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raised his taunting voice. “You can pack your things and kiss your girl good-bye. You’ll be riding upstate this afternoon. They’ll be hooking up your chair.”
    “Okay, Mister.” He looked hard at Harris, taking care not to let his Spanish accent show. “I’ll be ready.”
    An endless morning after Harris was gone. He had no girl to kiss good-bye, no sign of sympathy from anybody. The Anglo prisoners all despised him, perhaps the blacks and Latinos too. With nothing to pack, nothing at all to do, he walked the narrow cell and sat slumped on the narrow bunk, hating all gringos.
    Most of all, even more than Deputy Harris, he hated the gringo marijuaneros who had put him there. Gringos who didn’t want Mexicans to pilot airplanes or make money or have beautiful women. Ugly cabrones who called him and his people bungling fools, who laughed at them and cheated them and bullied them. Those jealous rivals had helped set up the sting, to get him and Hector and all their compadres out of the way.
    His one visitor that last morning was another hateful gringo, a fat Protestant preacher who came with a guard to stand outside his cell and beg him to kneel and pray for one final precious chance to escape the roaring fires of hell.
    “Believe with me!” The preacher’s pale eyes lifted toward his Lord. “Cast yourself into the loving arms of Jesus. I beg you, brother! Open your damned soul to admit His holy light. Believe and receive—”
    “That’s enough.” He cut the preacher off. “I’ve believed too many lies.” He turned to the guard. “Take him away.”
    His lunch came on a paper plate, a heavy gray slab of what the jail cook called meat loaf. A dead cockroach lay on top of it, legs up. Thanks, he thought, to Deputy Harris.
    It was Harris again who came with two guards to shackle his wrists and escort him down the corridor, past those stares of silent scorn and out to his cage in the police car. Two deputies drove him away.
    “Your final ride, killer boy! To something hotter than your cucaracha pie!”
    Harris stood waving. Glad to have no more of him, Torres moved his arms to ease the pressure of the handcuffs and sank into bitterness. Tierra de Diós, his brother Hector used to call it. God’s country. So it had seemed through all his hard childhood years in San Rosario. He remembered his father struggling to sound out the letters from fabulous Los Angeles.
    The city of the angels. Letters from his mother’s brother, Eduardo, who had become el tío rico. Later, those from Hector, who had gone north to share Eduardo’s good fortune and discovered enough to begin coming back to land his own airplane on the narrow airstrip the marijuaneros had made in the rocky campo above San Rosario.
    At last, when he had grown old enough, Hector had taken him north in the roaring airplane, all the way to la tierra de diós. There, sharing Hector’s buena suerte, he had learned to shoot guns and pilot aviones and date stunning gringo girls.
    God’s country, en verdad till those envious gringos set up la picadura. Their poison sting. Eduardo had posted a million-dollar bond and gone back to buy the hacienda where he had been a peon. Left with nothing for the mocking gringo lawyers, he and Hector had gone to prison, sentenced to twenty years. Hector died climbing the wall. Outside and on the run, but very little luckier, he had jumped off a freight train on a bleak winter night and found himself in Enfield.
    Penniless and shivering, he tossed a rock through a pawnshop window. The owner had left no cash, but he found a gun and tried a 7 Eleven for cash. The counter girl screamed. He waved the unfamiliar gun. It exploded. And now, many years and many miles and many disappointments since that first one, the day he discovered that digging weeds out of the ejido strip was really no fun at all, he was on his way to die.
    A dull concussion roused him. He felt it jolt the car. Distorted voices on the radio began squawking code