pantomiming the motions of a woman getting dressed. _“¿Adónde vas, mi vida?”__ he said. “Where are you going, my love?”

“Hush,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

The dew lay heavy on the blanket, on his shirt and the sling that cradled his arm. The day breathed in and out, just once, and then he repeated himself: “I said, where are you going? Don't make me ask again.”

“Nowhere. Don't trouble yourself.”

“You haven't started the fire,” he said.

No answer. The mist, the trees, the birds. He heard the sound of the creek running beneath its mats of algae to the sea, and in the background, the faint automotive hum of the first commuters coming down the canyon to work. A crow called out just behind them, harsh and immediate. And then she was there, kneeling before him on the blanket, her face fresh-scrubbed, hair brushed, in her good dress. “Cándido, _queridotan Q _quer,__ listen,” she said, milking his eyes, “I'm going up the road to the labor exchange to see if I can't… see if I might… find something.”__

_Find something.__ It was a slap in the face. What was she saying-that he was useless, impotent, an old man fit for the rocking chair? _Viejo,__ his friends called him because of the gray in his hair, though he was only thirty-three, and it was like a prophecy. What good was he? He'd taken America from her father so they could have a better life, so they could live in the North, where it was green and lush the year round and the avocados rotted on the ground, and everyone, even the poorest, had a house, a car and a TV-and now he couldn't even put food in her mouth. Worse: _she__ was going to earn _his__ keep.

“No,” he said, and his tone was final, clamped round the harshness of the negative like a set of pliers, “I won't have it. I didn't want you to go out the other day on that wild-goose chase just because some woman gave you a tip-and you got yourself lost, didn't you? Admit it. You were nearly separated from me-forever-and how would you expect me to find you, eh? How?”

“I'm not going to the city,” she said quietly. “Just to the exchange. Just up the street.”

He considered that scenario-his wife, a barefoot girl from the country who didn't know a thing about the world, out there among all those men, those lowlifes who'd do anything for a buck-or a woman-and he didn't like it. He knew them. Street bums who couldn't keep their hands in their pockets, sweaty _campesinos__ from Guerrero and Chiapas who'd grown up abusing their livestock, _indios__ from Guatemala and Honduras: coochie-coochie and hey baby and then the kissing noises. At least in the garment trade she'd be among other women-but up there, at the labor exchange, she'd be like a pot of honey with a hundred bees swarming round her.

They'd been living in the canyon three weeks now-there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L. A. or even Van Nuys-and though they didn't have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he'd felt happy for the first time since they'd left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was his, all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetcorner for work, the reek of the place, the roaches and the nits. Down here was different. Down here they were safe from all the filth and sickness of the streets, from _la chota__-the police-and the Immigration. Twice he'd gotten work, at three dollars an hour, no questions asked-once from a contractor who was putting up a fieldstone wall and then from a rico in a Jaguar who needed a couple of men to clear the brush from a ravine out back of his house. And each morning when he went out looking, not knowing whether he'd be back at noon or after dark, he'd warned America to douse the fire and keep out of sight.

He hadn't wanted to frighten her, but he knew what would happen if any of those _vagos__ from above discovered her down here while he was away. It would be just like that girl in the dump at Tijuana. He could see her now, skinny legs, eyes like pits. She was a child, twelve years old, and her parents poor people who were out working all day, sifting through the mountains of trash with broomsticks fitted with a bent nail at one end, and the drunks in the place had come after her. The girl's parents had a shack made out of wooden pallets nailed together, a surprisingly sturdy little thing set amid a clutter of tumble-down shanties and crude lean-tos, and when they went off in the morning, they padlocked the girl inside. But those aniand Qt those mals-they howled outside the door and pounded at the walls to get at her, and nobody did a thing. Nobody except Cándido. Three times he snatched up a length of pipe and drove them away from the shack-junkies, _cementeros,__ bottle suckers-and he could hear the girl sobbing inside. Twelve years old. One afternoon they managed to spring the lock, and by the time Cándido got there, it was all over. The sons of bitches. He knew what they were like, and he vowed he'd never let América out of his sight if he could help it, not till they had a real house in a real neighborhood with laws and respect and human dignity.

“No,” he said. “I can't let you do it. I was worried sick the whole day you were gone-and look at the bad luck it brought us.” He patted his arm in its sling by way of illustration. “Besides, there are no jobs for women there, only for men with strong backs. They want _braceros,__ not maids.”

“Listen,” she said, and her voice was quiet and determined, “we have maybe a cup of rice left, half a twelve-ounce sack of dry beans, six corn _tortillas__-no eggs, no milk. We have no matches to start the fire. No vegetables, no fruit. Do you know what I would do for a mango now-or even an orange?”

“All right,” he snarled, “all right,” and he pushed himself up from the blanket and stood shakily, all his weight on his good leg. The aspirin bottle was nearly empty, but he shook half a dozen tablets into his palm and ground them between his teeth. “I'll go myself. Nobody can tell me I can't feed my own wife-”

She wasn't having it. She sprang to her feet and took hold of his forearm in a grip so fierce and unyielding it surprised him. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe the next day. What happened to you would have killed an ordinary man. You rest. You'll feel better. Give it a day or two.”

He was woozy on his feet. His head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. The crow mocked him from an invisible perch. “And what do you plan to do for work?”

She grinned and made a muscle with her right arm. “I can do anything a man can do.”

He tried for a stern and forbidding look, but it tortured his face and he had to let it go. She was tiny, like a child-she _was__ a child. She couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds, and the baby hadn't begun to show yet, not at all. What could she hope to accomplish at a labor exchange?

“Pick lettuce,” she said. “Or fruit maybe.”

He had to laugh. He couldn't help himself. “Lettuce? Fruit? This isn't Bakersfield, this is L. A. There's no fruit here. No cotton, no nothing.” His face tightened on him and he winced. “There's nothing here but houses, houses by the millions, roof after roof as far as you can see…”

She scratched at a mosquito bite on her arm, but her eyes were alive, shining with the image, and her lips compressed round a private smile. “I want one of those houses,” she said. “A clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator, and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden and make a place for the chickens. That's what you promised me, didn't you?”

She wanted. Of course she wanted. Everybody who'd stayed behind to dry up and die in Tepoztlán wanted too-hell, all of Morelos, all of Mexico and the Indian countries to the south, they all wanted, and what else was new? A house, a yard, maybe a TV and a car too-nothing fancy, no palaces like the _gringos__ built-just four walls and a roof. Was that so much to ask?

He watched her lips-pouting, greedy lips, lips he wanted to 3“> Q wanted kiss and own. ”Well?“ she demanded, and she wasn't teasing now, wasn't bantering or joking. ”Didn't you?"

He'd promised. Sure he had. He'd held up the lure of all those things, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the glitter of the North like a second Eden; sure, a young girl like her and an old man like himself with gray in his mustache-what else was he going to tell her? That they would get robbed at the border and live under two boards at the dump till he could make enough on the streetcorner to get them across? That they'd hide out like rats in a hole and live on a blanket beside a stream that would run dry in a month? That he'd be hammered down on the road so he could barely stand or make water or even think straight? He didn't know what to say.

She let go of his arm and turned away from him. He watched the morning mist enclose her as she began to pick her way over the boulders that cluttered the ravine like broken teeth. When she got to the foot of the trail she swung round and stood there a moment, the mist boiling beneath her. “Maybe somebody will need a floor mopped or a stove cleaned,” she said, the words drifting down to him over the hum of the invisible cars above.

It took him a long moment, and when he spoke it was as if the air had been knocked out of him. “Yeah,” he said, sinking back down into the blanket. “Maybe.”

3

HIGH UP THE CANYON, NESTLED IN A FAN-SHAPED depression dug out of the side of the western ridge by the action of some long-forgotten stream, lay the subdivision known as Arroyo Blanco Estates. It was a private community, comprising a golf course, ten tennis courts, a community center and some two hundred and fifty homes, each set on one-point-five acres and strictly conforming to the covenants, conditions and restrictions set _forth__ in the 1973 articles of incorporation. The houses were all of the Spanish Mission style, painted in one of three prescribed shades of white, with orange tile roofs. If you wanted to paint your house sky-blue or Provencal-pink with lime-green shutters, you were perfectly welcome to move into the San Fernando Valley or to Santa Monica or anywhere else you chose, but if you bought into Arroyo Blanco Estates, your house would be white and your roof orange.

Delaney Mossbacher made his home in one of these Spanish Mission houses (floor plan #A227C, Rancho White with Navajo trim), along with his second wife, Kyra, her son, Jordan, her matching Dandie Dinmont terriers, Osbert and Sacheverell, and her Siamese cat, Dame Edith. On this particular morning, the morning that Cándido Rincón began to feel he'd lost control of his wife, Delaney was up at seven, as usual, to drip Kyra's coffee, feed Jordan his fruit, granola and hi-fiber bar and let Osbert and Sacheverell out into the yard to perform their matinal functions. He hadn't forgotten his unfortunate encounter with Cándido four days earlier-the thought of it still made his stomach clench-but the needs and wants and minor irritations of daily life had begun to push it into the background. At the moment, his attention was focused entirely on getting through the morning ritual with his customary speed and efficiency. He was nothing if not efficient.

He made a sort of game of it, counting the steps it took him to shut the windows against the coming day's heat, empty yesterday's coffee grounds into the mulch bucket, transform two kiwis, an orange, apple, banana and a handful of Bing cherries into Jordan's medley of fresh fruit, and set the table for two. He skated across the tile floor to the dishwasher, flung open the cabinets, rocketed the plates and cutlery into position on the big oak table, all the while keeping an eye on the coffee, meah N eye on†suring out two bowls of dog food and juicing the oranges he'd plucked from the tree in the courtyard.

Typically, he stole a moment out in the courtyard to breathe in the cool of the morning and listen to the scrub jays wake up the neighborhood, but today he was in a rush and the only sound that penetrated his consciousness was a strange excited yelp from one of the dogs-they must have found something in the fenced-in yard behind the house, a squirrel or a gopher maybe-and then he was back in the kitchen, squeezing oranges. That was what he did, every morning, regular as clockwork: squeeze oranges. After which he would dash round the house gathering up Jordan's homework, his backpack, lunchbox and baseball cap, while Kyra sipped her coffee and washed down her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements with half a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Then it was time to drive Jordan to school, while Kyra applied her makeup, wriggled into a form-fitting skirt with matching jacket and propelled her Lexus over the crest of the canyon and into Woodland Hills, where she was the undisputed volume leader at Mike Bender Realty, Inc. And then, finally, Delaney would head back home, have a cup of herbal tea and two slices of wheat toast, dry, and let the day settle in around him.

Unless there was an accident on the freeway or a road crew out picking up or setting down their ubiquitous plastic cones, he would be back at home and sitting at his desk by nine. This was the moment he lived for, the moment his day really began. Unfailingly, no matter what pressures were brought to bear on him or what emergencies arose, he allotted the next four hours to his writing-four hours during which he could let go of the world around him, his fingers grazing lightly over the keyboard, the green glow of the monitor bathing him in its hypnotic light. He took the phone off the hook, pulled the shades and crept into the womb of language.

There, in the silence of the empty house, Delaney worked out the parameters of his monthly column for _Wide Open Spaces,__ a naturalist's observations of the life blooming around him day by day, season by season. He called it “Pilgrim at Topanga Creek” in homage to Annie Dillard, and while he couldn't pretend to her mystical connection to things, or her verbal virtuosity either, he did feel that he stood apart from his fellow men and women, that he saw more deeply and felt more passionately-particularly about nature. And every day, from nine to one, he had the opportunity to prove it.

Of course, some days went better than others. He tried to confine himself to the flora and fauna of Topanga Canyon and the surrounding mountains, but increasingly he found himself brooding over the fate of the pupfish, the Florida manatee and the spotted owl, the ocelot, the pine marten, the panda. And how could he ignore the larger trends-overpopulation, desertification, the depletion of the seas and the forests, global warming and loss of habitat? We were all right in America, sure, but it was crazy to think you could detach yourself from the rest of the world, the world of starvation and loss and the steady relentless degradation of the environment. Five and a half billion people chewing up the resources of the planet like locusts, and only seventy-three California condors left in all the universe.

It gave him pause, It depressed him. There were days when he worked himself into such a state he could barely lift his fingers to the keys, but fortunately the good days outnumbered them, the days when he celebrated his afternoon hikes through the chaparral and into the ravines of the mist-hung mountains, and that was what people wanted-celebration, not lectures, not the strident call to ecologic arms, not the death knell and the weeping and gnashing of environmental teeth. The world was full of bad news. Why contribute more?

The sun had already begun to burn off the haze by the time Jordan scuffed into the kitchen, the cat at his heels. Jordan was six years old, dedicated to Nintendo, superheroes and baseball cards, though as far as Delaney could see he had no interest whatever in the game of baseball beyond possessing the glossy cardboard images of the players. He favored his mother facially and in the amazing lightness of his hair, which was so pale as to be nearly translucent. He might have been big for his age, or maybe he was small-Delaney had nothing to compare him to.

“Kiwi,” Jordan said, thumping into his seat at the table, and that was all. Whether this was an expression of approval or distaste, Delaney couldn't tell. From the living room came the electronic voice of the morning news: _Thirty-seven Chinese nationals were drowned early today when a smuggler's ship went aground just east of the Golden Gate Bridge…__ Outside, beyond the windows, there was another yelp from the dogs.

Jordan began to rotate his spoon in the bowl of fruit, a scrape and clatter accompanied by the moist sounds of mastication. Delaney, his back to the table, was scrubbing the counter in the vicinity of the stove, though any splashes of cooking oil or spatters of sauce must have been purely imaginary since he hadn't actually cooked anything. He scrubbed for the love of scrubbing. “Okay, buckaroo,” he called over his shoulder, “you've got two choices today as far as your hi-fiber bar is concerned: Cranberry Nut and Boysenberry Supreme. What'll it be?”

From a mouth laden with kiwi: “Papaya Coconut.”

“You got the last one yesterday.”

No response.

“So what'll it be?”

Kyra insisted on the full nutritional slate for her son every morning-fresh fruit, granola with skim milk and brewer's yeast, hi-fiber bar. The child needed roughage. Vitamins. Whole grains. And breakfast, for a growing child at least, was the most important meal of the day, the foundation of all that was to come. That was how she felt. And while Delaney recognized a touch of the autocratic and perhaps even fanatic in the regimen, he by and large subscribed to it. He and Kyra had a lot in common, not only temperamentally, but in terms of their beliefs and ideals too-that was what had attracted them to each other in the first place. They were both perfectionists, for one thing. They abhorred clutter. They were joggers, nonsmokers, social drinkers, and if not full-blown vegetarians, people who were conscious of their intake of animal fats. Their memberships included the Sierra Club, Save the Children, the National Wildlife Federation and the Democratic Party. They preferred the contemporary look to Early American or kitsch. In religious matters, they were agnostic.

Delaney's question remained unanswered, but he was used to cajoling Jordan over his breakfast. He tiptoed across the room to hover behind the boy, who was playing with his spoon and chanting something under his breath. “Rookie card, rookie card,” Jordan was saying, dipping into his granola without enthusiasm. “No looking now,” Delaney warned, seductively tapping a foil-wrapped bar on either side of the boy's thin wilted neck, “-right hand or left?”

Jordan reached up with his left hand, as Delaney knew he would, fastening on the Boysenberry Supreme bar just as Kyra, hunched over the weight of two boxes of hand-addressed envelopes-Excelsior, 50 °Count-clattered into the kitchen in her heels. She made separate kissing motions in the direction of her husband and son, then slid into her chair, poured herself half a cup of coffee lightened with skim milk-for the calcium-and began sifclu ad began ting purposively through the envelopes.

“Why can't I have Sugar Pops or Honey Nut Cheerios like other kids? Or bacon and eggs?” Jordan pinched his voice. “Mom? Why can't I?”

Kyra gave the stock response-“You're not other kids, that's why”-and Delaney was taken back to his own childhood, a rainy night in the middle of an interminable winter, a plate of liver, onions and boiled potatoes before him.

“I hate granola,” Jordan countered, and it was like a Noh play, timeless ritual.

“It's good for you.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jordan made an exaggerated slurping sound, sucking the milk through his teeth.

“Think of all the little children who have nothing to eat,” Kyra said without looking up, and Jordan, sticking to the script, came right back at her: “Let's send them this.”

Now she looked up. “Eat,” she said, and the drama was over.

“Busy day?” Delaney murmured, setting Kyra's orange juice down beside the newspaper and unscrewing the childproof caps of the sturdy plastic containers that held her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements. He did the little things for her-out of love and consideration, sure, but also in acknowledgment of the fact that she was the chief breadwinner here, the one who went off to the office while he stayed home. Which was all right by him. He had none of those juvenile macho hang-ups about role reversal and who wore the pants and all of that-real estate was her life, and he was more than happy to help her with it, so long as he got his four hours a day at the keyboard.

Kyra lifted her eyebrows, but didn't look up. She was tucking what looked to be a small white packet into each of the envelopes in succession. “Busy?” she echoed. “Busy isn't the word for it. I'm presenting two offers this morning, both of them real low-ball, I've got a buyer with cold feet on that Calabasas property-with escrow due to close in eight days-and I'm scheduled for an open house on the Via Escobar place at one… is that the dogs I hear? What are they barking at?”

Delaney shrugged. Jordan had shucked the foil from his hi-fiber bar and was drifting toward the TV room with it-which meant he was going to be late for school if Delaney didn't hustle him out of there _within__ the next two minutes. The cat, as yet unfed, rubbed up against Delaney's leg. “I don't know,” he said. “They've been yapping since I let them out. Must be a squirrel or something. Or maybe Jack's dog got loose again and he's out there peeing on the fence and driving them into a frenzy.”

“Anyway,” Kyra went on, “it's going to be hell. And it's Carla Bayer's birthday, so after work a bunch of us-don't you think this is a cute idea?” She held up one of the packets she'd been stuffing the envelopes with. It was a three-by-five seed packet showing a spray of flowers and printed with the legend _Forget-Me-Not, Compliments of Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, Mike Bender Realty, Inc.__

“Yeah, I guess,” he murmured, wiping at an imaginary speck on the counter. This was her way of touching base with her clients. Every month or so, usually in connection with a holiday, she went through her mailing list (consisting of anyone she'd ever sold to or for, whether they'd relocated to Nome, Singapore or Irkutsk or passed on into the Great Chain of Being) and sent a small reminder of her continued existence and willingness to deal. She called it “keeping the avenues open.” Delaney reached down to stroke the cat. “But can't one of the secretaries do this sort of thing for you?”

“It's the personal touch t. ” anal touchat counts-and moves property. How many times do I have to tell you?"

There was a silence, during which Delaney became aware of the cartoon jingle that had replaced the voice of the news in the other room, and then, just as he was clearing Jordan's things from the table and checking the digital display on the microwave for the time-7:32-the morning fell apart. Or no: it was torn apart by a startled breathless shriek that rose up from beyond the windows as if out of some primal dream. This was no yip, no yelp, no bark or howl-this was something final and irrevocable, a predatory scream that took the varnish off their souls, and it froze them in place. They listened, horrified, as it rose in pitch until it choked off as suddenly as it had begun.

The aftereffect was electric. Kyra bolted up out of her chair, knocking over her coffee cup and scattering envelopes; the cat darted between Delaney's legs and vanished; Delaney dropped the plate on the floor and groped for the counter like a blind man. And then Jordan was coming through the doorway on staccato feet, his face opened up like a pale nocturnal flower: “Delaney,” he gasped, “Delaney, something, something-”

But Delaney was already in motion. He flung open the door and shot through the courtyard, head down, rounding the corner of the house just in time to see a dun-colored blur scaling the six-foot chain-link fence with a tense white form clamped in its jaws. His brain decoded the image: a coyote had somehow managed to get into the enclosure and seize one of the dogs, and there it was, wild nature, up and over the fence as if this were some sort of circus act. Shouting to hear himself, shouting nonsense, Delaney charged across the yard as the remaining dog (Osbert? Sacheverell?) cowered in the corner and the dun blur melded with the buckwheat, chamise and stiff high grass of the wild hillside that gave onto the wild mountains beyond.

He didn't stop to think. In two bounds he was atop the fence and dropping to the other side, absently noting the paw prints in the dust, and then he was tearing headlong through the undergrowth, leaping rocks and shrubs and dodging the spines of the yucca plants clustered like breastworks across the slope. He was running, that was all he knew. Branches raked him like claws. Burrs bit into his ankles. He kept going, pursuing a streak of motion, the odd flash of white: now he saw it, now he didn't. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, goddamnit!”

The hillside sloped sharply upward, rising through the colorless scrub to a clump of walnut trees and jagged basalt outcroppings that looked as if they'd poked through the ground overnight. He saw the thing suddenly, the pointed snout and yellow eyes, the high stiff leggy gait as it struggled with its burden, and it was going straight up and into the trees. He shouted again and this time the shout was answered from below. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Kyra was coming up the hill with her long jogger's strides, in blouse, skirt and stocking feet. Even at this distance he could recognize the look on her face-the grim set of her jaw, the flaring eyes and clamped mouth that spelled doom for whoever got in her way, whether it was a stranger who'd locked his dog in a car with the windows rolled up or the hapless seller who refused a cash-out bid. She was coming, and that spurred him on. If he could only stay close the coyote would have to drop the dog, it would have to.

By the time he reached the trees his throat was burning. Sweat stung his eyes and his arms were striped with nicks and scratches. There was no sign of the dog and he pushed on through the trees to where the slope fell away to the feet of the next hill beyond it. The brush was thicker here-six feet high and so tightly interlaced it would have taken a machete to get through it in col aough it places-and he knew, despite the drumming in his ears and the glandular rush that had him pacing and whirling and clenching and unclenching his fists, that it was looking bad. Real bad. There were a thousand bushes out there-five thousand, ten thousand-and the coyote could be crouched under any one of them.

It was watching him even now, he knew it, watching him out of slit wary eyes as he jerked back and forth, frantically scanning the mute clutter of leaf, branch and thorn, and the thought infuriated him. He shouted again, hoping to flush it out. But the coyote was too smart for him. Ears pinned back, jaws and forepaws stifling its prey, it could lie there, absolutely motionless, for hours. “Osbert!” he called out suddenly, and his voice trailed off into a hopeless bleat. “Sacheverell!”

The poor dog. It couldn't have defended itself from a rabbit. Delaney stood on his toes, strained his neck, poked angrily through the nearest bush. Long low shafts of sunlight fired the leaves in an indifferent display, as they did every morning, and he looked into the illuminated depths of that bush and felt desolate suddenly, empty, cored out with loss and helplessness.

“Osbert!” The sound seemed to erupt from him, as if he couldn't control his vocal cords. “Here, boy! Come!” Then he shouted Sacheverell's name, over and over, but there was no answer except for a distant cry from Kyra, who seemed to be way off to his left now.

All at once he wanted to smash something, tear the bushes out of the ground by their roots. This didn't have to happen. It didn't. If it wasn't for those idiots leaving food out for the coyotes as if they were nothing more than sheep with bushy tails and eyeteeth… and he'd warned them, time and again. You can't be heedless of your environment. You can't. Just last week he'd found half a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken out back of the Dagolian place-waxy red-and-white-striped cardboard with a portrait of the grinning chicken-killer himself smiling large-and he'd stood up at the bimonthly meeting of the property owners' association to say something about it. They wouldn't even listen. Coyotes, gophers, yellow jackets, rattlesnakes even-they were a pain in the ass, sure, but nature was the least of their problems. It was humans they were worried about. The Salvadorans, the Mexicans, the blacks, the gangbangers and taggers and carjackers they read about in the Metro section over their bran toast and coffee. That's why they'd abandoned the flatlands of the Valley and the hills of the Westside to live up here, outside the city limits, in the midst of all this scenic splendor.

