I
The house of Esperanza was a small concrete structure near the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Immokalee, a small rugged town in the winter produce region of southwest Florida. The detail work on the house had never been completed: three of its outer walls lacked stucco; pipes and wiring were exposed throughout the interior, and several windows were still without glass. The roof had been tarred but remained unshingled, and every hard rainfall produced a new leak. Esperanza had informally inherited the house from Salvador Escondido, its builder and her husband by common law, who one morning kissed her goodbye at the front door, left for work in the produce fields and never returned. That had been almost two years ago. The most popular rumor was that he had run off to Chicago with an Anglo waitress from Fort Myers.
II
Chuy came to Florida in a truck crammed with fifteen other Mexican laborers illegally smuggled into the U.S.—wetbacks, they were called in Texas and sometimes called each other. They’d been led across the river one dark night by a smuggler who guided them into the Texas desert and to the waiting truck. Some of them had been taken off the truck in an orange grove somewhere in central Florida. The others, himself among them, had been brought to Immokalee.
He’d been in town almost three months when he met Esperanza while buying beer in the Mariposa Market in the company of his friend Esteban. He saw her at the far end of an aisle, leaning on a shopping cart and contemplating the shelves of canned soft drinks. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Esteban saw the way he was gazing at her and said, “Forget it, man. That one, she used to do it for twenty dollars—too damn much! Some said this one was worth it, but I never had the twenty dollars to find out. I wouldn’t pay twenty dollars for it anyway, not with any woman. Well . . . with Isabel Vega maybe, you know, the movie star—but not with this one. She’s too damn snooty, this one. They say she would not do it with you if she did not like you, the way you looked or talked or smelled, anything. If she didn’t like something about you, she’d say no and that was that.” Esteban habitually spoke as fast and voluminously as a man on the radio. “Listen, somebody once offered her thirty dollars to do it, a man she didn’t like, so she said no. All right, the fellow said, make it thirty-five. No, she says, go away. Forty, the fellow says, and he holds up twenty dollars in each hand. She slammed the door in his face so hard she nearly broke his nose. A pair of fools, the both of them—him for offering so much, her for turning it down. Anyway, she got on the welfare and stopped doing it anymore. Now her nose is like this”—Esteban tilted his head back and pushed up on his nose with his forefinger—“like she’s looking down at the world and every man in it. Bah! She’s a strange one, that whore!”
“Don’t call her that,” Chuy said without taking his eyes off her. He was enraptured by her proud posture, the liquid blackness of her hair, the play of muscle in her brown calves. He wondered if the children with her—a boy of about six or seven, a girl somewhat younger, and a boy of about three—could possibly be her own. She seemed too firm of breast and lean of belly to have borne three children.
Just then the younger boy accidentally brought a furious slide of canned drinks crashing to the floor. The woman wore sandals and one of the cans struck her exposed toes. She gave a small cry and might have fallen had she not been supporting herself on the cart. Chuy rushed to her without thinking and dropped to one knee and tenderly cradled her uplifted injured foot. Two of the toes were already swelling darkly and showed beads of blood at the top rims of the nails. He suddenly envisioned how he must look and felt his face go warm. The children gaped at him. He looked up to meet her eyes, expecting anger at his liberty, scorn perhaps, but her aspect was only of faintly amused curiosity. She made no move to withdraw her foot from his gentle grasp.
“Please, señora,” he said, “permit me to help you to get home with your groceries and children.” He was astonished at his own boldness, for he was not one to speak easily to women, not even to those of his acquaintance, never mind attend to the injured foot of one whose name he did not know. Up close, he saw that she was even lovelier than she’d looked from a distance.
“Thank you, señor,” she said softly. “You are very kind.” And she smiled upon him.
And so he took her home. And she insisted that he stay to have supper with them. And after they ate and she cleared the table they drank coffee with sugar and milk and smoked cigarettes and talked and laughed and listened to music on the radio. And after she put the children to bed and led them in their prayers and bid them good night she came out and sat beside him on the living room couch. And after a while, he made bold to kiss her. And she kissed him in return. And then they were touching, caressing, breathing hotly against each other’s neck. And then she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom and there they made love.
