“Gotcha,” said Gus. “And what will you be doing?”
“I’m going to hablar with Alejandro” — he nodded toward the young, scarred Mexican — “whenever were working together. I want him to get used to me, so he’ll understand and trust me when the time comes.”
At 9:50 Friday morning Donovan headed for the job site office, where he could put his feet up and drink coffee for the fifteen-minute break. Sure enough, Osvaldo headed for the portable toilet. Gus sauntered along behind him.
Dunc gestured to Alejandro.
“Vamos,” he said. Alejandro stared at him with uncomprehending eyes. Dunc grabbed his arm, half dragged him to his feet. “Venir. Rápido.” He swept his arm at the rest. “All of you. Ah...” He’d memorized the phrase. “Todo el mundo. Rápido! Rápido!"
Alejandro spat Spanish at them, they scrambled to their feet, Dunc started running for the cornfield fifty feet from the edge of the construction site. They ran after him, impelled by fear of unknowns he couldn’t even imagine. Thirty yards in, surrounded by head-high stalks, green and rustling, heavy with golden-silked ears, the rows at right angles to the seminary, Dunc stopped. He pointed at each in turn.
“Ustedes,” he said. “Esperar. Yo regresar. Comprender?"
He lay down in the depression between rows to give them the idea, stood up again, swung his arm around in a big circle, then pointed in turn to each of them.
“Usted... usted... usted... comprender?"
They understood. As they spread out through the corn rows, Dunc ran back to the site. When he heard the car and the van roaring up, he sat down quickly in the shade, lay back with his hands interlaced behind his head, the sweat drying under his blue work shirt.
The vehicles skidded to a stop. The four agents jumped out and began to fan out through the site. Suddenly they stopped and looked around, surprise on their faces. No Mexicans.
“Hey! You!” It was the redheaded immigration agent with the bulging neck who’d braced them two weeks ago.
Dunc sauntered over to them, all innocence. “Yeah?”
They ringed around him in a loose circle.
“Where are the Mexicans?” asked Thick-Neck.
Dunc shook his head in simulated bewilderment. One of the uniformed agents snapped, “The wetbacks.”
“The illegal aliens,” Thick-Neck amended quickly, his close-set eyes darting about. “We received a report there were illegal Mexican immigrants working on your cement crew.”
“You guys took ’em away two weeks ago.”
“Bullshit!”
“Gotta talk to Donovan about that. I just wheel cement.”
“Where’s the Mex honcho?” The other man wearing a suit was lean and stooped, with a big Adam’s apple.
Dunc tried to look stupid. “They all look the same to me.”
Osvaldo appeared, Gus strolling along a discreet distance behind. The agents surrounded the Mexican for low-voiced discussion and arm-waving. Osvaldo kept shrugging, looking more and more miserable. Finally they got back into their vehicles and spun out of there in an angry cloud of red dust.
“Royally pissed off,” said Dunc happily. “How’d you keep Osvaldo in there long enough?”
“Stuck a little wedge in the bottom of the door, he finally had to kick it open. He didn’t even notice what it was.”
Dunc brought the Mexican crew back from the cornfield. Joshua collared him when he got back up on the forms. “Didn’t I tell you leave well ’nough alone?” he scolded.
“Who’s going to do anything about it? Osvaldo?”
“Wasn’t thinkin’ of him,” muttered Joshua darkly.
At the union office Joshua and Samuel were ahead of them, just pocketing their greenbacks. The table-man gave a start of ill-concealed surprise when the Mexicans came crowding behind Dunc and Gus, chattering and laughing among themselves.
Dunc would remember it later. But not today. Tonight he had a date with Penny, his workweek fatigue was dropping away.
The front door opened and Penny skipped lightly down the front steps. Dunc ran around the car to open the other door. Her hair was loose around her face, she brought the scent of flowers with her. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a blue blouse and dark blue pumps. He got in under the wheel. She turned to face him on the seat, eyes shining.
“Okay, tell me! What are you going to do?”
“Gee, about what?” he asked blandly.
She lunged toward him, laughing, pretending to strangle him. Her skirt rode up, giving him a glimpse of inner thighs. He instantly looked away. She blushed and pulled the skirt down.
“You know very well what I mean! The Mexicans.”
“Oh, them. We already did it.”
On the parkway he told her about his day. Toward the end her elation turned to concern.
“What did Joshua mean? Why was he worried for you?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll ask him on Monday.”
They went to see Strangers on a Train in Pasadena. Dunc gave a start of surprise at the credits: one of the screenwriters was Raymond Chandler, his new writing hero!
And what a great scary movie to take a girl to! When the old-time carny worker was crawling bug-eyed through the muck and mire under the out-of-control roller coaster near the end of the film, Penny jammed her head up against Dunc’s chest with her eyes squeezed tight shut.
They ate in an Italian restaurant called Louise’s Trattoria in shabby old Pasadena on East Colorado Boulevard. In a dark-wood booth, in the voluble care of dark-haired waiters, they split an Italian-sausage pizza and drank draft beer and talked about their whole lives.
Penny had never met anyone before who was actually trying to be a writer, and was full of questions. She said she loved Hemingway’s romanticism, and Dunc explained at great length that you had to call it doomed romanticism.
“How about you, Penny?” he asked finally. “What do you want when you get out of college? Love, marriage, kids?”
“All of the above — doesn’t everyone? But after I broke up with Gerald, I knew that I really want to come back out west.”
“California,” said Dunc with not a little complacency.
“Not really. The real West. I want to work on one of those great ranch estates that have horses and real western food, and people who come to stay, like a hotel.”
“A dude ranch,” said Dunc.
“Is that what they call them? All right, someday I want to have a dude ranch of my own.”
When they had stopped in front of Aunt Goodie’s house, Penny brought up the question of the Mexican illegals again.
“If you’re right that you saw the one with the knife scar on his face out at Rephaim’s church—”
“Alejandro,” said Dunc. “He was one of them, all right.”
“So you mean that most of the farmworkers at Rephaim’s don’t have their green cards at all.”
“We don’t know for sure, of course, but Rephaim could be smuggling them in. Wouldn’t the Church of Melchizedek be a good transfer point after they get up here? I don’t know much Spanish, but I think Alejandro said that they pay a hundred bucks each, up front, to get smuggled across the border.”
“Rephaim is too tied up in his church to—”
“Even Uncle Carl thinks he’s a con man.”
“That’s because he’s jealous of the way Aunt Goodie listens to what Rephaim says.” She paused. “Oh, Dunc, be careful!”
She was worried about him! Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, kissing almost wildly, tongues darting, panting for breath. Her head was back, her arms clinging to him.