Coyotes? Coyotes were quaint. Little demi-dogs out there howling at the sunset, another amenity like the oaks, the chaparral and the views. No, all Delaney's neighbors could talk about, back and forth and on and on as if it were the key to all existence, was gates. A gate, specifically. To be erected at the main entrance and manned by a twenty-four-hour guard to keep out those very gangbangers, taggers and carjackers they'd come here to escape. Sure. And now poor Osbert-or Sacheverell-was nothing more than breakfast.

The fools. The idiots.

Delaney picked up a stick and began to beat methodically at the bushes.

The Arroyo Blanco Community Center was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the private road, Arroyo Blanco Drive, that snaked off it and wound its way through the oaks and into the grid of streets that comprised the subdivision. It was a single-story white stucco building with an, orange tile roof, in the Spanish Mission style, and it featured a kitchen, wet bar, stage, P. A. system and seating for two hundred. Thre, ahundred. e hall was full-standing room only-by the time Delaney arrived. He'd been delayed because Kyra had been late getting home from work, and since it was the maid's day off, there'd been no one to watch Jordan.

Kyra was in a state. She'd come in the door looking like a refugee, her eyes reddened and a tissue pinned to the tip of her reddened nose, grieving for Sacheverell (Sacheverell it was: she'd been able to identify the surviving dog as Osbert by means of an indisputable mole clinging to his underlip). For an hour or more that morning she'd helped Delaney beat the bushes, frantic, tearful, her breath coming in ragged gasps-she'd had those dogs forever, long before she'd met Delaney, before Jordan was born even-but finally, reluctantly, she'd given it up and gone off to work, where she was already late for her ten o'clock. She'd changed her clothes, reapplied her makeup, comforted Jordan as best she could and dropped him off at school, leaving Delaney with the injunction to find the dog at all cost. Every half hour throughout the day she called him for news, and though he had news by noon-grim, definitive news, news wrapped up in half a dozen paper towels and sequestered even now in the pocket of his windbreaker-he kept it from her, figuring she'd had enough of a jolt for one day. When she came home he held her for a long moment, murmuring the soft consolatory things she needed to hear, and then she went in to Jordan, who'd been sent home early from school with chills and a fever. It was a sad scene. Just before he left for the meeting, Delaney looked in on them, mother and son, huddled in Jordan's narrow bed with Osbert and Dame Edith, the cat, looking like survivors of a shipwreck adrift on a raft.

Delaney edged in at the rear of the auditorium beside a couple he didn't recognize. The man was in his forties, but he had the hips and shoulders of a college athlete and looked as if he'd just come back from doing something heroic. The woman, six feet tall at least, was around Kyra's age-mid-thirties, he guessed-and she was dressed in black Lycra shorts and a USC jersey. She leaned into her husband like a sapling leaning into a rock ledge. Delaney couldn't help noticing the way the shorts cradled the woman's buttocks in a flawless illustration of form and function, but then he recalled the thing in his pocket and looked up into a sea of heads and the harsh white rinse of the fluorescent lights.

Jack Jardine was up on the dais, along with Jack Cherrystone, the association's secretary, and Linda Portis, the treasurer. The regularly scheduled meeting, the one at which Delaney had stood to warn his neighbors of the dangers of feeding the local fauna, had adjourned past twelve after prolonged debate on the gate issue, and Jack had convened tonight's special session to put it to a vote. Under normal circumstances, Delaney would have stayed home and lost himself in John Muir or Edwin Way Teale, but these were not normal circumstances. Not that he was indifferent to the issue-the gate was an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even, and he'd spoken against it privately-but to his mind it was a fait accompli. His neighbors were overwhelmingly for it, whipped into a reactionary frenzy by the newspapers and the eyewitness news, and he didn't relish being one of the few dissenting voices, a crank like Rudy Hernandez, who liked to hear himself talk and would argue any side of any issue till everyone in the room was ready to rise up and throttle him. The gate was going up and there was nothing Delaney could do about it. But he was here. Uncomfortably here. Here because tonight he had a private agendum, an agendum that lay hard against his hip in the lower pocket of his windbreaker, and his throat went dry at the thought of it.

Someone spoke to the question, but Delaney was so wound up in his thoughts he didn't register what was being said. T wh aing saidhere would be discussion, and then a vote, and for the rest of his days he'd have to feel like a criminal driving into his own community, excusing himself to some jerk in a crypto-fascist uniform, making special arrangements every time a friend visited or a package needed to be delivered. He thought of the development he'd grown up in, the fenceless expanse of lawns, the shared space, the deep lush marshy woods where he'd first discovered ferns, frogs, garter snakes, the whole shining envelope of creation. There was nothing like that anymore. Now there were fences. Now there were gates.

“The chair recognizes Doris Obst,” Jack Jardine said, his voice riding out over the currents of the room as if he were singing, as if everyone else spoke prose and he alone spoke poetry.

The woman who rose from a seat in the left-front of the auditorium was of indeterminate age. Her movements were brisk and the dress clung to the shape of her as if it had been painted on, yet her hair was gray and her skin the dead bleached merciless white of the bond paper Delaney used for business letters. Delaney had never laid eyes on her before, and the realization, coupled with the fact that he didn't seem to recognize any of the people he was standing among, produced a faint uneasy stirring of guilt. He should be more rigorous about attending these meetings, he told himself, he really should.

“… the cost factor,” Doris Obst was saying in a brooding, almost masculine tenor, “because I'm sure there isn't a person in this room that doesn't feel our fees are already astronomical, and I'm just wondering if the board's cost analysis is accurate, or if we're going to be hit with special assessments down the line…”

“Jim Shirley,” Jack sang, and Doris Obst sank into her seat even as a man rose in the rear, as if they were keys of the same instrument. To his consternation, Delaney didn't recognize this man either.

“What about the break-ins?” Jim Shirley demanded, an angry tug to his voice. There was an answering murmur from the crowd, cries of umbrage and assent. Jim Shirley stood tall, a big bearded man in his fifties who looked as if he'd been inflated with a bicycle pump. “Right on my block-Via Dichosa? — there've been two houses hit in the last month alone. The Caseys lost something like fifty thousand dollars' worth of Oriental rugs while they were away in Europe, and their home entertainment center too-not to mention their brand-new Nissan pickup. I don't know how many of you sitting here tonight are familiar with the modus operandi, but what the thieves do is typically they pry open the garage door-there's always a little give in these automatic openers-then they take their sweet time, load your valuables into your own car and then drive off as if they were entitled to it. At the Caseys' they even had the gall to broil half a dozen lobster tails from the freezer and wash them down with a couple bottles of Perrier-Jouet.”

A buzz went through the crowd, thick with ferment and anger. Even Delaney felt himself momentarily distracted from the bloody evidence in his pocket. Crime? Up here? Wasn't that what they'd come here to escape? Wasn't that the point of the place? All of a sudden, the gate didn't sound like such a bad idea.

Delaney was startled when the man beside him-the athlete-thrust up his arm and began to speak even before Jack Jardine had a chance to officially recognize him. “I can't believe what I'm hearing,” the man said, and his long-legged wife nuzzled closer to him, her eyes shining with pride and moral authority. “If we'd wanted a gated community we would have moved to Hidden Hills or Westlake, but we didn't. We wanted an open community, freedom to come and go-and not just for those of us privileged enough to be able to live het a a to livere, but for anyone-any citizen-rich or poor. I don't know, but I cut my teeth on the sixties, and it goes against my grain to live in a community that closes its streets to somebody just because they don't have as fancy a car as mine or as big a house. I mean, what's next-wrist bracelets for I. D.? Metal detectors?”

Jack Cherrystone made an impatient gesture at the president's elbow, and Jack recognized him with a nod. “Who are we kidding here?” he demanded in a voice that thundered through the speakers like the voice of God on High. Jack Cherrystone was a little man, barely five and a half feet tall, but he had the world's biggest voice. He made his living in Hollywood, doing movie trailers, his voice rumbling across America like a fleet of trucks, portentous, fruity, hysterical. Millions of people in theaters from San Pedro to Bangor churned in their seats as they watched the flashing images of sex and mayhem explode across the screen and felt the assault of Jack Cherrystone's thundering wallop of a voice, and his friends and neighbors at Arroyo Blanco Estates sat up a little straighter when he spoke. “I'm as liberal as anybody in this room-my father chaired Adlai Stevenson's campaign committee, for christsakes-but I say we've got to put an end to this.”

A pause. The whole room was riveted on the little man on the dais. Delaney broke out in a sweat.

“I'd like to open my arms to everybody in the world, no matter how poor they are or what country they come from; I'd like to leave my back door open and the screen door unlatched, the way it was when I was a kid, but you know as well as I do that those days are past. ” He shook his head sadly. “L. A. stinks. The world stinks. Why kid ourselves? That's why we're here, that's why we got out. You want to save the world, go to Calcutta and sign on with Mother Teresa. I say that gate is as necessary, as vital, essential and un-do-withoutable as the roofs over our heads and the dead bolts on our doors. Face up to it,” he rumbled. “Get real, as my daughter says. Really, truly, people: what's the debate?”

Delaney found himself clutching at the thing in his pocket, the bloody relic of that innocent dog, and he couldn't restrain himself any longer, not after the onslaught of Jack Cherrystone's ominous tones, not after the day he'd been through, not after the look on Kyra's face as she slumped across that narrow bed with her son and her terrified pets. His hand shot up.

“Delaney Mossbacher,” Jack Jardine crooned.

Faces turned toward him. People craned their necks. The golden couple beside him parted their lips expectantly.

“I just wanted to know,” he began, but before he could gather momentum someone up front interrupted him with a cry of “Louder!” He cleared his throat and tried to adjust his voice. His heart was hammering. “I said I just wanted to know how many of you are aware of what feeding the indigenous coyote population means-”

“Speak to the question,” a voice demanded. An exasperated sigh ran through the audience. Several hands shot up.

“This is no trivial issue,” Delaney insisted, staring wildly around him. “My dog-my wife's dog-”

“I'm sorry, Delaney,” Jack Jardine said, leaning into the microphone, “but we have a pending question regarding construction and maintenance of a gated entryway, and I'm going to have to ask you to speak to it or yield the floor.”

“But Jack, you don't understand what I'm saying-look, a coyote got into our backyard this morning and took-”

“Yield the floor,” a voice called.

“Speak to the question or yield.”

Delaney was angry suddenly, angry for the second time that day, burning, furious. Why wouldn't people listen? Didn't they know what this meant, treating wild carnivores like ducks in the park? “I won't yield,” he said, and the audience began to hiss, and then suddenly he had it in his hand, Sacheverell's gnawed white foreleg with its black stocking of blood, and he was waving it like a sword. He caught a glimpse of the horror-struck faces of the couple beside him as they unconsciously backed away and he was aware of movement off to his right and Jack Cherrystone's amplified voice thundering in his ears, but he didn't care-they would listen, they had to. “This!” he shouted over the uproar. “This is what happens!”

Later, as he sat on the steps out front of the community center and let the night cool the sweat from his face, he wondered how he was going to break the news to Kyra. When he'd left her it was with the lame assurance that the dog might turn up yet-maybe he'd got away; maybe he was lost-but now all of Arroyo Blanco knew the grisly finality of Sacheverell's fate. And Delaney had accomplished nothing, absolutely nothing-beyond making a fool of himself. He let out a sigh, throwing back his head and staring up into the bleary pall of the night sky. It had been a rotten day. Nothing accomplished. He hadn't written a word. Hadn't even sat down at his desk. All he'd been able to think about was the dog and the gnawed bit of bone and flesh he'd found in a hole beneath a dusty clump of manzanita.

Inside, they were voting. The windows cut holes in the fabric of the night, bright rectilinear slashes against the black backdrop of the mountains. He heard a murmur of voices, the odd scrape and shuffle of hominid activity. He was just about to push himself up and go home when he became aware of a figure hovering at the edge of the steps. “Who is it?” he said.

“It's me, Mr. Mossbacher,” came the voice from the shadows, and then the figure moved into the light cast by the windows and Delaney saw that it was Jack Jardine's son, Jack Jr.

Jack Jr. swayed like a eucalyptus in the wind, a marvel of tensile strength and newly acquired height, long-limbed, big-footed, with hands the size of baseball mitts. He was eighteen, with mud-brown eyes that gave no definition to the pupils, and he didn't look anything like his father. His hair was red, for one thing-not the pale wispy carrot-top Delaney had inherited from his Scots-Irish mother, but the deep shifting auburn you saw on the flanks of horses in an uncertain light. He wore it long on top in a frenzy of curls, and shaved to the bone from the crest of his ears down. “Hello, Jack,” Delaney said, and he could hear the weariness in his own voice.

“They got one of your dogs, huh?”

“Afraid so.” Delaney sighed. “That's what I was trying to tell them in there-you can't feed wild animals, that's about the long and short of it. But nobody wants to listen.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt with the toe of one of his big leather hi-tops. In this light, the shoes seemed to grow out of the ground and meld with his body, trunks to anchor the length of him. There was a pause during which Delaney again contemplated pushing himself up and heading home, but he hesitated. Here was a sympathetic ear, an impressionable mind.

“What they don't realize,” Delaney began, but before he could finish the thought, Jack Jr. cut him off.

“By the way-the other night? When you came to see my father about the Mexican?”

_The Mexican.__ Suddenly the man's face floateing aface flod up again to press at the edges of Delaney's consciousness, fill him up like some pregnant ghost with images of rotten teeth and stained mustaches. The Mexican. What with Sacheverell, he'd forgotten all about him. Now he remembered. The boy had been stretched out on the sofa like a recumbent monarch when Delaney had gone over to Jack's to confer with him about the accident, and Delaney had thought it odd that Jack didn't offer to take him into another room or out on the patio where they could talk in private. Jack took no notice of his son-he might just as well have been part of the furniture. He put an arm round Delaney's shoulder, made him a drink, listened to his story and assured him that he had nothing to worry about, nothing at all-if the man was legal, why would he refuse aid? And if he was illegal, what were the chances he'd find an attorney to represent him-and on what grounds? “But Jack,” Delaney had protested, “I didn't report the accident.” Jack had turned to him, calm and complicitous. “What accident?” he said, and he was the most reasonable man in the world, judge, jury and advocate all rolled into one. “You stopped and offered to help-the man refused assistance. What more could you do?”

Indeed. But now Jack Jr. wanted to know, and the thought of it made Delaney's stomach sink. There were five people in the world who knew what had happened out on that road, and by luck of the draw Jack Jr. was one of them. “Yeah?” he said. “What of it?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where it happened-you said they were camping and all.”

“Out on the canyon road. Why?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt. “I was just wondering. I see an awful lot of them down there lately. You said it was down below the lumberyard, right? Where that trail cuts off into the ravine?”

For the life of him Delaney couldn't grasp what the boy was getting at-what was it to him? But he answered the question almost reflexively-he had nothing to hide. “Right,” he said. And then he got to his feet, murmured, “Well, I've got to be going,” and strode off into the darkness fingering the sorry lump of flesh in his jacket pocket.

He made a mental note to put it in the freezer when he got home. It would begin to stink before long.

4

THE MORNING AFTER AMéRICA CLIMBED UP OUT OF the canyon to offer herself at the labor exchange-futilely, as it turned out-she insisted on going again. Cándido was against it. Vehemently. The day before, he'd waited through the slow-crawling morning till the sun stood directly overhead-twelve noon, the hour at which the labor exchange closed down for the day-and then he'd waited another hour, and another, torn by worry and suspicion. If she'd somehow managed to get work she might not be back till dark, and that was almost worse than if she hadn't, what with the worry-and worse still, the shame. He kept picturing her in some rich man's house, down on her knees scrubbing one of those tiled kitchens with a refrigerator the size of a meat locker and one of those dark-faced ovens that boil water in sixty seconds, and the rich man watching her ass as it waved in the air and trembled with the hard push of her shoulders. Finally-and it must have been three in the afternoon-she appeared, a dark speck creeping over the sun-bleached rocks, and in her hand one of those thin plastic market bags the _gringos__ use once and throw away. Cándido had to squint to see her against the pain that filmed his eyes. “Where were you?” he demanded when she was close enough to hear him. And then, in a weaker voice, a voice of apology and release: “Did you get work?”

No smile. That gave him his answer. But she did hand him the bag as an offering and kneel down on the blanket to kiss the good side of his face like a dutiful wife. In the bag: two overripe tomatoes, half a dozen hard greenish oranges and a turnip, stained black with earth. He sucked the sour oranges and ate a stew made from the turnip and tomatoes. He didn't ask her where she'd gotten them.

And now she wanted to go again. It was the same ritual as the day before: slipping up from the blanket like a thief, pulling the one good dress over her head, combing out her hair by the stream. It was dark still. The night clung to them like a second skin. No bird had even begun to breathe. “Where are you going?” he croaked.

Two words, out of the darkness, and they cut him to the quick: “To work.”

He sat up and railed while she built a fire and made him coffee and some rice pap with sugar to ease the pain of his chewing, and he told her his fears, outlined the wickedness of the _gabacho__ world and the perfidy of his fellow _braceros__ at the labor exchange, tried to work the kind of apprehension into her heart that would make her stay here with him, where it was safe, but she wouldn't listen. Or rather, she listened-“I'm afraid,” she told him, “afraid of this place and the people in it, afraid to walk out on the street”-but it had no effect. He forbade her to go. Roared out his rage till his indented cheekbone was on fire, got up on unsteady legs and threatened her with his balled-up fist, but it did no good. She hung her head. Wouldn't look him in the eye. “Someone has to go,” she whispered. “In a day or two you'll be better, but now you couldn't even get up the trail, let alone work-and that's _if__ there's work.”

What could he say? She was gone.

And then the day began and the boredom set in, boredom that almost made him glad of the pain in his face, his hip, his arm-at least it was something, at least it was a distraction. He looked round the little clearing by the stream, and the leaves, the rocks, the spill of the slope above him and even the sun in the sky seemed unchanging, eternal, as dead as a photograph. For all its beauty, the place was a jail cell and he was a prisoner, incarcerated in his thoughts. But even a prisoner had something to read, a radio maybe, a place to sit and take a contemplative crap, work-they made license plates here in _Gringolandia,__ they broke rocks, but at least they did something.

He dozed, woke, dozed again. And every time he looked up at the sun it was in the same place in the sky, fixed there as if time had stood still. America was out there. Anything could happen to her. How could he rest, how could he have a moment's peace with that specter before him?

América. The thought of her brought her face back to him, her wide innocent face, the face of a child still, with the eyes that bled into you and the soft lisping breath of a voice that was like the first voice you'd ever heard. He'd known her since she was a little girl, four years old, the youngest sister of his wife, Resurrección. She was a flower girl at the wedding, and she looked like a flower herself, blossoming brown limbs in the white petals of her dress. He took the vows with Resurrección that day, and he was twenty years old, just back from nine months in _El Norte,__ working the potato fields in Idaho and the citrus in Arizona, and he was like a god in Tepoztlán. In nine months he had made more-and sent half of it home via _giros-__than his father in his leather shop had made in a lifetime. Resurrección had promised to wait for him when he left, and she was good to her word. That time, at least.

But each year the wait got longer, and she changedsiz qshe chan. They all changed, all the wives, and who could blame them? For three quarters of the year the villages of Morelos became villages of women, all but deserted by the men who had migrated North to earn real money and work eight and ten and twelve hours a day instead of sitting in the _cantina__ eternally nursing a beer. A few men stayed behind, of course-the ones who had businesses, the congenitally rich, the crazies-and some of them, the unscrupulous ones, took advantage of the loneliness of the forlorn and itching wives to put horns on the heads of the men breaking their backs in the land of the _gringos.__ “Señor Gonzales” is what they called these ghouls of the disinterred marriage, or sometimes just “Sancho,” as in “Sancho bedded your wife.” There was even a verb for it: _sanchear,__ to slip in like a weasel and make a _cabrón__ out of an unoffending and blameless man.

And so, after seven seasons away and six cold winters at home during which he felt like half a man because Resurrección would not take his seed no matter what they tried-and they tried Chinese positions, chicken fat rubbed on the womb during intercourse, herbs and potions from the _curandera__ and injections from the doctor-Cándido came home to find that his wife was living in Cuernavaca with a Sancho by the name of Teófilo Aguadulce. She was six months pregnant and she'd spent all the money Cándido had sent her on her Sancho and his unquenchable thirst for beer, _pulque__ and distilled spirits.

America was the one who broke the news to him. Cándido came to the door at his father-in-law's place, bearing gifts, jubilant in his return, the all-conquering hero, benefactor of half the village, the good nephew who'd built his mother's sister a new house and had a brand-new boombox radio in his bag for her even now, and there was no one home but America, eleven years old and shy as a jaguar with a pig clenched in its jaws. “Cándido!” she screamed, throwing herself in his arms, “what did you bring for me?” He'd brought her a glass Christmas ball with the figure of a _gabacho__ Santa Claus imprisoned in it and artificial snow that inundated him with a blizzard when you turned it upside down-but where was everybody? A pause, release of the limbs, a restrained dance round the room with the inverted Christmas ball: “They didn't want to see you.” What? Didn't want to see him? She was joking, pulling his leg, very funny. “Where's Resurrecci6n?”

Then came his season in hell. He took the first bus to Cuernavaca, sought out Teófilo Aguadulce's house and beat on the closed shutters till his hands were raw. He prowled the streets, haunted the _cantinas,__ the markets, the cinema, but there was no sign of them. Finally, a week later, Cándido got word that Teófilo Aguadulce was coming to Tepoztlán to see his ailing grandfather, and when he crossed the plaza at twelve noon, Cándido was waiting for him. With half the village looking on, Cándido called him out, and he would have had his revenge too, and his honor, if the son of a bitch hadn't got the better of him with a perfidious wrestling move that left him stunned and bleeding in the dirt. No one said a word. No one reached down a hand to help him up. His friends and neighbors, the people he'd known all his life, simply turned their backs on him and walked away. Cándido got drunk. And when he sobered up he got drunk again. And again. He was too ashamed to go back to his aunt's and so he wandered the hills, sleeping where he fell, till his clothes turned to rags and he stank like a goat. Children pelted him with rocks and made up songs about him, rhymes to skip rope by, and the keening of their voices burned into him like a rawhide whip. He made for the border finally, to lose himself in the North, but the coyote was a fool and the U. S. Immigration caught him before he'd gone a hundred yards and pitched him back into the dark fastness of the Tijuana night.

He was broke, and he danced for people on the streets there, begged change from _turistas,__ got himself a can of kerosene and became a _tragafuegos,__ a streetcorner firebreather who sacrificed all sensation in his lips, tongue and palate for a few _centavos__ and a few _centavos__ more. What he made, he spent on drink. When his fall was complete, when he'd scraped every corner of himself raw, he came back to Tepoztlán and moved in with his aunt in the house he'd built for her. He made charcoal for a living. Climbed into the hills every morning, cut wood and slow-burned it for sale to housewives as fuel for their braziers and the stoves they'd made out of old Pemex barrels. He did nothing else. He saw no one. And then one day he ran across America in the street and everything changed. “Don't you know me?” she demanded, and he didn't know her, not at first. She was sixteen and she looked exactly like her sister, only better. He set down the bundle of sticks he was carrying and straightened out his back with an abbreviated twist. “You're América,” he said, and then he gave it a minute as a car came up the road, scattering chickens and sending an explosion of pigeons into the air, “and I'm going to take you with me when I go North.”

That was what he thought about as he lay there in the ravine, fragile as a peeled egg, that was what America meant to him-just his life, that was all-and that was why he was worried, edgy, afraid, deeply afraid for the first time in as long as he could remember. What if something should happen to her? What if the Immigration caught her? What if some _gabacho__ hit _her__ with his car? What if one of the _vagos__ from the labor exchange… but he didn't like to think about them. They were too close to him. It was too much to hold in his aching head.

