CHINO HAD BEEN DRIVING SINCE EAGLE PASS, DOWN 83 through Laredo, down through the vacant land of dust-green mesquite and sun glare and bugs rising with the airstream over the hood and exploding in yellow bursts against the windshield. Like somebody was spitting them there.
Paco Rojas said, “Man, I’m in pain.”
Chino was counting the bug stains, more than a dozen of the yellow ones: some kind of bug flying along having a nice time and the next moment sucked into the wind, coming fast up over the hood, and wiped out, the bug not knowing what in the name of Christ happened to him. Maybe they had been butterflies. Seeing the bugs suddenly, there wasn’t time to tell what they were. Chino looked at the speedometer and up again, touching his sunglasses at the bridge. He was holding between eighty and eighty-five down the two-lane highway that rose and dropped through the emptiness—brush hiding the river somewhere off to the right—passing no signs, no cars, no people, only, every few miles, silver litter barrels that were lined with plastic bags.
“You hear me? I got to piss.”
Paco Rojas, in the back seat, had slept since Eagle Pass, stretched out belly up, mouth open, eyes hidden beneath thick sagging brows, a face that had been hit often and turned to leather, an ex-welterweight body turning light-heavy. When he sat up he hunched over to rest his arms on the front seat and stare through the windshield.
“All you got to do is stop the car.”
“We need gas,” Chino said. “I’m not going to stop twice.”
“How long you think it take me, an hour? Man, I got to go now.”
Maybe they were all different kinds of bugs, but all bugs were yellow inside. Like all people were red inside. Maybe. He’d never thought about it before. Chino’s gaze held on the stained windshield as he waited for a bug to come over the hood.
THE TEXACO STATION ATTENDANT WORE A DARK green shirt with the name Gil stitched over the pocket. He was big for a Mexican, or a Mexican American, or a Chicano or a Latin or whatever a dark-skinned man with a little mustache might be called in this town in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. BENSON, POP. 1,320. REDUCE SPEED TO 40. Though if a car went through at eighty there would be nothing on the street to hit. The station attendant was inside, breaking open a roll of quarters and letting them slide into the cash register. When the bell rang and he saw the Mercury—brown one, a couple of years old—rolling up to the pumps, he called out, “I got it.” The sound of a pneumatic wrench, coming from the attached service area, stopped and then started again.
The car was a mess. It had been traveling at least two, three days, yes, California plates, a couple of guys getting out he had never seen before. Chicanos. That surprised him. But not migrants. Sport shirts, nice pants kind of tight and low on their hips, nice shoes, or boots they looked like. The one with the sunglasses stood looking around with his hands on his hips. The other one, tough-looking guy, said, “Where you take a leak at?” coming toward the station, passing the attendant and not waiting. The attendant pointed and said over his shoulder, “Around the side. The key’s in the office, on a board.” Then to the other one, nice-looking guy in the yellow sport shirt and sunglasses, he said, “Fill it up?”
Chino nodded, not looking at the attendant but at the station. “You got any beer?”
“Up the street,” the attendant said. “Place has a sign, Hi-Life.”
Chino thought about it, staring at the deserted highway through town, at the frame and adobe storefronts and rusting signs. There were telephone poles in a line down the street but no sign of trees. Beyond the buildings, across the sweep of brush country to the horizon, there were no tall stands of trees. Chino walked over to the station and got himself a Sprite out of the machine. He stood there drinking it, one hand on his hip. Paco Rojas came around the corner; he threw the key with the wooden board inside the office, landing it on the desk, then came over and pulled a Pepsi out of the machine.
“We’ll get some beer down the road,” Chino said.
“I need something else than beer. I can’t sleep no more.”
“You looked like you were sleeping.”
“On and off. I should’ve brought some more downs.”
There was a sound of metal ringing on cement. Paco turned to the entrance of the service area to watch a mechanic changing a tire on a pickup truck. Chino didn’t look around. He was staring out at the highway again, south through town, wondering where thirteen hundred and twenty people could be hiding. Slow to twenty-five. And a stoplight at the intersection. They were proud of their stoplights in places like this. Saturday night the people came out and put chairs along the curb and watched the cars stop as the light turned red.
“Five-eighty,” the station attendant said. “You’re all right under the hood.”
“You get the windshield?”
“Yes sir, all the bugs off.”
Chino handed the attendant a bill and followed him into the office. “You know”—he was going to ask him about the yellow-gut bugs, but he changed his mind and said, “How far is Trinity?”
