

Juan and Willy

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter One

Juan Verdugo cussed Willy out for him not getting right to work on the F-250, but afterward, when Willy got the steam sprayer going, Juan did his best impression of a sneaky mother and crept around the left side of the work bay where this truck was parked. The truck, the one with the R.O. on it (and that meant the repair order), which Willy was now beginning to detail, and which they had already parked in the work bay, now had Willy's head under its hood. Willy was busy soaking the truck's engine with steam from a hose.

Juan hoped to hell that Willy was not destroying the truck's onboard computers by being careless with that steam, which was something that they had already done a couple of times, but they didn't give a flyin f about that actually, point blank. They better not get their pay docked, though, or that would suck. Not that they could do anything about it, truthfully, because they were the bitches of the goddamned service writer who was the dickhead taking orders from the general pain-in-the-ass manager of the shop, whom Juan referred to as Mr. Thank You Very Much Already for a Shitload of Nothing. Juan Verdugo was thinking all this and creeping in a crouched position with something like a black snake hidden in his hand trailing behind him. The big shiny truck was getting detailed, and Willy was under the hood soaking the truck's engine with steam, not knowing that he was about to get hit by something powerful for no reason other than the fact that Juan was bored that afternoon and Willy had made a nasty crack about the Santa Claus Mine that Juan and Willy had tried to find one weekend a couple of weeks ago using Willy's brother's good truck. The damage they had done to his truck had cost them (Willy, actually) a shitload. That Willy was full of nasty cracks and besides, Willy had tricked Juan the week before with a joke which wasn't very funny, using a garbage can, compressed air, and fire.

When Juan reached the front of the truck, he was hidden by the open hood, and the noise of the steam deafened everybody nearby, which gave Juan a chance to take a position, whip up the snake, and carefully aim it. The snake was an air hose that you use to fill tires and also which makes a sick weapon in a battle if you should want to have a battle at the end of a long day.

"Yo, son," Juan said as he flew the hose around in the air like a Star Wars Light Saber, "take this, you silly m.f. er! Take this, hombre! Ya, ha. Ayeeee! You're the bitch!"

He shot the hood of the truck squarely with compressed air and as he did, a loud rat-a-tat-tat of the compressed air smashing into the hood burst across the three bays where the detailers, Juan, Willy, and two others, all worked.

The noise was unbearable. It was ear-breaking, pounding, excruciating to listen to, louder than ten impact wrenches, and that horrible din of the air hitting the hood made Willy grab his head and scream and straighten up, and as he did so the hood of the truck came down on Willy, the friend of Juan Verdugo.

"You stupid fuck!" shouted Willy, screaming and stopping the pressurized steam.

"Ha, ha," shouted Juan Verdugo back. He peeked under the hood at his friend. "I got you, dog! Look at your face!"

Willy slowly extricated himself from under the closed hood. "You stupid fuck! Damn you, you little Mexican shit," he said, whipping the pressurized steam hose out of the engine compartment. "The hood hit my fucking back! And you know my back is almost broke! You know that really hurted me!"

"Yeah! All right, ese! Got you back, mother!" said Juan Verdugo. "Got you back for last week. Fire ain't funny, bruder. You best keep your hands off me."

"I'll whip you, then, man. Yahhh!" Willy ran to the side of the truck and pulled out his own air hose. "Hah!" shouted Willy.

The duel was on.

Juan Verugo scrambled onto the open truck tailgate and into the bed. Seeing his rival above him, Willy looked for a higher position somewhere at the back of the bay. He leapt atop a rolling cart and kicked some tools off it.

"Hey, those were mine, you shithead," yelled one of the other detailers at Willy. "You put those back!"

Willy paid no attention to the other man's request. He was shooting compressed air at Juan who was shooting it back.

In the lube bays across the yard, in the detail bays and in the yard where the cars were, the impact wrenches sputtered to a stop and the bays emptied as the mechanics gathered to watch Juan and Willy fight. They were always battling each other and were famous for the ridiculous way they dueled, the screaming taunts, and the way they jumped all around the bays, whipping each other and attacking with pressurized air.

Juan leaped on the edge of the truck bed and shot air at Willy. "Ayeeee!" Willy screamed, sliding himself out of the way in the rolling cart. "He, he, I knew you were going to do that. You didn't fool me at all! Try again, fucker!"

"Come on, come on, compadre," coaxed Juan. "Come to your amigo Juanie."

"No, you come here," replied Willy. "You come here!"

"Come here, bruder," said Juan. He tried to whip the hose at Willy, but missed. "Oh, trying to run over there, huh!" cried Juan happily. "Take that!"

"Ahahhhh! Woo! Gotcha!" shouted Willy, shooting air at Juan and barely missing.

"Missed! You are no good at this! I'm gonna give you lessons. This is my wild lasso," cried Juan.

"I'll give you a lasso, too, hombre, you mother."

"Get out!"

"Watch out!"

"He's going over there!" cried an onlooker.

"Look out below, Geronimo!" screamed Juan.

The crowd of mechanics were grinning at the spectacle of two grown men whipping and shooting compressed air, screaming and jumping away.

In the middle of some of the shouting, a tall man in a white shirt, dress pants, and a tastefully striped tie stepped out of the back door of the showroom, which led into the shop. "What's all the noise out here? There is strange noise at the back of the showroom and the customers—" began Mr. Thank You Very Much for a Shitload of Nothing.

The crowd of mechanic who were watching began to disperse.

"Come on, dude!" cried Willy to Juan.

"Here, here, little bruder," said Juan evilly.

"Whoa! Whoa! What do you think you're doing with those hoses?" said the horrified manager, "Didn't I tell you never to fight with those again? You were written up for this before!"

"Come on, come on!" said Willy, ignoring the manager.

"Ayeeee!" screamed Juan again as he leaped back into the truck bed and attacked. "Geronimo, bruder. Look out for you self. I'm comin'!"

Willy shot air at his flying attacker. Paper, metal particles, asbestos from brake shoes, dead leaves, pack rat pooh, and pigeon feathers pelted the bays and everyone gathered around the bays and the other remaining mechanics cringed and backed away and even the manager was forced to close his horrified eyes. His thinning hair rose on his head and the end of his tie, below his ten year pin, flew up.

When the air hose moved away, the manager opened his eyes and began ranting and raving: "Shut those hoses off, now! What do you think this is? A fight club? I told you none of this should ever happen again. I told you! What did you think you were doing? I'm writing you up. That's right. Fighting with air hoses? I told you I would write you up if this happened again. Didn't I tell you? I told you directly from the upper management that this dealership would not tolerate this dangerous situation and there was to be no more trouble from the two of you, no more dangerous fighting! Didn't I tell you no more trouble? No more fighting in here? You're both going straight to Scott! I'm gonna recommend you go! Yeah, that's right, both of you! I'm going to fire your shit outta here because I already told you! I told you! You haven't got any excuses because I told you that this would cost you your jobs! You are a pair of them, yeah, a pair of them, all right. Like no other pair of them that has been here at this dealership and I have known them all and fired many of their asses!" The man was burning up and his blue eyes were bulging. Juan and Willy went along with him because they had no choice. They went along to get their asses fired, again.

