Jack was at a sound studio in Burbank, but Selda let Delaney in. She'd just had her hair done-it was the most amazing winter-ermine color, right down to the blue highlights-and she was drinking coffee from a mug and pouring words into the portable telephone in a low confidential voice. “Did you get anything?” she asked, putting a hand over the mouthpiece.
Delaney felt awkward. Only the Cherrystones, and Kyra knew what he was doing, but in a sense the whole community was depending on him-there might be ten thousand Mexicans camped out there in the chaparral waiting to set the canyon afire, but at least these two were going to get a one-way ticket to Tijuana. If he hadn't blown it, that is. He shrugged. “I don't know.”
Jack's darkroom was a converted half-bath just off the den and it was cramped and poorly ventilated. Delaney oriented himself, switched on the fan, located what he needed, then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked on the safelight. He got so absorbed in what he was doing he'd almost forgotten what he was looking for by the time he was pinching the water off of the curling wet strip of film and holding it up to the light.
The face that stared back at him, as startled and harshly fixed in the light as any opossum's face, was human, was Mexican, but it wasn't the face he'd expected. He'd expected the cold hard eyes and swollen jaw of the graffiti artist with the bad dentures, the trespasser, the firebug, caught at last, proof positive, but this was a face come back to haunt him from his dreams, and how could he ever forget that silver-flecked mustache, the crushed cheekbone and the blood on a twenty-dollar bill?
6
AMéRICA NURSED HER BABY, AND CáNDIDO BUILT his house. It was a temporary house, a shelter, a place where they could keep out of the rain and lie low till he got work and they could live like human beings. The money-the apartment fund, the hoard in the peanut butter jar-wasn't going to help them. It amounted to just four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in a hard shapeless knot of plastic. Cándido had waited three days, and then, under cover of night, he'd slipped down through the chaparral and across the road into the devastation of the canyon. There was a half-moon to guide him, a pale thin coating of light that showed his feet where to step, but everything was utterly transformed; he had a hard time even finding the trailhead. The world was ash, ash two or three inches deep, and the only landmarks left to guide him were the worn humps of the rocks. Once he got to the streambed he was on familiar ground, stumbling through the rock-strewn puddles to the dying murmur of the stream in the sterilized night. There was no chirrup of frog or cricket, no hoot of owl or even the parasitic whine of a single mosquito: the world was ash and the ash was dead. He found the pool, the wreck of the car, the sandspit and the stone, the very stone. But even before he lifted it and felt in the recess beneath it for his hoard, the money that would at least get them back to Tepoztlán, if nothing else, he knew what he would find: melted plastic, fused coins, U. S. Federal Reserve Notes converted to dust through the alchemy of the fire. And oh, what stinking luck he had.
It was beyond irony, beyond questions of sin and culpability, beyond superstition: he couldn't live in his own country and he couldn't live in this one either. He was a failure, a fool, a hick who put his trust in a _coyote or a cholo__ with a tattoo on his neck, a man who couldn't even roast a turkey without burning down half the county in the process. His life had been cursed ever since his mother died and his father brought that bitch Consuelo into the house and she gave the old man nine children he loved more than he'd ever loved his own firstborn son. Cándido sat there in the ashes, rocking back and forth and pressing his hands to his temples, thinking how worthless he was, how unworthy of America, whose life he'd ruined too, and of his daughter, his beautiful dark-eyed little daughter, and what she could hope to expect. The idea that came into his head in the dark of that obliterated canyon was to run, run and leave America and Socorro in the ramshackle hut with the half pot of cat stew that America thought was rabbit (The cat? She's gone home to the rich people, sure she has…), run and never come back again. They'd be better off without him. The authorities would be looking for him, the agent of all this destruction, but they wouldn't be looking for America, the mother of a U. S. citizen, and Cándido had heard over and over how they had clinics and housing and food slips for poor Americans, and why couldn't his daughter get that sort of help? Why not?
He sat there for half an hour, awash in self-pity, as big a fool as any man alive, and then he knew what he had to do and he picked himself up, took the lump of plastic, the bent and blackened remnant of a grill from their old cookfire and the sixteen dollars he had in his pockets and climbed up the hill to the Chinese market, where they wouldn't be so sure to recognize him, and went in to buy cheese, milk, eggs, _tortillas__ and half a dozen disposable diapers. There were only two people in the store, a _gringo__ customer who ignored him, and the Chinaman behind the counter, who took his money in silence.
Cándido presented the groceries to América as if they were rare treasure and fixed her a meal in the aluminum dog dish on the grill that was the only thing left of their ill-starred camp in the canyon. It was late when they'd eaten and the air was damp and cold and Cándido was thinking of the cement blocks he'd seen out back of the Chinese market and how he could remove a pallet and make a wall of the blocks, with the fire on the inside to warm the place, when America took the baby from her breast and in the shadowy shifting light of the lantern fixed him with a look. “Well,” she said, “and what now?”
He shrugged. “I'll find work, I guess.”
Her eyes had the look of pincers, that grasping and seizing look she got when she wanted something and had made up her mind to get it. “I want you to buy me a bus ticket with that money,” she said. “I want to go home and I don't care whether you're coming with me or not. I've had it. I'm finished. If you think I'm going to raise my daughter like a wild animal with no clothes, no family, no proper baptism even, you're crazy. It's you they want, not me. You're the one.”
She was right, of course she was right, and he could already feel the loss of her like something cut right out of his own body, his heart or his brain, a loss no man could survive. He wouldn't let her go. Not if he had to kill her and the baby too and then cut his own worthless throat in the bargain. “There is no money,” he said.
He watched her lips form around a scowl. “That's a lie.”
Wordlessly, with a brutality that made him hate himself, he dug the nugget of plastic out of his pocket and dropped it on the scrap of wool carpet. Neither of them spoke. They lay there a long moment, stretched out beneath the green sheet of the roof, staring at the little bolus of plastic and the coins embedded in it. “There's your bus fare,” he said finally.
She had her baby, and every living cell and hair of it was a miracle, the thing she'd done herself though her father said she was stupid and her mother called her clumsy and lazy and unreliable-her creation, beautiful and undeniable. But who could she show her off to? Who was going to admire her Socorro, the North American beauty, born with nothing in the land of plenty? For the first few days she was too full of joy and too tired to worry about it. She was in a shack, another shack, hidden away like a rabbit in a burrow, and she was alive because of Cándido's bravery and his quick thinking, and she had her daughter at her breast and Cándido had delivered her. That was all for then. That was all she needed to know. But as he went out to scavenge things-a blanket he found on a clothesline one night, a beach towel to wrap the baby in-or left her to crouch in the bushes across from the post office and wait for Señor Willis's car that never came, she began to brood, and the more she brooded the more afraid she became.