“You want to get a bite tonight?” she said. “I know a great quiche place.”
He laughed; he got the stupid joke. “And you know how I like quiche.”
“The body needs sustenance.”
He looked at his watch. “I gotta get some paperwork done at the station.”
She crushed the cigarette against the leg of the metal table. “Yeah, all right.”
He leaned forward, put his hands on the table between them. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to call,” he said, his voice quiet. “It’s just…”
She touched his right hand, stroked the edge of it with her thumb. She could feel the heat rise in his palms. “Forget about it, Ben,” she said. “I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
6
AT 6:17 THE NEXT MORNING, Ben was climbing out of the drainage ditch that moated the strawberry field. He’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt—no khakis, no button-down, no necktie. He wanted to blend in. The western half of the field was empty, yellow police tape fluttering in the wind, a black-and-white parked on the street, keeping an eye on things. Beyond the black-and-white, a front-loader toppled an avocado tree, the gnashing of its mechanics carried in the wind. There were at least two dozen pickers working the eastern half of the field. From this distance they looked like foraging animals, backs bowed in the sun, stripping the plants clean of fruit.
As soon as he stepped into the field, a picker shoved two fingers between his lips and whistled. Two women bolted, dropped their buckets and fists of strawberries, and stumbled down the rows. Others shuffled away, glancing to see if Ben was in pursuit, but three others simply ignored him and bent again to the fruit. Ben recognized one of them.
“Right back at it, huh?” Ben said, when he got to him.
The Mexican stripped three strawberries from a plant, looked at them closely, and tossed the fruit into a bucket that was slung over his shoulder.
“You all need to eat, right?” the picker said.
“I hate strawberries.”
“Me, too.”
Ben watched the other pickers scurry into the cardboard houses, a woman snatching a half-naked boy who was pissing in the street. Suddenly the camp seemed deserted, a jumble of discarded boxes bleached by the sun.
“You’re legal, right?” Ben said. “That’s why you didn’t run?”
“I’ve got papers,” he said, “if you need to see them. They usually don’t ask until later, though.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not those guys,” Ben said. “I don’t give a damn, really. There’s a demand, you fill it.”
Ben plucked a strawberry off the vine and held it in his palm. It was bruised, and a splotch of pulp smudged his fingers.
“The whole field is infested,” the man said. “Black rot.”
Ben dropped the berry and wiped his fingers on his pants leg.
“Foreman wants us out here anyway,” the man said. “They’ll still sell it.”
The man shuffled down the row and started working on the next shrub. The hunch of his back suggested a warped spine, muscles broken down from years of labor, but his hands moved with a gentle dexterity and the fruit seemed to leap off the stem into his fingers.
“You know the boy, right?” Ben said. “El muchacho. You knew him?”
Ben watched the man’s jaw go hard, grinding his teeth. A shadow swept across the plants. Ben looked up, hawk wings passing in front of the white sun.
“The woman in the corner of the room yesterday,” Ben said. “The one crying. Is she the mother?”
“No se,” the man said.
“You don’t know?” he said. “Or you won’t say?”
The man stood and grimaced. Nose-to-nose with him, Ben saw that they were close in age. In the darkness of the cardboard house the other morning he had looked older, but in the early-morning light Ben saw that they could have gone to school together.
“Look. You people either don’t give a damn,” the man said, mimicking Ben’s inflection, “or you give a damn. But no one cares, me entiende?”
Yeah, he got it.
“Shit happens out here and you all just stay over there”—he looked toward the houses lining the field—“where it’s all nice and clean.”
“I care what happened to this kid,” Ben said. “If I didn’t, I’d be at home, feet up, drinking a cerveza.”
The man thumbed the brim of his hat off his brow; a line of paler skin creased his forehead.
“You know,” he said, “busting out a Spanish word here and there don’t mean nothing. You’re still a gringo cop, cerveza or no cerveza.”
“Where were you Tuesday night, two A.M.?” Ben asked.
“I was faceup on my cot, watching the wind shake the walls.”
“Anybody vouch for you?”
“You gonna play this TV-cop bullshit with me?”
“I think I want to see those papers now.”
The man broke his stare and looked off toward the mountains in the east, hunks of thrust-up land hovering above the band of smog.
“I knew the boy,” the Mexican finally said. “I liked him.” The man wouldn’t look at Ben, just stared at the suspended peaks. A man doesn’t look you in the face, he’s being honest, embarrassed by his feelings. One of those general truths Ben had learned over the years. “He was a good boy. Gave us hope.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Hope, you know? That thing you come to this shitty place for?” He kept staring at the mountains, a crust of snow on the tip of Mount San Antonio. “You been there?” the man said, nodding toward the peaks.
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“What’s it like?” he said. “What’s snow like?”
“Cold,” Ben said.
The man laughed cynically and bent to the strawberries again.
“The mother the one who can vouch for you?”
“No,” the Mexican said. “My wife, but we got kids, and you’ll have to arrest me before I let you near them.” The man weeded a clump of dandelion, garnishing the muck in the bucket. “Now I gotta get to work. They’re weighing at four-thirty.”
Ben nodded, watching the front-loader flatten the avocado grove. Maybe the man had papers but his wife was illegal. Talk to the police, you get sent back. It was the law, when certain men wanted to use it. The gangs in East L.A. had exploited this, used the law as another form of terror. No snitching or we’ll call immigration, and they’ll dump your pinche ass on the other side of the fence.
“Your back isn’t good,” Ben said to the man. “You seen a doctor?”