Elvia whispered back, "When things at my house got bad, I remembered your stories. About the desert, the plants, your mom." The ID card was warm from her body when she handed it to him. "I found an address for my mother in Tijuana. You like being on the road, right?"

"Not in your dad's truck," he said. "I just did five months for that car, remember?"

"I'll drive," she said.

"You got any money?" She shook her head. "We need to make some dinero real quick."

Hector said, "Mecca. We can make some money picking grapes, and St. Jude's won't look for you down south. They'll think you went to Rio Seco or LA."

Elvia started the truck, and Michael said, "Your dad takes good care of the engine. He'd kill me if he saw me ridin up here, huh?"

"Yeah," Elvia said, but she thought, If my dad knew about the baby, he'd really kill you. She turned the wheel hard, making a doughnut in the dust and heading for the freeway, the guys slumped low like little kids. The sun edged over the mountains, flat and silver as a pie tin.

The freeway was littered with tire pieces like crow wings. Michael lifted his head to read a few billboards. "Indian Ridge-a Jack Nicklaus golf course. Indian Lakes-an active adult community. They look real Cahuilla." She laughed at the silver-haired people drinking iced tea, riding in golf carts. "So if you're not active, you're dead?" Michael said. "A dead Indian?"

"You're dead, in a bed, or playing golf," she answered, just like her father had said. He used to make fun of the street names-Gene Autry Trail, Bob Hope Drive. Would he really take off for Florida, a new life? Or was he looking for her right now, maybe in Dually's truck? Dually, Warren, and her father-they'd beat Michael and Hector close to death.

Twenty dollars of love. Elvia shivered. Whenever someone owed her father or Warren money and couldn't pay, her father would say, "You can give me the money or I can get fifty dollars' worth of love outta your face. Make me feel better, since I'm broke."

How much love would take care of a stolen truck, a runaway daughter, and a baby?

Michael said, "You're on empty. This old truck'll burn petrol big time down to Mexico."

Elvia pulled off in Indio to spend her last five dollars on gas. Hector said, "We can make forty bucks a day in the grapes, if you guys work hard."

Michael said, "Hey, remember that long-hair dude, Caveman, from St. Jude's? He got out last month. Told me to meet him in Rio Seco if I want a hundred bucks. He wants to try the dreaming medicine, just like you. But he has to pay." He passed his hand over Elvia's braid and said, "Everybody's gotta pay. Except you."

She shivered again, even in the dawn's heat, even though the narrow highway already shimmered, like discarded cassette tape stretched out for miles through the sand.

"You're not in America now," Hector said. "You're in Califas, the brown state." He and Michael sat up straight now. "Nobody's gonna notice us here. No white faces except farmers."

Trucks passed hauling hay, vegetables, and boxes of grapes. Elvia peered at the next tiny town.

"Coachella." Hector pointed at grapefruit packing houses, auto repair shops, Mexican cafes.

"Arabia," he said, when the highway plowed through sand again, surrounded by date groves, the dangling amber bunches covered with paper bags.

Suddenly she saw the grapes, wall after wall of green vines that stretched for acres. Cars were parked along the highway shoulder, plumes of dust rose from trucks driving between fields, and people walked every row. Their faces were covered with bandannas, their heads with baseball caps, and their hands moved quickly as sparrows among the leaves.

"Mecca," Michael said.

"You been here before, too?" Elvia asked Michael.

"Yeah," he said. "Just one time. Doin what you're doin. Trying to figure out how I got here. How my moms met my dad here. How drunk he must a been."

He looked away, and Elvia saw his ponytail like a gleaming black rope in the hot sun coming through the windshield. When would she be alone with him, talk to him about why she really wanted to find her mother? He said, "True hell, mano. You got it marked on your map?"

Hector nodded, tapped on the black leather folder covering his knees.

"So you have maps of everywhere?" Elvia asked, scared now of the whole day, the whole trip stretching before her. "This is the fucking Wizard of Oz? What are you looking for, Michael?"

He stared at the fields, not at her. "For some money." Then he grinned. "And a good time. Nothin else."

Mecca was a few stores, a few streets lined with trailers and small houses, and the grapes all around. The smell of burning sugary fruit, fermenting in the sun, nearly made Elvia sick when they got out of the truck at a row of trailers-faded pink, turquoise, and-the one where Hector knocked-pale green as a watermelon rind. But when a man came out onto the single metal step, his huge belly straining against his white undershirt so the material was nearly purple, he frowned at Hector. "Where the hell you been?" he said. "Your jefita gave up on you. In May."