The station man looked up from making change. “That where you going?” When Chino didn’t answer but stared at him, the attendant said, “Twenty-three miles, straight down the road.”
Paco came into the doorway. “Have him take some Fritos out of that. Some peanuts.”
Beyond Paco, a car was pulling into the station: an old-model Ford sedan that was faded blue-purple and rusting out and needed a muffler. Chino watched the people getting out, moving slowly, stretching, and looking around. There seemed to be more of them than the car could hold. The station attendant was saying, “That’s not such a good place to go right now. You read about it, uh? The strike trouble?” There were six of them, four men in work clothes and two women, migrants, looking around and trying to seem at ease. One of the women took a kerchief from her head and, raising her face in the sunlight, closing her eyes, shook her hair from side to side, freeing it to the slight breeze that came across the highway stirring sand dust. Two of the men went to the pop machine, digging coins out of their pockets. The mechanic came out of the service area wiping his hands on his shirt, squinting as he passed from shade into sunlight. He said in Spanish, “How much do you want?”
Chino heard one of the men say give them a dollar’s worth, please. The woman with the kerchief was approaching the entrance now: a woman who could be twenty-five or forty, a thick body encased in dark slacks, a man’s shirt, and white earrings set against dark hair and skin. She said, past Paco in the doorway, “Is there a key you have to the Ladies’ room?” Paco turned to look her up and down.
As Paco looked away, the attendant, holding Chino’s change, began to shake his head. “No, it’s broken. You can’t use it. Go down the road someplace.”
Both were speaking Spanish. The woman said, “Maybe it’s all right now. Have you looked at it? Sometimes they become all right without fixing.”
The attendant continued to shake his head. “I’m telling you it’s broken. Take my word for it and go someplace else, all right?”
“What about the other one?” the woman said. “The Men’s room. She and I can use it and then the men.”
“That one too,” the attendant began.
“Listen,” the woman said, “we go in separately, you understand? The women, then the men. So you don’t have to call the police and say we’re doing it in there.”
“I can call the police right now.” The attendant’s voice was louder, irritated. “I’m telling you both toilets are broken. You got to go someplace else.”
“Where do you go?” the woman said. She waited a moment before glancing over her shoulder, feeling the strength of the others behind her. “No, he doesn’t go, this man. Never. That’s why he’s full of shit.”
The migrants grinned and some of them laughed out loud. The mechanic, standing near them holding a dollar bill, did not smile. He walked into the service area. When he appeared a moment later in the side doorway of the office that opened on the service area, he was holding a tire iron.
Chino said to the attendant who was holding his change, “When did the toilet break, since we got here?”
“Listen.” The attendant lowered his voice and spoke in English now. “I got to do what I’m told. Like anybody. The boss say don’t let no migrants in the toilet. He say, I don’t care they dancing around they can taste it, don’t let them in the toilet. They go in there mess up the place, piss all over, take a bath in the sink, use all the towels, steal the toilet paper, man, it’s like a bunch of pigs were in there. Place is filthy—I got to clean up after.”
“Let them use it,” Chino said.
“I tell you what my boss said. Man, I can’t do nothing about it.”
“What are they supposed to do?”
“Go out in the bushes, I don’t know. Mister, you have an idea how many migrants stop here?”
“I know what they can do,” Chino said. He looked from the attendant to the woman with the white earrings who was watching him, waiting. “Hey, he says for all of you to come in here.” When the woman didn’t move, Chino said, “Come in here, will you please?”
As she stood in the doorway, afraid or not understanding, Paco Rojas took her arm and brought her inside, moving her past Chino and the attendant to make room for the others. Paco looked at the mechanic standing in the side door to the service area. He continued to stare at the mechanic as he released the doorstop with his foot and let the glass-paneled door swing closed in the man’s face. The mechanic put his hand out, but he stepped back at the last moment to stand removed from them, holding the tire iron, watching dumbly through the glass.
Chino was looking out the main door. “Come on, all of you,” he said in Spanish. “The man wants you to come in here, out of the sun. Come on.” He waved his hand to hurry them.
But when they came they filed in hesitantly, bunching inside the doorway, not coming too far, looking at Chino and then at the attendant and then at the woman who was one of them and perhaps understood what was going on.
“Listen,” the attendant said to Chino, “when you work for somebody you got to do what you’re told, right? Man, I like it working here. I don’t want to go out and pick onions and cabbage. This is good work.”