The sun had ridden up over the eastern ridge. The heat was coming on faster than it had during the past week, the mist burning off sooner-there would be winds in the afternoon and the canyon walls would hold the heat like the walls of an oven. He could feel the change of the weather in his hip, his elbow, the crushed side of his face. The sun crept across the sand and hit him in the crotch, the chest, his chin, lips and ravaged nose. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.

When he woke he was thirsty. Not just thirsty-consumed with thirst, maddened by it. His clothes were wet, the blanket beneath him damp with his sweat. With an effort, he pushed himself up and staggered into the shade where America kept their drinking water in two plastic milk jugs from which he'd cut the tops with his worn-out switchblade. He snatched up the near jug and lifted air to his lips: it was empty. So was the other one. His throat constricted.

He knew better than to drink the water straight from the stream-and he'd warned America about it too. Every drop had to be boiled first. It was a pain in the ass-gathering wood, stoking the fire, setting the blackened can on the coals-but it was necessary. America had balked at first-why go to the trouble? This was the U. S. A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the _gringo__ fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He'd been here before, in this very spot, and he'd been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains? he demanded. Or how many houses were packed up there all the way to the asshole of the canyon, and every one of them leaching waste out into the gullies and streams that fed into the creek?

He knew better than to drink the water, but he did. He was dying. He was dried out like the husk of something washed up at high tide and left for a month irin qr a montn the sun, dried out like a fig, a soda cracker. It was beyond him even to contemplate gathering up twigs, searching for a scrap of paper, the matches, waiting till the water boiled for five full minutes and then waiting for it to cool-way beyond him. Mad with thirst, crazed, demented, he threw himself down in the sand, plunged his face into the algal scum of the pool beneath him and drank, drank till he nearly drowned himself. Finally, his stomach swollen like a _bota__ bag, he lay back, sated, and the afternoon went on and he dozed and worried and suffered his wounds only to wake and worry and suffer again.

It amazed him how quickly the shits came. When he'd drunk from the creek the sun had been just east of overhead and now it had settled a degree or two to the west, but it was still high and still hot. What did that add up to-two hours? Three? But there it was-the stirring in his gut, the cramping, the desperate uncontainable rush that every man, woman and child knew so intimately in his country, a poor underdeveloped place in which sanitation was a luxury and gastrointestinal infection the leading cause of death. Cándido had just enough time to get across the stream and behind the cluster of great splintered boulders he and America used as a privy before it came. And when it came, it came in an explosion, a raging cataract of shit that left him drained in an instant, and then it hit him again and again till he lost the strength of his legs and collapsed in the sand like a puppet with the strings cut.

Lying there, coated in sweat and sand and worse, his trousers ballooning round his ankles, he heard the first sharp cries from above-_gabacho-__accented cries-and he knew it was over. They were coming for him. They'd got hold of America and she'd told them where he was. _Ay, caray!__ What a mess! How could he run? Half-crippled, bestrewn with shit-and even now he could feel his guts churning again. And América-where was America?

He mouthed a prayer to the _Virgen Sagrada__ and became one with the rocks.

America sat in the shade of the wall-less shelter the _gringos__ had built to keep the itinerant job-seekers out of the sun (and coincidentally off the street, out of the post office parking lot and out of sight) and brooded about Cándido. He was too stubborn to think she could help. Too much the boss, the man, the _patrón.__ He treated her like a child, a know-nothing, someone who needed to be led by the hand and protected from all the evils of the world. Well, she had news for him: she was no longer a child. Did children bear children? In five months she'd be a mother, and then what? And while this new place terrified her-the whole country, the _gringos__ with their superior ways and their almighty dollar and their new clothes and fancy hairdos, the strange customs, the language that was like the incessant braying of a four-legged beast-she was doing what she had to do and she could look out for herself. She could.

After sitting in the corner all day yesterday, afraid to talk to anyone, she'd screwed up her courage this morning and gone straight to the man in charge and told him her name and asked for work. Of course, if he'd been a _gringo__ she never would have had the nerve to open her mouth-and he wouldn't have understood her anyway-but this man was a _campesino__ from Oaxaca, in battered jeans and a molded straw hat like the men in Tepoztlán wore, and he used the familiar with her right away and even called her “daughter.”

There must have been fifty or sixty men there at least, and they all stopped talking when she went up to the man from Oaxaca. No one seemed to take notice of her when she was off by herself, hunched beside a stump in the dawn, miserable like theevi qle like rest of them, but now she felt as if she were onstage. The men were staring at her, every one of them, some openly, some furtively, their eyes ducking for cover beneath the brims of their _sombreros__ and baseball caps whenever she looked up. Of all that mob, she was the only woman. And though she felt uneasy under their collective gaze-and nervous too to think that women must not get jobs here if she was the only one-she felt a strange sense of peace as she spoke to the headman in his battered jeans. She didn't know what it was at first, but then it hit her: all these faces were familiar. Not literally, of course, but they were the faces of her own people, her tribe, the faces she'd grown up with, and that was a comfort in itself.

The headman's name was Candelario Pérez. He looked to be in his forties and he was squat and work-hardened. He'd been informally elected by the others to keep order (making sure the men waited their turn instead of mobbing every pickup that pulled into the lot), clean up the trash and mediate between the workers and the _gringos__ of the community who'd donated the land and the lumber for the, sake of the hungry and homeless. “There's not much work for women here, daughter,” he said, and she could see the tug of sympathy in his eyes. He didn't know her from anybody, and yet he cared, she could see that.

“Doesn't anyone in these big houses need a stove cleaned or a floor mopped? Doesn't that ever happen?”

All the men were watching her. Traffic-amazing traffic-whined past on the canyon road, forty, fifty miles an hour, bumper-to-bumper, with barely room to breathe in between. Candelario Pérez gave her a long look. “We'll see, daughter, we'll see,” he said, and then he showed her where to sit, pointing to the corner she'd occupied now for three hours and more.

She was bored. She was frightened. What if she didn't get work-not today, not ever? What would they eat? What would her baby do for clothes, shelter, nourishment? And this place-wasn't it the perfect spot for _La Migra__ to come in their puke-green trucks and tan shirts and demand documents, _la tarjeta verde,__ a birth certificate, driver's license, social security card? What was stopping them? It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. As each car pulled into the lot and two or three men gathered round it, she held her breath in hope and fear, wanting work, desperately wanting it, yet mortally afraid of the bland white faces of the men staring out from behind the windshield. What, exactly, did they want? What were the rules? Were they from Immigration? Were they perverts, rapists, murderers? Or were they good people, decent rich people who needed help with a baby, with laundry, with the pots and pans and the ironing?

As it turned out, it didn't matter. She sat there from dawn till noon and she didn't get work. At eleven or so-she had no way of telling the time exactly-a big _gringa__ with wild dead-metal hair and eyes the color of a Coke bottle came up the canyon road with a strange jerking gait, passed through the open-air building like a zombie and threw herself down in the dirt beside América. It was hot already-ninety, at least-and yet the woman was dressed in the heavy brocade you might find on a sofa in a house of easy virtue, and she wore a shawl of the same material around her shoulders. When she got close, América could see the thin wire loop that punctured her right nostril.

“How you doing?” the woman said. “I'm Mary. Llama Mary.”

“Me _llamo América,”__ América returned. _“¿Habla usted espanol?”__

Mary grinned. Her teeth were enormous, like cow's teeth, more yellow than white. _“Poco,”__ she said. Little. “No work today, huh? You know, work, ere qnow, wor_trabaja.”__

Work. Was this woman offering her work? America's heart began to race, but then she caught herself. She didn't look like a housewife, this woman, not the kind América knew from the North American films and TV. She looked dirty, and she had the sad smell of poverty about her.

“I'm looking too,” the woman said, and she punched a thumb into her own chest for emphasis. “Me. I work-_trabaja__. Clean house, paint, odd jobs-_comprendo__? Sometimes get, sometimes no. You _sabe?”__

America didn't _sabe.__ Nor did she understand. Was this woman trying to tell her that she, a _gringa__ in her own country, was looking for the same work as América? It couldn't be. It was a fantasy. Crazy.

But Mary persisted. She made wiping motions with her hands, cleaned an imaginary window, even making little squeaking sounds to imitate the pressure of the rag and the release of the ammonia, and she dipped her imaginary rag into an imaginary bucket until America got the idea: she was a _criada,__ a maid, a cleaning lady, here in her own country, and as fantastic as it seemed, she was competing for the same nonexistent jobs America was.

Well, it was a shock-like seeing that gabacho with the long hair in Venice, begging on the streets. America felt all the hope crumple in her. And then the _gringa__-Mary-was digging around inside her clothes as if she were scratching fleas or something, actually squirming in the dirt. But it wasn't a flea she came up with, it was a bottle. Pint-size. She took a long swallow and laughed, then offered it to America. No, America gestured, shaking her head, and she was thinking: _Have I sunk to this, a good student and a good girl who always respected her parents and did as she was told, sitting here penniless in the dirt with a common drunk?__ “Escuse, pleese,” she said, and got up to seek out Candelario Pérez again to see if there was anything for her.

She couldn't find him. It was too late. By arrangement with the local citizens, the labor exchange closed down at noon-they might have been liberal and motivated by a spirit of common humanity and charity, but they didn't want a perpetual encampment of the unemployed, out of luck and foreign in their midst. Twelve o'clock came and you went home, unless you were lucky enough to have found a job for the day, and then you went home when the boss told you to go. They were very strict about camping in the ravine or in the brush along the road-not only the _gringos,__ but men like Candelario Pérez, who knew that one encampment could ruin it for them all. There was nothing to stop the _gringos__ from tearing down this building and calling in the cops and the hard-faced men from the INS. America knew nothing of this, and that was a small mercy. She did know that it was noon, and that the gathering was breaking up voluntarily.

She walked aimlessly round the lot. Cars went by on the canyon road, but fewer of them now, and at greater intervals. There was a gas station, a secondhand-clothing store; across the street, the post office, and then the little shopping center where the _paisano__ from Italy had his store. The men were staring at her openly now, and their stares were harder, hungrier. Most of them were here alone, separated from their families-and their wives-for months at a time, sometimes years. They were starving, and she was fresh meat.

The image spooked her, and she started off down the road, conscious of their eyes drilling into her. All the warmth she'd felt earlier, the familiarity, the brother- and sisterhood, was gone suddenly, and all she could think of, looming nightmarishly, was the faces of those animals at the border-_Mexican__ animals-the ones who'd come out of the night to attack her and Cándido as they crossed over. Mexicans. Her own people. And when the light hit them their faces showed nothing-no respect, no mercy, nothing.

America had been terrified to begin with-what she and Cándido were doing was illegal, and she'd never done anything illegal in her life. Crouching there beside the corrugated iron fence, her mouth dry and heart racing, she waited through the long night till the _coyote__ gave the word, and then she and Cándido and half a dozen others were running for their lives on the hard-baked earth of another country. Two-thirds of their savings had gone to this man, this _coyote,__ this emissary between the two worlds, and he was either incompetent or he betrayed them. One minute he was there, hustling them through a gap in the fence, and the next minute he was gone, leaving them in a clump of bushes at the bottom of a ravine in a darkness so absolute it was like being thrust into the bottom of a well.

And then the animals jumped them. Just like that. A gang of them, armed with knives, baseball bats, a pistol. And how did they know that she and Cándido would be there beneath that particular bush-and at the ungodly hour of four a. m.? There were six or seven of them. They pinned Cándido down and cut the pockets from his trousers, and then, in that hot subterranean darkness, they went for her. A knife was in her face, their hands were all over her, and they jerked the clothes from her as if they were skinning a rabbit. Cándido cried out and they clubbed him; she screamed, and they laughed. But then, just as the first one loosened his belt, taking his time, enjoying it, the helicopter came with its lights and suddenly it was bright day and the vermin were scattering and Cándido had her and the wash of the propellers threw the dirt against her bare skin like a thousand hot needles. “Run!” Cándido screamed. “Run!” And she ran, naked, her feet sliced by the rocks and the stabbing talons of the desert plants, but she couldn't outrun a helicopter.

That was the most humiliating night of her life. She was herded along with a hundred other people toward a line of Border Patrol jeeps and she stood there naked and bleeding, every eye on her, until someone gave her a blanket to cover herself. Twenty minutes later she was back on the other side of the fence.

Bitter reflections. She continued down the road, thinking to duck off onto one of the hilly side streets to her right, as she'd done yesterday. There were backyard gardens there, fruit trees, tomatoes and peppers and squash. She didn't mean to steal. She knew it was wrong. And she'd never stolen a thing in her life.

Until yesterday.

The voices echoed through the confined space of the ravine as if it were a public bath, high-pitched with excitement, almost squealing: “Hey, took-didn't I tell you?”

“What-you find something?”

“What the fuck you think that is-a fucking fireplace-and look, a fucking blanket!”

Cándido crouched there behind the rocks, afraid to breathe, trembling as uncontrollably as if he'd suddenly been plunged into an ice bath, and all he could think of was America. He'd been caught three times before-once in L. A., once in Arizona, and then with America just over the Tijuana fence-and the fear of that took his breath away and turned his stomach over yet again. It wasn't himself he was afraid for, it was her. For him it was nothing. A pain in the ass, sure, a bus ride to the border, his meager possessions scattered to the winds-but how would he get back to his wife? A hundred and eighty miles and no money, not a cent. There might be a beating. The _gabachos__ could be brutal-big men with little blond mustaches and hatuit qhes and e in their eyes-but usually they were just bored, just going through the motions. A beating he could take-even now, even with his face and his arm and the shit pouring out of him-but it was América he trembled for.

What would happen to her? How would he find her? If they'd caught her already-at the labor exchange, walking along the road-she could be on a bus even now. And worse: if they hadn't caught her and she came back here, back to nothing, what then? She'd think he'd deserted her, run off from his responsibilities like a cock on the loose, and what love could survive that? They should have made a contingency plan, figured out a place to meet in Tijuana, a signal of some kind… but they hadn't. He listened to the voices and gritted his teeth.

“Hey, dude, check this out-”

“What?”

“Look at this shit.”

But wait a minute-these weren't the voices of INS agents, of the police, of grown men… no, there was something in the timbre, something harsh and callow in the way the words seemed to claw for air as if they were choking on them, something adolescent… Cándido stealthily pushed himself to a sitting position, pulled up his trousers and crept forward on hands and knees to a place where he could peer between the rocks without being detected. What he saw got him breathing again. Two figures, no uniforms. Baggy shorts, hi-top sneakers, big black billowing T-shirts, legs and arms pale in the slashing sun as they bent to his things, lifted them above their heads and flung them, one by one, into the creek. First the blanket, then the grill he'd salvaged from an abandoned refrigerator, then his rucksack with his comb and toothbrush and a change of clothes inside, and then América's things.

“Shit, man, one of them's a girl,” the bigger one said, holding up América's everyday dress, blue cotton washed so many times it was almost white. In that moment Cándido confirmed what his ears had suspected: these weren't men; they were boys, overgrown boys. The one holding the dress out before him was six feet at least, towering, all limbs and feet and with a head shaved to the ears and _gabacho-__colored hair gone long on top-_redheads,__ did they all have to be redheads?

“Fucking Beaners. Rip it up, man. Destroy it.”

The other one was shorter, big in the shoulders and chest, and with the clear glassy cat's eyes so many of the _gringos__ inherited from their mothers, the _gringas__ from Sweden and Holland and places like that. He had a mean pinched face, the face of an insect under the magnifying glass-bland at a distance, lethal up close. The bigger one tore the dress in two, balled the halves and flung them at the other one, and they hooted and capered up and down the streambed like apes that had dropped from the trees. Before they were done they even bent to the rocks of the fireplace Cándido had built and heaved them into the stream too.

Cándido waited a long while before emerging. They'd been gone half an hour at least, their shrieks and obscenities riding on up the walls of the canyon till finally they blended with the distant hum of the traffic and faded away. His stomach heaved on him again, and he had to crouch down with the pain of it, but the spasm passed. After a moment he got up and waded into the stream to try to recover his things, and it was then that he noticed their parting gift, a message emblazoned on the rocks in paint that dripped like blood. The letters were crude and the words in English, but there was no mistaking the meaning: ***

BEANERS DIE

5

DELANEY COULDN'T FEEL BAD FOR LONG, NOT UP here where the night hung close round him and the crickets thundered and the air off the Pacific crept up the hills to drive back the lingering heat of the day. There were even stars, a cluster here and there fighting through the wash of light pollution that turned the eastern and southern borders of the night yellow, as if a whole part of the world had gone rancid. To the north and east lay the San Fernando Valley, a single endless plane of parallel boulevards, houses, mini-malls and streetlights, and to the south lay the rest of Los Angeles, ad infinitum. There were no streetlights in Arroyo Blanco-that was one of the attractions, the rural feel, the sense that you were somehow separated from the city and wedded to the mountains-and Delaney never felt the lack of them. He didn't carry a flashlight either. He enjoyed making his way through the dark streets, his eyes adjusting to the shapes and shadows of the world as it really was, reveling in the way the night defined itself in the absence of artificial light and the ubiquitous blast of urban noise.

Though the walk had calmed him, he couldn't suppress a sudden pounding in his chest as he passed the Dagolian place-heedless people, slobs-and turned up Piñon Drive, conscious once again of the burden in the pocket of his windbreaker. His house sat at the end of Piñon, in a cul-de-sac that marked the last frontier of urban development, and the chirring of the crickets seemed louder here, the darkness more complete. As if to prove the point, a great horned owl began to hoot softly from the trees behind him. Someone's sprinklers went on with a hiss. High overhead, a jet climbing out of LAX cut a tear in the sky. Delaney had just begun to relax again when a car suddenly turned into the street from Robles Drive, high beams obliterating the night. He glanced over his shoulder, squinted into the light and kept on walking.

The car was moving, but barely. Its exhaust rumbled menacingly, all that horsepower held in check, and from behind the rolled-up windows came the bottom-heavy thump of rap music-no words, no instrument, no melody discernible, just a thump. Delaney kept walking, annoyed all over again. Why couldn't they pass by already and let the night close back over him? Why couldn't he have a minute's peace even in his own neighborhood?

The car pulled slowly alongside him, and he could see that it was some sort of American car, older, a big boat of a thing with mag wheels and an elaborate metal-flake paint job. The windows were smoked and he couldn't see inside. What did they want-directions? No face was visible. No one asked. He cursed under his breath, then picked up his pace, but the car seemed to hover there beside him, the speakers sucking up all available sound and then pumping it back out again, _ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.__ The car stayed even with him for what seemed an eternity, then it gradually accelerated, made the end of the street, wheeled round and rolled slowly back down the block again-_ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump-__and this time the lights, still on bright, glared directly into Delaney's eyes. He kept going and the car crept past him again and finally faded to a pair of taillights swinging back onto Robles. It wasn't till Delaney was inside, and the door locked behind him, that he thought to be afraid.

Who would be up here at this hour in a car like that? He thought of the solemn fat man at the meeting and his litany of woes, the bringer of bad tidings, the Cassandra of Arroyo Blanco. Was it burglars, then? Muggers? Gangbangers? Is that what they were? As he crossed the kitchen and surreptitiously slipped Sacheverell's foreleg into the freezer beneath a bag of frozen peas-he'd bury it tomorrow, after Kyra went off to work-he couldn't help thinking about the gate. If there was a gate that car wouldn't have been there, and who knew what he'd just escaped-a beating, robbery, murder? He poured himself a glass of orange juice, took a bite of the macaroni and cheese Jordan had left on his plate at dinner. And then he saw the light in the bedroom: Kyra was waiting up for him.

He felt a stirring in his groin. It was nearly eleven, and normally she was in bed by nine-thirty. That meant one thing: she was propped up against the pillows in one of the sheer silk teddies he'd bought her at Christmas for just such an occasion as this, reading Anaïs Nin's erotica or paging through one of the illustrated sex manuals she kept in a box under the bed-waiting, and eager. There was something about the little tragedies of life, the opening of the floodgates of emotion, that seemed to unleash her libido. For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs-and who was Delaney to argue? She'd been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gallbladder operation, and he could remember never wanting to leave the motel room they'd rented across the street from the hospital-it was the next best thing to a second honeymoon. Smaller sorrows aroused her too-having a neighbor list her house with a rival company, discovering a dent in the door of her Lexus, seeing Jordan laid low with the flu or swollen up with the stigmata of poison oak. Delaney could only imagine what the death of a dog would do to her.

He came into the room with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, ready for anything. She was there, just as he'd pictured her, the pillows fluffed, the silk clinging to her breasts, her eyes moist with desire as she lifted them from the page. “How was the meeting?” she whispered.

He watched, transfixed, as she swung her smooth tanned legs over the side of the bed, set her book down on the night table and snapped off the reading light, leaving only the sensual flicker of a scented candle to guide them. “The meeting?” he echoed, and he was whispering too, he couldn't help himself. “It was nothing. The usual.”

And now she was on her feet, her arms encircling his shoulders, her body straining against his. “I thought”-her voice cracked and tiny-“I thought they were… debating the… gate and all?”

Her mouth was warm. He pressed himself to her like a teenager at a dance, oblivious of gates, coyotes, dogs and Mexicans. She moved against him, and then she pulled away to perch again at the edge of the bed, her fingers busy at his zipper. After a long pause, he whispered, “That's right… and you know how I feel about it, but-” And though his pants were down around his ankles and they were kissing again and he was caressing her through the black liquid silk, he couldn't help thinking about that car and the low rumbling menace of it and how that modified his views vis-à-vis gated communities, public spaces and democratic access… He lifted the silk from her thighs. “I guess I'm not sure anymore-”

She was wet. He sank into her. The candle sent distorted shadows floating up and down the walls. “Poor Sacheverell,” she breathed, and then suddenly she froze. Her eyes, inches from his, flashed open. “He's dead, isn't he?”

There'd been movement, warmth, a slow delicious friction, but now all movement ceased. What could he say? He tried to kiss her, but she fought his mouth away. He let out a sigh. “Yes.”

“For sure?”

“For sure.”

“You found him, didn't you? Tell me. Quick.”

She was clutching him still, but there was no passion in it-at least not the sort of passion he'd anticipated. Another sigh. “A piece of him. His foreleg, actually. The left.”

She drew in a sudden sharp breath-it was as if she'd burned herself or been pricked with a pin-and then she pushed him aside and rolled out from under him. Before he knew what was happening she was on her feet, rigid with anger. “I knew it! You lied to me!”

“I didn't lie, I just-”

“Where is it?”

The question took him by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“The”-her voice broke-“what's left of him.”

He'd done all he could. He would have had to tell her in the morning anyway. “In the freezer,” he said.

And then he was standing naked in the kitchen, watching his wife peer into the palely glowing depths of the freezer, her negligee derealized in the light of a single frigid bulb. He tried to nuzzle up against her but she pushed him impatiently away. “Where?” she demanded. “I don't see anything.”

Miserable, his voice pitched low: “Third shelf down, behind the peas. It's wrapped up in a Baggie.”

He watched her poke tentatively through the bright plastic sacks of vegetables until she found it, a nondescript lump of hair, bone, gristle and meat wrapped like a chicken leg in its transparent shroud. She held it in the palm of her hand, her eyes swollen with emotion, the heavy breath of the freezer swirling ghostlike round her bare legs. Delaney didn't know what to say. He felt guilty somehow, culpable, as if he'd killed the dog himself, as if the whole thing were bound up in venality, lust, the shirking of responsibility and duty, and yet at the same time the scene was irresistibly erotic. Despite himself, he began to stiffen. But then, as Kyra stood there in a daze and the freezer breathed in and out and the pale wedge of light from the open door pressed their trembling shadows to the wall, there came a clacking of canine nails on the polished floorboards, and Osbert, the survivor, poked his head in the door, looking hopeful.

