I
There were, Julio thought, some clear advantages to working in the fields rather than in the groves. For one thing, you did not have to climb a ladder to pick tomatoes, so there was much less risk of breaking your bones. And a full basket of tomatoes did not weigh even half as much as a full box of oranges, a difference for which your back was grateful at the end of the day. And in the fields he had seen but a single snake, a little green one said to be harmless except to bugs, but in the groves he had known more than one man who had been bitten by a rattler.
He was working swiftly but with care not to bruise the ripe tomatoes/plucking them from the vines and putting them in the basket, pushing the basket ahead of him along the low row of plants. He paused to wipe the sweat from his face, being careful not to get insecticide in his eyes.
So now he thought of a ladder as a risk, he told himself, of a hundred pounds of oranges as a great burden. Sweet Mother of God, he was thinking like an old man. He felt a rush of anger—followed instantly by confusion because he did not know what, exactly, he was angry about. About being in this dusty field, of course, breaking his back under a roasting sun. Did a man need more reason than this to feel angry? But he knew it was something else, too, something more than the outrage of a life at hard labor, that for the past few days had been gnawing on his spirit like sharp teeth.
“You there! Got to work goddammit!”
Gene, the worst-tempered of the crew chiefs, had spotted him kneeling idly and gazing into space and was pointing at him from six rows away. “This ain’t no mothafucken pignick!”
Although he still did not understand much English, Julio well enough understood Gene’s commands. Pinche negrito, he thought, as he resumed working. Goddammit you. Goddammit all of this. He suddenly wished he was back in the groves, the ladders and snakes and heavy loads be damned. In the grove you at least had some shade and so what if the air could get so thick it was hard work just to breathe? Out here you worked in the sun and you sweat like a mule and you crawled along on your hands and knees with your back bent and your spine cracking. You breathed dust and insecticide fumes all day long. The bug spray burned and stained your skin and you carried the smell of it everywhere, even after you washed. Goddammit! A man had to work hard all his life, yes, but not on his knees. A man was not meant to work on his knees.
Well . . . a priest, maybe, he thought, and strained to smile at his own weak joke.
II
He had arrived in Florida three months ago, crammed into the back of a truck with fifteen other men at the end of a journey that began shortly after they crossed the Río Grande some thirty miles upriver of Laredo, Texas. Guided by a Mexican coyote—a smuggler of illegal border-crossers—they splashed across the river in the middle of a windy moonless night, choking on the muddy water and on their pounding hearts, fearful of being captured by la migra—agents of the American immigration service—or by the Border Patrol. They walked and walked in the night wind under a sky blasting with stars, shivering in their wet clothes, and then just before sunrise the truck came clattering out of the vague gray dawn and found them as planned.
The driver was a freckled Anglo boy of about seventeen who counted the men and then handed the coyote an envelope and ordered them in wretched Spanish to get into the back of the truck and be absolutely quiet for the whole trip if they did not want to be captured by la migra. Watching them from the truck cab was a large pale Anglo in a cowboy hat who spoke not at all. The men clambered up through the rear of the box-shaped cargo compartment and sat on the floor with their backs against the sides. There were several plastic bottles of drinking water and some lidless gallon cans to hold their waste. Then the boy yanked down the rollered door and locked them in darkness.
Julio had been among strangers even then. Most of the other men in the truck were from the same region of Coahuila state and had long been acquainted. A few of the others had come together from Nuevo León, and there was a pair of friends from Chihuahua. But Julio had come the farthest, all the way from Nayarit, a state unfamiliar to the others, and only he had come alone.
The truck’s tires droned under them all day and night. The men’s excited jabbering gradually trailed off, and soon they were all curled on the floor and trying to sleep, occasionally cursing in the dark when someone made use of the piss cans and his aim was poor, or when a can was kicked over by someone’s careless foot or toppled by a sudden lurch of the truck. By the end of the first day every man’s clothes were damp and reeked of piss.
Julio slept fitfully, dreamt of his wife’s dark eyes, his children’s faces. Once, on waking in the reverberant darkness, he felt as if his chest had been hollowed, felt such an abrupt rush of loneliness he had to clench his teeth against weeping.
The truck made stops only for fuel—and every time it did, gasoline fumes rose thickly in the dark compartment, and the men warned each other not to light cigarettes. Sometimes the fuel stops were in a town and they would hear street traffic, and sometimes people shouting, and once they heard children laughing and guessed they must be passing by a school. Sometimes, as they rolled slowly through a town, they caught the smells of food and moaned quietly and told each other in whispers of the meals they were going to buy for themselves as soon as they received their first pay. During a stop sometime in the second day, the doorlock rattled and the door rolled up just far enough for the boy to shove into the compartment a large paper bag containing sandwiches and bags of corn chips. The sudden blazing strip of sunlight under the raised door was blinding, and the brief inward rush of fresh air burned Julio’s lungs as it cut through the stench he had become inured to. The sandwiches were made of bologna and dry bread—but every man gobbled his down in a few quick bites.