Chapter Two

Six weeks later, Juan Verdugo was carefully arranging a population of squeeze-bottle ketchups on a brown plastic tray and singing badly a narcocorrido in Spanish, inserting a flower-loving girlfriend from Arizona in the original Mexican lyrics, which he never knew anyways. As he sang his eyes became watery with the strain and his thin voice cracked horribly so that he sounded like a suffering toad, the type in desert arroyos after a rain. A second shadowy figure, Willy in a hair net and a dirty apron, crouched on a stepstool behind a rack of rubber aprons and coats near the sink where Juan Verdugo stood singing. In one hand this secret lurker wielded a large ladle as though it was a club and he was grinning, a sick, but happy leer. Farther away, in a brighter backdrop, like the background of a Dutch master's painting, a burly black man, evidently the chef, leaned on a muscular hand that was propped on the ledge of a steam table. His other enormous hand slowly scratched his broad back, wrinkling and stretching a white T-shirt.

All at once Willy gathered himself, and like some horrible panther he dove off the stepstool onto the back of Juan Verdugo, who was just in the process of thoroughly missing a high, screechy note.

"Crappy singer!" Willy Jent screamed when he landed on his friend, "I hate that crappy narco stuff."

Slashing with the ladle, Willy tried to pummel the large shoulders of Juan Verdugo, from the left, from the right, and straight down. But Juan had only feigned distraction; he fell back on his heels, deflected the ladle, and squirted Willy on the neck with ketchup from a bottle that suddenly appeared in Juan's hand.

"Ayeee!" screamed Juan happily.

The hands of Willy went to his friend's neck and came back splotched with ketchup, then he fell back as the chest of his apron was smeared with ketchup as well. Willy roared in anger and fell upon his friend. Together as a roiling animal they crossed the kitchen and slammed against a stainless steel shelf.

"Give up your crappy singing," yelled Willy from under the shelf. "Give it up, you annoying ass!"

"Ay, you jealous fucker, stop hitting me!" screamed Juan who was still squirting ketchup everywhere.

"Narco corridors again, huh!"

"Let go of me," said Juan wielding his ketchup wildly and approaching Willy's hair net and hair.

"I've got you now, and you're going to regret that stupid song!" Willy screeched.

The two men twisted and shoved themselves across the room until they ran up against another open shelf. An enormous aluminum colander bounced off its hook and crashed down on Juan's shoulders. The singer's hands slipped from his attacker's neck. The two wrestling workers bent over. Willy wrenched himself around and was thrown toward another wall where he slammed.

"Fucking fucker!"

"Ayeeee! Ayah!"

"Lousy singer!"

"Ayeeeehah!"

"Frick and Frack!" shouted the black chef, who appeared in the doorway of their back kitchen, clapping his hands in rhythm to the nicknames he'd given them, "Frick and Frack! Juan! Willy! Stop this! You morons! You two are wrecking my shelves! Stop it! Stop!"

Juan and Willy stood in the center of the room breathing hard and looking sheepish.

"Put everything back in place!"

"Get to work you worthless idiots!"

The pair struggled with each other for a few seconds more, and then, dropping their arms to their sides and grinning, they stood up straight. Willy sidled up to a sink and began scrubbing a large aluminum pot. Juan wiped his mouth, picked up the colander, and put it in the sink. He grabbed a ketchup bottle from the floor, wiped the nozzle of the bottle, and stowed it on the tray. He picked up the tray, opened the refrigerator door, and slid it in.

Chapter Three

The night's usual battle ended with no hard feelings between the two. Juan and Willy slumped in the back booth of Bess Tacos, the restaurant owned by Jipson Verdugo, Juan's cousin, and in this booth they noticed the effects of the wild weather that night, a mysterious, muddy alphabet smeared on the linoleum floor, the musty scent on the wind of the millions of wet creosote bushes evenly spaced across the southern swath of Arizona.

At the end of work, with Jipson's okay, Juan and Willy usually shared a couple of free beers together because they felt dragged out and wet. When they finished spraying plates the tops of their pants and the bottoms of their T-shirts, right through the apron, got drenched from squeezing the sprayer and opening and closing the dishwasher. They had learn how to time the opening of the dishwasher so that they pulled up the doors (both sides went up at the same time with one handle) just as the washer quit and they could reach in even though the hot water was still falling and pull out the tray of plates from one side and slide in another. They got wet doing that and they got wet from spraying fast, but they had to do it to be done before closing and in Juan and Willy's case they hurried to have a fight (sometimes it was funny) and then get to sit and have a free beer. The booth Juan and Willy sat in was near the kitchen, way in the back corner of Bess Tacos, where they could hear a lot of kitchen noise and no customers ever wanted to sit because they could not concentrate enough to read the writing on the sugar packets, should they happen to want to do such a silly thing.

Willy was noticing the effects of the storm, but Juan was not thinking of the weather. Juan could only focus on a certain gold mine he needed to find.

"Whaddup, ese," said Juan, as they sunk down on their tailbones across from each other.

"Nada," said Willy. "E tu?"

"Hmmm... I been thinkin of stuff. I heard this DJ Josue Josue on Loco Sono yesterday tellin' something. It was about the price of gold being sixteen-hundred and four dollars an ounce. It made me remember this gold mine that I never actually told you about. Forget about the Santa Claus Mine, cuz this one is los mejor, kick ass, no mierda."

Willy nearly always ended his work in the kitchen at Bess Taco like a zombie because his arms were so tired from spraying plates, but the sound of Juan's voice discussing gold made Willy wake up and try to listen. Willy glanced in the mirror that ran along beside the booth and he noticed that Juan was still the same big man, young in his face and with too much wavy hair. Willy noticed he still wore the hair net that was starting to make his brown hair flatten down always. The rest of him was tall, and pale, with smoky rings around his eyes. Not a bad looking guy, some said, except for the acne scars which women could hardly see in a dark bar, not that they could ever go to any of those bars because they were working almost every night at Bess Tacos. He decided his was probably the kind of face that deserved to discover a gold mine. "Oye, sixteen hundred and four dollars an ounce? That sounds kickass. Orale, that's better than breaking my back cleaning the steam table, and listening to Otis say, 'you better get every little crack clean,' that's such incredible mierda."

"No shit," said Juan. Fondly, Juan thought of how he had found out about the fabulous mine he was thinking about. It had happened when a yellowed page of onion-skin paper that was sort of torn up had fallen out of the center of a teeny blue book on his mother's shelf several weeks earlier, and he could still see the type-written words of a dying padre, which he had read by starlight until his mother had stopped him and took the book away. "Oye, I haven't told you, homeboy, I found the directions to anutter mine," said Juan, beginning to talk a second time after clearing his throat. "Something interesting. The story of an old padre. Some called him the babbling padre, but I think that was probably sinful or something to call him that."

Suddenly, rain blew in at the door, and someone came stumbling in, ducking and diving.

Willy leaned around the side of the booth and looked toward the front of the restaurant to see who had showed up, to see what other interesting things were going on, but not many other things were going on in Bess Tacos. It had its usual assortment of criminals and baked wackos–Jipson didn't get a lot of nice people wanting to eat at his place.