Chino was looking at the migrants, at the solemn Hispano-Indian faces and straw cowboy hats and sun-weathered shirts. “Where are you from?”
One of them said, finally, “Near San Antonio. We come here for the melons.”
“How much you work for?”
The man seemed surprised. “I don’t know. Whatever they pay.”
“You hear about the strike?”
“Something but not much. We hear people are still working.” The man frowned now, concerned. “Isn’t it true?”
“Maybe this one can tell you,” Chino said, looking at the attendant. “He wants you to come in and be comfortable.”
“I want them out of here!” The attendant slammed the cash register closed. “Right now.”
“He says he’s sorry about the toilet breaking down,” Chino said.
“They always broken,” the woman with the white earrings said. “Every place they keep the broken toilet locked so nobody steal it.”
“Listen, I don’t say they can’t use them,” the attendant said. “You think I own this place. I work here.”
“He says he works here,” Chino said.
The woman nodded. “We believe it.”
“And he says since the toilets aren’t functioning you can use something else.” Chino’s gaze moved over the office.
“What are you doing?” The attendant reached out toward Chino’s arm, then, realizing it, dropped his hand quickly. “Listen, they can’t use something else. They got to get out.”
“He says use the wastebasket if you want.”
“God Almighty, you’re crazy! I’m going to call my boss. Or you want me to call the police?”
“Try and hold onto yourself,” Chino said. “All right? You don’t own this place. You don’t have to pay for broken windows or nothing. What do you give a shit?”
The phone was on the desk in front of him, but the Texaco gas station man with Gil over his pocket, who had never been farther away from this place than San Antonio, hesitated now, afraid to reach for the phone or look at it. What would happen if he did? Christ, what was going on here? California Chicano hotshot dude comes in and tells people they can use his wastebasket. Guy he never saw before. Cold, quiet guy. And the other one—
Chino’s gaze moved from the attendant to the migrants. “He says use the wastebasket. It will be his pleasure.”
They were grinning now, the huddled group, beginning to move and shift their stance and glance at each other, confident of this man for no reason they knew of but feeling it, enjoying it, stained and golden smiles softening their faces and bringing life to their eyes, expressions that separated them as individuals able to think and feel, each one a person now, each one beginning to laugh now at the gas station man and his wastebasket and his boss and his goddamn locked toilets he could keep locked or shove up his ass for all they cared. God, it was going to be something to tell about.
But something else to do. To accept the man’s gesture of invitation—arm extended, open hand pointing to the wastebasket—and walk over there and use it, a dark green metal container that would hold everybody’s, hell, it would hold a gallon from everybody. But to actually use it—
Chino frowned, playing to the group. “You don’t know how, is that it?” He waited. As their smiles began to appear again he walked over to the basket. “I can show most of you.” He paused then and kicked the metal basket lightly. “See. Very good construction. Guaranteed.” He glanced over at the group again. “But a couple of you I don’t think I can teach.”
The women giggled, grinning, and the men followed, an audience hanging on to each line and gesture.
Their laughter stopped abruptly as Chino turned his back to them. They waited. The migrants, the station attendant, Paco Rojas, the mechanic watching through the glass, none of them moved. In the silence that lengthened they could hear a fly buzzing and stunting against the sunlit window. No one looked at the fly.
Paco Rojas said, “Man, you going to do it or not?”
“Shhhh!” The sound, a woman’s voice, came from the group of migrants.
The silence began to settle again, but it was momentary, a few seconds, broken abruptly by the deep drilling sound of Chino’s stream striking metal, as if a signal, and at once the migrants were yelling, cheering, laughing, warm and happy and satisfied, relieved, the women giggling, their eyes shining, still hearing the drone coming from the wastebasket. The gas station attendant, Gil, picked up the key attached to the wooden board and handed it to the smiling woman with the white earrings.
BEFORE THEY HAD EACH FINISHED A CAN OF JAX THE flat view of sand and scrub had given way to sweeps of green on both sides of the highway, citrus and vegetable farms, irrigation canals, and, in the distance, rows of slender towering palm trees that bordered the fields and marked the back roads. In the bottomland of the river valley it was hot early summer: midafternoon now, bright and still and soundless outside the air-conditioned Mercury sedan.
