"Serafina," Florencio said, coming toward her, but she moved to the next tree, drying her face on the sleeve of the sweatshirt Rigoberto had given her.

"I'm not afraid now," she said. "Don't."

She picked and moved, seeing only the oranges. Maybe Larry's constant chant of money, his novena like Rigoberto's, had gotten him what he wanted. Maybe he and Elvia lived in a big house on a hill far away from here. With pumpkins carved into faces, and a woman with red lips, red nails, and hair curled around her forehead, like in the magazines he used to bring.

In the vacant field near this grove, she saw wild tobacco bushes like the ones back home, the leaves her uncle used to chew. Nopales grew here, too. Vihncha, Elvia had whispered, holding up her finger, and Serafina had plucked out the small red spines with her teeth.

She picked the last of the oranges from this tree, and Rigoberto descended again, his bag so full he hung sideways. "It's true," he said, as if she'd never left. "They don't mind your hands, but they don't want to see your face."

She heard the motorbike cruising along the dirt roads through the groves. Don Rana glared at her, then said something to Rigoberto. Serafina pushed her face into the branches and reached for the oranges. Hand-filling globes, like the chhlos from Yukon Street, the pomegranates whose seeds she'd made into ruby-glistened jelly for the old woman next door. She concentrated on remembering the dusty trail along the chainlink fence, where Elvia's feet had left their prints.

This is my memory, she thought. My search. Rigoberto doesn't even want to know that her eyes are green. He doesn't know her middle name is Estrella. Our mother's name.

That night her back ached like fiery ropes were being pulled tight across her shoulders. Her hands were covered with scales of green and black, the citrus oil mixed with juice and dirt, and her forearms were a red mesh of scratches.

Serafina stayed upstream from the men. She wouldn't jump into the swift waters of the canal; she was afraid of the slick-looking mossy sides. She lay on her belly, staring at the surface for a while, and when the irrigation water came streaming from the cement tower into the furrows between the trees, she bent there at one of the arcs and washed her hair, her face, her arms.

With wet braids and stinging skin, she went to Araceli's. Tonight, Araceli had found epazote leaves to put flavor like home into the black beans.

She owed Araceli money. She owed Don Rana money for the canvas bag. She owed Florencio her life. She sat in the blustery wind, the smoke wrapping itself around her hair, listening to the radio someone had hung from a pepper tree branch.

"Por que l'amor de mi alma, solito Mexico . . . viva Zacatecas!" the banda sang on the radio. The last time she'd heard that song, she'd been walking in the market in Nochixtlan, buying chocolate and veladoras. It was an eerie feeling, as if the words and nopales and tastes in her mouth erased the border trails and the coyote.

The wind roared again, scattering the words, and she got up. But she didn't want to go back to the shack. She walked along the edge of the camp, hunching over herself, missing her rebozo. No one wore rebozos here. Don't be an Indian. She wrapped her hands around her elbows.

Elvia would be eating hamburgers, maybe potatoes. Ice cream. Then she would do her schoolwork and watch television, sleep in a room with a pink bedspread and a soft pillow.

Near Jesus's brush-covered cuevo, she looked down the sandy road, the canal snaking green under the flying grit. She heard the whine of the motorbike, and Don Rana shouted at her, "You going to leave down that road? So los malditos near el rio can roast you like a puerco Mixteco on their fire?" She turned to go back, and Florencio was waiting by the irrigation tank.

He had made several trips back to the river bottom, cutting cane stalks and tying them together to add a cooking room to the sleeping room. They sat in the doorway, the light falling through the tall cane stalks. "Are you watching me?" she said, finally.

"Yes."

"All the time?"

"Yes."

Serafina saw that he had laid a circle of hearthstones, round white rocks that looked funny, they were so clean. His mouth grinned, lopsided, but she saw his eyes still waiting. Then Rigoberto ducked inside with an armful of dead orange branches.

"We're going to pretend we're at home?" Rigoberto asked, shaking his head. "The harvest will be over in three weeks. Then we'll be gone."

Florencio only shrugged, grinned again. "Listen. When I was small, every spare moment my grandmother made baskets. For the market in Nochixtlan. I made hats. To sit around was to think of what you didn't have. But your hands gave your mind something to do. Here, when we're done, I'm so tired I think I can't do anything else. But I don't like my hands to be still."

"You won't even be here to harvest your corn," Rigoberto said, but he sat down by the hearthstones. Serafina glanced at the damp circles in the earth outside the shack, the sprouts rising like green rooster tails.

