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.”
PART TWO. EI Tenksgeevee
1
“HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” KENNY CRISSOM ASSURED him, and from the undisguised joy in his voice you would have thought he'd stolen the car himself to drum up business. This was the moment he lived for, his moment of grace and illumination: Delaney was without a car and he had a lot full of them. “You'd be surprised,” he added. “But look what it says about your car and its desirability-it's a class car all the way; people want it. No offense, but probably some judge or police chief down in Baja is driving it right now. They contract out. They do. Señor So-and-So says get me a Mercedes or a jag or an Acura Vigor GS, white with tan interior, all the options, and the dude down there calls his buddies in Canoga Park and they cruise the streets till they find one. Three hours later it's in Mexico.” He paused to shift his shoulders, tug at his tie. “Happens all the time.”
Small comfort to Delaney. It happened all the time, but why did it have to happen to. him? “I still can't understand it,” he muttered, signing the papers as Kenny Grissom handed them across the desk. “It was broad daylight, hundreds of people going by-and what about the alarm?”
The salesman blew a quick sharp puff of air between his teeth. “That's for amateurs, joyriders, kids. The people that got your car are pros. You know that tool the cops have for when somebody locks their keys in the car, flat piece of metal about this long? They call it a Slim Jim?” He held his index fingers apart to demonstrate. “Well, they slip that down inside the glass and flip the lock, then they ease open the door so it doesn't trip the alarm, pop the hood, flip the cable off the battery to disarm the thing, hot-wire the ignition, and bye-bye. A pro can do it in sixty seconds.”
Delaney was clutching the pen like a weapon. He felt violated, taken, ripped off-and nobody batted an eyelash, happens all the time. His stomach clamped down on nothing and the sense of futility and powerlessness he'd felt when he came up the road and saw that empty space on the shoulder flooded over him again. It was going to cost him four and a half thousand on top of the insurance to replace the car with the current year's model, and that was bad enough, not to mention the dead certainty that his insurance premiums would go up, but the way people seemed to just accept the whole thing as if they were talking about the weather was what really got him. Own a car, it will be stolen. Simple as that. It was like a tax, like winter floods and mudslides.