And there, as he discovered a few days later when his urine came out scalding, he caught the clap.
III
Her first husband, whom she’d married at age sixteen in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Brownsville, Texas, where she was born, had been killed in an oil field accident outside of Corpus Christi just a few months after the birth of their son, Raul. He had carried no insurance and left her penniless. For the next two years, she lived with a pair of scolding aunts in Matamoros. She tended to her infant son and prayed every night for a means to get away. The means came in the form of handsome Salvador Escondido, whom she met one morning under the palms of the riverside park. They’d known each other a month when he asked her to go with him to Florida. The following day, with Raul on her lap, they were on their way in Salvador’s rattletrap Chevy.
She loved Florida, its faithful sunshine and verdant lushness, its comforting long way from Texas and Mexico. During her four years with Salvador, she gave birth to two more children, María and Joselito. Then Salvador absconded and she had been obliged to provide for herself and the children however she could. At the local welfare office, she was time and again required to answer countless questions, asked for one document after another she did not have, instructed to fill out endless application forms she could barely understand even with the aid of a translator. She was made to wait weeks for official signatures and stamps of approval. During this long and complex process, she had supported her family by various means. She had taken in laundry and ironing. She had taken in sewing. She had taken in men. But she was careless and got pregnant again. With the help of a neighbor woman skilled in such matters, she was able to end the pregnancy without any effects more serious than a painful infection that lasted two weeks—and guilt that sometimes woke her sobbing in the middle of the night.
But she was desperate for money, and so she resumed receiving men. Soon thereafter she contracted gonorrhea. Repeated treatments at the local clinic made no headway against the disease, and the clinic doctor, a young Chicano named Gonzalez with little sympathy for human weakness, asked her how she expected to get cured if she persisted in prostitution. Until that moment she had avoided the word even in her thoughts, and hearing him say it made her rage with shame. She said she was persisting in only one thing, keeping her children fed, and she stalked out of his office.
Not until her welfare payments were finally approved and began to arrive in the mail did she stop seeing men and return to Dr. Gonzalez and his antibiotics. By the time she met Chuy in the Mariposa Market a few weeks later, she had assumed she’d been cured.
IV
All morning the rumor had snaked through the dusty, sunbaked produce fields: a raid was coming—a raid by la migra, the American immigration agents. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, but soon, very soon. The rumor was not an uncommon one—it went through the fields at least once a week. In fact, la migra did make a raid now and then, and it had now been several weeks since the last one, and so this time the rumor carried a feeling of great likelihood. Everyone could feel it.
During the lunch break, Esteban sat with Chuy in the shade of a roadside tree and chain-smoked Marlboros and gulped two RC Colas and told Chuy he was not going to wait to find out if the rumor was correct. He intended to take the midnight bus to Miami. He had spoken of going to Miami ever since Chuy met him. Many mojados talked of going there but few ever did.
“Miami, Chuy—that’s the place for us! The place is full with Cubans, with Latinos from everywhere, from Nicaragua and Honduras and Guatemala, everywhere! I know, man—I have been told by people who know. There are so many Latinos in Miami, nobody knows who’s legal and who’s not. Hell, nobody cares, not in Miami! And everybody speaks Spanish there, man, everybody knows that. In such a big city we will be a lot safer from la migra than we are in this little pueblo of a place where wetbacks are so easy to catch. Listen—in Miami we can be taxi drivers. That’s right! In Miami anybody can be a taxi driver. I have been told, man.”
Esteban put his palms forward as if to ward off an objection, though Chuy had given no sign of making one. “I know what you are going to say,” he said. “You are going to say how can we become taxi drivers if we don’t know how to drive a car. That is your trouble, my friend—you are always letting little things get in the way of a good idea. The answer to your question is simple: we will learn how to drive. There, you see? The problem is solved, eh? Besides, there are many kinds of work in Miami. It is not like this place where the only work is in the stinking fields. We can work in a restaurant if we want to—a fancy restaurant where all the customers are rich. We can work in white jackets, man. We can be clean and never again have to sweat for our pay. Think of it! Is that not a thousand times better than working in a field of dust and poison under the goddamn sun and sweating your life away like some burro?”