Late the next day, they felt the truck leave paved road and begin jouncing over uneven ground. Nearly an hour later they came to a stop and the lock sounded and the door flew up on its rollers and the Anglo boy counted out ten of the men, Julio included, and told them to get out. The other six men were again shut inside the truck and the truck departed.
They were in Florida. Julio had always thought it a beautiful name. Florida! It conjured visions of a lush land hung with flowers, a world far removed from the starkly rugged sierras where he grew up struggling for subsistence in cornfields full of stones. When he staggered out of the truck and saw the endless rows of rich green trees hung with golden fruit, he felt he’d been delivered to a garden of God.
They were housed in small, battered, unfurnished trailer homes set in a wide clearing deep in the grove, four men to a trailer, and they slept on the floor. They were fed from a mobile kitchen, a camper-backed pickup, that showed up twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Its rations were the same at both meals—rice and beans, flavorless white bread, bags of corn chips, ice water. They worked every day from sunup to sunset, scaling ladders to pick the fruit at the higher reaches of the trees, dropping the oranges into the canvas bag hung across their chests, descending the ladder to empty the bag into a packing box, repeating the process until the box was full, then lugging it to a truck with a long slat-sided bed and there collecting a ticket from a crew chief before emptying the box into the truck. They were paid in cash every night, forty cents for every ticket, and even after the bosses deducted expenses for shelter and food, Julio was left with more money than he could earn in a week of hard work back home. He allowed himself some money for beer and candy bars and for gambling a little in the nightly dice games, and the rest he kept in a thin roll held tight with a rubber band and tucked in the front of his underwear. Every night he fell asleep with his hand cupping the roll protectively.
As he went about his work he daydreamed of the glorious return he would make to his village of Santo Tomás one day. He recalled the promise he’d made to his wife, Consuelo, that he would come home in the spring, no later than midsummer, for sure. And perhaps he would—if he did not decide to stay in Florida a while longer and make even more money. A promise to a wife was a serious thing, he reminded himself, but subject to change, of course, with the unpredictable circumstances of a man’s life. Maybe he would be satisfied with the amount of money he would have saved by this summer, or maybe he would wish to stay a little longer and add a little more to it. Would not a man’s wife herself, his children too, be better off with every dollar more he saved? A man’s family would be proud of him for such industry. In any case, when he at last returned home he would be rich and respected and envied for miles around.
They had not been in the grove three full weeks before his sleep was shattered one night by sirens and by loudspeakers blaring in Spanish that everyone was under arrest and anyone who tried to run away would have worse trouble. Julio bolted from the trailer into the glare of encroaching headlights and spotlights of cars and trucks with blue lights flashing on their roofs. Cries of “La migra! La migra!” carried through the grove as men fled shouting in every direction. In panic he ran too, ran wildly, trying to escape the blinding lights, the crackling bullhorn voice of Legal Authority. He ran into the grove and was almost struck by a careening pickup truck that glanced off a tree. He jumped onto the rear bumper and held tight to the tailgate. The truck slued onto a narrow dirt trail and he was pulled into the bed and somehow—who could ever say how?—they escaped, five illegals of them and a single Anglo crew chief.
The chief drove through the night, and at sunrise they arrived in the farming town of Immokalee, two hundred miles south of the grove country they had fled. The chief deposited them at the Ross Hotel, a name suggesting amenities far beyond the realities of that dimly-lighted, onetime warehouse of unpainted concrete block. The place was an open dormitory for transient field workers and offered the cheapest bunks in town at three dollars a night, a private locker for a dollar more. It was even more malodorous than the trailers in the grove had been. Cockroaches skittered across the floor and the walls were covered with crude sexual drawings and profane scrawlings in English and Spanish.
“Put bars over the windows,” one man said to Julio, looking around, “and it could pass for the jail back home in Sabinas.”
III
He had now been living in the Ross for more than two months. He woke every morning before sunup and walked to the Farmers Market where the contractors with fields to be picked called out the day’s wages. As soon as he was hired on he’d board the crew bus and take a seat and doze off like most of the other pickers around him. The rattling bus would usually get them to the fields just before the sun broke redly over the trees—and even before they were off the bus, the chiefs would be barking for them to get to work, goddammit, get to work.