Willy told Juan it was just old Frank the Fart and he turned back. Gold being sixteen hundred and four bucks interested Willy all right and he wanted to know all about this mine Juan had an idea about. Willy took a sip of beer and held it in his mouth and then swallowed it. It felt cool on his hot throat. He asked Juan about the mine.

Before Juan could answer, Frank the Fart spoke.

"Pouring down like we's under a tipped-over aquarium," said Frank loudly. He was wiping his feet on the rubber mat spread in front of the cigarette machine. "Feels good. Don't think I can take much more of one hundred de-grease." Frank stumbled down the counter toward the booth where Juan and Willy slouched.

Willy turned his attention back to Juan who was telling more about mine. "The mine still has placers," Juan said. "Placers right on the surface."

"Placers?" asked Willy in disbelief.

"Placers as thick as a man's wrist. Silver and gold placers."

"Whooo-e," Willy said, whistling loudly and long at the idea.

"Ain't it blowin? Whooo. Whooo!" Frank imitated what he thought had been the wind. "I ain't heard it that bad since nineteen sixty-three, I think, in the summer when the roof blowed off Consolidated and a plane crashed into a big adobe on 39th. Hurt the plane moren adobe."

A young dude they didn't know with tattoos up his arms and spiky hair that he'd died black and pink was hunched over his plate of tacos and he snorted when Frank passed behind him.

"Your parking lot is nothin but mud," said Frank to Jipson. Jipson was tallying money with his phone. He nodded.

"Your brain is mud," muttered the taco eater.

"Heard that," said Frank as he gripped the counter with two messed-up hands and slipped the seat of his worn jeans—and the caved in place where his ass should have been—onto a stool at the counter. Damn, Willy thought, he had chosen a stool right across from Juan and him. "Disrespecting elders. It's sign of the coming Pock-o-lisp."

The taco eater snickered kind of evilly to himself and ended by wiping his mouth with a squeezed-up napkin while he studied the ceiling. Jipson's ceiling had warped and the paint was peeling.

"Do you believe in the comin Pock-o-lisp?" asked the old man loudly. He swung around on his stool toward Juan and Willy. His face was a creepy collection of brown spots, scabs and wrinkles. In the middle of all that horror he had two bright blue eyes. It was a horrible spectacle, that face of his.

"Shit, no," Willy said.

"Then it's comin. Another sign is nobody believes. Hurricanes and nobody believes. Two signs. Wait, three signs, hurricanes, nobody believes, and disrespecting elders."

Juan and Willy sighed. They'd wanted to have a conversation together in privacy, and now they had to have that old creepy guy looking right at them, listening in with an alert expression on his shrunken face and with his eyes peering at them like he was seeking out a gem in their every word.

"I tell you," said Juan in a lowered voice, "there is so much lost gold in the mountains and the canyons of Arizona that you could be rich working them for no more than ten Sunday afternoons. Less, make that three. Three Sundays. Lazy work, too."

"Sonia, git me number three," shouted the old man over his shoulder. He was so wrapped up in what they was saying that he didn't want to take his eyes off of them long enough to turn around.

"And a diet?" asked Sonia. Sonia's waitress outfit, which was a black top and black slacks, was so tight that it showed every roll of her flesh. She was starting a ticket at the back counter under this blue light Jipson had, and before she could start the ticket she was shaking the charms on her charm bracelet because they were always getting in the way of laying her wrist down.

"Diet, too," agreed the old coot.

"Why don't you ever get regular? You ain't fat like me," said Sonia.

"Remember, you can never be too rich or too thin," said the old man.

Juan and Willy looked at him as though they had not wanted to hear that.

They watched the old man for signs of more strange conversation bubbling out of him, Pock-o-lisps and such, and then, when the coast seemed clear, they began again, hoping their conversation would not include the crazy old man on the stool. "All you have to do, Wilhelmo, is find a teeny sliver of gold no wider than the itty, bitty end of a prong on this fork every day, no, I'm wrong, every other day, and you got your wages for the month taken care of, but I don't got a truck to get us there anywho."

Their wages from spraying plates were pretty low. There was some truth to Juan's words, however Willy suddenly felt he had to object to this suggestion of his friend's (that they get back into mining) on account of the many practical difficulties. He could sense them without actually naming them.

"Juanie, amigo of mine," he replied after taking a drink of his beer and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "You are so full of it. Sorry to say, any placers there were left in this state are gone now, man. That is the way it is. That is the way it is always gonna be. There are forces out there looking for riches who are already richer and powerfuller than we, hombre. You gotcher Asarci, your Morenci, your Cocomenci, your Demenci and your Gilamenci mines. And a bunch of other mencis I didn't mention in order not to discourage you. All those I named are big operations of cor-por-a-tions. A lot of them are Canadian, too. And you know no Canadian gives a rat's ass about no American in A-rid-zon-a. So what if the price of gold is sixteen hundred bucks? The price of copper is three times higher than last year, you know the big mining operations will be out there looking for copper. What are you thinking we could do? You can't just go out and dip your hands in them placers you are talking about. And if you mess around on some little guy's property and try to look for gold where he has staked a claim you could get a bullet in you because the price of lead is still pretty low."

"Oye, ese, you don't know everything," said Juan right away. "You have no hope in you, that is the problem as I see it. I still have hope. I can see a better day coming for me. Someday I will own a fully chromed-over motorcycle and I will take it to Puerto Pensca and ride around in real style on a vacation, which will be my first one of those fuckin things, my bruder, you know it. I will stay in a kickass hotel and order kickass foods. I know what is kickass to order, believe me. I can't wait for that day to show you how wrong you've been. I don't know if I'll give you a ride on my fully chromed-over motorcycle, though, or even take you with me. Anyway, I know a place you don't know about. And that is a gold mine." He had this wise/stupid look on his face that Willy noticed he got sometimes. It was really irritating to Willy to look at someone making a face like that, but Willy was one person who could control his temper.

"No one owns this place anymore," Juan continued, "and no one is ever out there so you can do what you like."

"Are you two talking about mining?" asked the old coot, breaking in.

"No, old timer," said Juan sternly. "If he comes over here it will suck balls," Juan said to Willy under his breath.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Oh, shit, no," Willy said, but Old Frank the Fart toppled off his stool and lurched over to their table.

He slid in beside Juan. "Nice of you boys to let me eat with you. Jest git off work?"

"Yes," they said. Their moods sunk.

"Bring my diet here, Sonia," said the old man loudly when Sonia came to the counter and found him gone. "I'm eating with these kind boys. Go on, boys, what you were saying bout the price of gold? That was real interesting. It's sixteen hundred an ounce? I hadn't seen that in the papers. It's another sign of the Pock-o-lisp. What does that make—three so far? Go on about the mines."

"Salsa, chips and a diet," said Sonia, putting the cola down in front of the old man along with an open saucer of salsa and a small bowl of chips. "The taco plate is on its way."

"Thank you. Go on boys, tell about the mines," he said happily.

They studied the table. Things were getting pretty sour because of him butting in.

"Go on," he told them. "Don't mind me."

"You won't get shot at the place I'm thinking of," Juan said finally.