It was apparently too much for Kyra. The relic disappeared into the depths of the freezer amid the peas and niblet corn and potato puffs, and the door slammed shut, taking all the light with it.

You didn't move property with a long face and you didn't put deals together if you could barely drag yourself out of bed in the morning-especially in this market. Nobody had to tell Kyra. She was the consummate closer-psychic, cheerleader, seductress and psychoanalyst all rolled in one-and she never let her enthusiasm flag no matter how small the transaction or how many times she'd been through the same tired motions. Somehow, though, she just couldn't seem to muster the energy. Not today. Not after what had happened to Sacheverell. It was only eleven in the morning and she felt as worn and depleted as she'd ever been in her life. All she could think about was that grisly paw in the freezer, and she wished now that she'd let Delaney go ahead with his deception. He would have buried the evidence in the morning and she'd never have been the wiser-but no, she had to see for herself, and that little foreleg with its perfectly aligned little toenails was a shock that kept her up half the night.

When she did finally manage to drift off, her dreams were haunted by wolfish shapes and images of the hunt, by bared fangs and flashing limbs and the circle of canny snouts raised to the sky in primordial triumph. She awoke to the whimpering of Osbert, and the first emotion that seized her was anger. Anger at her loss, at the vicissitudes of nature, at the Department of Fish and Game or Animal Control or whatever they were called, at the grinning stupid potbellied clown who'd put up the fence for them-why stop at six feet? Why not eight? Ten? When the anger had passed, she lay there in the washed-out light of dawn and stroked the soft familiar fluff behind the dog's ears and let the hurt overwhelm her, and it was cleansing, cathartic, a moment of release that would strengthen and sustain her. Or so she thought.

At eleven-fifteen she pulled up in front of the house she was showing-the Matzoob place, big and airy, with a marble entrance hall, six bedrooms, pool, maid's room and guesthouse, worth one-point-one two years ago and listed at eight now and lucky to move for six and a half-and the first thing she noticed was the puddle of water on the front porch. Puddle? It was a pond, a lake, and the depth of it showed all too plainly how uneven the tiles were. She silently cursed the gardener. There had to be a broken sprinkler head somewhere in the shrubbery-yes, there it was-and when the automatic timer switched on, it must have been like Niagara out here. Well, she'd have to dig around in the garage and see if she could find a broom somewhere-she couldn't very well have the buyers wading through a pond to get in the house, not to mention noticing that the tiles were coming up and the porch listing into the shrubbery. And then she'd call the gardener. What was his name-she had it in her book somewhere, not the service she usually used, some independent the Matzoobs had been big on before they moved to San Bernardino-Gutiérrez? González? Something like that.

Kyra had no patience with incompetence, and here it was, staring her in the face. How the gardener could come back week after week and not notice something as obvious as an inch and a half of water on the front porch was beyond her, and the pure immediate unalloyed aggravation of it allowed her to forget Sacheverell for the moment and focus on the matter at hand, on business, on the moving of property. Nothing escaped her. Not a crack in the plaster, a spot of mold on the wall behind the potted palm or an odor that wasn't exactly what it was supposed to be.

Odors were the key. You could tell three-quarters of everything about a house by the way it smelled-condition, upkeep, what kind of people owned it, whether the roof leaked or the basement flooded. What you didn't want was that dead tomblike smell of a shut-up house, as if it were a funeral parlor, or anything that smelled of dry rot or chemicals or even paint. Cooking odors were anathema. Ditto the stink of animals. She'd listed one house-one of her few failures-in which an old lady had died surrounded by thirty-two cats that had pissed, crapped and sprayed on every surface available, including the ceilings. The only hope for that place was to burn it down.

Now, stepping into the Matzoobs', the first thing Kyra did was close the door behind her and take a good long lingering sniff. Then she exhaled and tried it again, alert to every nuance, her nose as keen as any connoisseur's. Not bad. Not bad at all. There was maybe the faintest whiff of cooking oil from some long-forgotten meal, a trace of dog or cat, mothballs maybe, but she couldn't be sure. It helped that the place was empty-when it first went on the market eight months ago the Matzoobs were still here, the halls, closets and bathrooms steeping in their own peculiar odor. And to call the odor “peculiar” wasn't being judgmental, not at all-it was merely descriptive. Every family, every house, had its own aroma, as unique and individual as a thumbprint.

The Matzoobs' was a rich ferment of smell, ranging from the perfume of the fresh-cut flowers Sheray Matzoob favored to the pungent stab of garlic and coriander Joe Matzoob had learned to use in his gourmet cooking classes and the festering sweat socks of Matzoob Jr., the basketball star. It was a homey smell, but too complicated to do anybody any good. And the furniture was a nightmare. Big cumbersome pieces finished in an almost ebony stain that seemed to drink up what little light penetrated the thick blanket-like curtains Sheray Matzoob had inherited from her mother. And the portraits-they were something else altogether. Big, crude, cheesy things that made the Matzoobs look like ghouls, with gold-tinted frames and paint so thick it might have been applied with a butter knife.

But now the place was empty, and that suited Kyra just fine. Once in a while you'd get a place that was so exquisitely furnished you'd ask the sellers to leave their things in place until the house was in escrow, but that was rare. Most people had no taste. No dream of it. Not a clue. And yet they all thought they had it-were smug about it even-and they'd walk right out the door because of an unfortunate lamp or a deep plush carpet in a shade they couldn't fathom. All things considered, Kyra preferred it this way-a neutral environment, stripped to the essentials: walls, floors, ceilings and appliances. A vacant house became hers in a way-it had been abandoned, deserted, left in her hands and hers alone, and sometimes the sellers were off in another state or country even-and she couldn't help feeling proprietorial about it. Sometimes, making the rounds of her houses-she had forty-six current listings, more than half of them unoccupied-she felt like the queen of some fanciful country, a land of high archways, open rooms and swimming pools that would have made an inland sea if stretched end-to-end across her domain.

There was a broom in the garage-practically the only thing left there, if you discounted the two trash cans and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. Kyra swept the water from the front porch and then went into the bathroom in the master suite to freshen up her face before Sally Lieberman from Sunrise arrived with her buyers. The bathroom was dated, unfortunately, by its garish ceramic tiles, each with the miniature yellow, blue and green figure of a bird emblazoned on it, and by the tarnished faux-brass fixtures and cut-glass towel racks that gave the place the feel of the ladies' room in a Mexican restaurant. Ah, well, each to her taste, Kyra was thinking, and then she caught a good look at herself in the mirror.

It was a shock. She looked awful. Haggard, frowsy, desperate, like some stressed-out Tupperware hostess or something. The problem was her nose. Or, actually, it was Sacheverell and the night she'd spent, but all the grief and shock and exhaustion of the ordeal was right there, consolidated in her nose. The tip of it was red-bright red, naming-and when the tip of her nose was red it seemed to pull her whole face in on itself like some freakish vortex, The Amazing Lady with the Shrinking Face. Ever since she'd had her nose modified when she was fourteen, it had a tendency to embarrass her in times of stress. Whatever the doctor had done to it-remove a sliver of bone, snip a bit here and there-it was always just a shade paler than her cheeks, chin and brow, and it took on color more quickly. It always seemed to be sunburned, for one thing. And when she had a cold or flu or felt agitated or depressed or overwrought it blazed out from the center of her face like something you'd expect to find at the top of a Christmas tree.

You couldn't move property with a nose like that. But why dwell on it? She took out her compact and went to work.

Just as she was putting the finishing touches to her face she heard Sally Lieberman chiming from the front door, “We're here!”

Sally was mid-forties, dressed like she owned the store, worked out at the gym, a real professional. Kyra had closed six properties with her over the course of the past two years and she valued her input. The buyers, though, left something to be desired. They hung back at the door, looking sulky and hard-to-please. Sally introduced them as the Paulymans, Gerald and Sue. He was frazzle-haired and unshaven, in a pair of blue jeans gone pale with use, and she had pink and black beads braided into her hair. Kyra knew from experience not to judge from first appearances-she'd once had a woman in her seventies who dressed like a bag lady but wound up writing a check for a two-point-seven-mil estate in Cold Canyon-but they didn't look auspicious. Maybe they were musicians or TV writers, she thought, hoping for the best. They had to have something going for them or Sally wouldn't have brought them around.

“So what's with the wet spot on the porch?” the husband wanted to know, confronting her eyes, his voice nagging and hoarse.

You couldn't be evasive-evasive didn't work. Even the most complacent buyer would think you were trying to put something over on them, and a buyer like this would eat you alive. Kyra put on her smile. “A broken sprinkler head. I've already called the gardener about it.”

“That porch has a real pitch to it.”

“We offer a one-year buyer-protection policy on every house we list, gratis.”

“I can't believe this carpet,” the wife said.

“And look at this,” the husband whined, pushing past Kyra and into the living room, where he went down on his hands and knees to wet a finger and run it along the baseboard, “the paint is flaking.”

Kyra knew the type. They were looky-loos of the first stripe, abusive, angry, despicable people who'd make you show them two hundred houses and then go out and buy a trailer. Kyra gave them her spiel-deal of the century, room to spare, old-world craftsmanship, barely been lived in-handed them each a brochure with a glossy color photo of the house reproduced on the front and left them to wander at will.

By two, she had a headache. Nothing was moving, anywhere, there were no messages on her machine and only six people had showed up for the realtors' open house she'd catered herself on a new listing in West Hills-all that Chardonnay, Brie and Danish soda bread gone to waste, not to mention half a platter of California roll, ebi and salmon sushi. She spent the rest of the afternoon at the office, doing busywork, writing up ad copy and making phone calls, endless phone calls. Three extra-strength Excedrin couldn't begin to quell the throbbing in her temples, and every time she lifted a document from her desk she saw Sacheverell as a puppy chasing a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a part of him that had gotten away. She called Delaney at five to see how Jordan was taking it-he was fine, Delaney told her, so absorbed in his Nintendo he wouldn't have known a dog from a chicken-and then she left work early to close up her houses and head home.

The parking attendant gave her her keys with a smile full of teeth and a mock bow that took him almost to the ground. He was a young Latino with slicked-back hair and dancing eyes and he always made her feel good, and though it was a little thing and she knew it was his job to make the ladies feel good, she couldn't help smiling back at him. Then she was in her ear and the rest of the world wasn't. She switched off the car phone, fed one of her relaxation tapes into the slot in the console-waves breaking on a beach, with the odd keening cry of a seagull thrown in for variety-and eased out into the traffic snarled on the boulevard in front of the office.

Traffic was traffic, and it didn't faze her a bit. She moved with it, sat in it, ran with its unfathomable flow. The car was her sanctuary, and with the phone switched off and the waves rolling from the front speakers to the rear and back again, nothing could touch her. Just sitting there, locked in, the exhaust rising about her, she began to feel better.

She was responsible for closing up five houses every night, seven days a week, and opening them again in the morning so her fellow realtors could show them. These were the houses she was keying on, and though they had lockboxes, she needed to make sure they were secure at night-she couldn't count the times a careless realtor had left a window or even a door open-and to collect the cards of any of her colleagues who might have been through with a client. It added a good hour or more to her day, but it kept the sellers happy and she could go home and network with those cards while Delaney put up dinner and Jordan did his homework. And five houses was nothing, really-she'd had as many as twelve or thirteen during the boom years.

She went through the first four houses on automatic pilot-in the door, douse the lights, check on the automatic timers, punch in the alarm code and lock up, key in the lockbox-but with the last house, the Da Ros place, she took her time. This was a house you could get lost in, a house that made her other listings look like bungalows. Of all the places she'd ever shown, this was the one that really spoke to her, the sort of house she would have when she was forty and kissed Mike Bender goodbye and opened her own office. It sat high on a bluff above the canyon at the end of a private drive, with an unobstructed view of the Pacific on one side and the long green-brown spine of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other. Way below it, like some sort of fungus attached to the flank of the mountain, lay the massed orange tile rooftops of Arroyo Blanco.

There were twenty rooms, each arranged to take advantage of the views, a library, billiard room, servants' quarters, formal gardens and fishpond. In all, the house comprised eleven thousand square feet of living space, done up in the style of an English manor house, with towering chimneys, fieldstone walls and a roof stained russet and green to counterfeit age and venerability, though it only dated back to 1988. It was on the market because of a suicide. Kyra was representing the widow, who'd gone to live in Italy after the funeral.

Her headache was gone now, but it had been replaced by a fatigue that went deeper than any physical exhaustion, a funk, a malaise she couldn't seem to shake. All this over a dog? It was ridiculous, she knew it. There were people out there going through Dumpsters for a scrap to eat, people lined up on the streets begging for work, people who'd lost their homes, their children, their spouses, people with real problems, real grief. What was wrong with her?

Maybe it was her priorities, maybe that was it. What was she doing with her life? Cutting deals? Making Mike Bender richer? Seeing that Mr. and Mrs. Whoever found or sold or leased or rented their dream house while the world was falling to shit around her and dogs were dying and she got to spend an hour and a half a day with her son if she was lucky? She looked round her and it was as if she were waking from a dream, the sky on fire, the towers blazing above her. It was then, for just a moment, standing there in the tiled drive of Patricia Da Ros's huge wheeling ark of a house, that she caught a glimpse of her own end, laid to rest in short skirt, heels and tailored jacket, a sheaf of escrow papers clutched in her hand.

She tried to shrug it off. Tried to tell herself that what she did was important, vital, altruistic even-after food and love, what was more important than shelter? — but the cloud wouldn't lift and she felt numb from the balls of her feet to the crown of her head. She found herself drifting through the gardens, checking to see that everything was in order-she couldn't help herself-and there was no carelessness here because the gardener was her own and he knew just what was expected of him. All was quiet. The koi lay deep in their pools and the lawns glistened under a soft uniform mist from the sprinklers.

It was quarter past six and still warm-uncomfortably warm-but there was an offshore breeze and Kyra could see a skein of fog unraveling across the water below. The evening would be cool. She thought of her own house then, of Delaney going round opening the windows and turning on the big slow ceiling fans to gather in the breeze while the salad chilled and the pasta steamed and Jordan kicked a ball against the garage door. If she hurried, she could be home by seven.

But she didn't hurry. The more she thought of her own house, of her son, her husband, her solitary dog, the more enervated she felt. She lingered on the doorstep, wandered through the cavernous rooms like a ghost, ran her hand over the felt of the billiard table as if she were caressing the short stiff nap at the base of Jordan's neck. She was just checking to see that everything was in order, that was all, but in a way, a growing way, a way that almost overwhelmed her, she didn't want to leave, not ever again.

Late morning, the house silent, light muted, telephone off the hook. Delaney sat in his office, a converted bedroom fitted but with desk, couch and filing cabinets, leaning into a pool of artificial light while the sun cut precise slashes between the slats of the drawn blinds. He'd been out earlier with shovel and pickax, the heavy clay soil like asphalt, to dispose of the dog's remains, putting an end to that chapter. Mercifully. And now he was back at work, severed limbs, distraught wives, frightened children and public meetings behind him, putting the finishing touches to his latest column: PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK _Who am I, manzanita stick in hand and nylon pack clinging to my shoulders like a furled set of wings, out abroad in the wide world? Who am I, striding into the buttery glaze of evening sun amidst stands of bright blooming mustard that reach to my elbows and beyond? I'm a pilgrim, that's all, a seer, a worshiper at the shrine. No different from you, really: housebound half the day, a slave to the computer, a man who needs his daily fix of electricity as badly as any junkie needs his numinous drug. But different too, because I have these mountains to roam and these legs to carry me. Tonight__-_this evening-I am off on an adventure, a jaunt, a peregrination beneath the thin skin of the visible to breathe in the world around me as intensely as Wordsworth's leech-gatherer and his kin: I am climbing into the fastness of the Santa Monica Mountains, within sight and sound of the second-biggest city in the country (within the city limits, for that matter), to spend a solitary night.__

_I am excited. Bursting. Thrilling like a plucked string. For while I know these hills in the broad light of midday, and I know them in early morning and evening (and I've tasted them, as you might taste an exotic fruit) between the curtains of the night, this will be my first sojourn here under the stars. From the moment my wife drops me off at the Trippet Ranch trailhead with a kiss and a promise to come for me at nine the next morning, I feel a primeval sense of liberation, of release, and as I wend my way upward through the stands of undiscouraged shrubs, I can't help singing out their names in a sort of mantra-bush poppy, sumac, manzanita, ceanothus, chamise, redshanks__-_over and over again.__

_The mustard is an interloper here, by the way, an annual introduced by the Franciscan padres, who, so it is said, broadcast handfuls of seed along the Camino Real to mark the trail, but of course they had an ulterior motive too: this is the same mustard that winds up in a jar on our table. It blooms after the rains and transforms the hills, yellow flowers stretching to the horizon in pointillistic display, but by this time of the year it has already begun to fade. In a month there will be nothing left but shriveled leaves and dried-out stalks.__

_By contrast, the manzanita and toyon, with their lode of palatable berries, are on for the long haul, as are our two hardy members of the rose family, chamise__ (Adenostoma fasciculatum) _and redshanks__ (Adenostoma sparsifolium). _Tough customers, these. They deposit toxins in the soil to inhibit germination of competing plants and carry resins in their woody stems to feed the periodic brushfires that allow them to regenerate. They will see no rain__-_indeed, no moisture at all save for what little may drift in on the sea mist__-_till November or December. But there they are, holding the ground like an army keeping the sun at bay.__

_I will spend the night not at the prescribed campground (Musch Ranch), but in a more solitary place off the Santa Ynez Canyon Trail, with nothing more elaborate between me and terra firma than an old army blanket and a foam pad. Of course, unwelcome bed-fellows are always a concern up here, with rattlesnakes heading the list, but certain oversized members of the Arachnida class-tarantulas and scorpions, specifically__-_can be equally disconcerting.__

_A friend once joked that the scorpion has evolved his pincers in order to seize the big toe of the unsuspecting Homo sapiens and gain purchase for the fine penetrating over-the-back sting. Look at a scorpion lying there in the aperture of his burrow or scuttling about in the beam of a flashlight, and you might almost think it true. But like everything else in this Creation, the scorpion is beautiful in his way and beautifully adapted to seizing, paralyzing and absorbing his insect prey. (I once kept two of them in a__ jar-a _mustard jar, for that matter__-_and fed them on spiders. Though one was half again as large as the other, they seemed to coexist peacefully enough until I went away for a week and returned to see the larger drinking up the vital juices of the smaller, which at that point resembled nothing so much as a tiny scorpion-shaped balloon that someone had let the air out of.)__

_But that is why I am here instead of home in my armchair with a book in my lap: to savor not only the fixed joys and certitudes of Nature but the contingencies too. It's a heady feeling, the sort of feeling that makes you know you're alive and breathing and part of the whole grand scheme of things, drinking from the same fount as the red-tailed hawk, the mule deer, the centipede and the scorpion too.__

_Darkness is coming on as I spread my blanket on the earth at the head of a canyon near a trickling waterfall and settle in to watch the night deepen round me. My fare is humble: an apple, a handful of trail mix, a Swiss cheese sandwich and a long thirsty swallow of aqua pura from the bota bag. From somewhere deep in the hollow space below me comes the soft, almost delicate, hoot of the great horned owl-more a coo really-and it is answered a moment later by an equally diffident hoot off to the east. By now the night has taken over and the stars have begun to extricate themselves one by one from the haze. An hour passes. Two. I am waiting for something, I don't know what, but if I can filter out the glowing evidence of our omnipresent civilization (passenger jets, streaking high overhead on their incessant journeys, the light pollution that makes the eastern sky glow as if with the first trembling light of dawn), I feel that all this is mine to have and hold, for this night at least.__

_And then I hear it, a high tenuous glissade of sound that I might almost have mistaken for a siren if I didn't know better, and I realize that this is what I've been waiting for all along: the coyote chorus. The song of the survivor, the Trickster, the four-legged wonder who can find water where there is none and eat hearty among the rocks and the waste places. He is out there now, ringing-in the night, gathering in his powers and dominions, hunting, gamboling, stealing like a shadow through the scrub around me, and singing, singing for my benefit alone on this balmy seamless night. And I? I lie back and listen, as on another night I might listen to Mozart or Mendelssohn, lulled by the impassioned beauty of it. The waterfall trickles. The coyotes sing. I have a handful of raisins and a blanket: what more could I want? All the world knows I am content.__

6

THE BEANS WERE GONE, THE _TORTILLAS,__ THE LARD, the last few grains of rice. And what were they going to eat-grass? Like the cows? That was the question she put to Cándido when he tried to prevent her from going up the hill to the labor exchange for the fifth weary day in a row, and so what if it had a sting in it? What right did he have to tell her where she could go and what she could do? He wasn't helping any. He could barely get up and take a pee on his own-and what of the _gabacho__ boys who'd ripped up her dress and flung their blanket into the creek, where was he then? She threw it all at him, angry, hurt, terrified; and then he rose up off the blanket and slapped her. Hard. Slapped her in the pale rocky dawn of the ravine till her head snapped back on her neck like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle. “Don't you tell me,” he growled through his teeth. “It's an insult. A kick in the ass when I'm down.” He spat at her feet. “You're no better than your sister, no better than a whore.”

But you couldn't eat grass, and for all his bluster, he must have realized that. He was healing, but he was still in no shape to climb up out of the canyon and throw himself back into _la lucha,__ the struggle to find a job, to be the one man picked out of a crowd, and then to work like ten men to show the _patrón__ you wanted to come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. She understood his frustration, his fear, and she loved him, she did, to the bottom of her heart. But it hurt to be the target of those hard and filthy words, hurt more than the blow itself. And when it was all over, when the birds had started in again and the stream made its noise against the rocks and the cars clawed at the road above, what had been accomplished? Bitterness, that was all. She turned her back on him and made her way up that crucible of a hill for the fifth useless time in as many useless days.

Somebody handed her a cup of coffee. A man she'd seen the last two mornings, a newcomer-he said he was from the South, that was all. He was tall-nearly six feet, she guessed-and he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head like one of the _gringos__ in the supermarket. His skin was light, so light he could almost have passed for one of them, but it was his eyes that gave him away, hard burnished unblinking eyes the color of calf's liver. He'd been damaged somehow, she could see that, damaged in the way of a man who has to scrape and grovel and kiss the hind end of some irrecusable yankee boss, and his eyes showed it, jabbing out at the world like two we thnd grd bapons. He was Mexican, all right.

She had to turn away from those eyes, and she knew she shouldn't have accepted the coffee-steaming, with milk and so much sugar it was like a confection, in a styrofoam cup with a little plastic lid to keep the heat in-but she couldn't help herself. There was nothing in her stomach, nothing at all, and she was faint with the need of it. She was in her fourth month now, and the sickness was gone, but she was ravenous, mad with hunger, eating for two when there wasn't enough for one. She dreamed of food, of the _romeritos__ stew her mother made on Holy Thursday, _tortillas__ baked with chopped tomatoes, _chiles__ and grated cheese, chicken heads fried in oil, shrimp and oysters and a _mole__ sauce so rich and piquant with _serranos__ it made the juices come to her mouth just to think about it. She stood there in the warm flowing flower-scented dawn and sipped the coffee, and it only made her hungrier.

By seven, three pickup trucks had already swung into the lot, Candelario Pérez had separated out three, four and three men again, and they were gone. The stranger from the South was not chosen, and there were still ten men who'd arrived before him. Out of the corner of her eye, America watched him contend with Candelario Pérez-she couldn't hear the words, but the man's violent gestures and the contortions of his scowling pale half-a-_gringo'__s face were enough to let her know that he wasn't happy waiting his turn, that he was a grumbler, a complainer, a sorehead. “Son of a bitch,” she heard him say, and she averted her eyes. _Please,__ she was praying, _don't let him come over to me.__

But he did come over. He'd given her a cup of coffee-she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop-and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some _gringo__ or _gringa__ pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he'd been poked in the throat, “-enjoy the coffee?”