A thousand times better, Chuy thought. Ten thousand times better. He smiled and shook his head in amazement at the strength of his friend’s dreamy faith.
Esteban thought he was shaking his head at his idea. “Ah, Chuy,” he said sadly—and then abruptly brightened again. “Listen, man, don’t forget about the Cuban women. Miami is full of Cuban women. Everybody knows they are the most affectionate women in the world. That’s right. They have tits as sweet as melons, the Cuban girls, and asses big and soft like pillows. Oh man, I get dizzy just thinking about them. Jesus Christ, Chuy! Miami is the place for us! What the hell do you have here that is so important you cannot leave it, eh? A donkey job picking vegetables in the goddamn fields. A lousy cot in a flophouse full of drunkards. An appointment with la migra is what you’ll have if you don’t come with me tonight. It’s what you will have very soon.”
True, Chuy thought. The man speaks the truth.
Now Esteban tilted his head and his face went sly. “But wait. Can it be the woman? Is that it? Is my good friend Chuy thinking of her? No, no, that cannot be. My good and reasonable friend Chuy would never be so foolish to stay here just because of her.” And now his face was again serious. “Hey, man, really, not for her, eh?”
Chuy averted his friend’s eyes and said nothing. He took a bite of his barbecued pork sandwich and sipped from his bottle of Dr Pepper and stared at the fields across the road.
“Ah, Chuy,” Esteban said, shaking his head. He picked up a stone and flung it into the palmetto scrub. “You’ve been seeing her nearly every night for—how long?—almost a month, no? Well, that’s good, yes, a man should have all the fun he can. She’s damn good-looking and a hundred men in town would give their soul to the devil to be in your place and having such fun.” He paused and looked at Chuy sadly. “But it’s only fun, right, Chuy? I mean, you are not . . . serious about her? Hey, man, she was a—”
“Don’t!” Chuy whirled on him. “Don’t say it!”
Esteban made the raised-palms gesture again. “Yes, all right my friend, very well. I’m sorry. I spoke improperly.”
Chuy turned away and looked out at the fields again. Esteban stood up and brushed pine needles from his pants and scanned the sky. He cleared his throat. He looked at Chuy and said, “Look, if . . . well, maybe I’ll see you at the bus station tonight, eh?”
Chuy said nothing.
Esteban put his hands in his pockets and kicked at a pine cone and started to walk away. Then stopped and turned to look at him again. Chuy looked at him without anger now. He shrugged without knowing what he meant by it. Esteban smiled crookedly and shrugged in return.
The crew chiefs blew their whistles to signal the end of the lunch break.
V
At sunset the crews boarded the field buses for the ride back to town. They arrived at the Farmers Market in the dark, and Chuy went directly to the Ross Hotel, that onetime warehouse furnished in the manner of a ramshackle barracks with worn folding cots and battered surplus wall lockers. Most of its residents were field workers who would be in town only as long as the harvest season. Chuy had lived here since arriving in Immokalee.
He washed up at one of the large industrial sinks of tin and changed his shirt and combed his hair, then went to the long narrow counter by the front wall and reclaimed a shoebox containing his few possessions. Oscar, the evening manager and half-owner of the Ross, retrieved the cord-bound box from one of the closets behind the counter. The closets were kept locked and only Oscar and Martin—the day manager and other half-owner—had the keys. A month ago Oscar had discovered someone trying to force open one of the locks and he broke the thief’s spine with a tire iron. It was said that the closets of the Ross Hotel were safer than a bank.
The moon was round and white and blazing just above the pines when he got to Esperanza’s block. He paused across the dirt street from the house and smoked a cigarette and listened to the hymns of the evening congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe down the street. The windows of the house glowed brightly yellow, and the sight of the house infused him with a strangely bittersweet feeling, a confusion of yearnings he could not have explained to himself had he tried. Out here was darkness and chill wind and the odor of dirt as ripe as a ready grave. More than once he had staggered back to the Ross after a night in the cantinas with his friends and awakened on his cot at dawn with a painful head and this same raw-dirt smell in his nose, a smell ingrained in the dirty clothes he’d slept in and rising off the fresh mud on his shoes. He shivered in a gust of wind. His loneliness felt like a hand at his throat. And then he remembered last night. All day he had refused to think about it, but now, looking at the house, he remembered—and felt a rush of shame.
