"Where are you going here in el norte? To work, chingaso," he said.

The men were quiet. The coyote said, "Algodon? Fresas? Naranjas? Uvas?" He pointed a different way for each, a cigarette now held in his fingers. Cotton. Strawberries. Oranges. Grapes. Serafina watched Florencio.

"Do you even know?" The coyote's voice was fast now, harsh. "Or you're just going to wander around? Hope you find work? Shit. Everyone from Oaxaca is here. From Zacatecas and Nayarit and Michoacan. You better know where you're going if you want money. You, payaso?" He pointed the cigarette at Florencio.

"Naranjas," Florencio said finally, glancing at Serafina. She knew he didn't like to talk. He said you couldn't trust anyone once you were here.

"You say you been here before," the coyote said. "Where did you work?"

Florencio rested his hands on his knees, like he was displaying his nubbled skin on purpose. "San Diego. Santa Barbara. Santa Maria. Guadalupe."

"En Mexico?" Guillermo said. Serafina knew he hadn't been here before.

"No. In California," Florencio said.

"Guadalupe?" Guillermo whispered. "A city here?"

"Yes. Fresas." Florencio looked at the coyote.

"Fucking fresas," the coyote said. "I'm so tired of playing cat and mouse with la migra. Every day. If los gabachos don't want you Oaxaquenos to pick the fresas, why did they plant so many this year? Fucking stupid to run around like this. Hiding. They want you to work your pinche indio asses off anyway. They must eat fresas every fucking day."

It was quiet for a time, the men only chewing and smoking. Serafina felt their eyes on her when she handed them the last sweet bread. She didn't sit down again. In the yellow light dropping from the trees, she saw now the burned grass and earth beneath their feet. A fire had swept through this place. The soil was charred black, the tree trunks webbed charcoal.

Serafina stood up then, and walked carefully the other way, far from the men's voices. She paused to hear if anyone said her name. No one did. When she reached out to steady herself against a blackened tree, the puzzle-bark smelled acrid, and she thought suddenly of the gods her mother and uncle had always prayed to outside-clouds and sun and wind. All the santos' names had just rolled off Florencio's tongue. San Diego. Santa Barbara. She remembered now. California was full of saints, all dead, the green freeway signs like their tombstones.

Dizzy, she made her way to a charred pine tree near a steep cliff. She didn't want to pull down her jeans anywhere near the men. Serafina felt the barrettes sharp against her leg. She touched the blackened bark, bent down, and relieved herself. Then she zipped the jeans with clumsy fingers, turned and saw the two faces, mouths stretched open, gaping, empty eye sockets staring like little black caves.

She screamed, over and over, and Florencio came running. The burned men lay tangled in the pocket of earth between the tree and the cliff. Their skin stretched tight and black over their bones, shiny and hard as the tree bark. Their faces were silver in the morning light, like metal masks.

The coyote said behind her, "Campfire got out of control last month. The whole mountain burned. They got caught sleeping. Or they were just stupid. Stupid indios."

Florencio took her wrist and helped her over the stones. He stayed close behind her when they began walking. "Don't worry," he whispered. "We are closer now. We are almost there."

She didn't answer. Her feet throbbed inside her shoes, and with each step, pain knuckled up her back. Descanso, he had said. Someone had given these places Spanish names so long ago. Everywhere. Descanso meant rest. Soon they would rest.

"Answer me," he said, behind her again. Florencio was just ahead, ducking through the brush. The coyote's hand twitched the end of her braid.

"I am going to my brother," she said. "Florencio is his compadre."

"You're going if I take you to the truck." His voice was pleasant and soft, like a priest's murmur near the altar. "You're going to fuck me a hundred times first, if I want you to. If I fucked you and then cut your throat, no one would know. No one would even find you for a year. Like those two back there. And when they found you, they wouldn't give a shit."

Serafina didn't let herself stumble. She watched each foot, then glanced up at the men ahead. Florencio had stopped now, had turned his face toward them. She could see the slash of his teeth through his breathing-hard mouth.

"When we get to Descanso, we have to stop. For the heat. And wait for the truck. You can sleep. And dream about what I'm going to do to you later. Because there's nowhere for you to run. If you leave the trail, you're going to die. I want you to dream about that."

She walked. All this time, she had dreamed about Elvia. Milk and cloth and the sweetness of the skin on her neck. The sweat stung her eyes. She couldn't think of Elvia because it made her soft and weak. A little animal. She had to think only about the trail, about the man behind her. How would she live if he hit her in the head again? What if he hit her in the same spot? Her temple would collapse like a sugar candy skull. When the coyote threw her onto the ground, what could she do so he wouldn't hit her?