Florencio had carried the seeds from San Cristobal in a plastic bag in his pocket. He had planted the corn the day they returned. "This would be the fourth harvest, at home," he said now. She heard her father and uncle naming the plantings: the cloud planting, the rain planting, the wind planting, the autumn planting. She saw the steep fields around her uncle, the steep banks of tires holding up arroyo walls in Tijuana, and how people planted corn inside the black rings.

"You still believe in the old ways, after all this time here?" she said to Florencio. When she saw him studying the clouds, murmuring prayers, she recognized someone like her mother, who had never changed no matter where she lived, who never let Oaxaca fade like stone carvings worn down by water and wind.

But Rigoberto said, "The old ways stopped working, or half of Mexico wouldn't be here. Hear the story of the Oaxacan ants on the trail to Culiacan? Stepped on. And the trail to Tijuana. And the trail to here. Killing some and they just keep coming. Working hard all the time, and making the big people angry."

Florencio said, "It's easier to be angry. Like you. It's easier to be angry and knock everything off the table with your arm. Then you don't have to wash it and keep it and put it away." His voice was soft and fast.

"Then keep your hands busy," Rigoberto said, standing up. "But if you made hats right now and sold them here, they'd be Hecho en Mexico." He picked up a bag of saladitos-salted plums. "Look. Hecho en Mexico. Just like you. No matter what you do."

When he was gone, she said, "Rigoberto is like our father. He was impatient in church, in the fields. In his own head. He always wanted to be somewhere else. Like Rigoberto."

Florencio lit the fire. The smoke flattened and touched the stones. The bones of the earth, burning, suffering pain for us. Even here?

She wanted pots. She took out her molcajete, looking at the blue glass she'd laid inside the stone bowl. She missed her mano-buried in the ravine, covered with the coyote's blood, his disbelieving eyes imprinted in the porous stone when she hit him between the eyebrows-but she couldn't have touched it again. Florencio asked, "You understood him?"

Serafina frowned. How had he known what she was thinking? "The coyote?" she said, and Florencio shook his head. "Oh-Don Rana." She nodded. "Understanding the other words is always easier than saying them. Before, I knew some of what"-she hadn't spoken the name in so long-"Larry told me, but I couldn't speak." She rubbed her fingers inside the molcajete. "El coyote was the first one here, in California, to speak Spanish to me this time," she whispered. "But I didn't understand something. Reata. He pulled my braid."

Florencio buried his head in his hands, his long brown fingers deep in his hair, a crow's wing lying in the gap where the two fingers were missing. "Leash," he said. "Or lariat."

She wasn't sure what he was thinking, because he was a man who had delivered the final blow. But when she thought of the gun's metal against the bone of her forehead, she considered the coyote not a man but truly an animal who didn't consider her a woman but something small and helpless with long, braided fur. She rarely let the words into her memory, because it was finished. The n'un yuu nu'un had helped her, and she tried to repay them every day.

"He won't expect anything. Your brother. He says there is only today."

"He might be right," Serafina said.

"I think about tomorrow, and next month, next year," Florencio said, after a long pause. "If you look for her, and you find her, I would love her. But if you don't find her, you could still have another child. I would love that child, too. I would take care of you both."

Serafina couldn't look at him.

"I wouldn't leave," he said, softly. "If you wouldn't."

She listened to the wind hum across the cane stalks. She was thirty-one years old. When she'd held someone's newborn in San Cristobal, smelled the warmth rising from hair and mouth, felt the nuzzling head on her arm, she'd nearly collapsed from the hurt. Now she was so afraid she couldn't answer, couldn't even nod or blink away the tears that blinded her.

She got up and walked unsteadily into the next gust swirling through the arroyo.

"Do you need help with tonight's washing?"

Araceli looked surprised. Her face was so plump that her lips looked like a radish tucked into a mound of corn dough. She nodded.

Serafina scrubbed the frijole pot, rubbing sand on the crusted edges. Her eyes dried in the rushing air. She considered Florencio's words. He is a good man, she thought. Maybe I can stay with him. But she wanted to find Elvia first. She said, "I am coming to the mercado on Sunday."

Araceli nodded, scrubbing the black cast-iron pot at the faucet sticking out from the earth. "While Florencio was gone, your brother told me la migra got you long ago. You never came back, but you wanted to."

Serafina lifted her chin. "I lost a girl. Here."

"She died?"

