Kit drew in a heavy wet gulp of air. She looked as if she was about to break down and Kyra had just crossed the room to sit beside her on the sofa and offer some daughterly comfort when Jordan came tearing into the room, his clothes even dirtier and more disarranged than they'd been twenty minutes ago. “Mom,” he panted, and you could see his ribs heaving against the thin skin of his T-shirt, “I looked all over the place and I just can't find Dame Edith anywhere.”
4
CáNDIDO SAW THE CAT THERE AND AMERICA CRADLING it in her arms like a doll even as her body went rigid with the pain and then relaxed and tensed all over again for the next contraction. His first impulse was to shoo it away, but he stopped himself. If it helped take her mind off the pains, then why not? — and it seemed lost and hungry just like they were, content in the face of all this smoldering disaster to curl up and comfort his wife. All right. But the fire was creeping closer, charged one minute by the winds and then knocked back again when they ran out of breath. It wasn't safe here-they were taking a gamble, a big gamble-but he didn't know what else to do but watch and wait. And pray. Maybe pray too.
He already knew what was on the other side of the wall, and the prospect wasn't very comforting. In fact, if he let himself think about it his heart raced so much he was afraid it was going to burst. A development of big rich houses lay just a stone's throw away-he'd seen that much from the roof of the shed-and it was as dark as dark and totally deserted. He knew the place now. He'd worked in there one day with Al Lopez on a fence, but he didn't remember the wall-that was new, he was sure of it. What chilled him, though, was the thought that if all these people had been evacuated, abandoning all their things, their fine rich houses and their lawns and gardens and all the rest, then it looked grim for him and America. The fire was coming this way, no doubt about it, and they would be trapped, burned alive, the fat under their skin sizzling like backmeat in a frying pan, their bones charred and broken. He watched her. He sat with her. And he prayed.
Sometime in the small hours of that insufferable night America called out so sharply it was like a bark, like a dog's bark, and the cat was startled and jumped away from her and she tried to get up from the bed he'd made for her from the bags of seed. “Cándido,” she croaked, “I have to go, I have to move my bowels, I… I can't… hold it in any longer,” and as he tried to lift her up, to help her, he saw it between her legs, against her naked thighs and the red paste of the blood: her baby, his baby, his son. The crown of the baby's head was there between her legs, black wet wisps of hair, and he held her down and lifted her legs and told her to push, it was coming, and to push, push, push. Then there was a sound like gas released from a balloon-_Pffffffft!__-and there he was, his son, lying there all wrinkled in a bag of skin, slick with blood and mucus and what looked like curdled cheese. The noise of one of the big bombers came low overhead and there was the whoosh of its load driving back the flames below them, and Cándido smelled the strong human smell of the birth and the placenta coming out too, rich and warm in that shed full of seed and chlorine and manure. América's face was transported. She took the baby in her arms, the blue cord attached to it still, and cleared its mouth and started it breathing, started it crying, a thin mewl like the cat's, and she cradled it, the real thing, alive and healthy.
It was the moment Cándido had been waiting for. He leaned forward with the knife and cut the blue cord that was like a length of sausage and with a rag dipped in water wiped the mess from the tiny limbs and torso. He felt exultant, infused with a strength and joy that made a mockery of his poverty, his hurts and wants and even the holocaust that had leapt out of his poor cookfire in the depths of the canyon. He had a son, the first of his line, the new generation born on American soil, a son who would have all the _gabachos__ had and more. And then, moving the rag over the baby's abdomen as América put it to her breast-and there, between the legs, swabbing it clean-he discovered something in the unsteady wash of light that made him pause, hesitate, stop cold with the rag in his hand. This was no son. This was- But America already knew. “You know what I'm going to call her?” she said in a drowsy voice, the voice of someone in a dream so beautiful they don't want to let it go.
Cándido didn't answer. He was trying to absorb the fact that he was a father, finally a father-the father of a daughter-and his mind was already leaping ahead to the fire and the deserted houses and where they would stay the night tomorrow and the night after that and what would happen to him if the _gringos__ got hold of him.
The voice came back to him, sticky with contentment. “I'm going to call her Socorro,” she said, “-isn't that a pretty name? Socorro,” she repeated, and she nuzzled the baby's tiny red ear with the bridge of her nose and cooed it for her, “Socorro, Socorro, Socorro…”
It was dawn. The fire had spared them. It had rushed up over the hill in the night with a flap of beating wings and now the helicopters and the big swollen bombers were diving down out of sight behind the ridge. Cándido hadn't slept, not even for a second. He'd turned the wick down low on the lantern and set it beside America and then he'd gone out to sit on the roof of the shed and watch the war of fire and water. He saw men in the distance, stick figures silhouetted against the blaze, saw the arc of their hoses, watched the planes zero in. Twice he thought the flames would overtake them and he was poised to wake America and the baby and make a run for the road, but then the winds turned on a whim and blew at his back, chasing the fire up and over the hill, and they were saved.
Nothing moved out there in the soupy light of dawn, not even the birds. Smoke hung heavy over the canyon and in the distance the blackened hills steamed and the sirens cried out in exhaustion. Cándido eased himself down from the roof of the shed and stood for a moment looking in on América and the baby. América lay asleep on her side, the baby drawn in under the cover of her arm, as oblivious as if she were in a private room in the hospital with a hundred nurses on call. The cat was there too, nestled in the crook of her leg. It looked up at him and yawned when he reached down to turn off the lamp.
He didn't have much time-two, three, four hours at the most-and he knew what he had to do and how much of him it would take. The first thing was food. He was no looter, no thief, no _pandillero__ or _ladrón,__ but this was a question of survival, of necessity-he had a wife and a daughter now and they had to eat-and he swore to the Virgin of Guadalupe that he would pay back everything he appropriated. There was a garden in the house directly behind the wall and he climbed silently atop the shed and slipped down over the wall without thinking how he was going to get back up again.
The yard was still, silent, the whole canyon holding its breath in the wake of the fire. No one was home. But they would be back, back soon, and he had to work fast. He wouldn't enter the house-he would never do that, not even if he was dying of hunger in the street-but there was a garden shed here too (a little one, nothing like the big maintenance shed in which America and his daughter lay sleeping as if they didn't have a care in the world), and in the shed some of the things he would need: a hammer, a box of three-and-a-half-inch nails, four burlap sacks hanging from a hook. He stuffed the hammer into his back pocket, filled his front pockets with nails. Then he waded into the garden and weighed down the sacks with cucumbers, tomatoes and squash, topping them off with oranges and grapefruits from the trees that stood in neat rows in the far corner of the yard. What else would he need? He borrowed a bow saw and a hatchet and told himself he would sneak them back in the night and no one would be the wiser.