"Shot?" said Frank, "I been shot seven times and stabbed five and struck by lightning. Once, only struck by lightning once. I still got the scars from the lightning strike. What a terrible day that were." Old Frank the Fart stretched the side of his face and pointed to a teeny scratch that was invisible in all the other old age crap that was spreading all over his skin. "Look what it did to me!"

"Ah," Willy said politely to Frank. "That musta hurt. Okay, so what's this place?" he asked Juan.

"Yeah. Tell me, too. Oh, I sorry, boys," said Frank.

"Why should I tell you, you don't believe me," Juan said with his jaw sticking out the way it did when he got fed up with Willy.

"One taco plate," said Sonia, swinging the plate in front of Frank.

"Thank you, Sonia."

"Okay, forget it," Willy snapped.

"Typical miners. The battles begin. Heh, heh." Frank's laughing mouth cracked one of the taco shells and he coughed a wheezy snort.

Willy drank his beer and waited to see if Juan was going to talk some more about this mine that he had almost told about. Willy was feeling better because really he was also thinking about finding some way out of spraying plates and sixteen hundred bucks an ounce for gold sounded pretty good to him compared to carrying heavy stacks of plates around the kitchen and putting his hands in boiling water and slamming the doors of the washer down over and over until his shoulders practically snapped off at his spine.

"Are you talking about that Santa Claus Mine again?" Willy said awhile later after he decided Juan had clammed up due to the presence of the aggravating old man and Willy's remarks. Any mention of the Santa Claus mine was a sore point between them because Juan had told Willy before about this Santa Claus mine that nobody had never found and going there had damaged his older brother's truck. He didn't even know why he brought it up unless it was to aggravate Juan, which he later admitted was pretty damn stupid.

"Santa Claus Mine?" piped up the old timer again. "Did you fall for that one? I thought nobody would ever fall for that one again. Heh, heh." The last of the taco he had started to eat fell apart in the old timer's mouth and hands, and parts of it dropped and spat on his plate and on the space in front of him. "Oh, sorry," said Frank and more taco fell out of his mouth.

Juan and Willy threw their hands up in disgust. Juan snatched a napkin from the dispenser and dropped it from on high on top of a blob of salsa that had fallen from Frank's mouth.

"No, Wilhelmo," Juan said, "this is anutter mine."

The old man picked up the napkin. "Thank you."

Not wanting to offend Juan, Willy still went on because the old timer was staring at him and grinning. "Because I didn't like looking for the Santa Claus mine. I felt real bad about what we did to my brother's truck and he won't lend us his old Dodge ever again, by the way, if you were hinting about us borrowing his truck to go looking for another mine." They had punched a hole in the oil pan and Willy's brother had to pay for the tow back from the Wild Ass Mountains, which was more than two hundred dollars, and then he had to buy a new oil pan and have it fitted, which cost six hundred in labor alone. "How many mines do you know about anyway?"

Juan seemed to be brooding over Willy's suggestion that he wanted to wreck another truck. "Not that many."

"Bet you don't know about the Keystroke Mine?" said old Frank.

"Butt out," said Juan.

"Okay, sure. You don't want a fortune. That's okay by me. Pock-o-lisp will probably git both of yous before you can spend all the money you'd git from the Keystroke. Anyway, I'll eat my tacos."

"It just seems like you know an awful lot of mines," Willy said.

"A man's mind is full of mines when he gits the fever," said Frank.

Juan and Willy glared at the old man.

"Oh, sorry boys. Said I'd butt out."

"I don't know that many mines," Juan said bitterly. "But maybe I know enough mines to get us out of washing dishes, my bruder," he added.

Chapter Four

The next night Juan and Willy battled each other in the rear parking lot of Bess Tacos when taking out the garbage. Afterwards, they were sitting in the same booth at the back of the restaurant when Frank the Fart found them again and brought his plate of rolled-up tacos and sat right down without pretending to ask permission.

"What you boys done before you washed dishes here in the kitchen? If you don't mind me asking," asked Frank as he sat.

"Shit," said Juan under his breath to Willy.

"Used to be car detailers at a dealership," Willy said sullenly.

"Together?"

"Yeah."

Frank perked up. "That's nice. Work buddies. I had me a work buddy a long time ago. No, wait, that were my wife. What happened to that job?"

"We screwed up," said Juan.

"Screwed up what?" asked Frank.

"We were fighting with air hoses and that wasn't company policy."

"Had you always been detailers?"

"We were car handlers before that," said Juan.

"What happened?"

"We got fired from a different dealership," said Willy.

"We were blocking a drive with an Isuzu Trooper," Juan said.

"Did you crash it? Crash it into a valuable wall or somin?" asked Frank.

"No, we left the keys in the ignition and the engine running," said Juan.

"What? You did what?"

"Left it running all night," said Juan. "While we was checking the doors of a bunch of other cars, and all the different stuff we was supposed to do at closing, we forgot the car was running there blocking the drive and we both went home."

"The Trooper sat there till the morning," Willy added.

"Like a trooper, you could say. Te he," laughed Frank.

Juan and Willy regarded that old man with real hatred.

"So who found it?" asked Frank.

"A cleaner came in the next morning and found it. He told the head of sales and he came out and found the Trooper still running on the drive," said Willy.

"Shucks, tat were bad luck. It would have been better if it twoulda been stolen," said Frank.

"We never got that job in the wash rack there or the detail there which was good money," Willy said, sighing.

"You wouldn't have got it anywho, Wilhelmo, the goddamn manager of used cars wanted his nephew to start there," said Juan.

"Necrophilism, it's everywhere," cried the old coot. "Sign of the Pock-o-lisp. Third one. No, I wrong, fourth one."

"I coulda used the tips from that job," Willy said.

"Wash rack or detail were cream puff jobs, for sure," Juan agreed, "but we weren't nobody's nephew."

"Wages low?"

"Huh?" asked Juan.

"Where you worked next. Or did you come straight here?"

"No. We both worked in a cafeteria before we got the other detailing job."

"You don't say? Lunch ladies?"

"Cafeteria workers," said Juan and Willy simultaneously. Every fuckin' body was always teasing them when they found out they had worked in a school cafeteria. They were always calling them fuckin' lunch ladies.

"That's tough," said Frank. "What school?"

"Hobson Elementary."

"Oh, that were tough, I bet."

"Darn near tore my shoulder in two," Willy said.

"Damn!" said Old Frank. "How did that happen? Did a little kid do it?"

"No. How could a little kid do that?" said Juan with anger at the old man's stupidity.

"They pretty vicious."

"We worked for this big old cafeteria manager."

"Don't say. Were she terrible? Did she tear your shoulder?"

"She barely moved from her chair where she was the cashier and hundreds of chins ran down the front of her," Willy explained.

"Uh, that don't sound appetizing."

"It was pretty easy to take a little food home, though," Willy explained, "cause she was lenient about that and let us take home trays of baked chicken without batting an eye until I got hurt because she was taking food home too and I could have turned her in to the school district and she would have lost her job. One day she looked up from counting the lunch money and said, 'Willy, I saw you dump a quarter down the garbage disposal right now with an enchilada which was careless. It was on that last tray you sprayed. You better reach in there and get it for me.'"

"She were cheap," said Frank.