Now the singing in the church ceased and he heard the children in the house laughing happily. He could faintly hear the music of the little radio she kept in the kitchen so she could sing along to it while she cooked. His stomach growled.
He crossed the weed-and-sand front yard and knocked on the front door. The children’s voices rose excitedly, and then the door swung open and they clamored at the sight of him—Raúl, age seven and mop-haired and dark as an Indian; Maria, nearly five and already destined to break hearts with her beauty; and little Joselito, four years old and both shy and curious. Chuy ruffled Raúl’s hair and gave Joselito a quick tickle under the arm, then tossed his shoebox on the sofa and swept up María and swung her around as she shrieked with delight. He set her down again and she gave his leg a tight hug before running to rejoin her brothers at their game of Chinese checkers.
He shut the door behind him and went to the kitchen. Esperanza was at the stove, stirring a pot of beans. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and looked at him with serious aspect for a moment before smiling and asking, “Are you hungry?”
“I could eat something, yes,” he said.
“Then sit at my table,” she said, “and I will feed you.”
These had been the first words they’d spoken to each other under her roof, and the exchange had become a ritual on his arrival in the evenings.
The table was already set for him. The children, as usual, had been fed earlier. As she retrieved a bottle of beer from the little refrigerator and set it before him, she said, “Chuyito, are you practicing to be a salesman?”
He looked up at her, puzzled.
“Why else, I wonder, do you continue to knock on the door for permission to enter?” She stood beside him and stroked the back of his neck. “You are hardly a stranger anymore, you know.”
He felt his face go warm. “It would be impolite not to knock,” he said. “It is your house, after all.”
She made a small smile and shook her head, then went to the stove to prepare their supper plates.
She had told him much about herself during the past weeks. She had told him about her girlhood in Brownsville and her father’s small tortillería and the long hard hours the five of them—she and her parents and her two older brothers—had worked at making and packaging the tortillas, of the hard days after her father drowned at Padre Island one bright summer day while trying to save her oldest brother who drowned with him, of the loss of the tortillería to creditors, of her older brother’s running away from home a year later when he was but sixteen, of her mother’s subsequent illness and her long hard year of dying, of going to live with her horrid aunts and then meeting and marrying Raul and then living with the aunts again after his death on the oil rig, of coming to Florida with Salvador Escondido.
Regarding his own past he had been deliberately vague and was both relieved and curious that she did not question him closely about it. Not until a week ago had he confessed to her that he was in the country illegally, half expecting her to tell him to get out of her house immediately, before she got in trouble with the authorities for harboring him. But she had simply said she knew that. When he asked how she knew, she smiled at him as though at a sweet but slow-witted child and ran her hand through his hair. “Ah, Chuy,” she said, “you are so obviously illegal, my little son, that the back of your shirt is still wet. It could only be more obvious if you wore a big sign that said, ‘I am a wetback.’ Every evening that you show up at my door I give a prayer of thanks to God that la migra did not get you that day.”
For her part, she had told him even about the whoring. Only women who were ashamed, she said, lied to men, or women who were afraid of them.
And then, three nights ago, as they lay contentedly entwined in her bed after making love, she had kissed his ear and said he ought to give up his cot at that awful flophouse where he lived and move in with her, since he was with her almost every night anyway.
He had declined her offer with the explanation that such an arrangement would put at risk her welfare payments. She said she was willing to take the risk. If she lost the welfare she would go to work, maybe at the Farmers Market as a sorter, maybe even as a picker in the fields. Lots of women worked in the fields, she reminded him. He said that was true, but she had two children not yet of school age to care for at home, and even if she found someone to care for them while she was at work, she should not, for their sake, take the risk of losing the welfare money.
