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of their own country where they belonged.
    “No. Soy ilegal,” Salvador answered unflinchingly, looking at Place with recalcitrant eyes.
    “¿Mojado, huh?” Place responded.
    “¡No!” Salvador said, adding a tone of denial to his expression. “Mojado, no. Alambrado.”
    Place was bewildered. From his prior knowledge, as he had been told his father had done, he assumed that the illegal point of entrance for those who migrated south to north was made by swimming across the river; that was how the term “wet” or “wetback” was explained to him by older brothers. He had also assumed that even if someone crossed into the United States through California, Arizona, or parts of New Mexico where there is no river to wet one’s back, there was still a wetness or aspect of being mojado and thereby illegal.
    Salvador, understanding the jumbled expression his response created, read Place’s confusion. He explained to him that if one crosses over into Arizona, say, as he had, one would have to cross over, under, or through a wire fence or a fence made of alambre. So the correct term was alambrado. Once he prepositionally made it past the wire fence, Salvador told Place as he shifted his explanation to the story of his arriving, there were miles and miles of desert to cross, and the crossing had to be made on “la carretera del diablo,” the dangerous Devil’s Highway. “Es muy peligroso,” he warned Place as if some day he would take such a journey. He saw human skeletons in the desert as he worked his way to a secret meeting point where he was transported north in the trailer of a furniture truck with a few dozen other paisanos. Three flesh-baked and thirsty days later, he was in Washington state picking apples. From Washington, the truck smuggled the work crew down to Oregon, and from Oregon down to the Sacramento Valley and then over to the abundant vineyards of Sonoma county.
    In Mexico, Salvador continued as he wound his way backwards with a brief autobiography, he had worked with his family’s few cattle and attended school when he was not attending to his devoted mother and useless father. But he did finish his education all the way through the eighth grade, he added with a flourish of pride. And sensing that Place or most people who looked at him saw only an ignorant immigrant, Salvador stated, “No soy estúpido. No más tengo la cara.”
    Salvador laughed and waited for Place to understand his joke. Salvador also revealed that he had worked at racetracks near the frontera because the border and what lay north of it interested him. He slept in stalls and cared for horses whose lives seemed to be worth more than his own. He knew horses, but he did not know the other side of the fence. On the day he thought was his birthday—he wasn’t sure about the exact day, and he really was only close on his exact age, but time was abstract and subjective anyway, he explained, and much more of a concern to Americanos as was money—he made the crossing with a memorable hangover, a modest savings, a jug of water, and a package of corn tortillas.
    One day when he was walking back to his culvert that ran under a bridge and into Miwok Creek, and which was home to him and a few others, Salvador exhibited to the owners of Thundering Thoroughbreds Ranch his talent with horses when he caught a high-strung thoroughbred that had escaped, and rode it onto the ranch bareback using his belt as a halter. He left the culvert for the small help house which he shared with three other ranch hands and worked full-time and year round.
    He didn’t want to leave the ranch that had been his home for almost two years. He didn’t want to go back to Mexico, but he had no idea where he would be going. He told Place that he had petitioned Jacqueline and Mickey for work by gesticulating shoveling motions, raking movements, and lifting pantomimes, but they declined the request. Then he scoffed and predicted that Jacqueline and Mickey would not be