She wouldn't look at him. Wouldn't speak.

“I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, 'There's a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,' and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh, _linda?”__ And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.

Miserable, guilty-she'd taken the coffee, hadn't she? — she didn't resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again-there was something rotting inside of him. _“Me llamo José,”__ he said, holding out a hand to shake, _“José Navidad. ¿Y tú__? ¿_Cómo te llamas, pretty?”__

This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.

“Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don't bite. I'm a friendly guy-don't you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don't you?”

“All right,” she said, and she fel pl' and she t the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I'm a married woman and it's not right to talk to me like that-”

He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy, _loco,__ demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle-just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”

Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man-a giant of a fat man, a real _guatón-__stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then-miracle of miracles! — Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even-she had a job and they didn't. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded _guatón__ of a white man with no consciousness of how she'd gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.

“Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman's voice, in English.

America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.

The fat man, the _gringo,__ called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn't understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the _gringa__ had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn't speak any English-what do you want with her?”

_“Quiero trabajar,”__ América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”

Candelario Pérez said something to the man-América was there before the _gringa,__ first come, first served-and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment-too long-and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something-she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared-and Candelario Pérez told her, “It's all right, six hours' work and he'll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary-big Mary, the drunk, the _gringa__ maid who'd tried to cut her out-got in too.

Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the _Laboratorio Medico__ in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm's way. Those boys-those teenage _gabachos-__had terrified him. They weren't _La Migra,__ no, and they weren't the police, but the way they'd attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in e b'al teeth it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who'd raised them must have been even worse-and what would have happened if they'd come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?

He'd fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he'd lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América's dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren't his wife at all, just somebody he'd met in the street.

All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He'd gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end-a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter's floods crammed into every crevice.

Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand-if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his _huaraches__-they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut-and feel his way barefoot. It wasn't a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there-snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.

When he waded back in, clinging to the Tough canyon wall for support, the _huaraches__ were strung around his neck and the rucksack propped up on the crown of his head. The water reached his knees, his crotch, his waist, and finally it came right up to his armpits, which meant that America would have to swim. He thought of that as his toes felt their way through the muck, of America swimming, the hair spread wet on her shoulders, her dress balled up in one slim pretty hand and held high above her, and he began to feel horny, a sure sign that he was healing.

He found what he was looking for at the rear of the pool, just behind the wreckage of the car. There was a spit of sand there, a private beach just wide enough for a blanket and some sort of shelter-a lean-to, maybe-and then the canyon closed up like a fist. A sheer wall of stone, thirty feet or more in height, rose up out of a shallow pool to a cleft from which the stream splayed out into the air in a perpetual shower. The light was soft, filtered through the vegetation above, and what Cándido saw wasn't stone and leaf and grain of sand, but a sitting room with a big shaded lamp dangling from the ceiling, with sofas and chairs and a polished wooden floor that gleamed beneath a burden of wax. It was a revelation. A vision. The sort of thihen' sort of ng that might have inspired a pilgrim to build a shrine.

Cándido set down his rucksack and rested in the warm sand till his clothes dried to a uniform dampness. Then he got up and began constructing a rude hearth, one rock at a time, one beside the other, and in his excitement, in the heat of the moment, he forgot his pain. When it was done, when the circle was complete and the battered refrigerator grill laid neatly atop it, he found he still had the strength to gather firewood-anything to keep moving-and he began to think about what America might bring home with her. If she'd found work, that is. And of course he'd have to wait at the old spot for her and they'd have to wade across with the groceries… but maybe she'd have some _tortillas__ or a piece of meat and something to cook down into a stew, some vegetables and rice or a couple of potatoes…

There'd been no breakfast, nothing, not a twig to suck, and he was as hungry as he'd ever been in his life, but the hunger spurred him on and as the pile of water-bleached sticks began to grow an idea took hold of him: he would surprise her, that's what he would do. With a real camp. Something solid and substantial, a place they could call home-at least till he got back on his feet and found work and they could have their own apartment in a nice neighborhood with trees and sidewalks and a space for the car he was going to buy her, and he could see the outline of that space already, fresh blacktop, all neatly laid out and marked with crisp yellow paint…

He found some twine-or was it fishing line? — in a pile of water-run brush, and two black plastic bags that he was able to work into the thatch of the roof. His hip hurt him still, and his knee, and his ribs when he stretched, but he was a slave to the idea, and by the time the sun had passed over the lip of the canyon and left him in an artificial twilight, a sturdy lean-to of interlaced branches stood on the spit behind the rusted hulk of the car, work he could be proud of.

He dozed, exhausted from his efforts, and when he woke a weak patina of sunlight painted the eastern rim of the ledge above him. He looked up drowsily, full of a false sense of well-being, and then it hit him: _América. Where was she?__ She wasn't here… but then, how could she be? This wasn't their old camp, this wasn't a place she knew. He got to his feet, the pain digging claws into his hip, and cursed himself. It must have been four, five o'clock. She'd be back there, downstream, looking for him, and how could she doubt that he'd run out on her for good?

Cursing still, cursing nonstop, he plunged into the pool and slashed through the murky water, heart hammering, and never mind his clothes. He hurried along the streambed as fast as his hip would allow, frantic now, in a panic-and then he rounded the bend that gave onto their old camp and she wasn't there. The leaves hung limp, the stream stood still. There was no trace of her, no note, no pile of stones or scribble in the sand. This was _muy gacho,__ bad news. And fuck his stinking _pinche__ life. Fuck it.

Then it was up the hill, each step a crucifixion, and what choice did he have? — up the hill for the first time since the accident. He hadn't gone a hundred feet before he had to stop and catch his breath. The clothes hung sodden from his frame-and he'd lost weight, he had, lying there in the stinking sand with nothing but scraps and vegetables to eat for the last nine days like some wasted old sack of bones in a nursing home. He spat in the dirt, gritted his teeth, and went on.

The sun was hot still, though it must have been six o'clock at least, higher and hotter than down below. Despite his wet clothes he began to sweat, and he had to use his hands-or his one good hand-ru'e good hato help him over the rough places. When he was halfway up, at a spot where the trail jogged to the right and dodged round a big reddish chipped tooth of a boulder, he had a surprise. A nasty surprise. Turning the corner and throwing a quick glance up the trail ahead, he saw that he wasn't alone. A man was coming down from above, a stranger, long strides caught up in the mechanics of a walk that threw his hips out as if they belonged to somebody else. Cándido's first reaction was to duck into the bushes, but it was too late: the man was on top of him already, leaning back against the pitch of the slope like an insect climbing down a blade of grass.

_“Hey, 'mano,”__ the man said, his voice as high and harsh as a hawk's call. _“¿Qué onda?__ What's happening?” He'd stopped there in the middle of the trail that was no more than two feet wide, a tall pale man made taller by the slope, speaking the border Spanish of the back alleys and _cantinas__ of Tijuana. He was wearing a baseball cap turned backwards on his head and his eyes were a color Cándido couldn't identify, somewhere between yellow and red, like twin bruises set in his skull. He was one of the _vagos__ from the labor exchange, that's what he was. And he'd have a knife in his pocket or tucked into the back of his belt.

_“Buenas,”__ Cándido murmured, keeping an eye on him, though God knew he had nothing worth stealing but the clothes on his back-and they'd been washed and mended so many times they wouldn't fetch more than a few _centavos__ at a rag shop. But you could never tell: sometimes they'd steal your shirt just for pure meanness.

“What's it like down there, brother?” the man asked, indicating the ravine with a flick of his eyes. The sun glanced off his face. His skin was the color of a dirty bar of soap-not white, but not brown either. “Comfortable? Quiet? There's water, right?”

When the stranger swiveled his shoulders to scan the ravine, Cándido saw that he had a bedroll wound up tight and slung across his back with a length of twine. Cándido didn't want to give him any encouragement-if word got out, the whole labor exchange would be down there. “Not much,” he said.

This was funny. The man let out a little bark of a laugh and grinned to show off a cheap set of fake teeth. “Judging from the look of you, _carnal,__ there's enough to go swimming in, eh?”

Cándido held the man's eyes. He shrugged. “It's an unlucky place. I had a camp down there but they raided it three days ago. _Gabachos.__ They painted things on the rocks with their spray cans. You won't catch me down there again.”

Birds flitted from bush to bush. The sun stood still. The man was taking his time. “That what happened to your face? And that arm?”

“Yeah. Or no-not then.” Cándido shrugged again, conscious of the tattered sling that cradled his left arm. The arm was better, a whole lot better, but that still gave him an arm and a half to the stranger's two-if it came to that. “It's a long story,” he said.

The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido's ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass-he was in control, and he knew it. “So where's your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”

“They took it all,” Cándido lied. _“Pinche gabachos.__ I hid in the bushes.”

A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into hithe'hand intos pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he'd got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret-; he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now-“it's been good talking to you, always good to talk to a _compañero,__ but I've got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight… you don't know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”

No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido's head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.

“I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn't have a little bite of something on you, would you?”

The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him-he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.

“Sorry, _'mano,”__ the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed down the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn't be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.

Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the trail. Now he had to worry about this stinking crack-toothed _pendejo__ nosing around down in the canyon, as if he didn't have enough problems already. And what if he found their camp? What then? Cándido felt jealous suddenly, possessive: the son of a bitch. There was a whole range of mountains here, canyons all over the place-too many to count-and why did he have to pick this one? Anger spurred him on-and worry. He was breathing hard and his hip hurt, his knee, the throbbing crust of scab that masked the left side of his face. He kept going, forcing himself on, until a sudden screech of tires let him know that the road was just above him, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.

And then he emerged from the bushes and he was out on the road, the traffic hurtling past him in a crazy _gringo__ taillight-chasing rush-and what was the hurry, the constant hurry? Making a buck, that's what. Building their glass office towers and adding up the figures on their dark little TV screens, getting richer-that's what the hurry was. And that was why the _gabachos__ had cars and clothes and money and the Mexicans didn't. He walked along the highway, feeling strange-this was just where he'd been hit, just here-and he felt the cold steel rush of a passing car at his back and someone leaned on the horn and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He watched the taillights and cursed under his breath.

He looked first in the parking lot at the Chinese store, but America wasn't there. There were no Mexicans around at this hour, not a one-you'd think they'd all vanished into the earth, like those toad-stools that spring up after a rainfall and disappear by sunset. The place was swarming with _norteamericanos__ though, hordes of them, jumping in and out of their cars, hustling ins f' hustlingto the store and hustling back out again with their brown paper bags full of beer and wine and little sweet things to put in the mouth. They looked at Cándido like he was a leper.

On up the street, careful, careful, look both ways and cross. Nobody was coming down the canyon, but they were all going up, endlessly, relentlessly, enough cars to fill twenty big boats going back to Japan where they'd all come from in the first place. There was a little shopping plaza here, the one with the larger market and the _paisano__ from Italy. This was where America would be if she'd missed him down below, or if-and the idea hit him with the sudden force of inspiration-if she was working. Maybe that was it. Maybe he'd been worrying for nothing. Maybe she would have money and they could buy food.

Food. His stomach clenched at the thought of it and he felt faint for just a moment-a moment, that was all, but it was enough to make him lurch into a big beefy _gabacho__ with sideburns that ate up half his face and hair all piled up slick on his head like Elvis in one of those black velvet tapestries. The man shoved him away, a violent thrust of the arms, and said something harsh, something hateful, his face exploding with it. “Escuse, escuse,” Cándido blurted, throwing up his hands and backing away, but they were all watching now, all the _gabachos__ in the parking lot, and he would have run but his legs wouldn't carry him.

At six p. m., with the sun starting to slant down in the west and the shadows of the trees swelling against the windows like images out of a dream, America was working. Still working. Though the six hours were up and the fat man was nowhere to be found. Candelario Pérez had said six hours' work, twenty-five dollars, and this was eight hours now and she was wondering, did this mean the fat man would pay her more? Six divided into twenty-five was four dollars and sixteen cents an hour, and so, for two extra hours she should get, what-eight dollars and thirty-two cents more. She glowed with the thought of it. She was earning money, money for food, for Cándido and her baby-she, who'd never earned a _centavo__ in her life. She'd worked in her father's house, of course, cooking and cleaning and running errands for her mother, and he gave her an allowance each week, but it was nothing like this, nothing like earning a wage from a stranger-and a _gringo,__ no less. Cándido would be surprised. Of course he would have guessed by now that she was working, but wait till he saw her tonight, coming down that trail into the canyon with all the groceries she could carry, with meat and eggs and rice and a can of those big sardines, the ones in oil so rich you lick it from the tips of your fingers…

She thought of that, held the image in her brain till it was imprinted there, and her hands were quick and nimble even after eight hours, and the fumes hardly bothered her. They bothered Mary, though. Bothered her plenty. The big _gringa__ with the ring through her nose hadn't shut up about it since the fat man had led them into this great long beautiful room of his house lined with windows and given them each a pair of yellow latex gloves and the plastic bottles of the corrosive. America didn't understand what the woman was saying, of course, and she tried to block her out too, but the drift of it was inescapable. Mary didn't like the work. Mary didn't need the work. Mary had a house with a roof and four walls and a refrigerator with food in it. She didn't like the fumes or the fat man or his beautiful house or life on this planet. She tipped back a pint of that liquor she had with her and as the day went on she got slower and slower till practically all she did at the end was sit there and complain.

The work was hard, no doubt about it. The man haown'. The mand hundreds of straw cases lining the walls of the room and stacked up to the ceiling in the back, and in each case was a stone figurine of the Buddha, gone black with mold and age. They were all the same: two feet high, heavier than lead, the bald head and pregnant gut and the stupid grin that was meant to be a look of wisdom but could as easily have been senility or constipation. And each Buddha had to be scrubbed with the corrosive to take the discoloration off the brow, under the eyelids and lips, in the crevices beneath the arms and the tiny blackened indentation of the navel. When it was cleaned, when the corrosive had devoured the mold and the wire brushes had dug their deepest, the Buddha took on a rosy sheen, and then it was time to affix the glossy gold strip of paper with the glue already on it that read JIM SHIRLEY IMPORTS.

America didn't care about the fumes or the tired nasal rant of the _gringa__ or the stiffening in her fingers and the ache in her back from lifting statue after statue out of its cradle and setting it on the table before her-all she cared about was pleasing this healthy big bearded fat man who'd given her the chance to earn the money she needed to stay alive till things got better. She worked hard. Worked like two women. And she never stopped, not even to stretch her aching back or massage her cramping fingers, not even for a minute.

Finally, at quarter past seven by the bronze sunburst clock on the wall, the fat man slammed through the door, running sweat, and gave them a wild-eyed look. He was panting, and the big T-shirt he wore-Mickey Mouse poised on the steps of the Magic Kingdom-was wet under the arms. He barked out something in a roaring deep voice and Mary sprang to her feet, roaring something back at him. America had her head down, raking the wire brush across the belly of the nearest Buddha as if she were trying to saw it in two. She was tired and hungry and she had to pee, but at the same time she wanted to stay here forever in the big clean open room earning four dollars and sixteen cents for every hour the blood flowed through her veins and the air swelled her lungs. She scrubbed at the statue. Scrubbed furiously.

The _patrón__ didn't seem to notice. His words were truncated, clipped off as if he couldn't spare the breath for them-“Okay, that's it, let's go”-and he clapped his hands twice, two short impatient bursts as abrupt as a cannonade. America didn't dare look up. Her fingers flew, the brush rasped. He was standing right over her now-“Come on, let's go, I'm in a hurry here”-and she felt a quick surge of panic. It was time to go, yes? Eight hours and more-of course it was. And yet she couldn't escape the feeling that he was criticizing her, urging her to work faster, harder, to ply the brush and pour the corrosive and make every Buddha in the room shine as if it had just emerged from the mold.

“Jesus,” he said, letting the air hiss over his teeth, and she understood him now. She wanted to apologize-the words were on her lips-but she didn't have the chance. The next thing she knew he had her by the elbow and he was pulling her roughly from the seat-“Finish now, finish,” he was saying-while Mary, a cigarette clamped between her lips, called out _“Vamos”__ in a drunken slur and they were moving, all three of them, out the door, down the steps and into the rich new car with the airtight doors.

Mary sat up front with the _patrón;__ America had the broad plane of the rear seat to herself, like a queen or a movie star. She sank back in the seat and let her eyes play over the blue-green lawns with their bursts of flowers-flowers everywhere, the very trees on the streets in bloom-and the tall angular houses that rose out of the hills behind them, every one striped and striped again with windows, as if they were expecting an invasion from the seage 'from the. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of those houses, gazing out the kitchen window at the sunstruck crags of the canyon while the machine for the dishes did your work for you and the radio played the soft sad music of violins and cellos. She studied the back of the fat man's neck for clues. It was unrevealing. Thick, pinkish, with little puckered mouths of flesh at the nape and a riot of hacked stiff hairs, it could have been anybody's neck. And then she wondered about his wife-what was she like? Was she fat too? Or was she one of those women you saw in the ads with a leotard clinging to her puffed-up breasts and her eyes staring out from the page like an animal's?

They went through a gate-two broad pastel-colored steel grids that swung back automatically as the car approached. The gate hadn't been there in the morning-América was sure of that. It had been ten-thirty or so when they came through and she was alive to everything, to every nuance, to the houses, the cars, the people in them, and she remembered seeing half a dozen of her own people there, with picks and shovels and a cement mixer-she thought she recognized one of the men from the labor exchange but the car went by too quickly to be sure. Two stone pillars had framed the road under a wrought-iron bonnet with a Spanish inscription-ARROYO BLANCO-and then a word in English she couldn't decipher, and there was a little booth there, like the ticket booth in the movies, but no one was inside and the fat man didn't stop. Now the gate was up. America looked over her shoulder and saw that the steel bars extended on the outside of the two main pillars to a series of smaller stone columns that were only half-built. She saw a wheelbarrow, three shovels lined up neatly, a pick, and then they were out on the canyon road and heading back down the hill to the labor exchange.

Mary was saying something to the _patrón,__ waving her hands, pointing-directions, that was it-and he turned off onto a side street that wound through a stand of dusty oaks to a cluster of little cottages tucked under the arches of the trees. The cottages were in need of paint, but they were fine, charming even, with their wooden shingles, sturdy porches and beams gone gray with age. Pickup trucks and foreign sports cars sat out front of them. There were flowers in pots, cats all over the place, the smell of barbecue. This was where Mary lived, the _gringa__ maid.

The fat man pulled to a stop in front of a redwood bungalow at the end of the lane, Mary said something, and he shifted in the seat to reach for his wallet. America couldn't see what he was paying her but from the way the big worthless cow of a drunken _gringa__ was acting she was sure it was for the full eight hours and not just the twenty-five dollars she'd been promised-or had Mary been promised more? The thought stabbed at America as she sat there in the car and watched a boy of twelve or so burst into view on a dirt bike and vanish round the side of the bungalow in a mirage of exhaust. Candelario Pérez had said twenty-five dollars, but maybe Mary was getting thirty or thirty-five, plus the extra two hours, because she was white, because she spoke English and wore a ring through her nose. America was sure of it. She watched the two big heads, complicitous, watched the shoulders dip as the money changed hands, and then Mary was out of the car and the _patrón__ was leaning over the seat saying something in his breathless cut-up incomprehensible garble of a language.

He wanted her to sit in front, that was it. The contortions of his face, the gestures of his swollen hands told her as much. All right. America got out and slid into the cupped seat beside him. The fat man backed around and shot up the road in an explosion of dust.

He turned on the radio. No violins, no cellos: guitars. She knewet.'rs. She k the song vaguely-_Hotel California__ or something like that, _Welcome, welcome-__and she thought about the strangeness of it all, sitting here in this rich man's car, earning money, living in the North. She never dreamed it would actually happen. If someone had told her when she was a girl at school she wouldn't have believed them-it would have been a fairy tale like the one about the charmaid and the glass slipper. And when the fat man laid his hand casually across her thigh, even before he cheated her of the extra two hours and pushed her rudely from the car, she wanted to fling it away from her, hack it off with a machete and bury it in some _bruja's__ yard, but she didn't. She just let it lie there like a dead thing, though it moved and insinuated itself and she wanted to scream for the car to stop, for the door to open and for the hard dry brush of the ravine to hide her.

_7__

DELANEY WAS IN A HURRY. HE'D BEEN COOKING DOWN his marinara sauce since two and the mussels were already in the pot and steaming when he discovered that there was no pasta in the house. The table was set, the salad tossed, Kyra due home any minute, Jordan transfixed by his video game, the pasta water boiling. But no pasta. He decided to take a chance, ten minutes down the road, ten minutes back up: Jordan would be okay. “Jordan,” he called, poking his head in the door of the boy's room, “I'm going down to Gitello's for some pasta. Your mother'll be here any minute. If there's an emergency, go next door to the Cherrystones'. Selda's home. I just talked to her. Okay?”

The back of the boy's head was reedy and pale, the seed pod of some exotic wildflower buffeted by the video winds, a twitch here, a shoulder shrug there, the forward dip of unbroken, inviolable concentration.

“Okay?” Delaney repeated. “Or do you want to come with me? You can come if you want.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what? Are you coming or staying?”

There was a pause during which Delaney adjusted to the room's dim artificial light, the light of a cell or dungeon, and felt the fierce unyielding grip of the little gray screen. The shades were down and the rapid-fire blasts and detonations of the game were the only sounds, relieved at intervals by a canned jingle. He thought then of the house burning down with Jordan in it, Jordan aflame and barely aware of it-ten minutes down the road, ten minutes back up-and realized he couldn't leave him even for a second, even with Selda right next door and the mussels getting tough and the water boiling and Kyra due home. The kid was six years old and the world was full of nasty surprises-look what had happened to the dog in their own backyard. What was he thinking?

Jordan never even turned his head. “Stay,” he murmured.

“You can't stay.”

“I don't want to go.”

“You have to go.”

“Mom'll be home in a minute.”

“Get in the car.”

No traffic coming down the hill at this hour-it was nearly six-and Delaney made it in eight minutes, despite having to sit behind two cars at the gate that had gone up this afternoon to keep the riffraff out of the Elysian Groves of Arroyo Blanco Estates. The parking lot was crowded though, commuters with strained looks shaking the stiffness out of their joints as they lurched from their cars and staggered through the door in search of the six-pack, the prechopped salad (just add the premixed dressing) and the quart of no-fat milfla _Zip, bang, zing-zing-zing.__ “Uh-uh.”

And then Delaney was in full flight, springing up off his toes-and what else did they need: milk? bread? coffee? — his shoulders hunched defensively as he sought the gaps between the massed flesh and dilatory carts of his fellow shoppers. He had the pasta tucked under his arm-perciatelli, imported, in the blue-and-yellow box-and two baguettes, a wedge of Romano, a gallon of milk and a jar of roasted peppers clutched to his chest, when he ran into Jack Jardine. He'd been thinking about the horned lizard he'd seen on his afternoon hike (or horned toad, as most people erroneously called it) and its wonderful adaptation of ejecting blood from its eye sockets when threatened, and he was right on top of Jack before he noticed him.

It was an awkward moment. Not only because Delaney was practically jogging down the aisle and almost blundered into him, but because of what had happened at the meeting a week and a half ago. Looking back on it, Delaney had a nagging suspicion that he'd made a fool of himself. “Jack,” he breathed, and he could feel his face going through all the permutations before settling on an exculpatory smile.