She narrowed her eyes at this suggestion that she lacked sufficient maternal concern, but she held her tongue and tacitly deferred to his reasoning and had not brought up the matter since. And thus had he kept his cot at the Ross Hotel and returned to it every night after leaving her bed—and after stopping at the Corazón for a beer or two with his friends.
But now, watching her at the stove, he thought of the real reasons for his refusal to move in with her. Here was a woman who openly admitted to him that she had prostituted herself—and yet she was raising three well-disciplined children in the ways of the Church, teaching them proper behavior even as his own mother had tried to teach him, praying alongside them every night before they went to bed. Here was a woman who kept a clean house and cooked wonderful meals and showed him respect and fidelity. Here was a woman who had told him frankly and without shame that she could live without a husband—though she would prefer to have one—but not without the comfort of a good man in her house. What was a man to make of such a one? He saw her by turns as fragile and hard, guileless as a child and mysterious as a cat, sometimes saintly, at times beyond redemption. She confused him—and therefore frightened him—more than he cared to admit.
And there was still more to it than that. He sensed that to move in with her would be somehow to surrender something he could not even begin to define, and this feeling only deepened his confusion.
She ladled beans into two bowls and then paused to brush a strand of hair from her eyes with the back of her wrist. The gesture struck him as that of a little girl, and his chest suddenly ached with his affection for her. And then he was abruptly seized with guilt as he remembered the events of the previous evening, a sequence that began when the field bus arrived back at the Farmers Market and his friends asked him to come with them to Corazón for a beer. Although he had not told Esperanza he would join her for supper, he had eaten his evening meal there every night for more than a week, and he knew she would have something prepared for him. And so he’d told his friends he could not go with them now but would join them later, as usual. One of the men had laughed and raised his hands in front of him with the hands bent down at the wrists in the manner of a begging dog, and the gesture drew laughter from the others. They glanced sidelong at Chuy, and among themselves exchanged a look bespeaking humorous pity for one too fearful of his woman to join his friends for a beer before going home. Chuy felt his face go hot with anger—more at himself than at them, for he sensed they were right to ridicule him. “Hey, what the hell,” he said. “I do feel like a beer. Let’s go!” His friends had cheered and clapped him on the back.
But at the bar of the Corazón he had felt stupidly childish for having come for the reason he did. And then felt angrier yet because he did not think he should be feeling stupid for doing as he pleased. And then wondered just what it was he pleased to do. He gave hard thought to the question for the next few hours as he drank one beer after another.
He but vaguely remembered leaving the Corazón and making his hazy way to Esperanza’s house. He could remember nothing of what followed until he woke in her bed this morning, woke with an aching head to her insistent shaking of his shoulder and her exhortations to hurry or he would miss the bus to the fields. It was the first time he had spent the entire night in her bed and his hangover was weighted with guilt. He evaded her eyes as he hastened into his clothes, then rushed to the Farmers Market and got there just in time to catch the bus.
VI
Tonight she fed him a stew of turkey in a spicy chocolate sauce—together with steaming bowls of beans and rice, platters of warm tortillas and fried green chiles. She opened two more bottles of beer, one for him and one for herself, an sat across from him and watched him eat. The little radio on the shelf over the kitchen sink was tuned to one of the Spanish language stations, which tonight was playing a succession of tunes from the Revolution—“Adelita” and “Valentina” and “Jesusita de Chihuahua” and “Las Mañanitas.” “La Cucaracha” was the children’s favorite and when it came on she turned up the volume so they could hear it in the living room and sing along with it. They had finished their game of Chinese checkers and were now busily occupied in scissoring pictures out of magazines, photos of models and movie stars and palatial estates and automobiles. Esperanza permitted them to tape the pictures on any of the unfinished walls except the ones in the living room, which she reserved for crucifixes and framed paintings of the Sacred Heart and of the Blessed Mother.