But the narrow escape from the immigration agents’ raid on the orange grove had been a reminder of life’s ready perils and that a man had better take his pleasures when he could. He began to accompany a pair of new friends, Francisco and Diego, to a cantina called the Rosa Verde almost every night. The bar was about a mile beyond the edge of town, and sometimes they did not stagger out of the place until the early hours of the morning. And sometimes, after bidding his friends goodnight and heading back toward the Ross, he ended up sleeping in the palmetto thickets alongside the highway where he later woke shivering on the foggy ground with a hangover like an iron spike in his skull. Sometimes he awoke early enough to hurry to the Farmers Market before the crew buses left for the fields, and sometimes he missed the buses—twice last week—but was able to hitch a ride to the fields.
This morning he’d again come awake in the palmettos. He was lying huddled on his side, his clothes damp with dew, and staring into the pink eyes and long whiskered snout of a curious possum within inches of his face. He let a startled groan and the ugly thing scurried into the brush. His hangover was monstrous. With painful effort he got to his feet, clung to a papery cajeput trunk and heaved up the residue of the pickled pigfeet he’d so avidly consumed in the Rosa Verde the night before. He was repulsed by the smell of himself, the rancid taste of his tongue. The sun was already above in the trees and he knew the crew buses had long since departed the Farmers Market. He stumbled out to the shoulder of the road and started walking in the direction of the fields. Not ten minutes later a pickup stopped for him. The driver was a happy Chicano who spoke execrable Spanish and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the rock song on the radio. He gave Julio an appraising look and grinned and shook his head. “Bunked in the Palmetto Hotel, eh?” he said in English. “Rough, man.” Julio didn’t understand, and so smiled and shrugged. The Chicano laughed and turned up the radio.
He got out at a crossroads and thanked the driver for the ride and from there hiked another two miles to the tomato fields. The day was cloudless, the broad sky almost achingly blue, the sun already hot on his shoulders. A hawk circled over a cattle pasture and a flock of egrets rose on slow-beating white wings and banked away over the pines. The crew buses were parked in the shade of the roadside trees, their drivers napping or leafing through comic books and nudie magazines. When the black crew chief named Gene saw him heading for the stack of empty baskets by the loading truck, he stalked toward him, yelling, “You there! You fulla shit you think you come out here and work any goddam time you feel like. You! I’m talkin to you, goddammit!”
Julio stood with a basket in his hands and stared without expression at Gene’s yelling, contorted face. He didn’t need to understand the man’s words to know what he was saying. But he knew he would work. All week the order had been for red ripes and the chiefs needed every picker they could get.
“Goddammit, this be the lass mothafucken time, you unnerstan? The lass!” The chief gestured angrily toward an empty picking row. “Go-head on, get you sorry ass to work.”
The moment he settled onto his knees and started picking, he knew the day would be a mean one. It was not yet midmorning and already the sun was burning into his back and scalp. His blue Kansas City baseball cap was back in his locker at the Ross Hotel and he would have to work the day bareheaded. He remembered a red bandanna balled in his pocket and dug it out. Although he was tempted to wear it capped over his head and tied under his chin, he didn’t do it—that was the way the field women wore them. He rolled it and banded it around his forehead. It would keep the sweat out of his eyes for a short while, until it was saturated, and then would be worthless because he could not afford to stop working every few minutes to wring it out.
Each time a picker filled a basket with tomatoes he carried it to the end of the row to be inspected by a checker; If the checker approved the load, he gave the picker a ticket worth the day’s rate for a full basket, and then he called for a toter to take the tomatoes and load them in the truck. At the end of the day, the picker turned in his tickets for their total worth in cash. Today each ticket was worth forty-five cents. Last week the call had been for green tomatoes, the hardiest kind and thus the easiest to pick, as well as to check and load. The pickers had been able to work fast and the checkers hardly glanced at the loads before issuing tickets for them, and the toters had dumped them into the truck as casually as rocks. But when the order was for red ripes everybody had to work more carefully and the process was much slower. The pickers had to be mindful to pluck only ripe fruit and the checkers had to inspect the loads closely to ensure nobody was trying to get by with hiding greens and pinks under a top layer of ripes—a deception not unknown to pickers trying to fill baskets as fast as they could. The toters had to be careful not to bruise the tomatoes in loading them in the trucks. The crew chiefs stalked up and down the field, commanding the pickers to work faster, work harder, and the pickers cursed them under their breath. The call for red ripes always put everyone in meaner temper.
The fields were sprayed nightly and Julio’s stomach churned at the smell of the oily insecticide gleaming on the fruit. Within the hour his arms would be blackened to the elbows. The air was dusty, and the broken fruit discarded along the rows was already swarming with bulbous green flies, and the pickers had to work with their mouths closed against them. He ached in every muscle. His pulse beat painfully against the back of his skull and his eyes felt too large for their sockets. The insecticide seared the cuts in his hands. Sweat was already oozing from under his headband and rolling into his eyes, and when he wiped at it with the back of his hand his eyelids were left burning. His tongue felt like an oil-caked rag.