"You said it. I always gave her the kids' quarters (that was their change from lunch which they forgot) because I knew she would see money sitting on the trays because no money ever escaped her. But I had missed that one quarter and she had seen it fall into the garbage disposal. She pretended she was afraid of breaking school property (the garbage disposal) which could come back on her during evaluations and she was already getting razzed by other managers and had been written up because she dumped mashed potatoes down a pipe and sealed it closed and they had to call out expensive plumbers to unstick it, so a quarter in the disposal could grind up the gears. That mashed potato thing happened before I was hired so she couldn't blame me or she would have. I did as she said and looked in with all the ground up bits of enchilada and lettuce here and there but I ain't saw nothing like a quarter. 'It's gone,' I said."

"Then what'd she do?" asked Frank.

"'Look better,'" she ordered and went back to counting the money in the register. She had to have the count done before the man came with warehouse deliveries, because he always took the money bag and paperwork and she would get written up by her manager if it weren't ready in time."

"Managers sure love to write you up," said Frank, "yeah."

"I looked some more and, holy mierda, I saw it. I put my hand down but when I leaned over my left hip pressed a little teeny brass button that they used to switch on the disposal and I ground up the tips of two fingers and the side of this hand pretty good, but it was the wrenching my shoulder took when I pulled my hand back fast that has lasted all these years."

"Dang!" exclaimed Frank.

"'My hand!' I screamed when the blades were cutting the side of my fist. 'My hand! My hand!' 'Go ahead and take your hand outta there,' said the kitchen manager as calm and unconcerned as could be, like I had put his hand into a prize box at a party and I was taking more than my share."

"Of course, he went to the district approved urgent care place," said Juan, helping out with the story, "and got bandaged up and took some days off with pay. The doctor and nurse asked him all sorts of dumb-ass questions about the accident while they bandaged him up, and he answered them honestly thinking nothing of their interest 'cept that they cared about him the way another human would after they were fuckin' injured. But they was secretly taking notes of everything he said. After he went back to work, the school district sent this risk management team to talk to him and they told him by what he had said to the nurse and doctor that his accident was due to what they called blind stupidity on his part, though in fact it was that manager who had told him to do that, ordered him, to fish around in the disposal for that goddamn quarter."

"So you got no money from it?" asked Frank, turning back to Willy.

"Not a dime," Willy said.

"There ain't no justice in the Old Pueblo," said Frank.

"I hafta agree with that," said Juan.

And Juan had something there, for Willy always thought when people talked about all those freeloaders taking advantage of workers' comp they actually don't know about people like him who had shoulders messed up and got nothing. The number who get nothing and are hurt are about equal to the number who have nothing wrong with them and get loads of money. The people who are getting injured are so scared to do anything or don't realize how hurt they really are until too late. Especially when things creep up on you like the way you stand when you spray dishes that makes your feet and ankles hurt so bad you can not sleep at night or walk down the steps of the bus the next morning on the way to work. Juan and Willy knew that manager of theirs used to leave knives in the soapy sink and that is really a no-no in a kitchen and Juan and Willy saw people get cut. But the injured never filed workers' comp or even saw a doctor. 'Please no knives,' was what one cafeteria lady who came in there as a substitute wrote out on a note and taped up over the hot and soapy sink, which is one of the three sinks you have to have in a kitchen, but the manager went by and saw it and she tore it down, ripped it up, and threw it in the trashcan. She just giggled while she was doing that. She was still giggling in her office when Willy signed out on her computer. That substitute cafeteria worker and Willy were disgusted, but they were too weak and timid to do anything about it.

"Juanie, " Willy said then, "do you remember at the dealership how we said that a manager could come in drunk, park a new car, and stagger around, even smash into a telephone pole with a brand new car and no one would say anything except 'Watch out for that pole.' He would be kept on regardless of what he did that cost the company money and by that I mean profit."

"No, ese, no," Juan disagreed and he set his beer down on the table firmly, "now I hafta object. You ain't telling it right. A manager who smashes a car into a telephone pole will actually get a promotion, Wilhelmo. You know that as well as I do. He will get a promotion. And, mierda, they will write nice things about him on his annual evaluation such as 'Shows drive and initiative' and 'Driving the company to new, higher profits every day.'"

"Heh, heh," laughed Frank, finishing up his plate of rolled-up tacos. "You guys seen it the same ways I do."

"Sure, that's true enough," Willy said, not in a mood for more arguments, because he wanted to work Juan around to the topic of the mine again. Just telling the old geezer about what they had been through in the last few years, about the injuries and insults they had endured, made him ready to try something new. The Santa Claus Mine might have failed, but maybe another mine would succeed. Maybe this mine of the padre was just the ticket out of Poorville that they needed.

"It ain't just true, you can bet on it," said Juan.

"Mining is the best bet for you boys. You bound to have luck cuz you ain't had no luck before. I wish I could go looking for that Keystroke Mine with you. It's a mighta fine mine. But I'd rather fine my older brother before I die," explained Frank.

Just then, Spigot Soza who was a regular and who was always hanging out when it was closing at Bess Tacos came staggering along the counter to their booth. There were big gaps in his T-shirt where battery acid had eaten away the fabric, and you could see his brown skin underneath like brown islands. He changed batteries for a living at one of those big battery houses, but Juan and Willy didn't know then if he was working or if he was between jobs.

"He may be a billionaire for all I know," said Frank about his brother.

"I wish he were for your sake, old timer," said Spigot, who had heard this stuff about Frank's brother that he was looking for about a hundred times before.

"Well, I could fix my walls in the adobe. They's cavin in something awful. It used to be a mexicano candy store, you know. All night long I hear the adobe fallin out of the wall like little waterfalls behind the plaster. Adobe runnin down in the wall like sand in an hourglass, so are the days of my life and all that shit. It just keeps runnin. It's very discouragin."

"If you found your brother and he were a fuckin billionaire, it would be a storybook endin," said Spigot.

"A crappy storybook," Willy said.

"Yeah," said Juan. "The type people love to read."

"Well," Spigot said with a sigh, "I'm going home and did you know you're closin right now?"

Sure enough, Jipson was locking up the cash register and cabinets with his big bundle of keys. They paid no attention to Spigot going out, but hurried up polishing off their beers. Old Frank the Fart showed no sign of moving on, but he paid his bill, which Sonia gave him.

"Sonia, Sonia..." Juan began as he and Willy made their way to the front of the restaurant.

"I know. You need a ride," she said sourly.

"You are the nicest waitress," Willy said, being a kiss-up. Willy had lost his license for six months due to a couple of speeding tickets he couldn't afford to pay and Juan's latest car, which had been nothing but Bondo and spray paint, had been stolen two weeks earlier. Without Sonia's taking them home, they would both be on the bus.

"Shut up and get yer hand off my shoulder," said Sonia.

Jipson at the cash register suddenly announced, "I want to see everyone outside to talk about my new advertising campaign and what it's going to mean for all of us."

Oh boy, thought Juan and Willy, another advertising campaign and a discussion of what it was going to mean for them, which would be more work and less pay, probably.

Chapter Five

After Jipson announced that he was beginning a new advertising campaign, he explained that they should all meet outside because he wanted to show them something in the back of his truck. He hinted that he had purchased something spectacular.