Jack was cocked back on one hip, his jacket buttoned, tie crisp, a plastic handbasket dangling from his fingertips. Two bottles of Merlot were laid neatly in the basket, their necks protruding from one end. He looked good, as usual, in a pale double-breasted suit that set off his tan and picked up the color of his tight blond beard. “Delaney,” he said, leaning forward to reach for a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, his own smile lordly and bemused. He set the jar in his basket and straightened up. “You were pretty exercised the other night,” he observed, showing his teeth now, the full rich jury-mesmerizing grin. “You even took me by surprise.”

“I guess I got carried away.”

“No, no: you were right. Absolutely. It's just that you know as well as I do what our neighbors are like-if you don't keep to the agenda you've got chaos, pure and simple. And the gate thing is important, probably the single most important agendum we've taken up in my two years as president.”

For a moment Delaney saw the phantom car again, creeping down Piñon Drive with its speakers thumping like the pulse of some monstrous heart. He blinked to drive the image away. “You really think so? To me, I say it's unnecessary-and, I don't know, irresponsible somehow.”

Jack gave him a quizzical look. “Irresponsible?”

Delaney shifted his burden, milk from the right hand to the left, baguettes under the arm, pasta to his chest. “I don't know. I lean more to the position that we live in a democracy, like the guy in the shorts said at the meeting… I mean, we all have a stake in things, and locking yourself away from the rest of society, how can you justify that?”

“Safety. Self-protection. Prudence. You lock your car, don't you? Your front door?” A cluck of the tongue, a shift from one hip to the other, blue eyes, solid as stone. “Delaney, believe me, I know how you feel. You heard Jack Cherrystone speak to the issue, and nobody's credentials can touch Jack's as far as being liberal is concerned, but this society isn't what it was-and it won't be until we get control of the borders.”

The borders. Delaney took an involuntary step backwards, all those dark disordered faces rising up from the streetcorners and freeway on-ramps to mob his brain, all of them crying out their human wants through mouths full of rotten teeth. “That's racist, Jack, and you know it.”

“Not in the least-it's a question of national sovereignty. Did you know that the U. S. accepted more immigrants last year than all the other countries of the world _combined__-and that half of them settled in California? And that's _legal__ immigrants, people with skills, money, education. The ones coming in through the Tortilla Curtain down there, those are the ones that are killing us. They're peasants, my friend. No education, no resources, no skills-all they've got to offer is a strong back, and the irony is we need fewer and fewer strong backs every day because we've got robotics and computers and farm machinery that can do the labor of a hundred men at a fraction of the cost.” He dropped his hand in dismissal. “It's old news.”

Delaney set the milk down on the floor. He was in a hurry, dinner on the stove, Jordan in the car, Kyra about to walk in the door, but in the heat of the moment he forgot all about it. “I can't believe you,” he said, and he couldn't seem to control his free arm, waving it in an expanding loop. “Do you realize what you're saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country-we're a nation of immigrants-and neither of us would be standing here today if it wasn't.”

“Clichés. There's a point of saturation. Besides which, the Jardines fought in the Revolutionary War-you could hardly call us immigrants.”

“Everybody's an immigrant from somewhere. My grandfather came over from Bremen and my grandmother was Irish-does that make me any less a citizen than the Jardines?”

A woman with frosted hair and a face drawn tight as a drumskin ducked between them for a jar of olives. Jack worked a little grit into his voice: “That's not the point. Times have changed, my friend. Radically. Do you have any idea what these people are costing us, and not just in terms of crime; but in real tax dollars for social services? No? Well, you ought to. You must have seen that thing in the Times a couple weeks ago, about the San Diego study?”

Delaney shook his head. He felt his stomach sink, heard the thump of phantom speakers. Suddenly the horned lizard sprang back into the forefront of his consciousness: what good was squirting blood from your eyes? Wouldn't that just be gravy for whatever was about to clamp down on you?

“Look, Delaney,” Jack went on, cool, reasonable, his voice in full song now, “it's a simple equation, so much in, so much out. The illegals in San Diego County contributed seventy million in tax revenues and at the same time they used up two hundred and forty million in services-welfare, emergency care, schooling and the like. You want to pay for that? And for the crime that comes with it? You want another crazy Mexican throwing himself under your wheels hoping for an insurance payoff? Or worse, you want one of them behind the wheel bearing down on you, no insurance, no brakes, no nothing?”

Delaney was trying to organize his thoughts. He wanted to tell Jack that he was wrong, that everyone deserved a chance in life and that the Mexicans would assimilate just like the Poles, Italians, Germans, Irish and Chinese and that besides which we'd stolen California from them in the first place, but he didn't get the chance. At that moment Jack Jr. appeared from behind the cranberry juice display, the great fluttering sail of his T-shirt in motion, his pants wide enough to bankrupt the factory. Two liters of Pepsi sprouted from his knuckles and he cradled a bag of nachos the size of a pillow under his arm. The bag had been torn raggedly open. Delaney could see flecks of MSG, food coloring and salt crystals caked in the corners of the boy's mouth. “Hey, Dad,” Jack Jr. murmured, ducking his head to avoid a display banner and greeting Delaney with a dip of his eyes and an awkward croak of salutation. “Got to go, Dad,” he prodded, his voice aflame with hormonal urgency. “Steffie's waiting.”

And then they were moving in the direction of the cash registers-all three of them, as a group-and Jack, the conciliatory Jack, Jack the politician, Jack the soother of gripes, grievances and hurts real or imaginary, put an arm over Delaney's shoulder and warbled his sweetest notes: “Listen, Delaney, I know how you feel, and I agree with you. It's not easy for me either-it's nothing less than rethinking your whole life, who you are and what you believe in. And trust me: when we get control of the border again-_if__ we get control of it-I'll be the first to advocate taking that gate down. But don't kid yourself: it's not going to happen anytime soon.”

Though there were three checkers, people were lined up six deep at the registers. Delaney gave Jack a weak smile and got in line beside him. He gazed out over the mob of his fellow shoppers, past the checkout girl and the banners and baubles and slogans to the parking lot, where his Acura stood gleaming in the sun, and remembered that he was in a hurry-or had been. He could see the crown of Jordan's head bobbing and weaving just above the dashboard and pictured the electronic Armageddon raging in that confined space, the boy's nimble fingers sending intergalactic invaders to their doom even as the next ship landed.

Delaney opted for the paper bag-recycle, save the environment-and waited for the girl to ring up Jack and Jack Jr.'s purchases, the rack behind her bright with batteries, Slim Jims, toenail clippers and gum. He was thinking he could work that horned toad into his next column-it was symbolic somehow, deeply symbolic, though he wasn't sure of exactly what.

“Sorry for the lecture,” Jack crooned in his ear. “You see my point though?”

Delaney turned to him as the checkout girl swept Jack Jr.'s Pepsi bottles over the scanner with a practiced flick of her wrist. “All right, Jack,” he said finally, conceding the field, “I don't like the gate-I'll never like it-but! I accept it. None of us want urban crime up here-that'd be crazy. And if I got a little carried away at the meeting it was because this feeding of the predator species has got to stop, I mean people have to realize-”

“You're right,” Jack said, giving his elbow an affirmative squeeze. “Absolutely.”

“And I tell you, Kyra was really heartbroken over that dog-and I was too. You live with a pet all that time…”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

They moved toward the door, bags cradled in their arms, Jack Jr. looming over them like a distorted shadow. The door slid back and they were out in the lot, all three of them, the sun glancing off the windshields of the cars, the hills awash in light. Jack said he was sorry to hear about the dog and wondered if Delaney had ever thought about putting out a little newsletter for the community, the sort of thing that would alert them to the dangers of living on the edge of the wild and maybe even reprint one or two of his columns? People would love it. They would.

But Delaney wasn't listening. Across the short span of the lot, over by the gift shop, there was some sort of altercation going on-a fat-faced truck-driver type with an elaborate hairdo going ballistic over something… was it a fight? The three of them froze just behind Delaney's car as the trouble came toward them_-You wetback motherfucker, watch where the fuck you're going or I swear I'll kick your__ sorry _ass from here to Algodones and back__-and Delaney got a look at the other man involved. He saw the sideways movement, the scuttling feet in their dirty tire-tread sandals, the skittish red-flecked eyes and graying mustache, and experienced a shock of recognition: here it was all over again.

He felt anger and shame at the same time-the man was a bum, that was all, hassling somebody else now, and yet the look of him, the wordless plea in his eyes and the arm in a sling and the side of his face layered with scab like old paint brought all Delaney's guilt back to the surface, a wound that refused to heal. His impulse was to intercede, to put an end to it, and yet in some perverse way he wanted to see this dark alien little man crushed and obliterated, out of his life forever. It was then, in the moment of Delaney's vacillation, that the big man lurched forward and gave the Mexican a shove that sent him staggering into the rear of Delaney's car. There was the dull reverberation of sheet metal, a soft cry from the Mexican, and the big man, his face inflamed, spat out a final curse and swung round on his heels.

Jack Jr. stood rooted to the spot by the black leather blocks of his hi-tops, clenching his fists. Unruffled, Jack Sr. had stepped neatly aside, the pleats of his pants like two plumb lines, his mouth pursed in distaste. Delaney was reaching for his keys when the altercation swept toward them, and now he stood poised over the trunk of his car, groceries pressed like a shield to his chest, keys dangling limply from his fingers, looking on numbly as the dark man got shakily to his feet, muttering apologies in his own dark language. The Mexican seemed dazed-or maybe deranged. He lifted his heavy eyes to focus blearily on Jack, then Jack Jr. and finally Delaney. Faintly, from inside the car, came the thin tinny sound effects of Jordan's electronic war. The man stood there a long moment, squinting into Delaney's eyes, the rag of a sling hanging from his arm, his face sunk in its helmet of bruises, and then he turned away and limped across the lot, hunched under a rain of imaginary blows.

“See what I mean?” Jack said.

“What would you do with all this space?” Kyra heard herself asking, and even before the question passed her lips she knew it was wrong. She should have exclaimed, _And look at all this space!__ with the rising inflection of a cheerleader, but somehow she'd put a negative spin on it, the very question implying that the expanse of brilliantly buffed floors and high beamed ceilings was excessive, de trop, somehow too much, that the living room was the size of a basketball court and the master bedroom bigger than most people's houses-and who needed all that? Who but a monster of ego, a parvenu, a robber baron? It wasn't the sort of question a closer should ask.

Louisa Greutert gave her a curious look-nothing more than the briefest darting glance of surprise-but it was enough. Kyra knew what she was thinking.

Louisa's husband, Bill-thin, nervous, with a tonsure of silver hair and the face of an ascetic-was wandering through the immensity of the dining room, hands clasped behind his back. He was president of his own company, Pacific Rim Investments, and he'd lived in Bel Air for the past twenty years, the majority of that time with his first wife, who'd kept the house as part of the divorce settlement. Kyra pegged him for sixty-five or so, though he looked younger; Louisa was in her late forties.

“You know we know the Da Roses socially,” Louisa murmured, running a jeweled hand over the surface of a built-in mahogany china cabinet, “or we did, that is, before Albert took his life… They made some bad investments, is what I hear…” This wasn't so much a statement of fact as a supposition, an opening: she wanted gossip. And gossip was a commodity Kyra readily served up, if it suited her purposes. This time, though, she merely said: “She's living in Italy.”

“Italy?”

“Her family has an estate there. Near Turin. Didn't you know?” In fact, Kyra barely knew Patricia Da Ros-the referral had come to her from an associate at the Beverly Hills office, and aside from two long-distance calls, all the arrangements had been made via fax.

Louisa was silent a moment, lingering over some ceramic figurines displayed on a brightly painted Gothic Revival dresser; then she lifted her head like a hunting dog attuned to the faintest distant sound. It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the curtains of the big central room were aflame with light. “They were funny about this house. Did you know they never entertained. I mean never?”

Kyra let a small vaguely interrogatory noise escape her. This was her signal to talk the place up, rhapsodize over the views, the privacy, the value and exclusivity, but something held her back. She was reticent today, not herself at all, and as she watched this lithe busy woman stalk through the corridors and poke into the cupboards she had a revelation that took her by surprise-she realized that deep down she didn't want to sell the place. She wanted the listing, yes, and she was born to move property and the commission would put her over the top and ensure her of the sales crown for the fourth consecutive year, but she'd never felt this way about a house before. The more time she spent in it, cushioned from the hot, dry, hard-driving world, the more she began to feel it was hers-really hers, and not just in some metaphorical sense. How could these people even begin to appreciate it the way she did? How could anyone?

“Of course,” the woman went on now, trying the lower drawer of a locked sideboard, “they were a bit out of the way up here… and yet it's a terrific location, I don't mean to say that, right on the edge of Malibu and only, what, twenty minutes from Santa Monica? Still, I wonder who'd want to schlepp all the way out here even if they were the type to entertain…”

Kyra had nothing to say to this, one way or the other. Bill Greutert had already confided to her that he and his wife were looking for something out of the way and had specifically asked about this house. _It's just so crowded down there, he said, you get this feeling of the city closing in on you, even in Bel Air. There's just so many__-he'd waved his hand in exasperation, searching for the judicious term-people, _you know what I mean?__

Kyra knew. Since the riots she'd met dozens of couples like the Greuterts. They all wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe-something removed from people of whatever class and color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants pouring in from Mexico and Central America, from Dubai, Burundi and Lithuania, from Asia and India and everywhere else in the known world. Brown people. Colored people. People in saris, _serapes__ and kaffiyehs. That was what Bill Greutert meant. He didn't have to say anything more.

An hour later, Louisa Greutert was still making the rounds of the house, poking through drawers like a detective at the scene of a crime, while her husband paced back and forth against the backdrop of the canyon, hands clasped rigidly behind his back. Kyra tried to remain attentive, tried her best to look sincere and helpful, but her heart wasn't in it. She stood to make a commission on both ends of the deal-there was no other realtor involved-but still she just couldn't seem to motivate herself. By the end of the second hour she'd settled into a leather wing chair in the library, gazing out into the hazy sunstruck distance, idly thumbing through one of Albert Da Ros's leather-bound volumes-poetry, as it turned out. Louisa Greutert had to come looking for her finally, her voice echoing through the vast empty space of the house, the sound of her heels like gunshots coming up the corridor. “Through already?” Kyra murmured, rising guiltily from the chair.

And there was that look again, the head tilted to one side, the cold hard eyes fixing her with a look of amusement and disdain. “We've been here nearly two and a half hours.”

“Oh, well, I didn't mean-I didn't realize it had been that long.” Kyra let her gaze wander over the shelves of books, the leather-backed chairs, the wainscoting, the lamps in their sconces, and it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. “It's just that the place is so restful-”

She was aware in that moment of the presence of the husband in the hallway behind her, a ghostly figure like some unsettled spirit of the place. He crossed the room to his wife, there was a brief whispered consultation, and then the wife's voice came back at her with the suddenness of a twig snapping underfoot: “I'm afraid it's not for us.”

In the morning, Delaney sat at his keyboard, his face illuminated by the pale glow of the monitor. Over breakfast, he'd watched a pair of starlings crowding out the wrens and finches at the bird feeder, and an idea came to him: why not do a series of sketches on introduced species? The idea excited him-the whole thrust of the “Pilgrim” columns was that he himself was a recent transplant, seeing the flora and fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte, and a series on creatures like the opossum, the escargot, the starling and the parakeet would be perfect. The only problem was, the words wouldn't come, or the images either. When he tried to envision the canyon, the white dust trails threaded through stands of mesquite and yucca till the very bones of the mountains lay exposed, or even the parking lot at the Woodland Hills McDonald's, swarming with one-legged blackbirds and rumpled, diseased-looking starlings, he saw only the Mexican. His Mexican. The man he had to forget all over again.

He'd wanted to shout out an indictment-“That's him! That's the one!”-but something held him back. What, exactly, he didn't know. Misplaced sympathy? Guilt? Pity? It was a wasted opportunity because Jack was there to see for himself how blameless Delaney was-the man was a nuisance, a bum, a panhandler. If anything, Delaney was the victim, his twenty dollars separated from him through a kind of extortion, an emotional sleight of hand that preyed on his good nature and fellow feeling. He'd read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn't this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in front of a car for the thin hope of twenty bucks?

Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he'd turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty. Jordan wasn't hungry. Kyra was dreamy and distant. Osbert mourned his lost sibling, crouching behind the sofa for the better part of the evening, and even the cat lapped halfheartedly at a can of Tuna & Liver Flavor Complete Feline Dinner. A gloom seemed to hang over the household, and they turned in early.

But now it was another day and the house was quiet and Delaney had nothing to occupy him but nature and the words to contain it, yet there he sat, staring into the screen. After several false starts, he poked halfheartedly through his natural-history collection and discovered that the starlings he saw in the McDonald's lot were descendants of a flock released in Central Park a hundred years ago by an amateur ornithologist and Shakespeare buff who felt that all the birds mentioned in the Bard's works should roost in North America, and that the snails ravaging his garden and flowerbeds were imported by a French chef who'd envisioned them roasting in their own shells with a sauce of garlic and butter. It was rich material, fascinating in its way-how could people be so blind? — and he could feel the germ of it growing in him, but ultimately he was too unsettled to work. Though it was barely half-past ten, he shut down the computer and went out early for his afternoon hike.

There was a year-round stream he'd been meaning to explore up off the main canyon, a sharp brushy ascent cut into the face of the rock, and the extra two and a half hours would enable him to do it. It would require parking along the canyon road, in an area of heavy morning and afternoon traffic and narrow shoulders, hiking down into the main canyon and following the creekbed until he hit the smaller, unnamed canyon, and finally making his way up it. The prospect invigorated him. He pulled on his shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots, and he added two cream-cheese-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches to the _bota__ bag of water, snakebite kit, sunblock, map, compass, windbreaker and binoculars he always kept in his blue nylon daypack and unfailingly carried with him, no matter how short the hike. He didn't leave a note. He figured he'd be back in plenty of time to pick up Jordan from the summer activities program at the elementary school, after which he'd fix the boy a snack, and then when Kyra got home they'd go out to Emilio's. He just didn't feel like cooking. Not after last night.

It was clear and dry, the last day of June, the coastal fog that had lingered through the spring giving way to the high arching skies of summer. Delaney enjoyed the drive. The traffic was minimal at this hour and the Acura clung effortlessly to the road as he looped through the canyon, cutting cleanly through one curve only to accelerate into the next. He passed Gitello's, the lumberyard, the place where he'd hit the Mexican, and he didn't think twice about it-he was free of his desk and heading out into the wild and he felt blessed and unconquerable. He rolled down the window to catch the breeze in his face.

From here he could see where the previous year's firestorm had cut the canyon in two, the naked bones of the trees and bushes painted in black against the hillside, but even that cheered him. The canyon had already recovered, and he noted with satisfaction that the pyromaniac who'd set the blaze couldn't have conceived of the abundance of vegetation that would succeed it. Fertilized by ash, the grasses and wildflowers had put out a bumper crop, and the hills stood waist-deep in stiff golden grass, all part of the cycle, as undeniable as the swing of the earth over its axis.

After a while he began slowing to look for a safe place to pull over, but there were several cars behind him, including one of those pickups that sit about six feet off the ground and are invariably driven by some tailgating troglodyte-as this one was-and he had to go all the way down to the bottom of the canyon before swinging round in a gas station on the Coast Highway and starting back up. The ocean was there momentarily, filling the horizon, and then it was in his rearview mirror, reduced to a nine-by-three-inch strip. The first curve erased it.

There was a road crew up ahead on the right, just beyond the bridge where the road crossed the creek at the lower mouth of the canyon. He'd been slowed by them on his way down, and now, impulsively, he swung off the road just beyond the line of big yellow earthmovers. Why not start out here, he was thinking, where the banks were only twenty or thirty feet above the streambed? He'd have to work his way all the farther upstream, but he would save himself the long hike down from above. Of course, he didn't really like leaving the car at the side of the road, but there wasn't much choice. At least the road crew would slow traffic down some and hopefully keep the drunks and sideswipers at bay. He shouldered the pack, took a last admiring look at the car and the way its sleek white lines were set off against the chaparral, as if in one of those back-to-nature car commercials, then turned to plunge down the gravelly slope and into the cool dapple of the streambed.

The first thing he saw, within sixty seconds of reaching the stream and before he'd had a chance to admire the light in the sycamores or the water uncoiling over the rocks like an endless rope, was a pair of dirty sleeping bags laid out on the high sandy bank opposite. Sleeping bags. He was amazed. Not two hundred feet from the road, and here they were, brazen, thoughtless, camping under the very nose of the authorities. He climbed atop a rock for a better look and saw a blackened ring of stones to the immediate right of the sleeping bags and a moth-eaten khaki satchel hanging from the low branch of a tree. And refuse. Refuse everywhere. Cans, bottles, the shucked wrappers of ready-made sandwiches and _burritos,__ toilet paper, magazines-all of it scattered across the ground as if dropped there by a dying wind. Delaney sucked in his breath. The first thing he felt wasn't surprise or even anger-it was embarrassment, as if he'd broken into some stranger's bedroom and gone snooping through the drawers. Invisible eyes locked on him. He looked over his shoulder, darted a quick glance up and down the streambed and then peered up into the branches of the trees.

For a long moment he stood there, frozen to the spot, fighting the impulse to cross the stream, bundle the whole mess up and haul it back to the nearest trash can-that'd send a message, all right. This was intolerable. A desecration. Worse than graffiti, worse than anything. Wasn't it enough that they'd degraded the better part of the planet, paved over the land and saturated the landfills till they'd created whole new cordilleras of garbage? There was plastic in the guts of Arctic seals, methanol in the veins of the poisoned condor spread out like a collapsed parasol in the Sespe hills. There was no end to it.

He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. He tried to calm himself. He was no vigilante. It wasn't his place to enforce the law, no matter how flagrant the abuse-that was what he paid taxes for, wasn't it? Why let a thing like this ruin his day? He'd take his hike, that's what he'd do, put miles between him and this sordid little camp, this shithouse in the woods, and then, when he got back home, he'd call the Sheriff's Department. Let them handle it. At night, preferably, when whoever had created this unholy mess was sunk to their elbows in it, nodding over their dope and their cheap wine. The image of his Mexican rose up yet again, but this time it was no more than a flicker, and he fought it down. Then he turned and moved off up the stream.

It was rough going, clambering over boulders and through battlements of winter-run brush, but the air was clean and cool and as the walls of the canyon grew higher around him the sound of the road faded away and the music of running water took over. Bushtits flickered in the trees, a flycatcher shot up the gap of the canyon, gilded in light. By the time he'd gone a hundred yards upstream, he'd forgotten all about the sleeping bags in the dirt and the sad tarnished state of the world. This was nature, pure and unalloyed. This was what he'd come for.

He was making his way through a stand of reeds, trying to keep his feet dry and watching for the tracks of raccoon, skunk and coyote in the mud, when the image of those sleeping bags came back to him with the force of a blow: _voices,__ he heard voices up ahead. He froze, as alert suddenly as any stalking beast. He'd never encountered another human being down here, never, and the thought of seeing anyone was enough to spoil his pleasure in the day, but this was something else altogether, something desperate, dangerous even. The sleeping bags behind him, the voices ahead: these were transients, bums, criminals, and there was no law here.

Two voices, point/counterpoint. He couldn't make out the words, only the timbre. One was like the high rasp of a saw cutting through a log, on and on till the pieces dropped away, and then the second voice joined in, pitched low, abrupt and arrhythmic.

Some hikers carried guns. Delaney had heard of robberies on the Backbone Trail, of physical violence, assault, rape. The four-wheel-drive faction came up into the hills to shoot off their weapons, gang members annihilated rocks, bottles and trees with their assault rifles. The city was here, now, crouched in the ravine. Delaney didn't know what to do-slink away like some wounded animal and give up possession of the place forever? Or challenge them, assert his rights? But maybe he was making too much of it. Maybe they were hikers, day-trippers, maybe they were only teenagers skipping school.

