“What's it like down there, brother?” the man asked, indicating the ravine with a flick of his eyes. The sun glanced off his face. His skin was the color of a dirty bar of soap-not white, but not brown either. “Comfortable? Quiet? There's water, right?”
When the stranger swiveled his shoulders to scan the ravine, Cándido saw that he had a bedroll wound up tight and slung across his back with a length of twine. Cándido didn't want to give him any encouragement-if word got out, the whole labor exchange would be down there. “Not much,” he said.
This was funny. The man let out a little bark of a laugh and grinned to show off a cheap set of fake teeth. “Judging from the look of you, _carnal,__ there's enough to go swimming in, eh?”
Cándido held the man's eyes. He shrugged. “It's an unlucky place. I had a camp down there but they raided it three days ago. _Gabachos.__ They painted things on the rocks with their spray cans. You won't catch me down there again.”
Birds flitted from bush to bush. The sun stood still. The man was taking his time. “That what happened to your face? And that arm?”
“Yeah. Or no-not then.” Cándido shrugged again, conscious of the tattered sling that cradled his left arm. The arm was better, a whole lot better, but that still gave him an arm and a half to the stranger's two-if it came to that. “It's a long story,” he said.
The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido's ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass-he was in control, and he knew it. “So where's your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”
“They took it all,” Cándido lied. _“Pinche gabachos.__ I hid in the bushes.”
A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into hithe'hand intos pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he'd got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret-; he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now-“it's been good talking to you, always good to talk to a _compañero,__ but I've got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight… you don't know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”
No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido's head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.
“I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn't have a little bite of something on you, would you?”
The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him-he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.
“Sorry, _'mano,”__ the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed down the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn't be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.
Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the trail. Now he had to worry about this stinking crack-toothed _pendejo__ nosing around down in the canyon, as if he didn't have enough problems already. And what if he found their camp? What then? Cándido felt jealous suddenly, possessive: the son of a bitch. There was a whole range of mountains here, canyons all over the place-too many to count-and why did he have to pick this one? Anger spurred him on-and worry. He was breathing hard and his hip hurt, his knee, the throbbing crust of scab that masked the left side of his face. He kept going, forcing himself on, until a sudden screech of tires let him know that the road was just above him, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.
And then he emerged from the bushes and he was out on the road, the traffic hurtling past him in a crazy _gringo__ taillight-chasing rush-and what was the hurry, the constant hurry? Making a buck, that's what. Building their glass office towers and adding up the figures on their dark little TV screens, getting richer-that's what the hurry was. And that was why the _gabachos__ had cars and clothes and money and the Mexicans didn't. He walked along the highway, feeling strange-this was just where he'd been hit, just here-and he felt the cold steel rush of a passing car at his back and someone leaned on the horn and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He watched the taillights and cursed under his breath.
He looked first in the parking lot at the Chinese store, but America wasn't there. There were no Mexicans around at this hour, not a one-you'd think they'd all vanished into the earth, like those toad-stools that spring up after a rainfall and disappear by sunset. The place was swarming with _norteamericanos__ though, hordes of them, jumping in and out of their cars, hustling ins f' hustlingto the store and hustling back out again with their brown paper bags full of beer and wine and little sweet things to put in the mouth. They looked at Cándido like he was a leper.
On up the street, careful, careful, look both ways and cross. Nobody was coming down the canyon, but they were all going up, endlessly, relentlessly, enough cars to fill twenty big boats going back to Japan where they'd all come from in the first place. There was a little shopping plaza here, the one with the larger market and the _paisano__ from Italy. This was where America would be if she'd missed him down below, or if-and the idea hit him with the sudden force of inspiration-if she was working. Maybe that was it. Maybe he'd been worrying for nothing. Maybe she would have money and they could buy food.
Food. His stomach clenched at the thought of it and he felt faint for just a moment-a moment, that was all, but it was enough to make him lurch into a big beefy _gabacho__ with sideburns that ate up half his face and hair all piled up slick on his head like Elvis in one of those black velvet tapestries. The man shoved him away, a violent thrust of the arms, and said something harsh, something hateful, his face exploding with it. “Escuse, escuse,” Cándido blurted, throwing up his hands and backing away, but they were all watching now, all the _gabachos__ in the parking lot, and he would have run but his legs wouldn't carry him.
At six p. m., with the sun starting to slant down in the west and the shadows of the trees swelling against the windows like images out of a dream, America was working. Still working. Though the six hours were up and the fat man was nowhere to be found. Candelario Pérez had said six hours' work, twenty-five dollars, and this was eight hours now and she was wondering, did this mean the fat man would pay her more? Six divided into twenty-five was four dollars and sixteen cents an hour, and so, for two extra hours she should get, what-eight dollars and thirty-two cents more. She glowed with the thought of it. She was earning money, money for food, for Cándido and her baby-she, who'd never earned a _centavo__ in her life. She'd worked in her father's house, of course, cooking and cleaning and running errands for her mother, and he gave her an allowance each week, but it was nothing like this, nothing like earning a wage from a stranger-and a _gringo,__ no less. Cándido would be surprised. Of course he would have guessed by now that she was working, but wait till he saw her tonight, coming down that trail into the canyon with all the groceries she could carry, with meat and eggs and rice and a can of those big sardines, the ones in oil so rich you lick it from the tips of your fingers…