"That sounds nice," said Frank. "Everybody out! Let's see it!"

Of course, Frank the Fart didn't even work there, and nobody wanted a crazy old drunk like him ordering them around. The other waitresses, besides Sonia, and a bus boy named Maurice were curious about what Jipson had in the back of his truck. The cook, Otis, who was really not the type to enjoy restaurant camaraderie, wasn't interested, especially on a night when several customers had sent back their plates with a bunch of dumb complaints. He was banging huge restaurant pots around in the kitchen and cursing. "Goddamn dry macaroni! Effing Applesauce out of a can!" Otis was a black man who had been a cook in the Air Force and he wanted the kitchen operation to be flawless. Jipson thought this chef could finally be the one to keep the restaurant out of trouble with the health inspectors, but Juan and Willy didn't think he'd last. Irritated and pissed described the range of Otis' mood swings most nights.

It was warm and wet outside Bess Tacos after another big rainstorm. Traffic roared through the water all over town and it made a steady, sloshing noise. A plane, the last taking off that night, was revving its engine at the nearby airport. Sheet lightning flashed over the northwest corner of the mountains and a minute later the thunder rumbled. A lot of broken glass and puddles made the parking lot sparkly in the pale moonlight and sprinkles of rain were falling through the light of the old neon signs all along the street. With the rains came the smell of wet creosote, and it helped the town forget about the way the scorching summer had shriveled them up until they felt like the corpse of their great grandfather.

Willy was one of the last ones out the door, and everybody was gathered at the back of Jipson's truck near the restaurant sign. The letters "Bess Tacos" looped around in some pink neon which Jipson liked to say had cost him a chunk of change. When the light was on, the O in Tacos always shivered like it was half- baked or something which fit in with the neighborhood around there. Bess Tacos had troubles remaining open because it sat in that dangerous section of Ocotillo Highway between the El Paso Motel and what remained of the brick walls of the old Palm Court Inn. Ocotillo Highway used to take you out of town, but Juan liked to point out that it was a wasted street and everybody took the Interstate whether they were going to Texas or California. That section of Ocotillo Highway was chock full of meth addicts and criminal types with a few ordinary poor people sandwiched in between for good measure, just to give the meth addicts somebody to rob. Besides a lot of those nice people, there are also plenty of legless guys pushing themselves in wheelchairs and yelling nasty questions at you like "have you ever had a child come at you with a grenade?" and if you say 'yes' they screamed and wheeled for you and if you say 'no' they called you worse curse words and said they had a gun hidden under a blanket. These were guys with bottles in brown paper bags on their laps.

Bess Tacos was named for this aunt of Jipson's who was named Bestamenta Bojarandes Bettencourt or something like that. She was an old bag who was high up in the Democratic Party. Jipson liked her a lot. Another aunt named Fidelia, which is the female of Fidel, like Fidel Castro, wanted the restaurant named for her, not this Bess lady, and planned to loan Jipson money, and that would have made the name of the restaurant Faithful Taco in English which was an okay name, but four letters fit better on the sign and Jipson liked Bess better. Aunt Fidelia didn't say anything about being jealous about the name Bess until the sign was made up and raised in front of the abandoned dance hall that Jipson was converting into his restaurant and then she wouldn't give Jipson the big loan at low interest which she promised. He'd been on a provisional restaurant license many times since, due to no money from this faithless Fidelia.

The chef came out. "And Frick and Frack, who perchance was it that spilled all that sanitizer on the floor in the pantry and left the pump top off where I could step on it in the dark and break it in two?" He was really sarcastic when he was angry and his hands were on his hips, but asking who did it was only a trick because he was staring at Juan with his eyes narrowed.

"Changos," said Juan, "it was me that did that earlier. I meant to clean it up and put the top back so you'd never know."

"Well, now you don't have to worry about that because the top is never going to go back on the goddamn thing because of the way I have trodden on it underfoot! And we don't happen to have another one of those sanitizer pumps and now what does that mean, perchance? I guess it means that I will have to haul myself out of here sometime tomorrow and hurry up and find an open restaurant supply house that's got one of those pumps and I'll have to buy one or we're in violation of the health code!" said the chef sarcastically and he glared disgustedly at Juan.

"Otis, don't you understand what is going on here? I am trying to discuss my advertising campaign right now. It's not a good time to bitch about detailed kitchen business," said Jipson.

Otis took out his keys and strolled toward his cherry red Camaro without another word to Jipson or Juan.

"You never stay when I have to ask your opinion," said Jipson. "And you exaggerate everything."

"I'm going to exaggerate myself to bed," growled the chef. "I gotta go to the restaurant supply store tomorrow."

"All this fuss over the top of a sanitizer. I can get the goddamn top to the sanitizer," said Jipson. "I need to discuss my advertising campaign."

"You do not know where the restaurant supply store is at!" yelled the chef, getting in his car. A dog began barking behind the El Paso Hotel.

"If you're dealin meth, your better get outta that parking lot!" screamed a woman in the doorway of a nearby house. Her shout drowned out the sound of the barking dog.

"I am the owner!" shouted Jipson back at her. He began talking to his staff again: "There's nothing that bothers me more than a person who exaggerates everything. It makes me so mad I could boil inside. My blood bubbles around my body like I'm bursting. I feel like I'm going to explode! The anger takes over my mind and I can't control myself. I just want to strangle people who won't stop exaggerating."

The chef backed his Camaro and drove away slowly. He might have been angry, but he wasn't about to splatter the sides of his cherry car with mud.

"Well," said Jipson sadly, "I got you out here to show you my new promotion. The guy is gonna install it on the top of the restaurant tomorrow morning. It's under this tarp. It's a big blow-up taco. It lights up, too." With that, Jipson yanked back the tarp and they looked at a messy pile of vinyl.

"That's one ugly taco. It looks like hell," said Frank.

"Ugly?" said Jipson in shock.

"Yeah," said Sonia, lighting up a cigarette. "I don't know if I've ever seen any colors like it except for maybe in vodka vomit."

"Maybe nobody will notice it," Frank said hopefully.

"I want them to notice it!" cried Jipson in alarm. "That's the whole point of publicity and promotion! I want them to drive along Ocotillo Highway and notice this lit-up taco. I have paid for flyers going out tomorrow saying to look for the lit-up taco above Bess Tacos."

"That ugly taco is a mistake," warned Frank.

"Do you all agree that it is an ugly taco?" asked Jipson.

Everyone hemmed and hawed and hedged their opinions so carefully that it was obvious they agreed.

"Oh my god, ese carrode mierda, you all hate it! If I put it up, people driving by will notice it and they will be upset," said Jipson in a panic. "They will be so upset that they will never want to eat here again because the sight of it will turn their stomachs and gag them. This is it! This is the final blow. I've been waiting for the final blow and here it is, come at last! I am so tired of covering my ass in this restaurant. I go to work here every day and all I do is cover my ass. I can barely cover my ass. I've got to accept it. I'm not covering my ass!"

Saying all that aloud about his uncovered ass seemed to raise his spirits. Jipson marched over to a wall and shouted some curses and banged the wall with his fist. "It's ugly!" Then he struggled over to the edge of the slippery parking lot and started prying small rocks out of the ground. He threw a few of them randomly. He was a very bad shot and couple rocks came down near his staff and everybody tried to step around to the far side of the truck in the sticky mud.