A hundred yards away, set on a crate in the middle of the field, was a thirty-gallon water barrel covered with a wooden board. Throughout the day, the workers would go to the barrel and dipper a drink, but none of them ever drank fast enough to avoid a chief’s angry order to quit lazing and get back to work. The sight of the barrel roused Julio’s thirst like a half-mad dog, but he would not go for a drink, not yet. Not on a morning when he had started work after everyone else and before he had even picked his first basket. No, he told himself, it would be as always: he could not go for a drink until he had picked at least three baskets. It was a rule he had made for himself on his first day in the fields when he’d discovered that many of the pickers were drunkards working only for the money to buy their next bottle. They were the first to go to the water barrel every day, and few of them were ever able to work all the way through the afternoon. Any man who went for water ahead of such derelicts was ridiculed without mercy by the other pickers and deserved to choke on his shame. But Julio knew that by the time he had picked his first three baskets, all the bums would have made their first trip to the water barrel.
Everyone laughed at these bums, but kept their distance from them, too, for they all stank of something more than unwashed flesh and filthy clothes. The bums had a stink such as Julio had never before smelled on a living man, a stench of something dead, and it always made him feel a little afraid. One such wretch was working in the row to his left this morning, a sickly pale and red-eyed man whose grimace showed green teeth. Now and then Julio caught the smell of him and felt a small shiver even as bile rose hotly to his throat.
In the row to Julio’s right worked Big Momma Patterson, an enormous Negro woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, knee pads and gloves. She had been about ten yards ahead of him when he got to work, and she had since taken a full basket to the checker and started filling another, and the distance between them was now nearly fifteen yards. She was the best picker in the field today. The only one better was Sammy Bowlegs, a Miccosukee Indian who was at the moment serving sixty days in jail for setting fire to a woman’s hair in a barroom.
Julio’s hands and knees were now beginning to achieve their usual rhythm, his picking action gaining smoothness. His hands moved swiftly through the vines, grasping the tomatoes against his palms and snapping them free with a crook of the finger and a twist of the wrist, setting them quickly but gently into the basket. He pushed the basket forward and stepped up behind it on his knees. The same action again and again. When he filled his first basket and stood up, sharp pains ground into his back and his knees cracked loudly. He cursed and spat and picked up the basket and tried to swing it up to his shoulder as he usually did, but the action made him lose his balance and he sidestepped clumsily and his feet tangled in the vines and he just barely managed to drop the basket right-side up before he went sprawling. The derelict picker in the row beside him laughed and said something, and Momma Patterson looked back at him and smiled and shook her head. Gene came stomping down the row, swearing and gesticulating angrily. Julio retrieved the few spilled tomatoes and then jerked the basket up onto his hip and lugged it to the end of the row, ignoring Gene’s ranting as he did the flies raging around his head.
While working on his third basket he paused and leaned low over the vines and vomited quietly. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and was dizzy for a moment and then suddenly felt much better. Well, he thought, that’s done. By the time he filled the basket, the pasty drunkard in the row beside him had gone for water. Julio carried the basket to the checker, received his third ticket, retrieved an empty basket and took it back to his row, and then went to the water barrel and drank like a drowning man.
IV
Its little bell tinkling, the faded-orange lunch wagon came down the road and parked in the roadside shade as it did at noon every day. The owner and driver of the wagon was a thin-haired fat man named Harold who sweated constantly and had a wall eye. The wide serving window was attended by his busty but plain daughter, Georgia, who never smiled or scowled or showed any reaction to the fieldworkers’ pathetic attempts at flirtation except boredom and occasional impatience when one of them slowed up the line. Harold accepted cash or field tickets for his wares, the full range of which consisted of hot pork sausage on a bun, cold cheese sandwiches, corn chips, unchilled cans of soda pop, moon pies, cigarettes and candy bars.
The crew chiefs’ whistles shrilled up and down the fields, signaling the half-hour lunch break. Julio was not hungry nor even sure his stomach would accept food without throwing it right back up. But he had to eat something to give himself strength for the afternoon, the longest and hardest portion of the day. As the line advanced toward the serving window it was engulfed by the heavy smell of hot pork grease and Julio fought down a surge of nausea. He paid six tickets—two dollars and seventy cents—for a cheese sandwich and a can of Dr Pepper.
He crossed the road and sat in the grass in the shade of a mimosa tree. He stared morosely at his lunch. Six tickets. He had five left in his pocket. Never before had he picked so few baskets in a morning’s work—not even three days ago when he did not arrive at the fields until after nine o’clock in the morning. If he did not do better this afternoon . . .