“See,” Paco said, “right there on the counter they had all these cans of oil and stuff, on the shelves, you know? So if the guy’d started to come in, I mean if he’d touched the door, I’d have taken one of the cans and put it through the glass, right in the son of a bitch’s face.” Paco grinned. He was in the front seat now, reaching down between his knees to pop the tab off a can of beer.
“You want another one?”
“We’re almost there.” Chino’s gaze was fixed on the road.
“So, you want a beer or not?”
“I want to eat and go to bed.”
“When’re we going to see this guy?”
“I don’t know. We look around first.”
Paco took a swallow of beer. “I got to get me some downers today or I never sleep. Man, if I have to go to Mexico.” He held the can to his mouth again until it was drained, rolled his window down, and threw the can out as far as he could.
Then there were billboards in the fields advertising political candidates and car dealers. Then signs for motels and banks. Highway cafés and gas stations and drive-ins, taco-burger stands, a field of junked cars and hubcaps gleaming on the board front of a garage. A stucco motor court from out of the past stood in a grove of palm trees. Signs in front of old buildings announced used clothes, ROPA USADA. Railroad tracks crossed the highway and turned south to run parallel with the road, beyond a bank of weeds. A silver water tower against the sky said TRINITY—HOME OF THE BRONCOS. And now, on the right, warehouses and loading sheds lined the train tracks, platformed old buildings that bore the names of farms and produce companies.
“We got a cop on us,” Chino said.
Paco twisted around, hunching behind his arm on the backrest. He studied the white car coming up on them. “How you know it’s a cop?”
“He’s been there a while. Now he’s making his move.”
“I don’t see any light on top.”
“It’s a cop,” Chino said.
His gaze dropped from the mirror to the road ahead. There was no traffic coming this way. Chino flicked down the direction signal and swung left off the highway, taking his time, letting the car roll to a stop in front of a chicken and ribs carryout place.
“How about roast chicken? Buck and a half?”
“He’s pulling in,” Paco said.
Chino heard the car approach on his side and skid to a stop in the gravel. He could feel the white car about ten feet away but kept his eyes straight ahead, reading the signs that covered the carryout place.
Paco was facing him, hunched down to look through the side window. “Guy must’ve called them.”
“Take it easy. You want chicken or ribs?”
“Checking the license number now, see if it’s stolen. You ain’t going to find it there, buddy.”
Chino looked over: at the black-and-gold shield on the car door and the inscription BRAVO COUNTY DEPT. OF PUBLIC SAFETY, then at the man inside who was wearing a neat and official-looking cowboy hat, in profile, studying a clipboard that rested on the steering wheel.
“Sits there in his hat,” Chino said. “Takes all the time he wants.”
Squinting, Paco’s eyes were almost hidden beneath his heavy, scarred lids. “Maybe he don’t want us. No—he’s getting out.”
The Bravo County trooper came around the back of his car toward them: beige Stetson and sunglasses, tan pants and shirt, a revolver holstered in a bullet belt, and cowboy boots—a big man, middle-aged, slow-moving, solemnly looking over their car. As he reached the window, Chino was reading the signs again.
“You get french fries and coleslaw with the chicken.”
“Let me see your operator’s license.”
“Or they got barbecue, if you don’t want chicken or ribs.”
“I think chicken,” Paco said.
Chino nodded. “That’s what I want.”
The trooper’s solemn, deadpan expression did not change. “If you have a driver’s license I want to see it, if you haven’t, I want you to step out of the car.”
Chino looked up at him. “What for?”
“All right, get out.”
“I don’t know who you are. If you’re a cop or a cowboy or what.”
He stared at Chino a moment before stepping aside and motioning to his car. “You can’t read, Pancho, that says Bravo County Department of Public Safety. You spell it backwards it says Police. I can ticket you or I can arrest you, and if you give me any more mouth I’m going to throw your ass in jail. Now do you want to step out of the car or do you want me to pull you out?”
Chino looked at Paco. “Man wants us to get out.”
“What did we do?”
“I don’t know. He don’t say.”
“Maybe he tell us if we get out.” Under his breath Paco said, “The son of a bitch. The hick cop fuzz son of a bitch.”
“Both of you out this side,” the trooper said. He took Chino’s driver’s license and registration, looked at Paco and said he wanted some identification from him too, then motioned them over to the white car and made them lean against it with outstretched hands while he felt the legs of their pants.
“Listen, you got the wrong ones,” Paco said. “We don’t do nothing. What do people think, drive along, see us like this?”