Hector bit his lips. Elvia thought he looked like he would cry. Jefe. Boss. His little boss?

"Where'd they go?"

"She took two or three hermanos up to Watsonville for strawberries. Your pops said, 'Fuck fresas' and went to Washington. Apples, I guess."

His mother, Elvia thought. She gave up on him.

Hector said, "Tio, I need some work."

His uncle looked at the clipboard in his huge hands. "Show up when you feel like it? Damn, Hector. Everybody started at five. It's seven now. And it's Thursday. You crazy?" He glanced at Elvia and Michael. "It's 112 today. They picked before?"

"Yeah," Hector lied. "Orale, Tio, I need some money. Please."

"Go see Manuel at Block twelve, off Sixty-sixth," the uncle said. "Tell him I sent you, and don't fuck up. People here are feedin kids. Not just playin around." He handed Hector a bag and slammed the trailer door.

I'm feeding a kid, Elvia thought. She ate the spicy tamale Hector gave her, drank the manzana soda. Apple.

But Michael said, "Mano, if we're gonna sweat our asses off, I need somethin to keep me goin. You know."

Hector said, "My uncle's cousin. Guapo. He does the fields." He looked at Elvia. "My moms doesn't do speed. But her and my pops-they drink a lot, smoke mota. This is where she's from. No nothing. That's why I left last year."

Cars lined Sixty-sixth, and the grapes stretched across the hot earth, all the way to the ash-colored mountains. Hector counted off the blocks, and when she parked he said, "Put a long-sleeve shirt over that. Put on some pants. Or you'll get sunburned and cut at the same time."

He and Michael stood by the truck doors while she struggled out of shorts and into her jeans. Her skin was grimy with two days of sweat and dirt. She couldn't button her jeans at all. She left them undone and let the baggy tee shirt fall over her belly. Then she kicked up white dust on the roadside to keep up with Hector, who was waving at a man under a bright beach umbrella at the end of a row.

It was hell. Elvia held the clippers Hector gave her and snipped each stem. Crouching alongside the wall of grapevines, breathing the dust that rose from everyone's steps, from the wheelbarrow's progress, from the trucks that rumbled down the dirt road with boxes, she thought, Shit, I can do this. I run in the desert all the time.

But Hector yelled at her after the first box she filled. "Like frosty green marbles, big ones. Not babies. Not yellow. We get our asses kicked if we mess up the box." She worked slowly, dropping the heavy dangles of fruit into the box at her feet. After an hour, she looked up to see the people around her, their faces obscured by bandannas, their heads covered with baseball caps, their hands reaching through the leaves like blackened mitts. She felt dizzy, her back aching already as if her father's acetylene torch prodded the muscles above her hipbones. She could barely breathe, the heat like a thousand fire ants on her scalp. Salt trickled into her eyes, and when she wiped it with her hands, dirt and blood stung even worse.

Hector came by with a water bottle. He poured water into her eyes, into her mouth. Then he and Michael cut and dropped bunches like machines, filling three boxes to her one. Michael carried the full boxes to the end of the long row, where the scale man waited under the umbrella.

Through the stems and leaves, she could hear people talking in Spanish. She tried to look at the women's faces-what if her mother was here, right now, picking grapes? Each pair of eyes squinted, dismissing her, searching for the grapes.

As she touched each woody stem, each bunch of frosty green marbles, she smelled the fermenting juices and breathed the dust. Each breath was sharpened, hot, as if the dust particles carried thorns, and her lungs burned. When she'd filled another box, she bent over, ready to faint, and someone laughed on the vine wall. Melting-you wanted to melt away the baby. Fine. You'll die, too. She was on her knees when Hector came again, pouring more water onto her head and face, whispering, "You okay?"

"I can't breathe," she gasped.

Hector said, "There's pesticides on the grapes. You can't gulp with your mouth. Breathe through your nose. Don't give up yet. Come on. At least fake it."

A hand thrust through the vines, giving her a bandanna. Elvia tried to see the face, but she heard only laughter. She tied the cotton square around her nose and mouth, thinking it would suffocate her, but she smelled menthol in the cloth. She panted for a few minutes, then began to pick again.

Lunch was more tamales from a truck, and water. Elvia poured it onto her chest, her neck. She lay in the sandy alley between rows, her head in Michael's lap, her eyes closed. Melting-was the baby hot inside her, glowing like a tiny doll? No-it didn't have hands yet. No feet. It was just cells. Cells that might be disappearing into her aching, pulsing muscles and skin.