But of course he would do better. Didn’t he always do better in the afternoons? By then the pain of his head would have eased and he would have food in his belly and the return of his strength. At the moment, however, he was tired to his bones, more tired than he had ever been after a morning’s work. He did not understand it. This was not the first time he had worked in the sun with a tequila hangover. He wondered if he would be able to work through the afternoon without dropping from exhaustion. Then realized it was the first time he had ever wondered such a thing.
The sandwich tasted strongly of oily mayonnaise on the verge of turning rancid, but he forced himself to chew it, swallow it, keep it down. He spied Alfonso de la Madrid standing in the lunch wagon line—and then Alfonso saw him looking and quickly averted his gaze.
Julio’s belly tightened in anger. The five tickets in his pocket, together with about eighty cents in coins, represented all the money he had in the world, and the reason for that sad fact was an unfortunate incident on the Sunday just past. And the cause of that incident—and thus the true cause of his present poverty—was Alfonso de la Madrid. . . .
V
“Stop for him, man—he’s a Mexican!” Alfonso shouted as Diego’s rusty, smoke-trailing Plymouth rumbled past a hitchhiker. “Give the poor fellow a ride. Don’t be a bastard.”
They were on an isolated stretch of State Road 82, a two-lane blacktop flanked by cattle pastures and pine stands and citrus groves, returning to Immokalee from a day in Fort Myers. The red afternoon sun was almost down to the trees. Pine shadows touched the road. The sweet scents of orange blossoms and new-mown grass swept in through the car windows. Squalling blackbirds lined the telephone wires, and a scattering of cattle egrets fed on insects in the pastures.
They had been to a movie and then eaten at a Burger King and then stopped in at several bars. Alfonso sat in the front seat with Diego, both of them wearing new straw hats they had bought at the Edison Mall. Julio rode in the back with Francisco, who was not feeling too well. His eyes were bruised purple and swollen nearly shut, his lips cut and bloated, his nose hugely broken. These disfigurements had come to him in an alley behind a Fowler Avenue bar, by way of a shrimp boat captain at least twice his age. The shrimper had disputed the legality of a shot by which Francisco sank the eight ball to beat him in a pool game and win their bet of a beer. Francisco had said, “It is a technique much admired in Piedras Negras. I will accept a Budweiser as my prize.”
Although he had learned his English in Mexico, Francisco spoke the language quite capably, better even than Diego, who had been born and raised in Colorado and learned both English and Spanish in childhood—but unfortunately did not learn either very well. His pronunciations in both languages were often perplexing, and it was an old joke with his friends that no matter which language Diego used to call his dog, the confused animal would simply stare at him. from a distance and scratch its head. “Julio and me, we don’t even speak English,” Alfonso had once remarked, “and we speak it better than Diego.”
“Well, we ain’t in no fucken Perras Nigras,” the old shrimper had said to Francisco. “Around here that’s a illegal shot and you lose. Make mine a fucken Michelob.”
Francisco winked cockily at his friends at the bar and said to the shrimper: “Maybe you wish to discuss this disagreement outside, eh, old man? Under the eyes of God?”
“Fucken A John square,” the shrimper said, tossing his cue on the table and heading for the back door.
And now Francisco was not feeling so well.
Diego brought the Plymouth to a stop and the hitchhiker came running. Diego looked at Alfonso and said, “Maybe I should get rid of this car and get a bus, eh? To all the time pick up the damn people you always want me to pick up?”
“Your kindness has put a smile on the Holy Mother’s face,” Alfonso said. “You are ten feet closer to heaven.”
The hitchhiker was breathing heavily when he got to the car. Julio moved over, permitting the man to have the seat by the door.
“Many thanks,” the man said as Diego put the car in motion. He was tall and lean and hatless, his hair cropped short, like a soldier’s. His jeans and jacket still held the smell of new denim, and though his low-cut brown shoes were smeared with mud, they looked new also. On a band slightly too large for his wrist hung a gold watch. He said his name was Luis Blanco. Alfonso introduced him all around. Julio thought the man had eyes like a policeman—quick-moving, taking note of everything.
In answer to Alfonso’s questions, he said he was a baker in Fort Myers and was going to Immokalee to visit his girlfriend. He had a car of his own—a nice little Chevy only five years old—but it was being painted this weekend and so he had to use his thumb to get to Immokalee. He didn’t have to work tomorrow and would take the bus back to Fort Myers tomorrow night.
He asked about Francisco’s battered face and laughed together with everyone else—except Francisco, who glared at them all—when Alfonso told the story of the fight. Julio noticed a small dark tattoo on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of Luis Blanco’s left hand, a symbol shaped like an arrowhead. When Luis Blanco saw him looking at it, he casually covered it with his other hand. His Spanish was much like Francisco’s, a borderland region singsong. He was, he said, originally from Mexicali.
