He climbed the hill. Stood out front of the post office and sweated the police. And where was Señor Willis? He'd died, that must have been it. Sleeping in his car because his wife hounded him so much he couldn't take it, drinking out of the one bottle and pissing in the other, seventy-six years old with bad hips and an irregular heart and who could survive that? He was dead. Sure he was. But then, one hopeless hot wind-tortured afternoon, there came the Corvair, drifting down the road like a mirage, and there was Señor Willis with one eye bruised purple and swollen shut like some artificial thing grafted to his face, a rubber joke you'd find in a novelty shop. “Hey, _muchacho,”__ he said, “we got work. Get in.”
Three days this time. Installing new gates with gravity feed on an old iron fence around a swimming pool, then replacing the coping. And then Señor Willis was drunk, and then there was more work, and now, now that they had nearly five hundred dollars in the jar, there was a month's worth of work coming up, a whole big job of work, putting an addition on a young couple's living room in Tarzana, and what was wrong with that? America should jump for joy. They'd be out of here any day now, out of here and into an apartment where Señor Willis could come by and knock at the door and Cándido could come out and just get into the Corvair and not have to worry about La Migra snatching him off the street. But América wasn't jumping for joy. She wasn't jumping at all. She wasn't even moving. She was just sitting there by the moribund stream and the dwindling pool, bloated and fat and inanimate.
Cándido went up the hill. He was worried, always worried, but then life had its ups and downs and this time they were on the upswing, no doubt about it. He was making plans in his head and when he passed the big stubbed-toe rock where he'd encountered that son of a bitch of a _half-a-gringo__ with the hat turned backwards on his head, he refused even to think about him. There was no work today or tomorrow either. It was a holiday, Señor Willis had told him, a four-day weekend, and they would start in on the new project, the big job, on Monday. But what holiday was it? Thanksgiving, Señor Willis had said, _El Día de las Gracias, El Tenksgeevee.__
Well that was all right. Cándido would rather be working, he'd rather be putting his first and last months' rent down on an apartment, any apartment, anywhere, and bringing his wife up out of the hole she was in, but it could wait another week at sixty-four dollars a day-or at least he hoped and prayed it could. América was due soon-she looked like an unpoked sausage swelling on the grill. But he had no control over that-sure, he'd stood out there by the post office this morning, but nobody came by, nobody, it was like the whole canyon was suddenly deserted-and now he was coming back up the hill, three o'clock in the afternoon, to buy rice, stewed tomatoes in the can, a two-quart cardboard container of milk for his wife and maybe a beer or two, Budweiser or Pabst Blue Ribbon, in the tall brown one-liter bottle, for _El Tenksgeevee.__
He kept his head up on the road. La _Migra__ wouldn't be working today, not on _El Tenksgeevee,__ the lazy overfed fat-assed bastards, but you could never telclass="underline" it would be just like them to pick you up when you least expected it. There wasn't a lot of traffic-more than in the morning, but still it was nothing compared to a working day. Cándido crossed the road-careful, careful-made his way through the maze of shopping carts and haphazardly parked vehicles in the lot, and entered the _paisano's__ market, stooping to pick up a red plastic handbasket just inside the door.
The place was the same as always, changeless, as familiar to him now as the market in his own village, and still there wasn't a scent of food, not even a stray odor, as if the smell of a beefsteak or a cheese or even good fresh sawdust was somehow obscene. The light was dead. The shoppers were the same as always, the same changeless bleached-out faces, and they gave him the same naked stares of contempt and disgust. Or no, they weren't the same, not exactly: today they were all dressed up in their finery for _El Tenksgeevee.__ Cándido made his way down the canned-vegetable aisle, thinking to save the beer cooler for last, so as to keep the beer cold to the last possible moment-and he would reach way in back too, to get the maximally chilled ones. He smelled plastic wrap, Pine-Sol, deodorant.
He lingered over the beer, standing in front of the fogged-over door, comparing prices, the amber bottles backlit so that they glowed invitingly, and he was thinking: One? Or two? America wouldn't drink any, it was bad for the baby, and if she drank beer she might forget how implacably and eternally angry she was and maybe even let a stray smile fall on him. No, she wouldn't drink any, and one would make him feel loose at the edges, little fingers crepitating in his brain and massaging the bad side of his face, but two would be glorious, two would be thanksgiving. He opened the case and let the cool air play over his face a moment, then reached into the back and selected two big one-liter bottles of Budweiser, the King of Beers.
He was thinking nothing at the checkout, his face a mask, his mind back in Tepoztlán, the rocky _cerros__ rising above the village in a glistening curtain of rain, the plants lush with it, fields high with corn and the winter dry season just setting in, the best time in all the year, and he didn't pay any attention to the _gringos__ in line ahead of him, the loud ones, two men already celebrating the holiday, their garish shirts open at the neck, jackets tight in the shoulders. “Turkey?” one of them shouted in his own language, and his voice was rich with amusement, with mockery, and now Cándido looked up, wondering what it was all about. “What the hell do we want with a turkey?”
The man who'd been speaking was in his twenties, cocky, long-haired, rings leaping out of his knuckles. The other one, his companion, had six little hoops punched through his earlobe. “Take it, man,” the second one said. “Come on, Jules, it's a goof. Take it, man. It's a turkey. A fucking turkey.”
They were holding up the line. Heads had begun to turn. Cándido, who was right behind them, studied his feet.
“You gonna cook it?” the first man said.
“Cook it? You think it'll fit in a microwave?”
“That's what I'm saying: what the fuck do we want with a fucking turkey?”
And then time seemed to slow down, crystallize, hold everything suspended in that long three o'clock Thanksgiving moment under the dead light of the store and the sharp cat-eyed glances of the gringos. “What about this dude here? He looks like he could use a turkey. Hey, man”-and now Cándido felt a finger poke at his shoulder and he looked up and saw it all, the two sharp dressers, the plastic sack of groceries, the exasperated checkout girl with the pouf of sprayed-up hair and the big frozen bird, the _pavo__ in its sheet of white skin, lying there frozen like a brick on the black conveyor belt-“you want a turkey?”
Something was happening. They were asking him something, pointing at the turkey and asking him-what? What did they want from him? Cándido glanced round in a growing panic: everyone in the line was watching him. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.
The one nearest him, the one with the hoops in his ear, burst out laughing, and then the other one, the first one, joined in. “Oh, man,” the first one said, “oh, man,” and the laughter twisted in Cándido like a knife. Why did they always have to do this? he thought, and his face went dark.
Now the checkout girl chimed in: “I don't think we can do that, sir,” she said. “It's for the customer who made the purchase. If he”-and she indicated Cándido with a flick of her enameled fingers-“rings up fifty dollars he gets his turkey, just like you. But if you don't want one-”
“God, a turkey,” the first one said, and he was giggling so hard he could barely get the words out, “what a concept.”
“Hey, come on, move it, will you?” a tall black man with a knitted brow crowed from the back of the line.