She felt the poker of heat under her breastbone. "No. The police took me to la migra. She was sleeping in the car. I tried to tell them . . ."

"Oh! Who found her?"

"I don't know." Serafina rinsed sand from the black well of the pot. "She was three." She didn't mind telling this woman, impassive and huge, someone from Nochixtian who married a man from San Cristobal and then lost him when he found a woman in a strawberry camp up north. "She might not even be here. Maybe she lives in . . ." She thought about all the places she heard people mention. "In San Francisco, or Nueva York."

Araceli said, "I lost a child in Nochixtlan. When I go back, I lie on his grave and cry. I tell him I miss him. He was seven. He had fever. I leave him toys from here. I kiss the stone with his name." Araceli looked up from the grill. "You have nothing to touch. That is bad."

Serafina showed her the barrettes, and Araceli nodded gravely, biting her lips. They cleaned the plywood counter, stacked the few folding chairs, and, finally, Araceli blew out the veladora's tiny dot of flame in a pool of wax. When Serafina got back, Florencio and Rigoberto were asleep. She lay the barrettes along her cheek before she curled into herself on the blanket.

Rigoberto was right. When the money was in her hand, she felt like a person again, not a set of hands covered with clinging black tar and two feet swollen as the fat rind of grapefruit.

And in the Volkswagen taxi, crowded with Rigoberto and Araceli, swinging down the dirt road and then into a neighborhood that looked like a Tijuana colonia, she felt hopeful. Someone would be at the church, or the house; someone would remember her daughter.

In the Mercado Aparecida, she bought a cast-iron pot, the metal velvety black under her fingers. She bought a new mano, rough and too light to her palm. Small bags of spices, several pounds of beans, and a veladora. La Virgen de Guadalupe.

She and Rigoberto sent thirteen dollars by wire to Uncle Emiliano. The money disappeared across the counter, turning into a thin receipt in her hand.

But then she stood by the car, ready, and she couldn't see the right hill. The one with the cross of green, the mark of water. The one she had seen from Yukon Avenue.

Rigoberto told Alfaro, "She wants to go to el centro." He pointed to the tall buildings.

Serafina looked at the huge buildings, thousands of windows for watching eyes. She felt a ripple of fear in her stomach. If they were caught, where would she run? But she had come to look for Elvia. She would have to see the government. She said, "El centro."

They went down streets like darkened arroyos through the forest of buildings, past locked doors and glass windows with painted signs of the government. Rigoberto said, "Condado del Rio Seco. Estado de California. Who would you ask if the doors were open? You? No papers? Mojado . . ." His voice was softer. "Look. Inmigracion. Right next door."

She said, "Alfaro, do you know Yukon Avenue? L'iglesia del Santa Catarina?"

When they turned onto the narrow street, she couldn't believe the brown faces, the corn ready to harvest, the children playing in the dirt yards, screaming in Spanish. This neighborhood?

Plywood covered the windows at 2510, and Rigoberto asked a woman across the street who had lived there. His Spanish was good now. The woman shrugged and said she didn't know, maybe Guatemaltecos. Gone now.

Serafina stood on the sidewalk, touching the chainlink fence, looking at the dusty cactus in the back. She walked over to the other door, where the old woman with spiderweb hair had lived. All those years ago, the old woman had never answered her door unless she knew who was there. She was afraid of strangers. Serafina knocked. Will she remember me? Maybe she is dead now. She heard nothing, but she smelled something sweet coming from under the door. Grain? Cooking rice? She knocked again, but no one came.

When Alfaro drove past the statue of Santa Catarina, when he parked the car and she saw the oleander hedge, the well-watered grass, she nearly fainted. She wanted to bury her face in the leaves to find Elvia's scent. She fingered the sharp spears, and the bells rang loudly. A nun came out from the side door and stared at her as she moved toward the statue. Then people streamed from the double doors, white faces and brown, and Serafina ran back to the car, too afraid to touch the stone hands.

Florencio's hands were callused rough as stone from chopping firewood for Araceli. When he saw Serafina's new pots, he smiled. "You'll make salsa verde? Like home?" he asked.

But she stared at the cane walls. Of course she hadn't seen her daughter. Of course she would never find her. She wasn't brave enough. Or smart enough.

"Serafina," Florencio said. She touched his arm. If he wouldn't leave . . .