When he learned that all of them were pickers but for Diego, who worked as an auto mechanic in a garage, he asked if the pay was good for pickers at this time of year. Did they get paid every day, as he had heard? They must be doing very well to have a car and spend Sunday in Fort Myers and be able to buy new hats. Did they think he could get work in the fields? He missed his girlfriend and wanted to live closer to her.
“Hey, friend, any poor fool can work in the fields,” Diego said. “All you need is the strength of a burro and the brains of the same burro. You don’t want to quit a clean nice bakery to work in the fields.” He glanced at the man over his shoulder. “Pardon me for so saying, my friend, but that would be very stupid, even for love.”
“But pickers do get paid every day, right?” the man asked.
“Damn right we do,” Alfonso said. “We always have money in our pockets. Not like this poor fool”—he gestured at Diego—“who gets paid only on Friday and by Wednesday is broke again.”
Diego glared at him and said, “This poor fool has a car. And my friend Luis the baker here, he has a car. The only ones I see in this car who don’t have a car are ignorant pickers.”
“You have a car?” Alfonso said, feigning surprise. “Well, why don’t we use it next time instead of going to town in this donkey cart?”
Diego showed him a middle finger.
The Luis fellow turned to look at the rear window and Julio looked too, his curiosity roused. There was no traffic in sight in either direction. The man now looked at Francisco slumped against the door with his eyes closed, then looked intently at Julio as if he were trying to read his mind, then reached under his jacket and withdrew a small chrome-plated pistol. He held it in his right hand, on the side away from Julio. Julio gaped.
“Stop the car,” the man said. “Pull over to the side of the road.”
Diego looked at him in the rearview mirror. “What? Why?”
The man raised the gun where Diego could see it. “Do it,” he said.
“Hey, man, what the hell are you—” Alfonso began, but the man pointed the gun at him and snapped, “Shut up!”
“Oh, God,” Diego sighed and slowed the car, eased onto the shoulder and shut off the engine.
“Who told you to cut the motor, you idiot?” the man said.
“What?” Diego said, wide-eyed in the rearview. “I don’t know . . . nobody. I always do it because sometimes the motor, it gets a little too hot and—”
“Quiet!” the man ordered. He held the gun low, out of sight of anyone who might drive by, but pointed vaguely at Julio’s chest. Francisco had now come awake and seen the pistol and gone pale under his bruises. He sat utterly still against the door.
“I don’t want to shoot anybody,” the man said, “but I have done so before, so don’t try anything foolish, any of you. Understand?”
Diego and Esteban and Francisco nodded. The man looked at Julio and smiled tightly. “Do you understand?” he asked. Only now did Julio realize he had been wondering if a bullet from such a little gun would hurt very much. The man angled the pistol so that it pointed up at his face. The muzzle was small and dark and Julio’s mouth suddenly tasted of copper. He nodded.
“Very good,” the man said. “Now you two”—he gestured at Diego and Alfonso—“take all your money out of your pockets. Do it now! And you two”—looking now at Julio and Francisco beside him—“hand it over.”
Julio worked his hand in his pocket and extracted a few small bills and some coins and handed the money to the bandit, who accepted it with his left hand and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Wincing with pain, Francisco leaned across Julio and gave his money to the man.
“For the love of God,” Alfonso said plaintively as he handed his money over the seat. “Why are you doing this to us? We are not rich. We are Mexicans, the same as you. If you want to rob somebody, why not rob the gringos? They have all the money. That’s what I would do.”
The bandit stuffed Diego’s money in his pocket with the rest. “Oh sure, sure you would. Pancho Villa, that’s you. Now, pull your pockets inside out, all of you! Do it quick!”
He leaned forward to look into the front seat and saw that Diego’s and Esteban’s pockets were showing whitely. He glanced across at Francisco and saw that his pockets, too, hung limply from his pants. Only Julio had not reversed his pockets. The bandit narrowed his eyes at him.
“I gave you all I had,” Julio said. “Truly.”
“Truly?” the bandit echoed, arching his eyebrows. “Well, forgive my lack of trust, my friend, but”—he wagged the pistol at Julio’s pockets and showed a large grin—“I insist.”
Julio glanced down at the pistol, then stared hard into the man’s eyes. If he had been asked at that moment what was going through his mind he could not have said. But something in his face made the man lose his smile. He pressed the pistol against Julio’s right side and cocked the hammer. Julio had never heard that sound except in the movies and he marveled at its chilling effect in the world of mortal flesh. He felt his heart beating fast against his ribs.
“My friend . . .” the bandit said softly, almost sadly.
A van with dark-tinted windows whooshed past.
Julio pulled his pants pockets out and the rest of his money fell on the seat.