Chino kept his mouth shut and let the guy search him.
There was a shriek of rubber on pavement close behind them on the highway. A white Olds 98 dipped its hood with the braking sound, hit the gravel, and slid to a dust-hanging stop only a few feet behind the Mercury. The Olds bore no markings, but the two men who got out wore Bravo tan outfits, creased Stetsons, and sidearms, serious and official, on the job: one with trooper sunglasses and his hat straight and low over his eyes; the other an older man, in his late fifties, moving stiffly, hitching his pants up and holding his belly in.
The trooper waiting with Chino and Paco touched the brim of his hat and said, “Captain.”
“What’ve you got, Bob?”
“I got a couple of Franciscos here. Francisco Rojas.” The trooper was looking at their identification, reading from it. “And the other one, the driver, Francisco de la Cruz. Both of them live in Los Angeles.”
The captain looked over at the Mercury. “What about the car?”
“He’s got the registration, one in the yellow shirt. In his name. But I ain’t looked in the car good yet.”
“What’s the charge, Bob?”
“Couple miles north of here,” Bob Almont said, “I was behind these two, pacin’ them, and seen them throw a beer can out’n the highway.”
Paco straightened, starting to turn from the car. “You bust us for throwing away a beer can?”
Bob Almont grabbed Paco by the shirt collar and shoved him back against the car. “I tell you to move, Pancho? Nobody said anything to you.”
Over his shoulder, looking at the officer, Chino said, “I thought I was Pancho.”
Paco said, “A beer can, man, like we rob a gas station or something.”
Captain Frank McKellan, stiff and square shouldered, superintendent of the County Department of Public Safety, an appointed official, a member of the department thirty-seven years, Fourth of July parade leader on a Palomino, president of the Bravo County Gun Club, came over to them. He said, “You seen the litter barrels, didn’t you?”
Chino turned his head but couldn’t see the man, directly behind him now. “Painted silver,” Chino said.
“That’s right.” Captain McKellan nodded slowly. “We go to some expense to put those barrels all along the road. You know what it costs the taxpayers? Quite a bit. You people come along, you don’t pay any taxes. You come down here and work but you don’t pay any taxes. Maybe if you did you wouldn’t throw your cans and beer bottles out on the road and in the fields. I had a man couple months ago doing some irrigation for me, cut his hand on a broken bottle somebody heaved out in the field ’stead of puttin’ in a litter barrel. Man had to get his hand stitched up and cost him a half day’s work.”
Jesus Christ, Chino said, inside, to himself, but hearing it clearly.
“See,” Captain McKellan went on, “the man that got cut was a Latin, like yourselves, not an Anglo. You see my point? You throw your trash on the highway it’s a burden to the taxpayers, but you’re also hurtin’ yourselves.”
“We won’t do it again,” Chino said. “We promise.”
“I want to believe you,” Captain McKellan said. “You look like an intelligent boy, you’re clean, must’ve worked hard to buy that automobile.”
“Yes sir, worked very hard.”
“You come down here to pick?”
“Yes sir, melons.”
“How come you’re not workin’ in California?”
“Well, just for a change. We go back for the grapes end of July.”
“There’s some of you people around here don’t believe in work,” Captain McKellan said. “Sit on their ass and expect to get paid for it. You’re willing to work you can get all you want right now. Don’t pay no attention to the union.” He paused then. “You hear about the strike?”
“We heard something.”
“Stay away from those people, do your work, you can make yourselves fifty, sixty bucks a week.”
Christ, Chino said to himself, and out loud, “Yes sir, that sounds pretty good.”
“Bob,” the captain said then, “you write up the ticket yet? For litterin’?”
“Was just about to when you pulled up.”
“Well—they come all the way from California, Bob, to work—let’s let ’em off with a warning this time.”
Bob Almont nodded. “It’s all right with me. I mentioned though I hadn’t looked in their car good.”
Chino waited, holding himself away from the police car, staring at the ground in front of his feet.
“Well, I don’t know,” the captain said finally. “They’re not suspects. I think we’ll let ’em go. They can get a job and a few hours of work in before the day’s over. I know Stanzik’s hiring, been looking for pickers since the strike started. You know where Stanzik Farms’s at?”
“No sir, but I guess we can find it.”
“Tell ’em I sent you. Captain McKellan. You’ll get a job.”
“Yes sir,” Chino said. “We appreciate it very much.”