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Back at the door, she squinted at him through dirty lenses. “Simon-pure craziness. I know they ain’t nothing to it, because my own son’s down there. A security guard at EnGene. Anything bad, my Frankie’d a-called me before—”
    Her knobby hand darted at her throat, and he saw her gulp.
    “Before the phones went out.”
    “My brother works there.” He stepped closer to her, into that sharp turpene reek. “Do you know what they do—what they did at EnGene?”
    “Nothing bad. That’s certain sure.” Her head jerked for emphasis. “Frankie calls it bio research. Inventing new farmer sooticals. Frankie says they’ll wipe out cancer and asthma and my neuralgia. I just hope it’s soon!” She pushed a stringy gray wisp off her face. “All hush-hush, Frankie says, because the formulas—” She stopped to stare at the TV. A toothpaste commercial had broken off to show an empty news desk. The logo on the wall behind it read ENFIELD TONIGHT.
    “That crazy drunk, coming back. Claiming he’s the last man alive in Enfield—”

6
    Pancho Torres
     
     
    T he ladies and ladylike men of the Enfield Garden Club had toiled long to enhance “the tiptop lifestyle of the city magnificent,” planting ornamental pines in traffic islands and supporting the antilitter ordinance and phoning the mayor to gripe about weeds in vacant lots, but their civic benevolence had never reached the county jail. Filth festered there. The air conditioning had been broken all summer, while commissions and contractors squabbled over who should pay for repairs. In the baking heat, it was an evil-odored oven.
    Pancho Torres had been there since winter, when it was an evil-odored icebox. Lying naked and sweating through that last night in the solitary cell, he slept little and uneasily, escaping at last into a happy dream of San Rosario, back when he was small and dreams were real. It was morning in the dream. He lay listening to the slap-slap-slap of his mother patting out tortillas and the mouth-wetting smell as they toasted.
    “Hombres! Desayuno!”
    Men! His mother’s voice, calling him to breakfast with his father. No longer would he have to wait with Estrella and Roberto and little Jose until his father and Hector had eaten. For this was his cumpleaños! Today he was seven, and his mother had called him a man!
    She had bought him his first huaraches, made from a worn-out tire, and today he was going to the ejido with his father. Estrella and Roberto would have to take over his old tasks, carrying water to fill the olla and learning to work with their mother, climbing the hills for firewood and grinding masa for the tortillas.
    Barefoot no longer, he would be proud today, walking with his father in the strange-feeling huaraches. On their way out of the barrio and through the plaza and down to the growing crop of frijoles and maiz, people coming home from early mass would see them and know that now he was a man.
    “Hey you, killer spic! Hit the deck!”
    That mocking shout shattered the dream. He woke to the heat and the stinks of old sweat and old piss and old vomit and the dark flat face of Deputy Harris grinning through the bars.
    “Up and at ‘em, greaser boy! Good news for you.” Harris stopped to chuckle. “You’re leaving us today. Your lawyer won’t be down to see you off, but he left a message. Says he’s found no grounds for appeal. Ain’t that just too bad?”
    “A disappointment.” He nodded, trying hard not to show how much he hated Harris and the court-appointed lawyer and every Mexican-hating gringo. “No surprise.”
    The game of life had been rigged against him from the start. He had tried to play it by the hard rules the gringos taught him, against odds he had never really understood. A tantalizing game, because it let him win enough to think he was born lucky, until the mala suerte snatched everything away.
    A cruel gringo game, where his unlucky people always lost.
    “Listen up, greaser boy.” Harris