She could barely lift herself off the sand when the work began again. The sky and sand and leaves were all white, blinding her as she reached for the grapes, rubbery hot. She panted inside the bandanna. Her mother could be picking beside her. Her mother could be washing these grapes and popping them into her other children's mouths. Elvia steadied herself against a pole until she could see again. Then she turned and followed Hector back down the row, where the late-season vines were sending tendrils across the sand to trip unwary feet.

The green hallways emptied out before dusk, and Elvia was still struggling with her last box.

"So who's your ruca, Hector?" someone said behind her.

"I'm nobody's ruca," Elvia answered, spinning around.

The girl laughed. "You look like nobody. Never seen nobody pick so damn slow."

Elvia thought, It's not my fault, okay? I'm pregnant. But the teenage girl came around the wall of vines, in stretch pants and old sneakers, her belly huge, as if she'd have the baby any day.

Elvia was so startled she dropped her clippers, and the girl laughed again. "Clumsy, too," she said. "I was gonna tell Marisela you married Hector so she'd kick your ass."

"Shut up, Tiny," Hector said, grinning. "I'm not here. You're not talkin to me. I'm not really here. I'm headin back to Rio Seco. City college this year."

"Orale, schoolboy, Sally's still in love with you, too," Tiny said. Elvia stared at the women coming down the row, waving at Hector. She couldn't believe he was a big deal here, with his neat ponytail and wide smile, his notebook of maps. He took her box down to the scale man, who was waiting impatiently, and then another girl came up behind Elvia.

"So that's your vato buying crystal?" she hissed. "Spending your money you ain't made yet."

Elvia saw Michael now, leaning into the window of a turquoise Mustang that had been cruising the avenue. Hector said, "Guapo. Michael was looking for him. And he's always looking for somebody like Michael."

Just like Dually, Elvia thought, tired, her feet swollen into her shoes. Suddenly she knew-Michael's gonna sketch all day and night, like Callie and my dad. He hates the world slow and ordinary, one place you know. Like I wish it was.

"Everybody looks like fuckin ghosts fadin away," Michael said beside her. The trampled sand, the bare vines limp and bedraggled, the piles of trash and pallets and boxes at the end of the rows-she stared at the retreating backs, and they did look haunted, covered with fine, pale dust and bent by the day. People walked toward town or loaded into trucks and cars.

"Come on," Hector said. "We won't have a place to sleep if we don't book up."

Every parking lot and sandy area was taken up with cars and trucks. People were stretched out on hoods and in truck beds, sleeping or talking, propped against tires, playing cards and starting small barbecues. Elvia jerked the truck into a small island of sand in the sea of cars and trucks and folding chairs in a vacant lot. Hector said, "We gotta wait for Rosario."

Elvia laid her head on the door frame, so tired she could hardly move. A carload of men next to them was listening to the radio. "Por que l'amor de mi alma, solito Mexico . . ." The song spilled from the open windows. "Viva Zacatecas!" someone in the back sang along.

"Sinaloa, Michoacan, Zacatecas," Hector said. "Where'd you say your moms was from?"

Elvia shrugged. "Mexico."

"Thirty-one states, so you better get a clue." Hector pointed. "There's Rosario. The tamale lady. From Cabazon Reservation. See the red truck? Every night she comes. Beef tamales like you never had. And apple empanadas. Like pies but better."

"From the rez, huh? She's Cahuilla," Michael said, peering at the old woman.

Hector shrugged. "She's a cook. She's been coming here since I was a kid. Summer for the grapes. Winter for the dates. Sometimes we lived in a station wagon."

"Well, I ain't sleepin with all these people," Michael said, scowling, three lines etched between his brows. "Cause I don't want to be around when they start fuckin and fightin." His eyes were shiny as night glass. "My moms met my pops here. Probably fucked me into the world in a fuckin parking lot. I ain't in the mood to think about whether my pops is sittin in that old-ass Dodge Dart right there."

"Life's a bitch," Hector said, his voice hard for the first time. "And then you die. But if you got a better place . . . We gotta be back in the field at five, or Manuel ain't paying us, sabes?" He stalked over to the red truck and brought back a bag that smelled of chile and cinnamon.

Elvia felt the sweat and dust drying on her arms and face now that a breeze moved through the valley. "I need a shower, big time."

"Most people take a bath in the canal right there." Hector pointed to the drainage ditch under the bridge.

She shook her head. "Then let's go somewhere else."

Michael pointed her south on the highway, the sun red in the dust hanging over the fields. After a few miles, Elvia saw a glimpse of blue, a huge mirage of a lake. Then she smelled briny ocean. "Where are we?" she asked, at the expanse of water glittering against the sand.