The bandit looked at the clump of bills and then at Julio and then gathered the money with his free hand. “Oh, truly,” he said in a mimicking voice. “That’s all of it . . . truly.” He laughed and hefted the fistful of money as if trying to guess its worth by its weight. Julio knew exactly how much it was. Seventy-nine dollars. Five of which he had won at the cockfights on the previous weekend and the rest was all the money he had managed to save during his time in Florida.
“Jesus Christ, Julio,” Francisco said thickly through his swollen lips.
“Have you been robbing banks?” Diego said.
“Listen, man,” Alfonso said to the bandit, “the rest of us are not so rich like this one. Those twelve dollars of mine are all the money I have in the world. Leave us some little bit of money, eh? Please. Enough for a beer and a taquito tonight, eh?”
“Is this one always so stupid?” the bandit asked as he finished tucking money into his pants pocket.
“Always,” Diego said. “But look . . . can’t you leave me with some money? I’m not like these pickers, man, I have a wife, I have little children. I have—”
The bandit shook the pistol at him. “You’re going to have another hole in your goddamn head if you don’t shut up.”
Diego’s eyes widened and he threw up his hands.
“Put your hands down, stupid!” the bandit said, glancing quickly along the road to see if any cars were passing by. “Sweet Jesus, what did I do to get a bunch like you? You fools think you’re the only ones with troubles? If I told you pricks my troubles we would all drown when this car filled with your tears. Now leave the keys in the ignition and get out, all of you. Out! Now!”
Diego looked stricken. “You are not going to steal my car?” He had recently paid one hundred and twenty-five dollars for this ancient six-cylinder Plymouth, having saved the money for it over a period of nearly a year. It had not been easy. Almost every penny he earned went toward the support of his wife and seven children.
“Steal it?” the bandit said. “Listen, fool, I wouldn’t steal a piece of shit like this. I only steal cars my sainted mother would not die of shame to see me driving. I wouldn’t stoop so low as to steal this stinking car.”
“I’m very glad to hear that,” Diego said, looking both relieved and somewhat injured, “even though I don’t think you truly realize what a good car this—”
“I’m just going to borrow the damned thing. Now get out—everybody! Start walking back the way we came. Move!”
They got out and began walking. They heard the motor grinding as the bandit tried to start it, heard his faint cursing of the recalcitrant engine.
“The son of a bitch is going to have to hitch another ride to make his getaway,” Francisco muttered.
“The shoemaker’s children go barefoot,” Alfonso said, “and the mechanic’s car needs a mule to pull it.”
“You shut up,” Diego said, pointing a finger in Alfonso’s face. “Don’t say another word—not you!”
Alfonso put up his palms defensively and backed away.
The motor finally clattered to life and they stopped walking and turned to look. A single headlight beam poked out in front of the car into the gathering gloom and then the transmission shrieked as the bandit worked it into gear. Diego groaned and said, “Doesn’t that bastard know how to drive?”
The Plymouth lurched onto the highway and began a ponderous acceleration, trailing a thick plume of dark smoke and grinding loudly every time the bandit worked the column gearshift. Then the car went around a wide bend in the road toward Immokalee, still some fifteen miles away, and the taillights disappeared.
They spoke little as they trudged along the shoulder of the road. Except for Diego, the only legal citizen among them, they all ducked down in roadside ditches or ran into the pines to hide every time headlights appeared on the highway. One never knew when those lights might belong to la migra.
Diego put his thumb out to every car and truck that came flashing up from behind them. But the Sunday evening traffic was sparse and none of it even slowed down for him. His rage increased with every vehicle that sped past. He shook his fist at the shrinking taillights and bellowed, “Bastard! God damn you! Are you afraid I’m going to rob you, you son of a bitch? God DAMN you!”
He swore as fervently every time he caught sight of Alfonso, who was keeping a careful distance behind all of them.
“‘Stop for him, he’s a Mexican!’” Diego mimicked sarcastically, glaring back at Alfonso. “You are a stupid shit!”
“I think we ought to hang him from one of these trees,” Francisco said, and Alfonso dropped a few feet further behind. He was keeping uncharacteristically mute in the face of his fellows’ rancor.
VI
The sky was gray with dawn light when they at last reached the town limit. A couple of ragged men sat on the curb in front of a convenience store and looked upon them with curiosity as they walked by. Julio glanced back just as Alfonso slipped away into the shadows of a side street and disappeared. A little farther on, Francisco said, “Look!” and pointed down the block to their right. The Plymouth was parked at the end of the street. Diego let out a whoop and jogged toward it.
“Good,” Francisco said as he and Julio followed after him at a walk. “Now he can give us a ride to the market.”
When they got to the car Diego was staring in horror upon the freshly crumpled right front fender. “Look,” he said, pointing at the damage. “Just look what he . . . what that dirty prick . . . look how he did. He steals my good car and can’t drive it twenty miles without wrecking it. That son of a bitch should be in prison. Look!”
