The man shot Ben a who-you-kidding look and inched down the row. Ben joined him. The Mexican kept an eye on Ben for a few moments and then ignored him. If the gringo wanted to pick strawberries, he seemed to think, let him. The man was right: Most of the berries were rotten, bruised and bleeding juice, but a few remained on each bush. Ben plucked them from the stems and placed them in plastic cases fitted together inside the wheelbarrow. When they were five plants down, Ben returned to the wheelbarrow and rolled it down the line. The man said nothing, just looked Ben in the eye.
“Name’s Ben Wade,” he said, lifting a strawberry from the stem. It was a good one, shining red in the sun. “My grandfather used to work the fields. When he first got here in ’34.” Ben pressed his knees into the sun-bleached dirt, the heat of it burning through his jeans. “He came here when the windstorms hit Kansas and destroyed everything.” He found another good fruit and placed it in the plastic container. The man glanced at the berry, pulled it out.
“No,” the man said, pointing to a tiny mark hidden beneath the green leaves. “This’ll make people sick.”
They went down the row together, five minutes in silence, picking the fruit, tossing the rotten, packaging the few worth selling. Ben barely remembered his grandfather, but he knew the story. The southern Kansas farm. The “black snow” of ’34. Winds billowing dry soil into a two-thousand-foot undulating wall that peppered the clapboard house with pebbles. The family huddled together in the pitch-black living room, the sand scouring their teeth, the dust sucked into their lungs. A milky blind spot in Ben’s father’s eye had attested to the day: The dirt had sandpapered his iris. When the storm finally passed the next morning, the west side of the house was buried to the eaves. The barn leaned east, the whole thing swaying toward collapse. Inside the barn, the chickens clayed still, their beaks open in frozen gasps. The land was drifted with soil; great heaves of it duned the cornfields and sludged the well. Who knew about the horses and the sheep lost out there on the land? And before the month passed, a man in a suit with a police escort stood on the porch with papers saying the bank owned the property.
Ben wondered what it must have been like for his grandfather, a man who held property once, a man with a Model A, a man with chickens and livestock and his own garden, bent in a field like a tenant farmer. Then even that job was taken away by the waves of Mexican immigrants. The anger he must have felt, the rage Ben felt now radiating from this man—rage that breaks down the body, wilting it toward the soil. That’s why Ben didn’t like the raids; he was barely a generation removed from this world.
“Something’s wrong about this boy’s death,” Ben finally said. “Murder or suicide, neither add up.”
“The whole pinche world don’t add up.” The man leaned back on his haunches. “I was awake,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “The wind had me up all night. I had to tie the corner of the ceiling down with packing twine. I didn’t hear anything. Replayed the whole night in my head, wondering if I missed something, wondering if I could have done something, you know, but all I remember is the wind.”
Ben pulled the slip of paper he’d taken from the boy out of his back pocket and showed it to the man.
“You recognize this handwriting?”
The man looked at it, glanced at the mountains, then stared too hard at Ben when he said, “No.”
“Nothing?” Ben said.
“No, man,” he said, his voice aggravated. “Just some writing.”
“I need to talk to his mother,” Ben said, standing up now.
The man said nothing, just kept his face to the ground, his hands working the fruit.
“Entiendes?” Ben said.
The Mexican looked up at Ben. “She’s got other kids,” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I get it,” he said. Natasha was right yesterday: something else to protect.
Ben stood there, watching the man shuffle down the row, the wind whipping bulldozer dust across the fields. The yellow machine tipped an avocado tree, the roots clinging to the soil, the front-loader and tree locked in stasis before the roots ripped loose and the trunk fell.
“They’ll keep the body for a few weeks,” Ben said. “After that they’ll donate it to UC Med School.” Ben pulled his card from his wallet and handed it to the man. “You think of something,” Ben said, “there’s that phone over at the Texaco station.”
The man blinked, found out: Just as Ben thought, this man had made the call about the kid’s body. The Mexican slipped the card into the chest pocket of his sweat-wet shirt.
“There was another boy,” the man said.
“Another?” Ben said. The Mexican wasn’t going to give up the mother, her other children. Ben respected him for it.
“Someone he knew from the school.”
“He went to school?”
“We got him a fake address,” he said. “From someone sympathetic to us.”
“This sympathetic person’s name?”
“You think I’m going to tell you that?”
“I’ll find out.”
“Then find out,” he said. “You can explain to the other kids why they can’t go to school. Kids are allowed, but not without an address.”
“This person is letting others use the address?”
The man glanced at the San Gabriels again. He stayed silent.
“The boy wanted to go to the mountains,” the man said in answer to the question. “I said I’d take him one day.” He shook his head.
“What about this other boy, the one from school?” Ben pressed.
The man glanced at Ben. “I found them together in the orange groves one day,” he said, hesitating. “The boy’s mother’s a good Catholic, tu comprendes?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“I told him I wouldn’t tell her,” he said. “I promised him.”
“You feel guilty now?”
The man nodded. “Promises,” the man said. “Maybe some aren’t worth keeping.” He tossed a disintegrated strawberry into the bucket. “He was a good boy. Confused, but good.”
“You got a name for this school friend?” Ben said.
“Neil.”
“Last name?”
“No,” he said. “Just Neil.”
—
THERE WERE FIVE Neils registered at the high school: Neil Cleffi, Neil Kowolski, Neil Peck, Neil Roth, Neil Wolfe.
As soon as the students were hunkered down in their first-period classes, Ben was in the attendance office, going through the class lists with Helen Galloway, a fifty-something widow who still wore her wedding ring.
“What do you know about these kids?” Ben said. “Any gossip?”
“All business?” she said, arching her eyebrows. “How about a hello? A hug?”
She tugged Ben’s shoulders toward her and forced her affection on him, her hand swiping up and down his back. Behind her, hanging on the wall above the typewriter, was a picture of her dead son, Paul, a Marine dressed in his black formals, his white cap pulled low over his brow; he was killed in the barracks bombing in Beirut in ’83. Helen was the eyes and ears of the school. Most of the stuff that flew under the radar of the rest of the administration, Helen knew about. If you knew kids were absent, it wasn’t difficult to find out why. Years ago, Helen was the one who finally called Ben’s mother when he stopped going to school, spending his days down at the beach, riding waves. She was the only one who called—not the assistant principal of discipline, not his teachers, not the swim coach. He’d hated her for it then.
“I heard about you and Rachel,” she said, her hands on his shoulders and looking up at him. “I’m sorry.”