"Saltan Sea," Michael said. "Everybody used to fish here, but now the lake's all fucked up. Full of poison and salt from the fields. See the mountains?" He pointed to the purple riven range rising across the water. "Where those stripes are, that's where the real lake was. When my grandpa's grandpa lived here."

Elvia could see the marks, an ancient shoreline. "So this lake isn't real?"

Michael said, "He told me Lake Cahuilla was a hundred years ago, big water from Indio to Mexico. And people fished. Then this long drought came and there was just a puddle. The people went further in the desert or up to the mountains. My grandpa's people went to Desert Springs. Then in, like, nineteen hundred something, farmers came and pulled the irrigation water from the Colorado River. It flooded a few times and the whole river poured in here, till the railroad people dumped all this junk to dam it up. Now it's the Saltan Sea. A fake lake." His voice was still sketch-fast, Elvia thought.

Hector said, "My grandpa used to come here all the time. He was from Veracruz. Lived on fish-tilapia and corvina, in salsa Colorado. But now all the fish are dying off. Pull in there."

Elvia parked at the concrete shell of a two-story motel, with the front wall gone and a honeycomb of bare rooms-no windows, no carpet, no furniture, like square caves staring at the glowing water.

"Desert people took it all for their trailers," Hector said when they climbed into a room on the second floor, the cement floor and walls still warm. He opened the tamales.

Michael was restless, sweeping trash from the floor with a palm frond. "What would your pops do if he saw his truck right now?"

"He'd probably try to kick your ass. Both of you."

"What if we kicked his ass?" Michael said softly.

"What?"

"You ran, right?" Michael shrugged. "Like you never want to see him again. Was he treatin you bad? Messin with you? Is he your real dad?"

She remembered what Sandy's daughter, Rosalie, had called him, that day he came to get her. "Yeah-my bio dad. He never messed with me. He messed with everybody else."

Once, at the Tourmaline Market, a man had leaned into the truck window while she waited for her father. He asked what time it was, how hot it usually got. Her father came outside and punched the man in the face, then rubbed his skull in the hot sand. He said, "Get in your fuckin Honda and drive. If you can't drive cause your face hurts, I'll drive you someplace. My choice."

She couldn't say to Michael, I left him because I was gonna get bigger and bigger from a baby with your eyes. Your skin. And I was scared of everything.

"You seem like him sometimes."

"Maybe. Sometimes. When I'm driving."

Michael didn't smile. He took out a cigarette. "And who knows what you got from your moms, right? See, Hector can't figure out what he got from his parents. He's like alien boy."

"Look," Hector said, turning to Elvia. "There's twelve of us. A dozen eggs, okay? I'm number ten. My parents, they work hard wherever. Like today. You do that every day, and then you gotta have some beer. They get drunk, they fight, they have another baby, they move on. But you know what? My mom-she works all day in the field, and then she's gotta cook somethin for everybody, gotta wash out the clothes and hang em up. I don't blame her for gettin high. She's like, so tired, I don't know what she was when she was herself."

"So now they're gone?" Elvia said.

Hector nodded. "I miss my mom. But last year, I worked the grapes. And then they were going up north to Parlier and Dinuba for the rest of the grapes. I turned seventeen. I figured it's like my last chance to finish school. So I stayed in the arroyo with Michael and went to Tourmaline High. Now I want to go to college. Geography." He looked embarrassed, holding out his hands for the cornhusk tamale wrappers. The apple empanadas were doughy, spicy with cinnamon. When Hector went out with the trash, Elvia lay on her side. Every muscle ached, in her thighs and along her back and even her wrists. Inside her lungs, she felt a washing sting like Listerine. Poison. Dust. Heat. She couldn't do this every day, for the rest of her life.

Michael squatted beside her, his hands dangling from his knees. Elvia studied his face in the glow. He broke open a cigarette, sprinkling the tobacco on her hand. "You need this for your prayers." Then he lit another cigarette and sucked hard, passing it to her. She shook her head. "Just hold it," he said, pulling her hand and putting the cigarette in her fingers. "You feel the warm?"

She nodded. The ember and the smoke. "I didn't know it was like a tiny heater. I always hated them cause my dad smoked so much." She lifted the cigarette to her lips and took a puff, feeling the burn in her throat, and then pushed the smoke back out.

"Just say no, right?" Michael laughed. "You know what? When I'm sittin outside, specially in the winter, and I'm feelin strange like I miss somebody, I always light up. The smoke looks like people sometimes. Check it out."