All that was fine, but he was drunk. Drunk for a purpose, for a reason. Drunk because he was fed up with the whole yankee gringo dog-eat-dog world where a poor man had to fight like a conquering hero just to keep from starving to death, drunk because after three weeks of on-again, off-again work and the promise of something better, Al Lopez had let him go. Rigoberto's brother, the one who'd been ill, was back from his sickbed and ready to work. A hernia, that's what he had, and he'd gone to the gringo doctors to sew it up, and that was all right, because he had papers, _la tarjeta__ verde, and he was legal. Cándido was not. “Haven't I done good work?” he asked Al Lopez. “Haven't I run after everything you told me to do like a human _burro,__ haven't I busted my balls?”
“Yes, sure,” Al Lopez had said, “but that's not the problem. You don't have papers and Ignacio does. I could get in trouble. Big trouble.” And so Cándido had bought the sausages and the wine and come home drunk with the dress and the shorts in a paper bag, and he was drunk now and getting drunker.
In three weeks, he'd made nearly three hundred dollars, minus some for food and the first dress he'd bought America, the pretty one, from the gringo store. That left him just over two hundred and fifty dollars, which was half what he'd need for a car and a quarter what he'd need for a decent apartment, because they all-even the Mexican landlords-wanted first and last months' rent and a deposit too. The money was buried in a plastic peanut butter jar under a rock behind the wrecked car and he didn't know how he was going to be able to add to it. He'd only got work once when Al Lopez hadn't come for him, and that was just half a day at three dollars an hour, hauling rock for a wall some old lam sá some olddy was building around her property. It was the end of July. The dry weather would hold for four months more, and by then América would have had her baby-his son-and they would have to have a roof over their heads. The thought darkened his mood and when America stepped into the firelight to show off the big shorts with her jaguar's smile, he snapped at her.
“Those _vagos,”__ he said, and the tongue was so thick in his throat he might have swallowed a snake, “they took more than just your money, didn't they? Didn't they?”
Her face went numb. “You go to hell,” she said. _“Borracho.__ I told you, I told you a thousand times,” and she turned away and hid herself in the hut.
He didn't blame her. But he was drunk and angry and he wanted to hurt her, wanted to hurt himself, twisting the knowledge round and round his brain like a rotten tooth rotated in its socket. How could he pretend not to know what had happened? How could he allow himself to be fooled? She hadn't let him touch her in three weeks, and why was that? The baby, she claimed. She felt sick. She had a headache. Her digestion wasn't right, no, Cándido, no… well, maybe it was true. But if he ever found that son of a bitch with the raw eyes and that stupid _pinche__ baseball cap… and he looked for him too, everywhere, every time Al's truck took a turn and there was somebody there beside the road, a pair of shoulders, a cap, blue jeans and a stranger's face… Cándido knew what he would do when he found him, his fist pounding on the window till the truck stopped, the _vago__ loping up to the truck for a ride, his lucky day, and the first thing Cándido could lay his hands oh, the big sledge for driving stakes, the machete for clearing brush, and if he went to prison for a hundred years it would be sweet compared to this…
If she was lying to him it was to spare him, he knew that, and his heart turned over for her in his drunkenness. Seventeen years old, and she was the one who'd found work when he couldn't, she was the one who'd had them sniffing after her like dogs, she was the one whose husband made her live in a hut of sticks and then called her a liar, a whore and worse. But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die.
But then dead men didn't work either, did they?
3
SMOKE ROSE FROM THE BARBECUE IN FRAGRANT ginger-smelling tufts as Delaney basted the tofu kebabs with his special honey-ginger marinade and Jordan chased a ball round the yard with Osbert yapping at his heels. Kyra was stretched out by the pool, having finished up her jog with forty laps of the crawl and her weekly glass of Chardonnay, and though her briefcase stood at her side, she seemed for the moment to be content with contemplating the underside of her eyelids. It was a Sunday in mid-August, seven in the evening, the sun fixed in the sky like a Japanese lantern. There was music playing somewhere, a slow moody piano piece moving from one lingering faintly heard note to the next, and when Delaney looked up from turning the kebabs he watched a California gnatcatcher-that rare and magical gray-bodied little bird-settle on the topmost wire of the fence. It was one of those special moments when all the mad chittering whirl of things suddenly quits, like a freeze-frame in a film, and Delaney held on to it, savored it, even as the fragrance of ginger faded into the air, the piano faltered and the bird shot away into nothingness. Things had been tough there for a while, what with the accident, the loss of Sacheverell, the theft of his car, but now life had settled back onto an easy even keel, a mundanity that allowed the little things to reveal themselves, and he was grateful for it.
“Is it ready yet?” Kyra called in a smoky languorous voice. “Do you want me to put the dressing on the salad?”
“Yes, sure, that would be great,” he said, and he felt blissful, rapturous even, as he watched his wife swing her legs over the side of the chair, adjust the straps of her swimsuit and stride gracefully across the patio and into the rear of the house.
At dinner, which Delaney served on the glass-topped table by the pool, Kyra filled her glass with Perrier and announced, with a self-deprecating giggle, that she'd “cleaned up Shoup.” Jordan was toying with his tofu, separating it from the mushrooms, the mushrooms from the tomatoes and the tomatoes from the onions. Osbert was under the table, gnawing at a rawhide bone. “What?” Delaney said. “What do you mean?”
Kyra looked down at her plate as if uncertain how to go on. “Remember I told you about all those people gathering there on the streetcorners-day laborers?”
“Mexicans,” Delaney said, and there was no hesitation anymore, no reluctance to identify people by their ethnicity, no overlay of liberal-humanist guilt. Mexicans, there were Mexicans everywhere.
“Mexicans,” Kyra confirmed with a nod. Beside her, Jordan stuffed a forkful of white rice in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully a moment and extruded a glistening white paste back onto the tines of his fork. “I don't know,” Kyra went on, “it was a couple of weeks ago, remember? By the 7-Eleven there?”
Delaney nodded, dimly remembering.
“Well I got on Mike's case about it because when it gets to be a certain number-ten maybe, ten is okay, but any more than that and you can see the buyers flinch when you drive by. That's the sort of thing they're moving out here to get away from, and you know me, I'll go out of my way, the most circuitous route, to give people a good impression of the neighborhood, but sometimes you just have to take the boulevard, it's unavoidable. Anyway, I don't know what happened, but one day I suddenly realize there's like fifty or sixty of them out there, all stretched out up and down the block, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against the walls, so I said to Mike, 'We've got to do something,' and he got on the phone to Sid Wasserman and I don't know what Wasserman did but that streetcorner is deserted now, I mean deserted.”