He was probably right. She was alone. These men wouldn't help her. None of them was her husband, or brother. She didn't look at Florencio's back. She didn't look at his hat. She stared at the trail five feet in front of her. The coyote passed her easily, not touching her braid, and began to whistle.

The truck was not here, in Descanso. They were in a clearing at the summit. The mountain air was so thin Serafina felt dizzy.

The coyote, so angry now that his neck was suffused with red, stalked around the packed dirt where Serafina could see that people had camped many times before. A trash heap was piled in the trees, and the remains of several fires were scattered in the sandy field. His friend was supposed to meet them here with ten more pollos and the truck, he muttered. They must be in Santa Ysabel. Twenty more miles. Fuck walking. They would wait here, through the night.

"Make something to eat," he yelled at Serafina, pointing to the battered nopales near a boulder. He tossed a knife onto the dirt. Serafina cut the green cactus, scraping off the spines, trying to calm herself.

Elvia had gotten tiny thorns in her finger, that last day. When Larry and his friend Warren had come home, Serafina was cleaning nopales, moving the knife blade over the tiny red spines, shirring off the needles to leave the pads green and smooth, dappled with blind white dots. She loved few things more than this motion, this skin like a baby's, this comforting heap of food that grew anywhere, even here.

Larry's eyes were paler green than shorn nopales. He'd been so angry that day, when Serafina was cooking the cactus, when Elvia said in Mixtec that the thorns hurt her. Larry threw the keys, like a metallic dragonfly. "Get a life. Speak English. Drive to Taco Bell." Warren had laughed, after his thick red fingers reached inside her blouse, brushing her breasts and pulling out her money. Larry spun a cactus pad out the duplex door like a green plate.

Serafina glanced up at the coyote, who was impatiently watching her finish the nopales. He picked up the knife and snapped it shut. Florencio built a fire to roast the cactus on sticks. Serafina sat near the flames, watching the sun drop into the far bushes.

The coyote was thirsty. He drank much of the water. Then he said, "I need the money now. Before the truck comes. Because then we have to leave in a hurry. Give me the fucking money now. Let's go."

"Five hun-" Jesus began.

But the coyote said, "Give me what you have. All your fucking money."

The men gave him folded bills. He walked over to Serafina and said, "Come here."

"She-" Florencio stood up, and the coyote pulled a black gun from his waistband.

"Come here," he said again.

When she was in front of him, he grabbed her by the braid and said, "This is how you move los indios. By la reata." She didn't know the word, but he used her hair as a leash, pulling her head so sharply she felt her cheeks shiver like gelatin. He pushed her into the brush.

They came out in another ravine, steep walls of sand and a large cave where rushing water had scoured out a shelter. Blackened stones set in broken circles meant people had camped here, too. The sun had faded to gray shadow. The coyote's mustache was thick and black as burned rope. He jerked her around by her braid. She pulled out her roll of dollars and gave it to him.

"Kiss the money," he said, grinning. "That's all that matters here."

He shoved the dollars toward her mouth, pushed the paper between her teeth, rubbed her tongue. I have been here before, she thought. I know about the money. This money.

"And this," he said. "This is the only other thing that matters." He pushed the gun at her mouth. "Put your tongue inside it, fucking india. Kiss the fucking gun. No. Put your tongue inside now."

He pushed hard, and her tongue bled. He scraped the metal circle on her lips, and she closed her eyes. In church she kissed her thumb when she made the sign of the cross. This metal was only a thumbnail against her lips. He hit her in the jaw with the gun. She fell. Descanso, she thought. Rest. I will rest. If I knew Elvia was dead, I would cut my own wrists and let the blood flow out of me until I was so light, I would rise up to meet her. And my mother. So light.

She heard him urinating on the fire circle. Then he nudged her with his boot. "Get up."

She stood up, her jaw loose and hot, and her hand went automatically to her pocket.

"What do you have? Silver. I saw you take something from your pocket." He shoved her fingers down and made her pull out the barrettes. "Shit. Nothing. You have nothing."

He slapped them from her fingers with the gun, and they fell in the sand. Pulling her braid so tightly her eyes blurred, he pushed the barrel of the gun to her forehead, twisting and rubbing again. Leaving a mark, she knew, from a tiny sharp edge that scored her skin.

His other hand clutched her blouse front, just as Warren's had, and anger blurred her eyes. The barrettes were lost now. He bent to unzip his pants again, and Serafina touched her forehead. She saw smudges of black on her fingers. The god of the hearthstones. She pulled the mano from between her breasts and hit him in the temple with the heavy stone, which rested perfectly in her hand, as always.

