Money? Stanley laughs and shakes his head, like he’s talking to a child. Money’s the biggest con of all, chum. It’s only good for making more money. Anything you can pay for, you can steal.
Claudio gives him a skeptical look, wipes his damp palms across his hollow stomach.
What’s the matter? Stanley says. If you don’t believe me, just name something. Anything you want, I’ll be back here with it in less than an hour. I’ll get you two of ’em. Go on and try me.
You will be caught.
I ain’t gonna get caught. C’mon, what do you want? A watch? A fancy watch? I’ll get us a couple of fancy watches. A matching pair.
You should not even go outdoors in the daylight. You need your hair to be cut. You look like a criminal.
Like hell I do, Stanley says. I look like an honest American boy. He pats his matted curls with an involuntary hand.
You look like a monkey. A dirty American monkey.
Claudio grins slyly, steps forward. He tugs a handful of Stanley’s hair; the blanket slips. Stanley flails at Claudio’s arm, shoves him away, pulls him back in, wriggling.
It’s another two days before the rain blows through, by which time Stanley has grown stir-crazy, desperate to wander. He walks Claudio to the traffic circle through the cool morning air, sharing a stolen breakfast of Twinkies and oranges. The bus to Santa Monica pulls up as they arrive; Claudio shoves what’s left of his fruit into Stanley’s sticky fingers and runs ahead. He turns and smiles once he’s crossed Main, and Stanley smiles back. The fleeting dialogue of their faces across the busy street conveys many things, trust not foremost among them. Claudio vanishes behind the coach, reappears in shadow through its windows, settles into a seat. Stanley watches the kid’s sharp-nosed profile—eclipsed by the irregular beat of passengers in the aisle, cars on the street—until the bus rolls away.
He walks back to the oceanfront and crosses the boardwalk to the beach, swallowing the last of the luminous orange wedges, sucking his fingertips clean. He breaks the rind into bits and pitches it to a group of seagulls running in the swash; the gulls take the pieces, fly with them, and drop them into the waves, where other gulls swoop at them in turn. Aerated, the ocean is sky-blue, opaque, dotted with pulses of silver. A row of white surf breaks two hundred feet out, cracking like a heavy whip, hollowing a brief cavern in the foam. Its dyspeptic growl echoes down the waterfront.
Stanley wipes his mouth and smells the citrus oil on his hands, thinking of the winter harvest in Riverside. That first week of work he probably ate his weight in fruit: sweet clementines, brilliant valencias, navel oranges bigger than bocce balls. Last month, after he and Claudio snuck away from the groves and hitched a ride into Los Angeles from a Fuller Brush man, they both swore they’d never touch citrus again. Now they find themselves craving it.
Stanley met Claudio on a mixed picking crew. He didn’t like him much at first. The kid seemed too smooth for harvest work, too cagey, no more born to it than Stanley was himself. Stanley made him out to be on the run from trouble, or maybe just slumming: a prodigal outcast from some mansion on some hill. He also figured Claudio for a sandbagger, feigning ineptitude to duck the worst work, certain his job was secure since the crew boss spoke no Spanish and needed him to translate. They ignored each other at first. But the whites on the crew were all older than Stanley, closemouthed, and the Mexicans seemed to steer clear of Claudio. Eventually the two began to talk.
Stanley never asked questions, so Claudio’s story came out slowly, in no special order. The youngest of thirteen by two mothers, he’d grown up comfortable and invisible in a big house outside Hermosillo. His father was a famous general—he’d fought Pancho Villa at Calaya, the Cristeros in Jalisco—and his brothers left home to become lawyers, bankers, statesmen. Claudio spent his days in the cinema in town, learning English from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, raising his small hands to hide the subtitles. He grew older, made quiet plans to travel north. Claudio told Stanley these stories as they worked, whispered them at night in the bunkhouse, and later, when they slipped into the dark groves to plot escape under moon-silvered citrus leaves, Stanley lay still and watched Claudio’s lips move until he no longer understood anything at all.
He likes Claudio a lot. He’s not sick of having him around. At idle times on his long cross-country drift he’s often wished he had somebody to share his adventures—somebody who’d listen to him, who’d believe the stories he tells himself about himself—and then this oddball Mexican kid came along and seemed to fit the bill. And it’s been great, having a partner. It’s made things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be.