"This is a curse," cried Jipson slumping down on the concrete curb stop in a heap of self-pity. "This trouble is sent from my enemies. I lost another cook and now I got a crabby, uncooperative cook and I bought an ugly blow-up taco and I'm doomed. Caramba!"

They all knew it really wasn't that bad because the taco wasn't even up yet and probably no one would read the flyer anyhow. Also, no customers had seen the ugly taco yet because almost everyone but Spigot and Frank had gone home. In their opinions, Jipson was losing it.

"You're doomed anyway cause of the Pock 'o Lisp," said Frank, kind of cheerfully.

"It's a sign," said Jipson in despair.

"No," said Frank right away, "This ain't a sign." He walked away. "Guess I'll go home and listen to the adobe falling in my walls. Don't never stop. Like blood outta human veins. Like sand in the hourglass. So are the days of our lives. See you boys," he said to Juan and Willy, "Hope you find your gold mine. I'd like to go with you but I gots to find my brother." Frank stumbled away in the dark.

Jipson was so distracted by his worries that he didn't hear the remark about gold mining.

They were all left looking at the balloon thing and then Sonia said she had to go home, and she headed for her truck. Juan and Willy scurried behind her, their feet slipping in the mud. They feared she would leave without them. "Slow down," said Sonia irritably, "I'm not going off without you."

Jipson walked back to the restaurant and turned off the lights as Sonia circled the truck around to him. The two other waitresses got into their cars and pulled away. The bus boy put up his hoodie and disappeared with Spigot in the direction of a bar.

"Maybe it will look better in the morning," said Juan to Jipson out the window of Sonia's truck, but without much faith. They all knew it would still be ugly in the morning.

"My old man has a ladder," said Sonia hollering out her window over the sound of her gunning engine, "It's a good one made of aluminum with sections that slide and everything, but we loaned it to the neighbors and they never gave it back. I don't even see it in their yard now and I asked them politely for it twice."

"Bring it tomorrow," said Jipson sadly, not hearing what she'd said. "I'm gonna have the guy put the taco up anyways. He asked me about a ladder."

Juan and Willy went home in Sonia's truck and she said if she were as superstitious as Jipson she would shoot herself to put herself out of her misery. She just thought superstitious people were about the stupidest people in the whole world and it made her mad when the people in her family were superstitious. Poor people, especially in Arizona, she found were always superstitious. Her mother had been superstitious and it had landed her in jail for two years, which was a long story she wasn't willing to share with them except that it involved the manufacture of a "desert product." They thought she was talking about selling peyote buds and Willy tried to make a mental note to himself to try to score some of those from her sometime cuz he never got a chance to try buds and they sounded real interesting to try out sometime. Willy thought Sonia was way overboard by calling all superstitions dumb.

The next day, Willy woke up early because the phone kept ringing beside his ear.

"Hello?" he said, finally picking it up.

"Willy, is that you?" asked a voice.

"Yes, who is this?"

"It's Jipson. I need you to come in early," he said. "The restaurant is busy. Everyone is stopping their car and coming in. They love the ugly taco sitting on my roof! It's terrible! Terrible! I don't have the staff. The people won't get served and they won't ever come back again! I'll be ruined! I'm barely covering my ass as it is."

Willy got dressed in a hurry in the warm rectangle of sunlight that flowed through the curtains near his bed. The desert sun had bleached them of color, though ghosts of leaves could still be seen. He stopped by the backdoor of his brother and sister-in-law's converted garage, which was in front of the converted garage where he was living. When he knocked and his sister-in-law opened the door, he told her he had been called into work early so she would know where he went and she said, "Ain't you lucky! I wish I would get more hours. They won't give me no more hours and I'm the only one who wants them. I keep asking and they turn me down." His sister-in-law worked at the cemetery, and they were always cutting her hours. Willy's brother Tim was his only relative; his parents had left town years ago and forgotten him. He waved at the old lady, Mrs. Grijalva, who owned the house in front of the two converted garages. Willy liked his landlady. She owned an old Hudson car that was in the new garage at the back of the two converted garages behind her house and she said some day, when he got his license back, she would let him drive her to the cathedral.

Willy took the bus down to Bess Tacos. On the way he noticed that the city was nothing but big brown puddles everywhere, puddles that the bus splashed through. When he got off the bus and walked down Ocotillo Highway toward Bess Tacos he had to step over lots of palm tree fronds that had come down in the big winds the night before. As he got closer to work, he saw lots of cars in the dirt parking lot of Bess Tacos, more than he'd ever seen even on a Sunday morning and this was a Thursday! There were people pointing and jabbering. All of them were looking at the sign, at that ugly taco which was slumping on the roof there. Who knew anybody would take an interest in an ugly taco or that they would crowd Jipson's restaurant just to be near it? You can't predict nothing about people, he thought.

Crossing the parking lot, he saw two attractive women smoking hash and leaning against a car. One of the women jiggled a baby in its stroller in front of her and as he walked by them, Willy heard her say, "That's so awesome that they have a baggy vomit taco on top of the restaurant."

"Isn't it? Isn't it so fucking cool," said the other lady. "And it's in a snow globe."

"Oye, mamacita, que buena estas," said Willy, repeating the pat phrase he had heard Juan use before, directing it at the one without a baby. He came back to them and stood in front of the stroller. "Nice babicita," he said to the other.

"A poco crees que yoy a salir contigo?" The girl without the baby had asked him if he really thought she would go out with him.

Willy thought she had said something good to him. "I work in there," Willy said. "My boss bought that thing a few days ago. Yeah, isn't it awesome? Everybody thought it was gonna drive people away but I knew it was kickass. That was easy to see. Sure is somethin', though."

"Oh yeah," said the one with the baby looking him up and down and smiling a little. "Kickass?"

"Yeah, and if you come around at closing, I can probably get you a free beer," Willy said proudly.

"A free beer, huh?" said the other, passing the pipe to her friend.

"Get lost, loser," said the other one, giggling maliciously. Then they both starting cackling. Chuckles were just bubbling out of them at the sight of him, but he did not see what they had to laugh at.

"Okay, you don't have to be insulting," Willy said. In Willy's experience, women were pretty sensitive to physical defects in a man and didn't like them no matter what other good things there are about him such as he was ready to settle down and lived in his own nice, converted garage at the back of his brother and sister-in-law's home which happens to be a nice converted garage behind a nice converted garage behind a little house.

It turned out that the people coming by to look at the ugly taco balloon resulted into about a 300% increase in business for Bess Tacos for breakfast and 500% increase for lunch. By dinner, those damn crazy people were everywhere crowding around staring at the balloon and laughing. Willy guessed that was the best use of their time, but afterwards they were eating at the restaurant to Jipson's delight.

"Boys," he said to Juan and Willy that afternoon, "I'm getting rich by the minute. This could work out to be something big. Real big!"

Juan Verdugo had a strange feeling that the work part of the equation was mostly going to be for Willy and him to do on their own, and Jipson would do all the gettin rich.