He dropped the gun, and she swung again and again. When he was on the ground, his eyes blank, she pounded at his head until the mano was covered with blood.

She dropped the stone pestle and her whole body trembled. The ravine was silent. She couldn't hear anyone. The men were afraid of the gun.

But Florencio stumbled through the brush tunnel. "I thought he would shoot you, if I came," he said. His eyes widened, and he reached toward the cut on her mouth, but she pushed his hand away. Something was wrong with the way her jaw hung. She knew she couldn't talk.

He flinched at the blood on the coyote's teeth, the pants gapped open, the stone mano lying nearby. But he listened, bent to touch the man's neck.

"Alive," he whispered. He reached for the money on the ground, the bills folded soft and thick as a doll's pillow. Serafina remembered the barrettes.

She scrabbled for them in the sand and put them in her pocket. Her fingers were crusted with dried blood. Florencio said, "Go back." He didn't look at her, but at the ground near her feet.

She moved quickly to the black gun that had left the dent of a circle she could feel on her forehead. She threw it down the ravine into a tangle of brush. No. No gun. She tried to say the words, but only a deep, muffled bleat came from her mouth, and she shook her head in frustration and pain.

"Serafina," Florencio said. He let his fingers sway toward the boots. "He will come after us, if he lives. Find us. We have to get to Yuu Sechi."

Rio Seco. The mano was in her hand. Sticky with drying blood. "If he comes after us, he'll kill us," Florencio said. Serafina dug a hole in the sand and covered the mano. Then she ran back to the fire, where the others were waiting, staring, until she hid her head in folded arms.

When Florencio emerged into the clearing, his face was gaunt, his hands black, and she knew he'd lifted soot-covered rocks over his head. A killing pile. He stared at her, and said, "Now we have to walk the rest of the way."

The Tiltepec men grew angry on the second day of walking to Santa Ysabel. "No truck now, no way to get to Los Angeles. We had a ride to Fresno. We can't walk all the way to Fresno."

"Shut up," Florencio said finally. "He could have just as well shot us as given us a ride. I gave you back all your money. So shut up and walk."

She couldn't answer for herself. She couldn't talk. Her jaw was swollen big as a fist. She could barely walk, her ankle sore and misshapen as dough. They couldn't hike along the highway shoulder, because Florencio said people in the mountains hated Mexicanos so much that they ran them over, shot at them from cars. So they fought through the brush and creekbeds in the day, rested when the heat became overpowering, and then tried to hug the highway at night.

The sun beat down until she could smell the oil burning on the asphalt underfoot and in the greasy bushes by the road. Skeletons of small animals were dry and flat. The faint, stinging circle on her forehead reminded her of how close she'd come to dying.

Death seemed to hover over all the California mountains as she stumbled, Florencio holding her arm. When she felt she would faint from the heat, Florencio said, "Water. Look." He led them to a nearly dry stream, and the men drank from the brackish puddles. She couldn't bend over. With his hands, he funneled water into her mouth, and she tasted moss and earth and oil.

"Down there," he said, pointing south, "in the desert, people die all the time because they have no water. The coyote drops them off and says someone in a truck will come. Just like this one didn't come. The people wait forever, and the sun kills them."

Guillermo said, "We're not in the desert now. If we had the gun, at least we could shoot a rabbit for food." He studied Florencio suspiciously. "You have it. You want to sell it."

"No," Florencio said impatiently. Tiltepec people didn't always like San Cristobal. Serafina didn't look at their eyes on her. No one trusted anyone here, in California.

They saw the cabinlike store in the evening. Santa Ysabel was tiny. There was no truck in sight. Florencio bought water and crackers and a few cans of soup, and they left hurriedly. In another dark clearing, they rested. Eventually, the Tiltepec men slept in a row, their beer cans like candles at their heads.

Serafina's jaw felt hotter, as if a bright marigold of pain were fastened to her bone. "You still can't talk?" Florencio whispered. She shook her head. "Did he hit you with the gun?" She nodded, pointed to the place on her jaw.

Florencio said, "You have to open your mouth enough for water." But just separating her lips made tears stream from her eyes. She took the bottle and dribbled water past her teeth.

He knelt and put his fingers on either side of her face. "When I was in the hospital for my fingers, everyone got hurt in the fields that month. I saw a nurse put one man's jaw back. Someone hit him with a shovel. She said if she didn't put it back, it would always hang wrong."