“I have the medicine for you,” Esperanza said, taking a small brown bottle from her apron pocket and pushing it across the table to him. “I’m sorry it took Irma so long to get it, but her friend has had to be very careful.” Irma was a friend who had a friend who worked in a pharmacy and was sometimes able to get certain medicines for those in need of it—for a price, of course, but a much better price than one would have to pay to the pharmacy even if one had a prescription. “She says this is very strong. She says to take one pill every morning, one at noon, and one at night when you go to bed. The burning should stop in just a day or two, but Irma says to keep taking the pills until they are all gone, even after the burning has stopped.”
“Do you have to take such pills?” he asked.
“No. The doctor is giving me injections.”
“Does he think you are . . . seeing men again?”
Esperanza shrugged.
“I don’t like for him to think that.”
He had not risked going to the clinic himself because it was widely believed that la migra had posted agents there disguised as patients. The radio made daily announcements that such rumors were completely false, that anyone needing medical attention could come to the clinic without fear of being arrested, that no one in the clinic would question any patient’s immigration status. Such announcements were also believed to be tricks of the immigration service.
He had a second helping of everything and drank another bottle of beer. As he finished mopping the mole sauce off his plate with a tortilla, Esperanza excused herself and went to put the children to bed. Raul called goodnight to Chuy from the kitchen door and Maria dashed in to give him a quick hug and kiss. Joselito peeked into the kitchen from behind his mother’s skirt and Chuy winked at him and the boy giggled and ran off down the hall.
While she led them in their prayers he smoked a cigarette and finished his beer. After she tucked them into bed and turned out the lights in the rest of the house, she returned to the kitchen and poured coffee for them both. They sipped in silence but for the music from the radio. After a time she got up and turned down the volume and refilled their cups.
“You are very quiet tonight,” she said.
He smiled at her and shrugged.
“Last night you were not so quiet.”
He felt his smile dissolve and he stared down into his coffee cup. “I am sorry about last night.”
“Do you remember what you said?”
He felt a sudden tightness in his belly and recognized the feeling as alarm but had no idea why he felt it.
“I am told it can be difficult to remember things when one has been so drunk as you were.”
“I am very sorry I came to your house in such disgraceful condition,” he said, glancing at her and then looking into his coffee again. “Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Esperanza said. “A man sometimes gets drunk with his friends. What is more natural?”
Chuy sipped at his cold coffee.
“A man gets drunk,” Esperanza said, “and he says things. You said you love me.”
Chuy glanced at her. He could not read her face. He lit a cigarette and looked into his empty cup and exhaled a long plume of smoke.
“You said you want to marry me,” Esperanza said.
She got up and took their cups to the sink and washed them and dried them and hung them on little hooks under the cupboard. She sat down at the table again and took a cigarette from his pack and lit it.
“Oh, Chuyito,” she said with a small smile. “Don’t look so sad, my son. I will not ask you anything about love. Questions about love are always so foolish. No one truly understands love.”
Chuy looked at her and said nothing. He told himself to think of nothing. It was a trick he had learned. If you thought of nothing, nothing could bother your mind.
“But I want to know,” she said. “Were you telling the truth? Do you truly want to marry me?”
His cigarette burned his fingers and he quickly snuffed it in the ashtray.
“If an illegal marries a legal citizen of this country, then he too becomes a legal citizen. That is the law. Did you know that, Chuy?”
He had heard that such was so, but had not known if it were true. One heard so much that was not true. “Yes,” he said.
“You would no longer have to live in fear of la migra.”
“No,” he said. Think of nothing, he told himself.
“I can be a good wife, Chuy. I would be, for you.”
“I know.” It was not so hard to think of nothing.
“The children love you and respect you. I believe you would be a very good father for them.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you truly want to marry me as you said?”
He looked at her. There was no pleading in her voice or her eyes, nor the slightest show of fear. She blinked slowly and waited for his answer.
“Yes,” he said. And she smiled.
They smoked in silence for a while. He studied the palm of his hand, its lines, its thick scars, the marvelous manner in which it obeyed his silent commands to open and close.
“I am very happy, Chuy,” she said. “But I want you to know that it truly makes no difference to me about love. I give myself to you, Chuy. I give you my family. I give you citizenship in this country. I give you my house where you will always have a home and always be safe. All I want is a good father for my children and a good man in my bed. I ask nothing more. You have my love, of course, but I do not demand yours in return. I can live without love. I have learned to live without it.”