Everything had to be different now from the way it was at home. There were no promises. There was no church. Florencio wasn't her husband. But he had taken care of her like a husband. She closed her eyes. His hands spread across her back, pulling her closer, not as rough as Larry's wrists, not as soft as her daughter's baby fingers, and she tried not to remember anything.

drylands.

Who can fuckin survive without wheels?

Larry sat on the curb outside the hospital. Afternoon sun stung white into his eyes.

The first day Ellie was in the desert, she sat on the curb outside his place, and he watched her for like an hour. She didn't move. What a stubborn kid. Wouldn't say shit to him. Wouldn't come inside, even though it was 106. Finally he went and sat beside her. Ants. So many it looked like the street itself was moving. Like they were moving the world, she finally said. First time she really spoke to him.

It was like she hated him. He couldn't figure out why he did it. But she was his-his bad attitude, his feet and hands even. Jeans, boots, no curls. Those braids, though. Lasso. But she was his kid. Not a son, but not a girl in dresses and ribbons and all that shit. A cool girl. A him-version of a girl. Not blubbering, whispering. Just watching.

Where the hell would she go?

No money to pay the hospital bill. They'd be sending him letters forever, demanding dinero. But he had no address. He'd left the Tourmaline house number, figuring if Callie ever went back, she could see what Dually did when people didn't pay for their high.

What if Ellie had gone back there, to that place?

He started walking. He was in Indio. Only hospital around. How the fuck would he get to Tourmaline or the Sands, or anywhere? Shit. He'd had the truck since he was eighteen, since he got here to the desert after bailing on the group home. Bailing on Colorado.

The September wind stirred up sand on the shoulder of the road. Just like the prairie. The drylands. Outside Nunn, where the wind could blow straight from Wyoming all the way down to the prairie. Down the highways marked off straight and square. State road 198. His mother's house. No car after her old Biscayne broke down. No guy to fix it. Larry hadn't known how then. All he knew was his father had bailed. Part Indian. Cherokee or something. His mother's eyes blue like faded jeans.

That Biscayne would be a low rider's dream, out here. Indio.

He couldn't even take the fuckin bus to school when it snowed. Sometimes it took the guy from Nunn three or four days to plow out to 198.

When his mother died frozen, he walked for two days, to Greeley. Hopped a train. Got caught stealing a Dodge Ram.

Too old to steal a fuckin car now. Too old to hitch a ride to the Sands. Tired of sharing a room with fuckin Warren. Feels like I been sharing a room with him since Saint Thomas. I known him all my life, but I ain't gotta like him. Just like family-just like Ellie. She was mine, but she didn't have to like me.

How the hell can I find her? Walking. First I was strapped down and now I'm floating like a fuckin ghost out here. He heard the creaking signs over the road, like drunk baby birds. He knew he was heading slowly toward Griffin's place.

He'd bought the truck at Griffin's, when he got off the train to here. Wherever was here. Indio. Longest fucking trains anywhere came through here. He'd seen the sign. Junkyard Dog.

Crate of grapes sitting near the office. Smelling like cheap wine. Griffin bought anything. He acted like Larry was around yesterday even though it'd been about five fucking years.

"Somebody stole them over to Mecca. Help yourself, Foley."

Tastes like mud. Hot. Like wine pills popping in your throat.

"You need to sit down. In the shade. Where the hell's your Ford? You let that Ford go, you're more of an idiot than I thought. Here, sit your sorry ass down. What the hell happened to you? I heard you had a woman. A kid."

Larry saw Griffin's hands on his hips, gnarled fingers like black-veined tree roots growing into his coveralls. The grape was sour in his teeth.

A couple months ago, one of his teeth had fallen out. Too much speed with Callie-speed made your gums loose and green, made your teeth decide they were bailing. A side tooth. Ellie looked at it. Long yellow tooth in his hand. She looked scared, like it was a scorpion. "Who keeps grown-up teeth?" she said, almost to herself, and Larry said, "What? Who keeps any teeth?"

"I have a kid," he told Griffin. "Don't need a woman."

"Well, I ain't got no kids here, but there's two women yonder. I gotta go. Drink some water, Foley, then come see me."

Larry squinted into the field of dusty windshields. Yonder was a Bronco. He threw the last grape toward the chainlink fence, and he heard a woman say, "Where you headed?"

He could see their faces now, dark because of the shade under the Bronco, or the dirt, or their blood. But one had reddish hair. They lay on blankets, a radio beside the front left tire, an oil pan with ice and beer beside them. A box of clothes. Fuck-living under a fucking Bronco.

He turned away, his head aching. They laughed.