He dozed, woke, dozed again. And every time he looked up at the sun it was in the same place in the sky, fixed there as if time had stood still. America was out there. Anything could happen to her. How could he rest, how could he have a moment's peace with that specter before him?
América. The thought of her brought her face back to him, her wide innocent face, the face of a child still, with the eyes that bled into you and the soft lisping breath of a voice that was like the first voice you'd ever heard. He'd known her since she was a little girl, four years old, the youngest sister of his wife, Resurrección. She was a flower girl at the wedding, and she looked like a flower herself, blossoming brown limbs in the white petals of her dress. He took the vows with Resurrección that day, and he was twenty years old, just back from nine months in _El Norte,__ working the potato fields in Idaho and the citrus in Arizona, and he was like a god in Tepoztlán. In nine months he had made more-and sent half of it home via _giros-__than his father in his leather shop had made in a lifetime. Resurrección had promised to wait for him when he left, and she was good to her word. That time, at least.
But each year the wait got longer, and she changedsiz qshe chan. They all changed, all the wives, and who could blame them? For three quarters of the year the villages of Morelos became villages of women, all but deserted by the men who had migrated North to earn real money and work eight and ten and twelve hours a day instead of sitting in the _cantina__ eternally nursing a beer. A few men stayed behind, of course-the ones who had businesses, the congenitally rich, the crazies-and some of them, the unscrupulous ones, took advantage of the loneliness of the forlorn and itching wives to put horns on the heads of the men breaking their backs in the land of the _gringos.__ “Señor Gonzales” is what they called these ghouls of the disinterred marriage, or sometimes just “Sancho,” as in “Sancho bedded your wife.” There was even a verb for it: _sanchear,__ to slip in like a weasel and make a _cabrón__ out of an unoffending and blameless man.
And so, after seven seasons away and six cold winters at home during which he felt like half a man because Resurrección would not take his seed no matter what they tried-and they tried Chinese positions, chicken fat rubbed on the womb during intercourse, herbs and potions from the _curandera__ and injections from the doctor-Cándido came home to find that his wife was living in Cuernavaca with a Sancho by the name of Teófilo Aguadulce. She was six months pregnant and she'd spent all the money Cándido had sent her on her Sancho and his unquenchable thirst for beer, _pulque__ and distilled spirits.
America was the one who broke the news to him. Cándido came to the door at his father-in-law's place, bearing gifts, jubilant in his return, the all-conquering hero, benefactor of half the village, the good nephew who'd built his mother's sister a new house and had a brand-new boombox radio in his bag for her even now, and there was no one home but America, eleven years old and shy as a jaguar with a pig clenched in its jaws. “Cándido!” she screamed, throwing herself in his arms, “what did you bring for me?” He'd brought her a glass Christmas ball with the figure of a _gabacho__ Santa Claus imprisoned in it and artificial snow that inundated him with a blizzard when you turned it upside down-but where was everybody? A pause, release of the limbs, a restrained dance round the room with the inverted Christmas balclass="underline" “They didn't want to see you.” What? Didn't want to see him? She was joking, pulling his leg, very funny. “Where's Resurrecci6n?”
Then came his season in hell. He took the first bus to Cuernavaca, sought out Teófilo Aguadulce's house and beat on the closed shutters till his hands were raw. He prowled the streets, haunted the _cantinas,__ the markets, the cinema, but there was no sign of them. Finally, a week later, Cándido got word that Teófilo Aguadulce was coming to Tepoztlán to see his ailing grandfather, and when he crossed the plaza at twelve noon, Cándido was waiting for him. With half the village looking on, Cándido called him out, and he would have had his revenge too, and his honor, if the son of a bitch hadn't got the better of him with a perfidious wrestling move that left him stunned and bleeding in the dirt. No one said a word. No one reached down a hand to help him up. His friends and neighbors, the people he'd known all his life, simply turned their backs on him and walked away. Cándido got drunk. And when he sobered up he got drunk again. And again. He was too ashamed to go back to his aunt's and so he wandered the hills, sleeping where he fell, till his clothes turned to rags and he stank like a goat. Children pelted him with rocks and made up songs about him, rhymes to skip rope by, and the keening of their voices burned into him like a rawhide whip. He made for the border finally, to lose himself in the North, but the coyote was a fool and the U. S. Immigration caught him before he'd gone a hundred yards and pitched him back into the dark fastness of the Tijuana night.
He was broke, and he danced for people on the streets there, begged change from _turistas,__ got himself a can of kerosene and became a _tragafuegos,__ a streetcorner firebreather who sacrificed all sensation in his lips, tongue and palate for a few _centavos__ and a few _centavos__ more. What he made, he spent on drink. When his fall was complete, when he'd scraped every corner of himself raw, he came back to Tepoztlán and moved in with his aunt in the house he'd built for her. He made charcoal for a living. Climbed into the hills every morning, cut wood and slow-burned it for sale to housewives as fuel for their braziers and the stoves they'd made out of old Pemex barrels. He did nothing else. He saw no one. And then one day he ran across America in the street and everything changed. “Don't you know me?” she demanded, and he didn't know her, not at first. She was sixteen and she looked exactly like her sister, only better. He set down the bundle of sticks he was carrying and straightened out his back with an abbreviated twist. “You're América,” he said, and then he gave it a minute as a car came up the road, scattering chickens and sending an explosion of pigeons into the air, “and I'm going to take you with me when I go North.”
That was what he thought about as he lay there in the ravine, fragile as a peeled egg, that was what America meant to him-just his life, that was all-and that was why he was worried, edgy, afraid, deeply afraid for the first time in as long as he could remember. What if something should happen to her? What if the Immigration caught her? What if some _gabacho__ hit _her__ with his car? What if one of the _vagos__ from the labor exchange… but he didn't like to think about them. They were too close to him. It was too much to hold in his aching head.
The sun had ridden up over the eastern ridge. The heat was coming on faster than it had during the past week, the mist burning off sooner-there would be winds in the afternoon and the canyon walls would hold the heat like the walls of an oven. He could feel the change of the weather in his hip, his elbow, the crushed side of his face. The sun crept across the sand and hit him in the crotch, the chest, his chin, lips and ravaged nose. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.
When he woke he was thirsty. Not just thirsty-consumed with thirst, maddened by it. His clothes were wet, the blanket beneath him damp with his sweat. With an effort, he pushed himself up and staggered into the shade where America kept their drinking water in two plastic milk jugs from which he'd cut the tops with his worn-out switchblade. He snatched up the near jug and lifted air to his lips: it was empty. So was the other one. His throat constricted.