He knew better than to drink the water straight from the stream-and he'd warned America about it too. Every drop had to be boiled first. It was a pain in the ass-gathering wood, stoking the fire, setting the blackened can on the coals-but it was necessary. America had balked at first-why go to the trouble? This was the U. S. A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the _gringo__ fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He'd been here before, in this very spot, and he'd been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains? he demanded. Or how many houses were packed up there all the way to the asshole of the canyon, and every one of them leaching waste out into the gullies and streams that fed into the creek?
He knew better than to drink the water, but he did. He was dying. He was dried out like the husk of something washed up at high tide and left for a month irin qr a montn the sun, dried out like a fig, a soda cracker. It was beyond him even to contemplate gathering up twigs, searching for a scrap of paper, the matches, waiting till the water boiled for five full minutes and then waiting for it to cool-way beyond him. Mad with thirst, crazed, demented, he threw himself down in the sand, plunged his face into the algal scum of the pool beneath him and drank, drank till he nearly drowned himself. Finally, his stomach swollen like a _bota__ bag, he lay back, sated, and the afternoon went on and he dozed and worried and suffered his wounds only to wake and worry and suffer again.
It amazed him how quickly the shits came. When he'd drunk from the creek the sun had been just east of overhead and now it had settled a degree or two to the west, but it was still high and still hot. What did that add up to-two hours? Three? But there it was-the stirring in his gut, the cramping, the desperate uncontainable rush that every man, woman and child knew so intimately in his country, a poor underdeveloped place in which sanitation was a luxury and gastrointestinal infection the leading cause of death. Cándido had just enough time to get across the stream and behind the cluster of great splintered boulders he and America used as a privy before it came. And when it came, it came in an explosion, a raging cataract of shit that left him drained in an instant, and then it hit him again and again till he lost the strength of his legs and collapsed in the sand like a puppet with the strings cut.
Lying there, coated in sweat and sand and worse, his trousers ballooning round his ankles, he heard the first sharp cries from above-_gabacho-__accented cries-and he knew it was over. They were coming for him. They'd got hold of America and she'd told them where he was. _Ay, caray!__ What a mess! How could he run? Half-crippled, bestrewn with shit-and even now he could feel his guts churning again. And América-where was America?
He mouthed a prayer to the _Virgen Sagrada__ and became one with the rocks.
America sat in the shade of the wall-less shelter the _gringos__ had built to keep the itinerant job-seekers out of the sun (and coincidentally off the street, out of the post office parking lot and out of sight) and brooded about Cándido. He was too stubborn to think she could help. Too much the boss, the man, the _patrón.__ He treated her like a child, a know-nothing, someone who needed to be led by the hand and protected from all the evils of the world. Well, she had news for him: she was no longer a child. Did children bear children? In five months she'd be a mother, and then what? And while this new place terrified her-the whole country, the _gringos__ with their superior ways and their almighty dollar and their new clothes and fancy hairdos, the strange customs, the language that was like the incessant braying of a four-legged beast-she was doing what she had to do and she could look out for herself. She could.
After sitting in the corner all day yesterday, afraid to talk to anyone, she'd screwed up her courage this morning and gone straight to the man in charge and told him her name and asked for work. Of course, if he'd been a _gringo__ she never would have had the nerve to open her mouth-and he wouldn't have understood her anyway-but this man was a _campesino__ from Oaxaca, in battered jeans and a molded straw hat like the men in Tepoztlán wore, and he used the familiar with her right away and even called her “daughter.”
There must have been fifty or sixty men there at least, and they all stopped talking when she went up to the man from Oaxaca. No one seemed to take notice of her when she was off by herself, hunched beside a stump in the dawn, miserable like theevi qle like rest of them, but now she felt as if she were onstage. The men were staring at her, every one of them, some openly, some furtively, their eyes ducking for cover beneath the brims of their _sombreros__ and baseball caps whenever she looked up. Of all that mob, she was the only woman. And though she felt uneasy under their collective gaze-and nervous too to think that women must not get jobs here if she was the only one-she felt a strange sense of peace as she spoke to the headman in his battered jeans. She didn't know what it was at first, but then it hit her: all these faces were familiar. Not literally, of course, but they were the faces of her own people, her tribe, the faces she'd grown up with, and that was a comfort in itself.
The headman's name was Candelario Pérez. He looked to be in his forties and he was squat and work-hardened. He'd been informally elected by the others to keep order (making sure the men waited their turn instead of mobbing every pickup that pulled into the lot), clean up the trash and mediate between the workers and the _gringos__ of the community who'd donated the land and the lumber for the, sake of the hungry and homeless. “There's not much work for women here, daughter,” he said, and she could see the tug of sympathy in his eyes. He didn't know her from anybody, and yet he cared, she could see that.
“Doesn't anyone in these big houses need a stove cleaned or a floor mopped? Doesn't that ever happen?”
All the men were watching her. Traffic-amazing traffic-whined past on the canyon road, forty, fifty miles an hour, bumper-to-bumper, with barely room to breathe in between. Candelario Pérez gave her a long look. “We'll see, daughter, we'll see,” he said, and then he showed her where to sit, pointing to the corner she'd occupied now for three hours and more.
She was bored. She was frightened. What if she didn't get work-not today, not ever? What would they eat? What would her baby do for clothes, shelter, nourishment? And this place-wasn't it the perfect spot for _La Migra__ to come in their puke-green trucks and tan shirts and demand documents, _la tarjeta verde,__ a birth certificate, driver's license, social security card? What was stopping them? It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. As each car pulled into the lot and two or three men gathered round it, she held her breath in hope and fear, wanting work, desperately wanting it, yet mortally afraid of the bland white faces of the men staring out from behind the windshield. What, exactly, did they want? What were the rules? Were they from Immigration? Were they perverts, rapists, murderers? Or were they good people, decent rich people who needed help with a baby, with laundry, with the pots and pans and the ironing?
As it turned out, it didn't matter. She sat there from dawn till noon and she didn't get work. At eleven or so-she had no way of telling the time exactly-a big _gringa__ with wild dead-metal hair and eyes the color of a Coke bottle came up the canyon road with a strange jerking gait, passed through the open-air building like a zombie and threw herself down in the dirt beside América. It was hot already-ninety, at least-and yet the woman was dressed in the heavy brocade you might find on a sofa in a house of easy virtue, and she wore a shawl of the same material around her shoulders. When she got close, América could see the thin wire loop that punctured her right nostril.