The tall one looked dubiously toward the house, the great broad artifact of stone, lumber and glass that cut across the horizon like a monument to the ruling tribe, and then said something in Spanish to his companion, a quick sudden spurt of language. She wanted to break for the car, fling open the door and hit the automatic locks before they could get to her; then she could start it up with a roar and swing round in a vicious circle, jam the wheel, hit the accelerator- “We are sorry too much,” the tall one said, and he ducked his head, false and obsequious at the same time, then came back to her with a smile. She saw false teeth, yellowed gums. His eyes bored right through her. “Me and my friend? We don't know these place, you know? We hike, that's all. Just hike.”
She had nothing to say to this, but she forced herself to stand firm, watching for sudden movement.
The man turned his head, spat out something to his companion, and for the first time she noticed the strange high breathy quality of his voice. “Sorry,” he repeated, coming back to her eyes. “A mistake, that's all. No problem, huh?”
The blood pounded in her temples. She could hardly breathe. “No problem,” she heard herself say.
“Okay,” the man said, and his voice boomed out as he tugged at his bedroll and turned to leave, the decision made, the moment expended, “okay, no problem.” She watched them head back the way they came, and she'd begun, almost involuntarily, to drift toward the car, when the tall one suddenly stopped short, as if he'd forgotten something, and turned back to level his smile on her. “You have a nice day, huh?” he said, “-you and your husband. And your brother too.”
2
CáNDIDO HAD BEEN LUCKY. DESPITE HIS FACE AND his limp and the fact that it was half an hour after the labor exchange closed down for the day and everyone had gone home, he got work, good work, setting fence posts for five dollars an hour, and then later painting the inside of a house till past dark. The boss was a Mexican-American who could speak English like a _gringo__ but still had command of his native tongue. Cándido had been sitting there in the dirt by the closed-down labor exchange, feeling hopeless and angry, feeling sorry for himself-his wife had got work, a seventeen-year-old village girl who didn't know the first thing about anything, and he hadn't, though he could do any job you asked him, from finish carpentry to machine work to roofing-when Al Lopez pulled into the lot. He had an Indian from Chiapas in the back of the truck and the Indian called out to him, _“¿Quieres trabajar?”__ And then Al Lopez had stuck his head out the window and said, _“Cinco dólares__,” because his regular man, another Indian, had got sick on the job, too sick to work.
It was nearly one o'clock by the time they got to the place, a big house in a development of big houses locked away behind a brand-new set of gates. Cándido knew what those gates were for and who they were meant to keep out, but that didn't bother him. He wasn't resentful. He wasn't envious. He didn't need a million dollars-he wasn't born for that, and if he was he would have won the lottery. No, all he needed was work, steady work, and this was a beginning. He mixed concrete, dug holes, hustled as best he could with the hollow metal posts and the plastic strips, all the while amazed at the houses that had sprouted up here, proud and substantial, big _gringo__ houses, where before there'd been nothing. Six years ago, the first time Cándido had laid eyes on this canyon, there had been nothing here but hills of golden grass, humped like the back of some immemorial animal, and the dusty green canopies of the canyon oaks.
He'd been working up in Idaho, in the potatoes, sending all his money home to Resurrección, and when the potatoes ran out he made his way south to Los Angeles because his friend Hilario had a cousin in Canoga Park and there was plenty of work there. It was October and he'd wanted to go home to his wife and his aunt Lupe, who'd practically raised him after his mother died and his father remarried, and the timing was right too because most of the men in the village were just then leaving to work in the citrus and he'd be cock of the walk till spring. But Hilario convinced hihadther othm: You're here already, he'd argued, so why run the risk of another crossing, and besides, you'll make more in two months in Los Angeles than you did in the past four in Idaho, believe me. And Cándido had asked: What kind of work? Gardening, Hilario told him. Gardening? He was dubious. You know, Hilario said, for the rich people with their big lawns and their flowerbeds and the trees full of fruit they never eat.
And so they pooled their money with four other men and bought a rusted-out 1971 Buick Electra with a balky transmission and four bald-as-an-egg tires for three hundred and seventy-five dollars, and started south in the middle of the season's first snowstorm. None of them except Cándido had ever seen snow before, let alone experienced or even contemplated the peculiar problems of driving in it. With its bald tires on the slick surface, the Buick fishtailed all over the road while huge howling semitrailers roared past them like Death flapping its wings over the deepest pit. Cándido had driven before-but not much, having learned on an old Peugeot in a citrus grove outside of Bakersfield on his first trip North-and he was elected to do the bulk of the driving, especially in an emergency, like this one. For sixteen hours he gripped the wheel with paralyzed hands, helpless to keep the car from skittering like a hockey puck every time he turned the wheel or hit the brakes. Finally the snow gave out, but so did the transmission, and they'd only made it as far as Wagontire, Oregon, where six _indocumentados__ piling out of the smoking wreck of a rust-eaten 1971 Buick Electra were something less than inconspicuous.
They hadn't had the hood up ten minutes, with Hilario leaning into the engine compartment in a vain attempt to fathom what had gone wrong with a machine that had already drunk up half a case of transmission oil, when the state police cruiser nosed in behind them on the shoulder of the road. The effect was to send everybody scrambling up the bank and into the woods in full flight, except for Hilario, who was still bent over the motor the last time Cándido laid eyes on him. The police officers-pale, big-shouldered men in sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats-shouted incomprehensible threats and fired off a warning shot, but Cándido and two of the other men kept on running. Cándido ran till his lungs were on fire, a mile at least, and then he collapsed in a gully outside of a farmhouse. His friends were nowhere in sight. He was terrified and he was lost. It began to rain.
He couldn't have been more at a loss if he'd been dropped down on another planet. He had money-nearly four hundred dollars sewed into the cuff of his trousers-and the first thing he thought of was the bus. But where was the bus? Where was the station and how could he hope to find it? There was no one in the entire state of Oregon who spoke Spanish. And worse: he wasn't even sure, in terms of geography, where exactly Oregon was and what relation it bore to California, Baja and the rest of Mexico. He crouched down in the ditch, looking wistfully across the field to the farmhouse, as the day closed into night and the rain turned to sleet. He had a strip of jerky in his pocket to chew on, and as he tore into the leathery flavorless meat with quivering jaws and aching teeth, he remembered a bit of advice his father had once given him. In times of extremity, his father said, when you're lost or hungry or in danger, _ponte pared,__ make like a wall. That is, you present a solid unbreachable surface, you show nothing, neither fear nor despair, and you protect the inner fortress of yourself from all comers. That night, cold, wet, hungry and afraid, Cándido followed his father's advice and made himself like a wall.
It did no good. He froze just the same, and his stomach shrank regardless. At daybreak, he heard dogs barking somewhere off in the distance, and at seven or so he s coán or so haw the farmer's wife emerge from the back door of the house with three pale little children, climb into one of the four cars that stood beside the barn, and make her way down a long winding drive toward the main road. The ground was covered with a pebbly gray snow, an inch deep. He watched the car-it was red, a Ford-crawl through that Arctic vista like the pointer on the bland white field of a game of chance at a village _fiesta.__ Awhile later he watched a girl of twenty or so emerge from the house, climb into one of the other cars and wind her way down the drive to the distant road. Finally, and it was only minutes later, the farmer himself appeared, a _güero__ in his forties, preternaturally tall, with the loping, patient, overworked gait of farmers everywhere. He slammed the kitchen door with an audible crack, crossed the yard and vanished through the door to the barn.