And then he remembered the girl from the birding class he'd taken out of boredom. It was just after he'd got to California, before he met Kyra. He couldn't recall her name now, but he could see her, bent over the plates in Clarke's _An Introduction to Southern California Birds__ or squinting into the glow of the slide projector in the darkened room. She was young, early twenties, with thin black hair parted in the middle and a pleasing kind of bulkiness to her, to the way she moved her shoulders and walked squarely from the anchors of her heels. And he remembered her cheeks-the cheeks of an Eskimo, of a baby, of Alfred Hitchcock staring dourly from the screen, cheeks that gave her face a freshness and naivete that made her look even younger than she was. Delaney was thirty-nine. He asked her out for a sandwich after class and she told him why she never hiked alone, never, not ever again.

Up until the year before she'd been pretty blithe about it. The streets might have been unsafe, particularly at night, but the chaparral, the woods, the trails no one knew? She had a passion for hiking, for solitary rambles, for getting close enough to feel the massive shifting heartbeat of the world. She spent two months on the Appalachian Trail after graduating from high school, and she'd been over most of the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mexican border to San Francisco. One afternoon in May she went out for a short hike up one of the feeder streams of the Big Tujunga Creek, in the San Gabriels. She'd worked past two, waitressing for the lunch crowd at a grill in Pasadena, but she thought she'd get two or maybe three hours in before dinner. Less than a mile up there was a pool she knew at the base of a cliff that rose to a thin spray of water-she'd never been beyond the pool and planned to climb round the cliff and follow the stream to its source.

They were Mexicans, she thought. Or maybe Armenians. They spoke English. Young guys in baggy pants and shiny black boots. She surprised them at the pool, the light faded to gray, a faint chill in the air, their eyes glazed with the beer and the endless bullshit, stories about women and cars and drugs. There was an uncomfortable moment, all five of them drilling her with looks that automatically appraised the shape of her beneath the loose sweatshirt and jeans and calculated the distance to the road, how far a scream would carry. She was working her way around the cliff, unsteady on the loose rock, her back to them, when she felt the grip of the first hand, right there-she showed him-right there on her calf.

Delaney held his breath. The voices had stopped abruptly, replaced by a brooding silence that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity before they started up again, lazy now, contented, the buzz of a pair of flies settling down on the sidewalk. And then, through some auditory quirk of the canyon walls, the voices suddenly crystallized and every word came to him true and distinct. It took him a moment, and then he understood: Spanish, they were talking Spanish.

He was already angry with himself, angry even before he turned away and tried to slink out of the reeds like a voyeur, angry before the choice was made. The hike was over, the day ruined. There was no way he was just going to waltz out of the bushes and surprise these people, whoever they were, and the defile was too narrow to allow him to go round them undetected. He lifted one foot from the mud and then the other, parting the reeds with the delicacy of a man tucking a blanket under the chin of a sleeping child. The sound of the creek, which to this point had been a whisper, rose to a roar, and it seemed as if every bird in the canyon was suddenly screaming. He looked up into the face of a tall raw-boned Latino with eyes like sinkholes and a San Diego Padres cap reversed on his head.

The man was perched on a boulder just behind and above Delaney, no more than twenty feet away, and how he'd got there or whether he'd been there all along, Delaney had no idea. He wore a pair of tight new blue jeans tucked into the tops of his scuffed workboots, and he sat hunched against his knees, prying a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket with exaggerated care. He attempted a smile, spreading his lips in a show of bravado, but Delaney could see that the man was flustered, as confounded by Delaney's sudden appearance as Delaney was by his. “Hey, _amigo,__ how's it going?” he said in a voice that didn't seem to fit him, a voice that was almost feminine but for the rasp of it. His English was flat and graceless.

Delaney barely nodded. He didn't return the smile and he didn't reply. He would have moved on right then, marching back to his car without a word, but something tugged at his pack and he saw that one of the reeds had caught in his shoulder strap. He bent to release it, his heart pounding, and the man on the rock sprawled out his legs as if he were sinking into a sofa, folded the stick of gum into his mouth and casually flicked the wrapper into the stream. “Hiking, huh?” the man said, and he was smiling still, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Me,” he said, “I'm hiking too. Me and my friend.” He jerked his head to indicate the friend, who appeared behind Delaney now, just beyond the reeds.

The friend regarded Delaney out of an expressionless face. His hair hung in coils to his shoulders and a thin wisp of beard trailed away from the base of his chin. He was wearing some sort of poncho or _serape,__ jagged diamonds of color that leapt out against the quiet greens of the streambed. He had nothing to add to the first man's description. They were hiking, and that was it.

Delaney looked from the first man to his companion and back again. He wasn't alarmed, not exactly-he was too angry for that. All he could think of was the sheriff and getting these people and their garbage heap out of here, of hustling them right back to wherever they'd come from, slums, _favelas, barrios,__ whatever they called them. They didn't belong here, that was for sure. He jerked the reed out of the ground and flung it away from him, adjusted his pack and began picking his way back down the streambed.

“Hey, _amigo”__-the man's voice came at him in a wild high whinny-“you have a nice day, huh?”

The walk to the road was nothing-it barely stretched his muscles. The anticipation had gone sour in his throat, and it rankled him-it wasn't even noon yet and the day was shot. He cursed as he passed by the sleeping bags again, and then he took the bank in five strides and he was out in the glare of the canyon road. He had a sudden impulse to continue on down the stream, under the bridge and around the bend, but dismissed it: this was where the creek fanned out into its floodplain before running into the ocean, and any idiot who could park a car and clamber down a three-foot embankment could roam it at will, as the successive layers of garbage spread out over the rocks gave testimony. There was no adventure here, no privacy, no experience of nature. It would be about as exciting as pulling into the McDonald's lot and counting the starlings.

He turned and walked back up the road, past the line of cars restrained by a man in a yellow hard hat with a portable sign that read STOP on one side and SLOW on the reverse. The trucks and bulldozers were quiet now-it was lunchtime, the workers sprawled in the shade of the big rippled tires with their sandwiches and _burritos,__ the dust settling, birds bickering in the scrub, chamise and toyon blooming gracefully alongside the road with no help from anyone. Delaney felt the sun on his face, stepped over the ridges of detritus pushed into the shoulder by the blades of the earthmovers and let the long muscles of his legs work against the slope of the road. In one of his first “Pilgrim” columns he'd observed that the bulldozer served the same function here as the snowplow back East, though it was dirt rather than snow that had to be cleared from the streets. The canyon road had become a virtual streambed during the rainy season and Caltrans had been hard-pressed to keep it open, and now, in early summer, with no rain in sight for the next five months, they were just getting round to clearing out the residual rubble.

That was fine with Delaney, though he wished they'd chosen another day for it. Who wanted to hear the roar of engines and breathe diesel fuel down here-and on a day like this? He was actually muttering to himself as he passed the last of the big machines, his mood growing progressively blacker, and yet all the defeats and frustrations of the morning were nothing compared to what awaited him. For it was at that moment, just as he cleared the last of the Caltrans vehicles and cast a quick glance up the road, that he felt himself go numb: the car was gone.

Gone. Vanished.

But no, that wasn't where he'd parked it, against the guardrail there, was it? It must be around the next bend, sure it was, and he was moving more quickly now, almost jogging, the line of cars across the road from him creeping down toward the bridge and a second man in hard hat and bright orange vest flagging his SLOW sign. Every eye was on Delaney. He was the amusement, the sideshow, stiff-legging it up the road with the sweat stinging his eyes and slicking the frames of his glasses. And then he made the bend and saw the tight shoulderless curve beyond it and all the naked space of the canyon spread out to the horizon, and knew he was in trouble.

Dumbstruck, he swung reluctantly round on his heels and waded back down the road like a zombie, tramping back and forth over the spot where he'd parked the car and finally even going down on one knee in the dirt to trace the tire tracks with his unbelieving fingertips. His car was gone, all right. It was incontrovertible. He'd parked here half an hour ago, right on this spot, and now there was nothing here, no steel, no chrome, no radial tires or personalized license plates. No registration. No _Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.__

The first thing that came into his head was the police. They'd towed it. Of course. That was it. There was probably some obscure regulation about parking within two hundred feet of a road crew or something-or they'd posted a sign he'd missed. He rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the faces in the cars across from him, and approached a group of men lounging in the shade of the nearest bulldozer. “Did anybody see what happened to my car?” he asked, conscious of the barely restrained note of hysteria in his voice. “Did they tow it or what?”

They looked up at him blankly. Six Hispanic men, in khaki shirts and baseball caps, arrested in the act of eating, sandwiches poised at their lips, thermoses tipped, the cans of soft drink sweating between their fingers. No one said a word.

“I parked right there.” Delaney was pointing now and the six heads dutifully swiveled to regard the vacant shoulder and the scalloped rim of the guardrail set against the treetops and the greater vacancy of the canyon beyond it. “A half hour ago? It was an Acura-white, with aluminum wheels?”

The men seemed to stir. They looked uneasily from one to the other. Finally, the man on the end, who seemed by virtue of his white mustache to be the senior member of the group, set his sandwich carefully down on a scrap of waxed paper and rose to his feet. He regarded Delaney for a moment out of a pair of inexpressibly sad eyes. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later Delaney was having his hike after all, though it wasn't exactly what he'd envisioned. After questioning the boss of the road crew-_We haven't towed nothin' here, not to my knowledge__-he started back up the canyon road on foot. It was three miles or so to the near grocery and the telephones out front, but it was all uphill and the road wasn't designed for pedestrians. Horns blared, tires screeched, some jerk threw a beer can at him. For fear of his life he had to hop the guardrail and plow through the brush, but it was slow going and the burrs and seedheads caught in his socks and tore at his naked legs, and all the while his head was pounding and his throat gone dry over the essential question of the day: what had happened to the car?

He called the police from the pay phone and they gave him the number of the towing service and he called the towing service and they told him they didn't have his car-and no, there was no mistake: they didn't have it. Then he called Kyra. He got her secretary and had to sit on the curb in front of the pay phone in a litter of Doritos bags and candy wrappers for ten agonizing minutes till she rang him back. “Hello?” she demanded. “Delaney?”

He was bewildered, immobilized. People pulled into the lot and climbed casually out of their cars. Doors slammed. Engines revved. “Yes, it's me.”

“What is it? What's the matter? Where are you?” She was wound tight already.

“I'm at Li's Market.”

He could hear her breathing into the receiver, and he counted the beats it took her to absorb this information, puzzle over its significance and throw it back at him. “Listen, Delaney, I'm in the middle of-”

“They stole my car.”

“What? What are you talking about? Who stole it?”

He tried to dredge up all he'd heard and read about car thieves, about chop shops, counterfeit serial numbers and theft to order, and he tried to picture the perpetrators out there in broad daylight with hundreds of people driving obliviously by, but all he could see was the bruised face and blunted eyes of his Mexican, the wheel clutched between his hands and the bumper gobbling up the fragments of the broken yellow line as if the whole thing were one of those pulse-thumping games in the arcade. “You better call Jack,” he said.

8

IT WAS LIKE BEING HAUNTED BY DEVILS, RED-HAIRED devils and _rubios__ in eighty-dollar running shoes and sunglasses that cost more than a laboring man could make in a week. What had he done to deserve such a fate? Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball, first the big jerk with the Elvis hair and then the _pelirrojo__ who'd run him down in the road, the very one, and his gangling tall awkward _pendejo__ of a son who'd hiked all the way down into the canyon to violate a poor man's few pitiful possessions. It was too much. He needed to go to confession, do penance, shrive himself somehow. Even Job would have broken down under an assault like this.

For the next hour he hid himself in a clump of shrubbery at the far end of the parking lot, watching the door of the _supermercado__ for América. This was where she'd look for him-it was the only place she knew besides the Chinese store, and she must have known he wouldn't hang around there any longer than he had to. So he waited in the bushes, out of sight, and though his concealment made him feel better-at least now no one was going to push him around-he was still in a fever of worry. What if he'd missed her and she was down below in the canyon, staring numbly at the bleak pile of rocks where their camp used to be? What if the _patrón__ of the job he hoped she'd gotten forced her to do something with him? What if she was lost, hurt or worse?

The traffic was thinning on the road now and fewer cars were pulling in and out of the lot. His tormentors-the _gabachos__ young and old-had shoved into their cars and driven off without so much as a backward glance for him. He was about to give it up and cross the road to the labor exchange and look hopelessly round the empty lot there and then maybe head back down the road to where the path cut into the brush and shout out her name for every living thing in the canyon to hear, when a Mercedes sedan pulled up in front of the grocery and America stepped out of it.

He watched her slim legs emerge first, then her bare arms and empty hands, the pale flowered dress, the screen of her hair, and he was elated and devastated at the same time: she'd got work, but he hadn't. They would have money to eat, but he hadn't earned it. No: a seventeen-year-old village girl had earned it, and at what price? And what did that make him? He crouched there in the bushes and tried to read her face, but it was locked up like a strongbox, and the man with her, the _rico,__ was like some exotic animal dimly viewed through the dark integument of the windshield. She slammed the door, looked about her indecisively for a moment as the car wheeled away in a little blossom of exhaust, and then she squared her shoulders, crossed the lot and disappeared into the market.

Cándido brushed down his clothes, made good and certain that no one was looking his way, and ambled out of the bushes as if he'd just come back from a stroll around the block. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with the _gringos__ he passed nd out goas he crossed the lot and ducked into the grocery. After a week and a half of living on so little that his stomach had shrunk and his pants were down around his hips, the effect of all that abundance was devastating. There was no smell of food here, no hint of the rich stew of odors you'd find in a Mexican market-these people sanitized their groceries just as they sanitized their kitchens and toilets and drove the life from everything, imprisoning their produce in jars and cans and plastic pouches, wrapping their meat and even their fish in cellophane-and yet still the sight and proximity of all those comestibles made his knees go weak again.

Candy, there was a rack of candy right by the door, something sweet and immediate to feed the hunger. Little cakes and things, Twinkies and Ho-Ho's. And there, there were the fruits and vegetables lit up as on an altar, the fat ripeness of tomatoes, mangoes, watermelon, corn in its husk, roasting ears that would sweeten on the grill. He swallowed involuntarily. Looked right and then left. He didn't see America. She must be down one of the aisles pushing a basket. He tried to look nonchalant as he passed by the checkers and entered the vast cornucopia of the place.

Food in sacks for pets, for dogs and cats and parakeets, seltzer water in clear bottles, cans of vegetables and fruit: God in Heaven, he was hungry. He found América poised in front of one of the refrigerated displays, her back to him, and he felt shy suddenly, mortified, the unwanted guest sitting down at the starving man's table. She was selecting a carton of eggs-_huevos con chorizo, huevos rancheros, huevos hervidos con pan tostado-__flicking the hair out of her face with an unconscious gesture as she pried open the box to check for fractured shells. He loved her in that moment more than he ever had, and he forgot the Mercedes and the rich man and the _gabachos__ in the parking lot assailing him like a pack of dogs, and he thought of stew and _tortillas__ and the way he would surprise her with their new camp and the firewood all stacked and ready. Things would work out, they would. “América,” he croaked.

The face she turned to him was joyful, proud, radiant-she'd earned money, her first money ever, and they were going to eat on it, stuff themselves, feast till their stomachs swelled and their tongues went thick in their throats-but her eyes, her eyes dodged away from his, and he saw the traces there of some shame or sorrow that screamed out at him in warning. “What's the matter?” he demanded, and the shadowy form of that rich man in the Mercedes rose up before him. “Are you all right?”

She bowed her head. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out three clean fresh newly minted bills, two tens and a five, and her smile came back. “I worked all day,” she said, “and there's more work tomorrow, scrubbing Buddhas.”

“What? Scrubbing what?”

The _gabachos__ were watching them now, from every corner of the market, darting glances at them as they hustled by with their quick strides and dry-cleaned clothes, little baskets clutched to their chests, staring at a poor man and his wife as if they were diseased, as if they were assassins plotting a murder. America didn't answer him. She laid the eggs in the cart, on the little wire rack some _gabacho__ genius had designed for them, and looked up at him with widening eyes. “But you're here,” she said. “I mean, you're walking. You made it up out of the canyon.”

He shrugged. Felt his face tighten in its twisted mask. “I was worried.”

Her smile bloomed and she fell into his arms and he hugged her tight and to hell with every _gringo__ in the world, he thought. And then they shopped-the discount _tortillas,__ the pound of _hamburguesa__ meat, the eggs, the sacks of rice and beans, the coffee and the powdered milk, and before long they were walking back down the road in the hush of the falling night, the shared sweetness of a chocolate bar with almonds seeping into the secret recesses of their mouths.__

The light held for them till they reached the bottom of the trail, and then it thickened into darkness. Cándido clutched his wife's hand as they groped along the streambed, a plastic sack of groceries dangling from the crook of his bad arm. He was breathing hard, aching all over, but he felt buoyant and hopeful for the first time since the accident. He was mending and he would go up the hill to the labor exchange in the morning, America had earned money today and she would earn more tomorrow, they would fill their stomachs and lie on the blanket in their hut and make love hidden away from the world. They would eat the sardines with the white bread first, while the fire settled and the _hamburguesa__ meat snapped and hissed in the bottom of the pot, and then they would dip into the hot grease with their tortillas to take the edge off their hunger, and the meat would form the foundation of the stew till at eleven or maybe even twelve midnight they would pour steaming cups of it from the pot. All that.

He was able to find his way with his fingers, the night like pitch, moonless and with that ugly yellow urban sky clamped like a lid over their heads. The stream soughed through the rocks, something pounded its wings in the dark and flapped through the trees. He suppressed his fear of rattlesnakes and went on, trying to erase the memory of the thick coiled whiplash of a thing he'd encountered somewhere along here last month and the _mala suerte__ that hung over the killing, skinning and roasting of it. And where was its mate? Its mother? Its mother's mother? He tried not to think about it.

When they came to the pool he told America she was going to have to take her clothes off and she giggled and leaned into him, brushing her lips against his cheek. He could just make out the pale hovering presence of her face against the absence of her hair and clothes. The water was black, the trees were black, the walls of the canyon black as some deep place inside a man or woman, beneath the skin and bones and all the rest. He felt strangely excited. The crickets chirred. The trees whispered.

Cándido stripped, balled up his clothes and stuffed them in the plastic sack with the eggs. His wife was there, right there against him, and he helped her off with her dress in the dark and then he pulled her to him and tasted the chocolate on her lips. “Take your shoes off too,” he warned, running a hand down her leg to her ankle and back up again. “It's not deep, but the bottom's slippery.”

The water was warm, heated by the sun as it trickled down through the canyon, traveling all those tortuous miles to get here, to this pool, and the air on their wet skin was cool and gentle. Cándido felt his way, step by step, and America followed him, the water lapping at her breasts-she was so short, so skinny, such a _flaca-__the groceries and her bundled dress held up high above her head. He stumbled only once, midway across. It was almost as if a human hand had jerked his foot out from under him, but it must have been a branch, slick with algae and waving languidly in the current, some trick of the bottom-still, it caused him to fling out his arm in reaction and when he did the bag of eggs slammed against the rock wall like a lesson in fragility. “Are you all right?” America whispered. And then: “The eggs? Are they broken?”

But they weren't-except for two, that is, and he and America lapped them from the shells for strength even as he bent to light the fire and show off the fastness of the place and the hut he'd built with its stick-frame entrance and thatched roof. The fire caught and swelled. He knelt in the sand, feeding sticks into the grasping greedy fingers of flame, the smell of woodsmoke pricking his memory through the nostalgia of a thousand mornings at home, and he saw his mother burning a handful of twigs to get the stove going, corn gruel and toast and hot coffee smothered in sugar, and then he turned his head from the fire and watched his wife's limbs and hips and breasts fill with light. She was squatting, so busy with the meat, the pot, the onions and chiles and rice that she had no consciousness of her nudity, and he saw now, for the first time, that her pregnancy was a reality, as solid and tangible a thing as dough rising in a pan. She glanced up, saw him looking, and reached automatically for her dress. “No,” he said, “no, you don't need it. Not here, not with me.”

A long slow look, the hair hanging wet on the ends, and then she smiled again to show off her big square honest teeth. The dress stayed where it was.

They cooked the meat, the knots in their stomachs pulled tighter and tighter by the smell of it, the _hamburguesa__ meat working with the onions and _chiles__ to enrich the poor neutral breath of the canyon. They sat side by side in the sand, warmed by the fire, and shared the tin of sardines and ate half the loaf of store bread, North American bread baked in a factory and puffed up light as air. She held the last sardine out for him and he put his hands on her breasts and let her feed it into his mouth, the fire snapping, the night wrapped round them like a blanket, all his senses on alert. He took the sardine between his lips, between his teeth, and he licked the golden oil from her fingers.

In the morning, just before first light, they squatted over the pot and dipped _tortillas__ into the lukewarm stew. They drank their coffee cold, took a package of saltines and a slice of cheese each for lunch, and went naked into the pool. The water felt chilly at this hour and it was a trial to slosh through it like penitents in the penitential dawn, cursed by birds and harassed by insects. Their clothes felt clammy and damp and they looked away from each other's nudity as they hurriedly dressed on the cold shore. Still, as America followed Cándido's familiar compact form up the narrow dirt trail, she felt a surge of hope: the worst of it was behind them now. She would work, no matter what the fat man demanded of her, and Cándido would work too, and they'd take out just what they needed for food and necessities and the rest would go under a stone in the ground. In a month, maybe two, they could go up the canyon and into the city she barely knew. There was an apartment waiting there for them, nothing fancy, not for now-a single room with a hot shower and a toilet, some trees on the street and a market, someplace she could buy a dress, some lipstick, a brush for her hair.

Cándido was limping and he had to stop three times to catch his breath, but he was improving, getting better by the day, and that was an answer to her prayers too. They waited till there was a break in the traffic before emerging from the bushes and they kept their heads down and their feet moving as they hurried up the shoulder of the road. The cars terrified her. There was a chain of them, always a chain-ten, twenty, thirty-and they sucked the air with them, tore it from her lungs, and left a stink of exhaust behind. The tires hissed. The faces stared.

It was early, very early, and they were the first ones at the labor exchange, there even before Candelario Pérez. Most of the men took buses or hitched rides to get there, some coming from twenty and thirty miles away. And why go so far? Because they were country people and they hated the city streets, hated lining up on _las esquinas,__ the street corners, where there were gangs and dirt and filthy things written on the walls. America didn't blame them. She remembered her trip to Venice, the terror and disconnectedness of it, and as she settled into her customary spot against the pillar, drawing her legs up under her, she looked out into the heavy ribs of the trees and felt glad to be there.

Cándido sat heavily beside her, the good half of his face turned toward her in soft focus. He was fidgeting with his hands, snatching twigs from the dirt, snapping them in two and flicking the pieces away from him, over and over again. He'd removed the sling from his arm, but he still carried it awkwardly, and some of the crust had fallen away from the wound on his face, pale splotches of flesh like paint flecks showing through. He was quiet, moody, all the high spirits of the previous night dissolved in a look of silent fury that reminded her of her father, bent at night over the fine print of the newspaper, his back aching and his feet twisted from the confinement of the shoes they made him wear in the restaurant. Cándido was brooding, she could see that, afraid no one would choose him for work because of his face and the limp he couldn't disguise-even though he was first in line and would work his heart out. And though he hadn't said a word, neither of apology nor of thanks, she knew it hurt him to have a woman earning his keep. She made small talk to distract him-It was going to be warm, wasn't it? The stew had turned out well, hadn't it? Would he be sure to remind her to pick up a little soap powder so she could wash their clothes tonight? — but no matter what she said he responded only with a grunt.

