Cándido took the risk. He waited till the rain began to crackle on the pavement and the hair hung wet in his eyes, and then he stepped out of the bushes, crossed the road and stood beneath the overhang out front of the post office, stamping his feet and hugging his shoulders to keep the circulation going. Surely somebody would take pity on him and bring him home to work in a warm basement, putting up drywall or painting or cleaning out the trash. He waited, wet through and shivering, and every _gringo__ who got out of his car and ducked into the post office gave him a look of unremitting hate. If they didn't know he'd started the fire personally, they all suspected it, and where there was once tolerance and human respect, where there was the idea of community and a labor exchange and people to support it, now there was only fear and resentment. They didn't want to hire him, they didn't want to see him warm, they didn't want to see him fed and clothed and with a place to sleep at night that was better than a ditch or a shack hidden in the weeds-they wanted to see him dead. Or no: they didn't want to see him at all. He waited there through the afternoon, and when he couldn't take the cold anymore he went into the lobby of the post office, a public place, and a man in a blue uniform stepped from behind the counter and told him in Spanish that he had to leave.
America was strange that night. He huddled next to her, trying to stop shivering, and she didn't mention going home, not once, though she'd driven him half-mad with it for the past two weeks. Now it was the baby-that was all she could talk about. The baby needed to go to a clinic, the baby needed a doctor-a _gringo__ doctor-to look at her. But was the baby sick? he wanted to know. She looked all right to him. No, América gasped, no, she's not sick, but we need to have a doctor check her-just in case. And how will we get to this doctor, how will we pay? He was irritated, feeling harassed, squeezed dry. She didn't know. She didn't care. But the baby had to have a doctor.
In the morning, Cándido put a pot of rainwater on the grill to boit-he'd run a length of PVC pipe off the development's sprinkler system, easiest thing in the world, what with the saw and the cement and all the elbows and connectors right there in the shed for the taking, but he didn't use it if he didn't have to-and he skidded down the muddy slope, keeping low to the cover, and went back to the post office. It was overcast, with a cold breeze coming down out of the mountains, but the rain had tapered off at dawn and that was a relief. Cándido leaned against the brick front of the building, watching the earthworms crawl up out of the saturated earth to die on the pavement and trying his best to look eager and nonthreatening to the _gringos__ and _gringas__ who hurried in and out the door with Christmas packages in their arms. He could hear the creek where it cut into the bank out back of the post office before whipping round to pass under the bridge and plunge into the cut of the gorge. It was a sinister sound, a hiss that rose to a roar and fell back again as a crippled tree or boulder slammed along the bed of the stream and hung up on some hidden obstruction. They would have been flooded out if they were still camped below, flushed down the canyon like waste in a toilet, battered against the rocks and washed out to sea for the crabs to feed on. He thought about that, watching the earthworms wriggling on the pavement and the postal patrons stepping delicately through the puddles as if dirtying their shoes was the worst tragedy that could befall them, and he wondered if the fire hadn't been a blessing in disguise. Maybe there was a Providence looking out for him after all.
The thought cheered him. He began to smile at the people going in and out, combing his mustache down with his fingers and showing his teeth. “Work?” he said to one woman riding up off her heels like a gymnast, but she turned away as if he were invisible, as if it were the wind talking to her. But he kept on, his smile growing increasingly desperate, until the man in the blue uniform-the same one as yesterday, a _gabacho__ with a ponytail and turquoise eyes-came out and told him in textbook Spanish that he was going to have to leave if he didn't have business at the post office. Cándido shrugged his shoulders, grinning still-he couldn't help it, it was like a reflex. “I'm sorry if I'm bothering anybody,” he said, relieved to be explaining himself, relieved to be talking in his own language and thinking that maybe this was the break he was looking for, that maybe this man would be another Señor Willis, “but I need work to feed my wife and baby and I was wondering if you knew of anything around here?”
The man looked at him then, really looked at him, but all he said was “This isn't a good place for you to be.”
Dispirited, Cándido crossed the road and shambled over the bridge in the direction of the Chinese market and the lumberyard beyond it. He'd hardly even noticed the bridge before-it was just a section of the road suspended over the dead brush of the streambed-but now its function was revealed to him as the churning yellow water pounded at its concrete abutments and the boulders slammed into it with a rumble that was like the grinding of the earth's molars-all through the summer and fall there had been no water, and now suddenly there was too much. Cándido stood for a while outside the Chinese store, though he was nervous about that, and sure enough, the old Chinaman, the one with the goggle glasses and the suspenders to hold the pants up over his skinny hips, came out to shoo him away in his weird up-and-down language. But Cándido wouldn't give up and so he stood just down the street from the lumberyard, hoping some contractor picking up materials might see him there and give him work. It wasn't a propitious place, even in the best of times, and Cándido had never seen a single _bracero__ hunkered over his heels here. Rumor had it that the lumberyard boss would call the cops the minute he saw a Mexican in the lot.
Cándido stood there for two hours, trying to attract the attention of every pickup that pulled into the lumberyard, so desperate now he didn't care if La _Migra__ picked him up or not, but no one gave him even so much as a glance. His feet hurt and his stomach rumbled. He was cold. It must have been about half-past four when he finally gave it up and started back along the road, looking for cans to redeem and thinking he would watch for his chance to stick his head in the dumpster out back of the _paisano's__ market-he had to bring something back with him, anything. Every once in a while they would throw out a bag of onions with nothing worse than a few black spots on them or potatoes that had sprouted eyes-you never knew. He was keeping his head down and watching his feet, thinking maybe there'd be some meat that wouldn't be so bad if you boiled it long enough or some bones and fat from the beef they'd trimmed out, when a car swerved in across the shoulder just ahead of him.
He froze, thinking of the accident all over again, wet roads, _norteamericanos__ in a hurry, always in a hurry, and the next car blared its horn in a shrill mechanical curse because the rear end of the first car, the one right there on the shoulder, was sticking out into the roadway and all the endless line of cars coming up the hill with their wipers clapping and headlights glaring had to break the flow to swerve around it. But now the door was swinging open and another horn blared and Cándido was poisoned with déjà vu: this inescapable white, the fiery red brake lights and the yellow blinker, it was all so familiar. Before he had a chance to react, there he was, the _pelirrojo__ who'd run him down all those months ago and then sent his gangling ugly _pelirrojo__ of a son down into the canyon to harass and torment him, and the look on his face was pure malice. “You!” he shouted. “You stay right there!”