He lifted her jaw like a shelf, and pain tore through her skull, flared as though the marigold were on fire. Then he tore a tee shirt into strips and wrapped them around her jaw and mouth. "It will keep you warm." He made a pallet of their clothes and said, "Put the good side of your face here. I will stay awake. I am used to not sleeping. When we pick the naranjas, we pick all night. The boss parks the trucks so the headlights shine on the field. I don't need to sleep."

His voice faded, and she slept.

When she knelt at the stream, the blackened blood came off her hands revived and red again from the water. She washed the barrettes, dried them, smelled the metal. She had always cried for a blanket of Elvia's, a shirt, anything that would smell of her skin and breath. But a blanket would have been shreds by now. The barrettes glowed in her palm until she put them away.

They walked parallel to the highway, in the blistering heat of lower land. Serafina saw trucks pass by with people brown as she, and a crumbling adobe house with brown children in the dirt yard. "Indios. Californios," Florencio whispered. "Mixtecos can survive, too. We can make it."

Her tongue, swollen in her mouth, throbbed with thirst. She was glad she couldn't speak. Maybe she would never have to talk again. She drank a few sips of water when they stopped, and the pain of moving her lips washed her forehead clean of thought.

In the clearings, she saw how many had come before them by the piles of plastic water jugs and trash and ashes. Serafina knelt near the fire circles in each place and prayed, "n'un yuu nu'un. Thank you. I will not burn your stones." She laid two wildflowers at the edge of the blackened rocks.

If they didn't get to Rio Seco soon, she would have to wash clothes in a stream. Find wild plants or something to cook. They would live more primitively than in Oaxaca. She thought she was delirious. Her head swam with heat. Maybe she should go home. But she couldn't get home. Never again. She would never see San Cristobal again.

They descended from the forest into brush and chaparral again, stopping beside a river, SAN LUIS REY, the highway sign read. The land was flatter, golden and parched in places.

"We are near the highway to Rio Seco now," Florencio said. Serafina saw more adobe houses, more wooden shacks, Mexican people living near an avocado grove.

Florencio went to a cardboard shack near the trees and paid a woman for some tortillas and water and beer. In the dark, Serafina took off her jeans. She washed her legs and arms in the swirling puddles of river. Now she was home. I am delirious, she thought. All the santos were here, and the stones at the river's edge, and she was nearly naked, hungry, praying.

rest.

Gold teeth. They had gold teeth. The Mexicans brought him here. From the date grove. He dumped me out there in the trees.

All he saw was Dually's knuckles and a baseball bat. Dually said, "I'm not gonna waste bullets on your fuckin loser ass."

The Mexicans put two teeth in my pocket. I guess I spit em out. On the sand.

The nurse kept saying, "You awake now? Hmmm? That's very good, that you wake up. You been sleeping so long. Let's check your pulse, okay?"

She looked Indian, like the woman at the hotel. She said, "Tajinder. That's my name. You call for me, okay? Push the button if you need something."

His jaw was fuckin wired shut.

How long? Where's Ellie now, if Dually was hidin her? He said, "I don't know what the fuck you want, asshole." He said it in my ear, when I was down. He said, "Your bitch is gone."

I must a said, "Ellie?"

He hit me in the mouth again. Swear to God, he put a fuckin paper bag over my head. From the grove. The ones the Mexicans put on the dates.

"I ain't sellin your bitch nothin, cause her ass is gone. Bustin down my door lookin for money. You got the wrong strategy, asshole."

He must a hit me in the head. I can't move. My arms are strapped down. Fuckin tied up like a dog. How can I figure out where Ellie is if I can't move?

Dinner in a hose. In my arm. Shit. How long? Did he have Ellie or not? He was talkin about Callie. Your bitch is gone.

Ellie's not-she's my kid. He knew that.

Tajinder has a long braid. Warren called em ragheads. Indian. Ellie's mom was Indian. Tajinder's short like her. But her face is rounder. "Mauritian," she said. "I am from an island. Here it is too hot for me. I need some rain. But the wind blows only sand here. There. Now your IV is hooked up again."

Guess since I ain't talkin, she'll just jabber away. Like any woman. Except Sara. She could go hours and not say shit. Only to Ellie, when they were alone. She taught Ellie those cavewoman words. Like for moon. Yoo-hoo. I remember that.

Ellie could go for hours, too. Just like me. Didn't have to say shit. Didn't have to jabber. Callie jabbered all fuckin night. Every woman I been with talked all the time. Except Sara. Ellie was always askin about her lately. Why? Where the hell did she go?