Candelario Pérez arrived ten minutes later in a battered white pickup with six other men, and then the lot began to fill. Men came singly and in groups of two or three, appearing out of nowhere, loose-jointed and hopeful, men of all ages, their hands empty, their clothes simple and clean. A few of them stood apart, gathering across the road at the intersection of one of the side streets, or milling around in clumps of two or three in the post office parking lot, taking their chances with the _gringos,__ but most shuffled across the expanse of gravel, dust and weed to report to Candelario Pérez.

And then the contractors began to arrive, the white men with their big bleached faces and soulless eyes, enthroned in their trucks. They wanted two men or three, they wanted four or five, no questions asked, no wage stipulated, no conditions or terms of employment. A man could be pouring concrete one day, spraying pesticide the next-or swabbing out urinals, spreading manure, painting, weeding, hauling, laying brick or setting tile. You didn't ask questions. You got in the back of the truck and you went where they took you. And the bosses, the ones who did the hiring, sat up front, as motionless as if they were carved of wood. América wondered if they were somehow grafted to their trucks, if their mothers had given birth to them right there on the seat of the cab and they'd sprouted up behind the windshield like some sort of unnatural growth. All she ever saw of them was elbows and faces. She sat there quietly, waiting for someone who might need a floor mopped or an oven cleaned and the trucks pulled up, the tinted windows sank noiselessly into the gleaming door panels and the elbows appeared, followed by the sharp pointed noses and oversized ears, the flat hard calculating eyes wrapped in sunglasses.

Ten trucks must have pulled into the labor exchange that morning-and another half dozen into the lot by the post office-and forty men got work. Cándido was the first in line each time and each time he scrambled up out of the dirt for nothing. She watched him with a sinking feeling, his look of eagerness and hope as he disguised the hitch in his walk and tried to hold the bad arm rigid at his side, and then the face of rage and despair and the ravaging limp as he came back to her.

At nine-thirty or so the fat man wheeled into the lot in his rich long car. América had been chattering away about Tepoztlán to take Cándido's mind off the situation-she was remembering an incident from her childhood, a day when a September storm swept over the village and the hail fell like stones amid the standing corn and all the men rushed out into the streets firing their pistols and shotguns at the sky-but she stopped in midsentence when she heard the crunch of' gravel and looked up into the lean shoulders and predatory snout of the _patrón's__ car. She felt the living weight of the big man's hand in her lap all over again and something seized up inside her: nothing like that had ever happened to her before, not in her own country, not in Tepoztlán, not even in the dump in Tijuana. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of eight, and her parents had loved her and she'd gone to school all the way through and done everything that was expected of her. There were no strange men, no hands in her lap, there was no living in the woods like a wild animal. But here it was. She rose to her feet.

America crossed the lot in a kind of daze, picturing the bright expanse of that big room with the Buddhas and the windows that laid all the world at her feet, and the money too, twenty-five dollars, twenty-five more than nothing. The window of the car threw her reflection back at her for a moment, then it ceremonially descended to reveal the face of the _patrón.__ He didn't get out of the car, but there he was, expressionless, the beard clipped close round his mouth to frame his colorless lips. Candelario Pérez came up to him, managing to look officious and subservient at the same time-_A sus órdenes,__ let me bow and scrape for you-but the big man ignored him. He motioned with his head for America to go round the car and get in the front seat beside him, and then he glanced up at Candelario Pérez and said something in English, a question. Did he want Mary too, was that it? Mary was nowhere in sight. Probably drunk in her little redwood house sitting in front of a refrigerator stocked with hams. America turned to look for Cándido, and he was right there, right in back of her, and they exchanged a look before she dropped her eyes, hurried round the car and got in. The _patrón__ gave her the faintest nod of acknowledgment as she shut the door and settled herself as far away from him as possible, and then he turned back to Candelario Pérez, who was touting the virtues of Cándido and the next two men in line-anybody could scrape the crud from a stone Buddha-but the fat man shook his head. He wanted only women.

And then they were out of the lot and wheeling up the canyon road, the trees rushing past them, the car leaning gracefully into the turns, turn after turn after turn, all the way up to the gate and the men working there with their picks and shovels. The radio was silent. The _patrón__ said nothing, didn't even look at her. He seemed pensive-or tired maybe. His lips were pursed, his eyes fixed on the road. And his hands-fleshy and white, swollen up like sponges-stayed where they belonged, on the wheel.

She had the big room to herself. She lifted the Buddhas from the cartons, dipped them in the corrosive, scrubbed them with the brush, affixed the labels and packed them back up again. It wasn't long before her eyes had begun to water and she found herself dabbing at them with the sleeves of her dress-which was awkward, because they were short sleeves and she had to keep lifting one shoulder or the other to her eyes. And her nose and throat felt strange too-the passages seemed raw and abraded, as if she had a cold. Was the solution stronger than what they'd been using yesterday? Mary, the big gringa, had complained all through the day without remit like some insect in the grass, but América didn't remember its being as bad as this. Still, she kept at it, the Buddhas floating through a scrim of tears, until her fingers began to bother her. They weren't stiffening as they had yesterday, not yet, but there was a sharp stinging sensation round the cuticles of her nails, as if she were squeezing lemon into a cut, and she realized with a jolt that the big man had neglected to give her the plastic gloves. She held her hands up to the light then and saw that the skin had begun to crack and peel and that all the color had gone out of the flesh. These weren't her hands-they were the hands of a corpse.

She was alarmed. If she didn't have those gloves there would be nothing left of her fingers by the end of the day-only bones, as if in some horrible costume for the Day of the Dead-but she was too timid to go look for them. The _patrón__ might be watching even now, watching to see if she was scrubbing hard enough, ready to burst in and abuse her in his harsh superior language, to send her home, fire her, lay his big bloated paw in her lap. Her fingers were burning. Her throat was a cinder. She couldn't see the Buddhas for the water in her eyes. Finally, she stole a look over her shoulder.

No one was watching her. Both doors that gave onto the room were shut and the house was silent. The near door, the one she'd come in through, led to the garage and the stairway to the second floor, and the other must have been to the bathroom, judging from the amount of time Mary had spent behind it yesterday. For her part, America had been afraid to get up from her seat-who knew when the _patrón__ would come to check on them? — and that was a trial, because she felt like she always had to pee lately and she'd had to hold it all day (it was the baby crowding her organs, she knew that, and she wished she could talk to her mother about it, even for a minute). But that was over. That was yesterday. The second she and Cándido got off the road and into the cover at the head of, the trail, she'd squatted in the bushes and the problem was solved. This was different. This was dangerous-and it wasn't her fault. The _patrón__ should have given her the gloves, he should have remembered.

It was eleven-fifteen by the sunburst clock. The mountains pressed at the windows. Her fingertips burned. The statue before her loomed and receded and her head felt light. Finally she got up from the chair and hurried across the room-she had to rinse her hands at least, to take the sting away, no one would deny her that…

There was a bathroom behind, the door, as she'd surmised, pink and white tile, a little shower stall, fluffy pink mats and wallpaper decorated with dewy-eyed little rabbits, and she couldn't help admiring it-this was just what she wanted, so pretty and efficient, so clean. She ran the cold water over her hands, and then, not wanting to risk dirtying the plush white towels, she dried them on her dress. That was when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her hair all ragged and wild-she looked like a madwoman, a gypsy, a beggar in the street-but she suppressed the image, eased back the lid of the toilet and sat down quickly, thinking to relieve herself now and get everything over with at once.

Sequestered there in that pink bathroom with the bunnies on the walls and the pristine towels and the lilac soap in a little ceramic dish, she felt at peace for the first time since she'd stepped away from Cándido and slipped into the big man's car. She studied the architecture of the shower, marveling at all that pretty tile, and thought how nice it would be to have hot water whenever you wanted it, a dab of shampoo, soap, a bristle toothbrush instead of a stalk of dry grass. And then she thought about the fat man, all lathered up with soap, and his pink ridiculous flesh and fat white feet. Maybe he'd go away to China to buy more Buddhas for his store and she could stay here and sleep in the big room at night and use the bathroom ten times a day if she wanted…

She was thinking about that, daydreaming-just for a second-when a sudden noise from above brought her back to herself. There was a dull thump, as if someone had just pushed a chair back from a table, followed by the sound of footsteps. América jumped up from the toilet, afraid to flush it for fear of giving herself away, and in her extremity forgot what she'd come for. The footsteps were directly overhead now, and for a moment she froze, unable to think, unable to move. _The gloves__, that was it. She tore open the cabinet under the sink, rifled the drawers beside it-one, two, three, four-but there were no gloves and the footsteps seemed to be coming closer, coming down the stairs. She hit the chair on the run and snatched up her brush in a panic.

The footsteps ceased. There was no one on the stairs, no one overhead. The Buddha on the table gave her his look of inscrutable wisdom.

Three Buddhas later, she had to give it up. She couldn't take it a second longer-no one could. She rinsed her hands again and the relief flooded over her. Then, steeling herself, she went to the door, eased it open and peered up the stairs to where a larger, more formal-looking door gave onto the floor above. She hesitated a moment, gazing into the penumbral depths of the garage. The car was there, the car that cost more than her entire village could make in a year, and there was a refrigerator too, a washer and dryer, all sorts of things. Tennis rackets. Sticks for that game they play on the ice. Birdcages, bicycles, chairs, beds, tables, a pair of sawhorses, cardboard boxes of every shape and size, tools, old clothes and stacks of newspapers, all of it amassed on the garage floor like the treasure of some ancient potentate.

She mounted the stairs on silent feet, her heart pounding. How would she ask for gloves? In pantomime? What if the big man got dirty with her? Wasn't she asking for it by coming into his house all alone? She hesitated again, on the landing at the top of the stairs, and then she forced herself to knock. Her knock was soft, apologetic, barely a whisper of the knuckles against the wood. No one answered it. She knocked again, a bit more forcefully. Still nothing. She didn't know what to do-she couldn't work without those gloves. She'd cripple herself, dissolve the skin from her bones…

She tried the doorknob.

It was open. “Alo?” she called, her face pressed to the crack of the door. _“¿Alguien está aquí?”__ But what was it they said in those old movies on television that used to crack up all the girls in the village? _Yoo-hoo__, wasn't that it? She gave it a try. “Yoo-hoo!” she called; and it sounded as ridiculous on her lips as on any actress's.

She waited a moment and tried it again. “Alo? Yoo-hoo?”

There was the sound of movement, heavy footsteps on the floor, and the fat man shuffled into view. He was wearing a pair of wire-rim spectacles that seemed to pinch his face, and house slippers on his feet. He looked puzzled-or irritated. The white lips glared out from the nest of his beard.

“Escuse, pleese,” America said, half-shielded by the door. She was on the landing still, not daring to enter the house. She held up her hands. _“Guantes.__ Pleese. _Para las manos.”__

The _patrón__ had stopped ten paces from the door. He looked bewildered, as if he'd never seen her before. He said something in English, something with the lift of a question to it, but his tone wasn't friendly, not at all.

She tried again, in dumb show this time, rubbing her hands together and making the motions of pulling on a pair of imaginary gloves.

Then he understood. Or seemed to. He came forward in two propulsive strides, took hold of her right wrist and examined her hand as if it were something he'd found stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Then he dropped it with a curse-flung it way from him-turned his back on her and stalked out of the room.

She stood there waiting, her eyes on the floor. Had he understood? Did he care? Had he gone to get her the gloves or was he ignoring her-after all, what should he care if the flesh rotted off her bones? He'd laid his big presumptuous paw in her lap and she'd shrunk from it-what use did he have for her? She wanted to turn and dash back down the stairs, wanted to hide herself among the Buddhas-or better yet, in the bathroom-but she stood her ground. When it came down to it, she'd rather starve than dip her hands in that solution for even one second more, she would.

But then she heard the heavy footfall again, the vase on the little table by the door trembling with the solidity of it, and the _patrón__ came round the corner, moving quickly, top-heavy and tottering on his feet. The little glasses were gone. In his hand, a pair of yellow plastic gloves. He thrust them at her impatiently, said something in his cacophonous blast of a voice-thank you, goodbye, I'm sorry; she couldn't tell what-and then he slammed the door shut on her.

The day sank into her veins like an elixir and she worked in a delirium of fumes, scrubbing statue after statue, her aching hands sealed away from the corrosive in the slim plastic envelope of the gloves. Her eyes watered, her throat was raw, but she concentrated on her work and the substantiality of the twenty-five dollars the _patrón__ would give her, trying not to think about the ride back and what it would be like sitting next to him in the car. She pictured the _cocido__ she and Cándido had made from yesterday's profits, visualizing each chunk of meat, the _chiles,__ the beans, the onions-and the _tortillas__ and cheese and hard-cooked eggs that went with it-all of it carefully wrapped in the plastic bags from the store and secreted beneath a rock in a cool spot she'd dug out in the wet sand of the streambed. But what if an animal got to it? What did they have here in the North? _El mapache__, the short-nosed cousin of the coatimundi, a furtive, resourceful animal. Still, the stone was heavy and she'd wrapped the food as tightly as she could. No: it was more likely that the ants would discover it-they could get into anything, insidious, like so many moving grains of sand-and she saw a line of them as thick as her wrist pouring in and out of the pot as she scrubbed one of a thousand blackened Buddhas. The vision made her hungry and she removed the gloves a moment to devour the dry crackers and slivers of cheese she'd brought along, and then she dashed across the room to wet her mouth under the faucet and relieve herself, flushing quickly this time and darting back to the table before the roar of the rushing water had subsided.

She worked hard, worked without stint for the rest of the day, fighting back tears and lightheadedness to prove her worth, to show the _patrón__ that all by herself she could transform as many Buddhas as both she and Mary had been able to the day before. He would notice and he would thank her and ask her back the next day and the next, and he would know that she was worth more than the kind of girl who would have lifted his hand from her lap and pressed it to her breasts. But when he finally reappeared-at six by the sunburst clock on the wall-he didn't seem to notice. He just nodded his head impatiently and turned to trundle heavily to the car while the garage door rose beyond him as if by levitation.

He didn't put his hand in her lap. He didn't turn on the radio. When they swung into the lot at the market, he pulled out his wallet, shifting his weight with a grunt, extracted a twenty and a five and turned his blue-eyed gaze to the horizon as she fumbled with the door handle and let herself out. The door slammed, the engine gave a growl, and he was gone.

She didn't see Cándido anywhere. The parking lot was full of white people hurrying in and out of the market with brown plastic bags tucked under their arms, and the labor exchange across the street was deserted. She felt a sharp letdown-this was where they'd agreed to meet-and for a long moment she just stood there in the middle of the lot, looking round her numbly. And then it occurred to her that Cándido must have gotten work. Of course. Where else would he be? A feeling like joy took hold of her, but it wasn't joy exactly or joy without limit-she wouldn't feel that until she had a roof over her head. But if Cándido had work they'd have enough money to eat for a week, two weeks maybe, and if they could both find a job-even every second day-they could start saving for an apartment.

For now, though, there was nothing to do but wait. She crossed the lot, clutching the bills in her hand, and found an inconspicuous perch on a tree stump at the corner of the building. From here she could watch the lot for Cándido and stay out of the way-all those _gringos__ made her nervous. Every time a car swung into the lot she felt her heart seize. She couldn't help thinking of _La Migra__ and those tense silent men in the tan uniforms who'd ministered over the worst night of her life, the night she'd been stripped naked in front of all those people, though Cándido assured her they wouldn't find her here. The chances were small. Minuscule. But she didn't like chances, any chances, and she shrank into the vegetation and waited.

An hour went by. She was bored, scared, beginning to imagine all sorts of calamities: Cándido had been picked up by the police, he'd gone back to the canyon and stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes, another car had hit him and he lay bleeding in the bushes. From there her mind took her to their camp-maybe he was down there now, starting the fire, warming the stew-and then to the stew itself, and her stomach turned inside out and gnawed at her. She was hungry. Ravenous. And though the store intimidated her, the hunger drove her through the doors with her money and she bought another tin of sardines and a loaf of the sweet white bread that was puffed up like edible clouds and a Twix bar for Cándido. She was afraid someone would speak to her, ask a question, challenge her, but the girl at the checkout stand stared right through her and the price-$2.73-showed in red above the cash register; sparing her the complication of having to interpret the unfathomable numbers as they dropped from the girl's lips. Outside, back on her stump, she folded the sardines into slices of bread and before she knew it she'd eaten the whole tin. Her poor bleached fingers were stained yellow with the evidence.

And then the sun fell behind the ridge and the shadows deepened. Where was Cándido? She didn't know. But she couldn't stay here all night. She began to think about their camp again, the lean-to, the stewpot, the blanket stretched out in the sand, the way the night seemed to settle in by degrees down there, wrapping itself round her till she felt safe, hidden, protected from all the prying eyes and sharp edges of the world. That was where she wanted to be. She was tired, enervated, giddy from breathing fumes all day. She rose to her feet, took a final glance around and started off down the road with her bread, the Twix bar and her twenty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents all wrapped up in the brown plastic bag dangling from her wrist.

At this hour, the traffic had slowed considerably. The frenetic stream of cars had been reduced to the odd vehicle here and there, a rush of air, a hiss of tires, and then the silence of the canyon taking hold of the night, birds singing, the fragment of a moon glowing white in a cobalt sky. She looked carefully before crossing, thinking of Cándido, and kept to the edge of the shoulder, her head down, walking as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself. By the time she reached the entrance of the path she was breathing hard, anxious to get off the road and hide herself, but she continued past it, slowing her pace to a nonchalant stroll: a car was coming. She kept her head down, her footsteps dragging, and let it pass. As soon as it had disappeared round the bend by the lumberyard, she retraced her steps, but then another car swung round the curve coming toward her and she had to walk past the trailhead again. Finally there was a respite-no one coming either way-and she ducked into the bushes.

The first thing she did was relieve herself, just like last night. She lifted her dress, squatted over her heels and listened to the fierce impatient hiss of the urine as the light settled toward dusk and the smell of the earth rose to her nostrils. A moment ago she'd been out there on the road, exposed and vulnerable-frightened, always frightened-and now she was safe. But the thought of that frightened her too: what kind of life was it when you felt safe in the bushes, crouching to piss in the dirt like a dog? Was that what she'd left Tepoztlan for?

But that was no way to think. She was tired, that was all. Her shoulders ached and her fingers burned where the skin was peeling back from her nails. And she was hungry, always hungry. If she'd stayed in Tepoztlán through all the gray days of her life she would have had enough to eat, as long as her father was alive and she jumped like a slave every time he snapped his fingers, but she would never have had anything more, not even a husband, because all the men in the village, all the decent ones, went North nine months a year. Or ten months. Or permanently. To succeed, to make the leap, you had to suffer. And her suffering was nothing compared to the tribulations of the saints or the people living in the streets of Mexico City and Tijuana, crippled and abandoned by God and man alike. So what if she had to live in a hut in the woods? It wouldn't be for long. She had Cándido and she'd earned her first money and now Cándido was able to work again and the nightmare of the past weeks was over. They'd have a place by the time the rains came in the fall, he'd promised her, and then they'd look back on all this as an adventure, a funny story, something to tell their grandchildren. _Cándido__, she would say, _do you remember the time the car hit you, the time we camped out like Indians and cooked over the open fire, remember?__ Maybe they'd have a picnic here someday, with their son and maybe a daughter too.

She was holding that picture in her head, the picnic basket, one of those portable radios playing, a little boy in short pants and a girl with ribbons in her hair, as she worked her way down the trail with her brown plastic bag. Pebbles jumped away from her feet and trickled down the path ahead of her like water down a streambed. There was a clean sharp smell of sage and mesquite and some pale indefinable essence that might have been agave. There were certainly enough agave plants scattered across the slopes, their huge flowering stalks like spears thrown from the sky. Did they have a scent? she wondered. They had to, didn't they, to attract the bees and hummingbirds? She'd have to get up close and smell one sometime.

She had almost reached the place where the big rounded spike of rock stuck out of the ground when a sudden noise in the undergrowth startled her. Her eyes darted to the path in front of her and she caught her breath. She had a fear of snakes, especially when the light began to fail and they came out to prowl, their coarse thick evil-eyed bodies laid alongside the trail like sticks of wood, like shadows. But this was no snake, and she had to laugh at herself even as the first of the quail, slate heads bobbing, scuttered across the path with a rasp of dead leaves. Cándido was forever trying to snare the little birds but they were too quick, folding themselves into the brush or crying out like scared children as they spread their wings and shot up over the bushes and down the canyon to safety. She stopped a moment to let them pass, the chicks at their heels, and then she stepped into the deep purple shadow cast by the rock.

He was waiting there for her, with his hoarse high voice and his skin that was like too much milk in a pan of coffee, with his hat turned backwards on his head like a _gringo__ and the raw meat of his eyes. There was another man with him, an Indian, burnt like a piece of toast. They were sitting there, perched on blunt stools of sandstone, long silver cans of beer dangling from their fingertips. “Well, well,” he said, and his face was expressionless in the smothered light, _“buenas noches__, _señorita?__-or should I say _señora?__ Yes? Right?” And he threw it back at her: “Married woman.”

There was no time for revision, no time for remonstrance or plea. She turned and ran, uphill, toward the road she'd just escaped-they wouldn't touch her there, they couldn't. She was young and in good shape from climbing up and down out of the canyon twice a day for the last six weeks and she was fast too, the blood singing in her ears, but they were right there, right behind her, and they were grown healthy men with long leaping houndlike strides and the sinews gone tight in their throats with the pulse of the chase. They caught up with her before she'd gone a hundred feet, the tall one, the one from the South, slamming into her like some irresistible force, like the car that had slammed into Cándido.

A bush raked her face, something jerked the bag from her wrist, and they fell together in the dust that was exactly like flour spread over the trail by some mad baker. He was on top of her, sitting on her buttocks, his iron hand forcing her face into the floury dust. She cried out, tried to lift her head, but he slammed his fist into the back of her neck once, twice, three times, cursing to underscore each blow. “Shut up,” he snarled. “Shut the fuck up.”

The other one stood behind him, waiting. She could hear the rasp of their breathing, anything possible now, and she recoiled from the stinking graveyard breath of the one atop her. He hit her again, suddenly, once at the base of the skull and then in the small of the back. Then he eased up from her, leaning all his weight on the hand that pinned her face to the ground, and with the other hand he took hold of the collar of her dress, her only dress, and tore it down the length of her till the cool evening air pricked at her naked skin. In a frenzy, in a rage, the curses foaming on his lips, he shredded her panties and rammed his fingers into her.

It was as if a tree had fallen on her, as if she were the victim of some random accident, powerless, unable to move. She breathed the dust. Her neck hurt. His fingers moved inside her, in her private places, and it was like he was squirting acid into her. She squirmed in the dirt and he shoved back at her, hard and unrelenting. Then he lifted his hand from the back of her neck, breathing spasmodically, and she could hear him fumbling in his pocket for something and her heart froze-he was going to murder her, rape and murder her, and what had she done? But it wasn't that, it wasn't that at all-it was something in a wrapper, silver foil, the rustle of silver foil. Was it one of those things, one of those-no, a stick of gum. There, in the quickening night, with his dirty fingers inside her as if they belonged there and the Indian waiting his turn, he stopped to put a stick of gum in his mouth and casually drop the wrapper on the exposed skin of her back, no more concerned than if he were sitting on a stool in a bar.

She clenched her eyes shut, gritted her teeth. His hand went away and she could feel him shift his weight as he balanced himself to work down his pants. She stiffened against the pounding of her blood and the moment hung there forever, like the eternal torment of the damned. And then, finally, his voice came at her, probing like a knife. “Married woman,” he whispered, leaning close. “You better call your husband.”