He walked two steps ahead of her and he had nothing to say, his shoulders squared up like a fighting cock's, his eyes eating up the street. The few people out at this hour-drunks, mainly-gave him a wide berth. Though she was tired and shot through with despair, though her feet hurt and her stomach clenched on nothing, America didn't dare ask him where they were going or what the plan was or where they would sleep, eat, wash, live. She just followed along, numbed and vacant, and all the acid odors of the street assaulted her as if they'd been distilled just for her, for her and her alone. They walked for blocks and blocks, heading west, then turned onto a bright big boulevard to the south and followed it eternally, past shuttered restaurants, record shops and great hulking dimly lit malls floating like factory ships in black seas of macadam. It was very late. The leaves of the trees hung limp. There were hardly any cars at all on the streets.
Finally, just as she thought she was going to collapse, they came to another broad boulevard that looked familiar somehow, painfully familiar, though it was different now in the muted light, the sidewalks deserted, traffic dormant, every decent person home in bed. She'd never been very good with directions-Cándido joked that she could get lost just going from the kitchen to the bathroom-but she knew this place, didn't she? They were crossing against the light, no cars coming in either direction, when it came to her: they were back on the canyon road, right back where they'd started, where the shade trees overhung all those pretty little unattainable houses and the yards that were thick with swing sets and tricycles. She felt her heart sink. What were they doing here? He wasn't going to make her walk all the way back up the road and down into that miserable hole tonight, was he? He couldn't. He was crazy. Insane. She'd throw herself down right here on the sidewalk and die first.
She was about to say something, when he stopped suddenly just outside a restaurant she remembered from the morning, a little place set apart on its own paved lot, with plate-glass windows, a candy-striped roof and a big illuminated red-and-white bucket revolving round a pole atop it. The place was closed, dark inside, but the lot on either side of it was lit up like brightest day. “You hungry?” Cándido whispered, and they hadn't spoken in so long her voice sounded strange in her own ears when she said yes, yes she was. “Okay,” he said, shooting a nervous glance up and down the street, “follow me and be quick about it-and keep your voice down.”
She wasn't thinking. She was too tired to think, too depressed. There must have been some vague wonder in the back of her brain, some sort of puzzlement-did he know someone who worked here or was he going to lift something, supplies they delivered late at night? — but it never came to the surface and she just followed him stupidly into the harsh flood of the lights. They were in the back lot now, hidden from the street, fenced in on three sides. A big gray metal bin stood there, just outside the rear door, and it gave off an odor that told her immediately what it was.
Cándido astonished her. He strode right up to the thing and threw back the lid and he never noticed the dark quick shadow that shot out from beneath the bin and disappeared between the slats of the fence. All at once she understood: garbage, they were going to eat garbage. Sift through it like the _basureros__ at the dump, take somebody else's filthy leavings, full of spit and maggots and ants. Was he crazy? Had he gone mad with the knock on his head? Even at their lowest, even in Tijuana in the' dump they'd been able to scrape together a few _centavos__ to buy steamed corn and _caldo__ from the street vendors. She stood there frozen at the edge of the lot, watched in shock and disbelief as Cándido leaned into the bin till his legs came up off the ground and he began to kick for balance. She could feel the outrage burning in her, fueled by all the cruel disappointments of the day, a rising white-hot blaze of it that pushed her forward to sink her nails into his leg. “What are you doing?” she demanded in a whisper she could barely contain. “What in the name of Jesus do you think you're doing?”
His legs kicked. She heard him grunt from deep inside the bin. Somewhere out on the street an engine roared to life and she flinched and let go of him. What if someone caught them? She'd die of shame. “I'm not touching that, that shit,” she hissed at the flailing legs, at his fat floundering rear. “I'd rather starve.” She moved a step closer, outraged, and the smell hit her again, mold, rot, decay, filth. She wanted to shove him into the bin and slam the lid down on him, she wanted to break things, pound her fists against the walls. “Maybe you can live like this, but not me,” she said, fighting to keep her voice down. “My family's respectable, miles above the likes of you and your aunt, and my father, my father-” She couldn't go on. She was breathless and weak and she thought she was going to cry.
There was a prolonged grunt from the depths of the bin, and then Cándido resurfaced, feeling his way with his feet, backing out of the mouth of the dumpster like a hermit crab emerging from its shell. He turned to her with his face ironed gray under the blast of the floodlights and she saw that his arms were spilling over with red-and-white-striped cardboard boxes, little things, like candy or cigar boxes. Grease, she smelled grease. Cooking grease. Cooking grease gone cold. “Your father,” he said, holding out one of the boxes to her, “is a thousand miles away.”
He looked round him quickly, that worried look on his face, tensed a moment, then relaxed. His voice softened. “Eat, _mi vida,”__ he said. “You're going to need it to keep up your strength.”
8
IN THE EAST, FALL CAME IN ON A GUST OF CANADIAN air, invigorating and decisive. The leaves changed. The rain fell in cold gray splinters and the puddles developed a second skin overnight. The world was closing down, getting snug in dens and burrows, and the equinox was no casual thing. But here, in the bleached hills above Los Angeles, fall was just another aspect of the eternal summer, hotter, drier, hurled through the canyons on the breath of winds that leached all the moisture from the chaparral and brought combustible oils to the surface of every branch and twig. This was the season Delaney had the most trouble with. What was there to recommend in hundred-degree temperatures, zero-percent humidity and winds that forced fine grains of degraded sandstone up your nostrils every time you stepped out the door? Where was the charm in that? Other writers could celebrate the autumnal rituals of New England or the Great Smoky Mountains-watching the birds flock overhead, cutting wood for the stove, cranking up the cider press or stalking somnolent bears through the leafless woods with the first wet scent of snow in the air-but what could Delaney do to color the dismal reality of the season here? Sure, he educated his audience about fire-dependent germination, solvent extractives in manzanita and chamise, the release of nutrients in wood ash, but what could you do with a season that anticipated not the first soft magical transforming bl itoor? ce anket of snow but the hellish raging infernos that vaporized everything in their path and shot roiling columns of atramental smoke twenty thousand feet into the air?
The winds blew, and Delaney sat at his desk and tried to make sense of them. He was still collecting material for a column on introduced species and population conflict, but the seasonal phenomena had to take precedence. How did the ground squirrels react to the drop in humidity? he wondered. Or the lizards? Maybe he could do something with the lizards, and not just the homed lizard, but all of them-the fence lizard, the western skink, the side-splotched lizard, the banded gecko. Did the winds change their behavior? Did the moisture content of their prey go down? Did they spend more time in their burrows during the heat of the day? He should have been out observing them, but the weather was getting him down. A high-pressure system had been stalled over the Great Basin for weeks now and every day was a replica of the day before: hot, cloudless, wind like a rope burn. He'd been out on the trails yesterday and spent most of his time applying Chap Stick and chasing his hat. Dust blew in his eyes. The scrub was whipped flat as if by the force of some great invisible hand. He cut his hike short and went home to sit in the air-conditioned living room, shades drawn, watching a joyless football contest between panting fat men who looked as if they'd rather be elsewhere.