Julio could not help thinking that the right fender now resembled the left one more closely than it had before, but he did not think this a good moment to mention it to Diego.
And now Diego discovered a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. He snatched it up and gaped at it in disbelief. It cited him for parking in front of a fire hydrant. He shivered as if suddenly very cold. He whimpered lowly. He crumpled the ticket in his hand and raised the fist to heaven and shook it as though he would demand an explanation from God Himself.
“What kind of son of a bitch—” he began, then started choking on his bile and outrage and fell to a harsh and prolonged fit of coughing that raised the veins starkly on his forehead. He slowly recovered, hacking and spitting, wiping the webs of mucus from his nose, the tears from his eyes. “What kind of son of a bitch . . .” he said breathlessly, brandishing the ticket at his friends, “would give a man a goddamn ticket . . . in the middle of the goddamn NIGHT!” He turned his face up to the sky. “Oooooh God,” he moaned, “what bastards! What injustice! What injustice this stinking world is full of!”
The town was coming to life all around them. Several cars and trucks rolled past, their occupants staring out at them—some with amusement, some with indifference, some with disdain. Diego glared balefully at the hydrant, at the car, at Julio and Francisco, then whirled and went to the driver’s side and got in and slammed the door shut with such force that the driver’s side window shattered and showered him with broken glass.
He let a furious howl and pounded on the steering wheel with his fist. His curses rang in the streets.
The engine cranked laboriously as Diego worked the ignition key, then it began to sputter, then abruptly roared into action and poured black smoke from its exhaust pipe. He wrestled with the shift lever in a series of horrific metallic shrieks until the transmission at last surrendered to first gear. The engine still racing furiously, Diego released the clutch pedal and the Plymouth shot into the street with tires screaming and veered wildly for a moment before he had it under control. He fought the transmission through the rest of the grinding gearshifts as he drove away in a clatter and a cloud of oily smoke, heading home to a wife and seven children who would shriek and squall the whole while he got ready to go to work, sleepless and empty of pocket.
Julio and Francisco watched him until he rounded a corner and was gone.
“We should have asked him for a ride to the market,” Francisco said.
Julio yawned hugely and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not this time.”
As they were walking to the Farmers Market Francisco said, “At least the son of a bitch left the keys in the car for him.”
“That’s right,” Julio said. “Diego should be thankful, shouldn’t he?”
Francisco looked at him and started to laugh—and then winced with the pain of his battered face.
VII
The matter was quite clear to them all: Alfonso de la Madrid was to blame for the robbery. He had been the one who wanted to pick up the hitchhiker and then the hitchhiker had robbed them. The matter was clear enough. Diego had made it known that he did not want to see Alfonso ever again—and if he did see him, he would run over him with his car and then drive back and forth over him until there was nothing left but a stain in the road. Francisco, too, would get narrow in the eyes at the mention of Alfonso’s name. None of them had spoken to Alfonso in the several days since the robbery and Alfonso was keeping his guarded distance from them all. He had not even shown his face in the Rosa Verde.
Sitting in the shade of the mimosa, Julio watched Alfonso buy his lunch and then hurry away to find a place to eat it, well removed from Julio’s sight. The fool knew damn well it was all his fault.
And yet. . . . Furiously chewing the last of his sandwich, Julio knew that his lingering anger of the past few days did not entirely have to do with Alfonso. It was rooted in something deeper. His friends had attributed his low spirits to having been robbed of more money than they had. He was the only one among them who had managed to save any money, and he had given up every dollar of it. What man wouldn’t feel sour about that?
But that wasn’t it, either. No. What was eating at his heart, Julio knew, was something else.
It was this: he had done nothing to resist the bandit. He had sat there and let the man rob him.
Why had he not tried to take the little gun away from him? It was a question he had been asking since the robbery.
The robber had let his guard down several times. He had been laughing, enjoying himself, loose with his attention. He had been within easy reach.
He could have grabbed the gun from the man. He could have grabbed it and forced it from him. The man had not looked very strong. He could have taken the gun from him and shoved it up his nose and made him beg for mercy, made him weep with regret for having tried to rob him.
Why didn’t he at least try it?
Had he been afraid?
Well, now . . . of course he had been a little afraid. The fellow had a gun, didn’t he? Show him a man who was not afraid of a gun and he would show you a fool.
Ah? And why would such a man be a fool?
Why? Mother of God, the question was more than foolish. Because a gun can kill you. Kill you quick.
His rage tore through him.
Sweet Jesus. Was that what he had been afraid of? Of being killed? Of being killed quick?
The realization made him laugh out loud—and the laughter burned in his eyes.