VII
They lay on their backs, their shoulders touching, and smoked in the dark. The sheets smelled of their lovemaking.
“Your sleep last night was troubled,” she said. “You spoke names. Calles. Muria. Others. Tell me: who are those names?”
He watched the tip of her cigarette flare and cast her face in red light and shadow. The names were of men with whom he had sneaked across the Río Grande into the United States one night several months ago. In another lifetime. Calles had been barely more than a boy. Coughing with sickness in the back of the truck bringing them to Florida, coughing until blood gushed from his mouth, and still coughing until he died. They had buried him at the edge of a swamp in a place called Alabama. And Muria. The tough guy from Culiacán. He had punched a field boss who cheated him on his pay and the boss loosed the big dogs on him and the animals ripped his arms open to the bones and tore his crotch bloody before the other bosses got them off him at last and took Muria away—to a hospital they said—and nobody ever saw him again. That had happened two months ago.
“Nobody,” he said. “I don’t know. Who can say why he has the dreams he has?”
They put out their cigarettes and she turned on her side so that her buttocks pressed against him. He reached around and held her breast, then slid his hand down her smooth belly. She worked her hips and in a moment they were joined. Joselito began to whimper in the other bedroom. The child was a poor sleeper and given to frightening visions in the dark. By the time Chuy spent himself and rolled away from her, the boy was crying loudly, and Esperanza got up quickly to tend to him. After a time the boy quieted and then she came back to bed and snuggled against him and murmured endearments against his neck as he caressed the curve of her hip. She soon fell asleep.
He lay awake. The wind had come up and he heard it rushing through the trees. Moonlight swept in and out of the room through the open window above the bed. She lightly snored once, smacked her lips and moved in more snugly against him, and breathed deeply once again. A dog barked persistently in the distance.
The moonlight vanished behind the closing clouds. He could smell the rain coming. He wondered what time it was. They had come to bed around nine o’clock, maybe a little later. The wind-up clock was ticking on the small table on her side of the bed but it was too dark to see it.
Maybe you are no different than good-hearted but foolish Esteban, he thought—damned to living on the thin air of stupid dreams. Maybe you will be poor as always, even here, in this country of milk and money. Maybe there is nothing ahead but defeat and more defeat and still more defeat until you are dead. Maybe.
The dog went silent for a moment and then renewed his barking more furiously than before. Chuy gently disengaged his arm from under Esperanza, paused to see if she would waken, then eased out of bed and scooped up his clothes and carried them to the living room.
He dressed quickly. The wind was stronger now, and he could hear the trees tossing. He groped along the sofa in the dark until he found the shoebox, and then took it into the kitchen and flicked on the little light over the stove. He cut the cord binding and removed the top. The box held a deck of playing cards, an empty key ring, a pair of wool socks, a few seashells, a blue bandanna, and a large jackknife he had won from Muria in a dice game two days before the dogs got him. He took out the socks, bandanna and knife, then closed the box and retied it tightly and set it on the shelf over the sink. He emptied his pockets and placed his money on the counter, spread out the bills and coins, made a quick count and then re-pocketed two dollars. He rolled the bandanna into a rope and tied it around his neck. He picked up the knife and admired the clean feel of its onyx grips, then opened it as he had been taught by Muria—with a hard backhand snap of the wrist, so that the blade appeared almost magically. It was six inches long and honed as finely as a shaving razor.
He folded the blade back into the haft and put the knife in his pocket. He scooped the money off the counter—five dollars and some change—and went back to the bedroom and entered on tiptoe. The woman was lying on her side, her face in dark shadow. He carefully placed the money on the dresser and then quietly opened the closet door and took his hat from its hook.
As he retraced his steps to the bedroom door, she said distinctly, “God will damn you for your stupidity.”
He did not falter in his stride. He went down the hallway and through the living room and out the front door. He walked fast across the yard and turned down the street into the gusting wind as the first drops of rain stung his face and he left behind the house of Esperanza.