Chapter Six

That day and the next were busy: wash, wash, wash. Soon the busy days became a busy week and then a month and finally it was November and more and more people were still coming. Bess Tacos was booming, and Juan and Willy worked really long hours. They kept thinking Jipson would offer to increase their wages since they had been good about not showing up messed up from drinking or partying with weed, but some things are predictable and that is that good things will work around to be screwy in the end for those working. What happened was Jipson's happiness at his success seemed to turn him against Juan and Willy.

One night, after working there the whole day, they had dumped the dishwater and were scrubbing the last pots and dipping them in the sink with the sanitizer.

"Clean the flies' bodies off the window sill," ordered Jipson as he passed behind them. He just said it like that, quickly, like Juan and Willy were there to be ordered. He had never spoken to them like that before, though Otis always did. Willy did what Jipson said, but he was sure upset by it. Those flies' bodies had been there for a long time and Jipson had never thought of mentioning them before.

The next morning Jipson had complaints nonstop about the way they did everything in the kitchen. When he used to compliment them for dumping out the applesauce when a cockroach ran into it and praise them for lots of other honorable acts like finding cans that were dented and mouse-chewed bread bags and stuff, now he wanted them to hop to it and stay late doing all sorts of things he never wanted before like wiping the tables carefully, even on the edge and under the condiments, and filling napkin holders the right way so the napkins could actually come out one by one and not in a clump.

"And check the dishwasher temperature and dump it more often," Jipson said. That took more time because every time you dumped the water it took a long time for the water to refill and, of course, you had to stop washing.

"Run the silverware twice like I told you. Once flat on the tray and a second time in the canisters." That doubled the time it took to do the silverware.

"Wash those bodies down the floor drain with a bucket of water." He was talking about cockroaches they had killed. Big sewer ones, a few months earlier. They were down in the floor drain and that probably wouldn't look too good if the health inspectors came around again.

At the end of the third day from when he had started picking on them, they were drinking their beers in the booth and Jipson left the register where he was totaling up the receipts for the last few days and he ambushed them. He said: "Listen, I need full time sprayers now not this farting around from you two."

"Excuse us?" said Juan.

"You heard me. That means you don't quit till the dishes are stacked on the steel shelves in the front and not on the counter in the back and the three sinks are wiped dry, and the soap is refilled, and the steam table completely apart and wiped clean, every part of it. Oh, and don't forget that the salsa bowls need to be refilled, enough for every booth and put them in the refrigerator on the tray with a note about the date they was filled and a tray on top. You're always forgetting the note and the tray on top. That is going to get noticed on the health inspection. And, also, only one beer at the end of the night. Not two or three like you are taking now. I'm not made of money, you know."

Jipson went back to the cash register.

Willy saw Juan's eyes narrow at the big ass of his cousin as it went away, but he didn't say anything, but just drank his beer in silence. Willy thought about the fact that they had run around the kitchen doing everything Otis and Jipson had demanded, and now he was attacking them? Willy could always count on Juan to give him support when he needed to feel better, but it usually involved an imagined trip to Puerto Penesco in his chromed-over motorcycle.

And Willy wanted to hear about something besides the motorcycle. After this tirade from Jipson, Juan's hint back in September about them mining somewhere was beginning to sound a whole lot better to him. He completely forgave Juan for the Santa Claus Mine and what it had done to his brother's truck. Willy was sick of Jipson ripping him another asshole, and he was thinking 'Sayonara, buster, mining sounds pretty good compared to working in this fucking slave camp you're running, thank you very much.'

"I had a great grandfather who did a little mining out here in Arizona in the 1930s," Willy said out of the blue, "and to keep aholt of a claim on some pile of rocks out near the reservation he paid this guy who lived out near his claim to go out and dig a big latrine and to use it whenever he could. That was to show that somebody was out there working the claim. A full latrine was something that showed any nosy mine inspector that you were still actively mining the place. That way he could holt onto the claim and still have a job in town and not go out there so much."

"A guy was paid to shit by your great grandfather?" asked Juan in amazement. "Is this what you are telling me, ese?" He always thought Anglos were pretty stupid about their money. He would ask Willy what he paid for certain groceries and snort at what prices Willy paid, like he could get it a hellava lot cheaper in the Mexican grocery stores. At Thanksgiving especially he would go on and on about what Anglos paid for their Thanksgiving dinners. He always knew where he could get turkey cheaper and he was sure all the Mexicans in town knew the same place, or they would just have beans instead that night, except for the rich Mexicans which he agreed were almost as stupid as Anglos.

"I know what you're thinking," Willy said testily, "but what I mean is I wish opportunities like that came for us, Juanie."

"Bueno, with all the gold in the mine I'm thinking of..."

There was that tempting mine again! Willy wondered if Juan would mention it in a way that would let him in on it. If only Juan would say something definite about it, Willy had decided he wouldn't let it pass by without acting interested and he would pump Juan for all the information he was willing to give. Not to steal the mine or anything, but to let him know that he was interested in trying to find it with him.

"...we don't need to get paid to shit but it's a pleasant prospect anywho," said Juan, finishing his thought.

"It certainly is," Willy said kind of half- listening to what Juan had said just then and kind of frozen in a way because he hadn't gone on to talk about the mine in any detail and Willy was disappointed and frustrated and trying to think of what to say next to get him going on the topic again. Also, part of his mind was somewhere else imagining them, and especially him, getting rich for a change on a secret mine full of gold nuggets. This mine idea sounded too good for him to pass up. But things were getting awkward.

He did not want to intrude on anyone's golden prospect but he was sorely tempted by everything Juan was saying. Willy wanted to tell Juan he was in on anything he wanted to do, and he would even do a lot of the grunt work, but he felt like he was being a pushy Anglo by doing it. Maybe Juan had in mind that the mine was going to be all his and he didn't want to share it with Willy. Maybe he had somebody else in mind to go with him.

Sometimes Juan and Willy had troubles getting along about them being different cultures and Juan thought Willy was too pushy. An Anglo, Juan said, was just naturally pushy, but he didn't like it and sometimes didn't feel like putting up with it from Willy. Juan could be irritating to Willy at times, too, especially when he really got on his high horse about all of the Anglos and their problems. Willy thought Mexicans were natural hypochondriacs, always talking about illness and looking for drugs to fix what ailed them. Willy didn't like being called an Anglo and lumped in with a lot of other people that he didn't even know. Of course, nobody likes getting picked on, so he got all defensive about his people. Juan hated it when Willy mentioned his many health setbacks. But all in all they'd been friends throughout the years and they'd backed each other up.

Willy took a deep breath and went ahead with trying to feel him out about his part in this mine idea.

"I think we oughta plan to go out there to that lost mine if you would let me in on it," Willy said finally, not wanting to force his company on him or make him share gold he really had a right to. "I didn't mean to make fun of the Santa Claus Mine when you talked about it in September. That probably just wasn't meant to be, and you said whoever told you about that was messing with your head."

"My friend, I accept your apology about the Santa Claus Mine. Forget about it. I knew you didn't mean to be a pain in the butt even though you were being one. You are only an Anglo, after all, and you have to act the way Anglos do. I will gladly take you with me again," said Juan. "In fact, Wilhelmo, I would be honored to have you as my partner in getting the gold. I can not do it myself. I'll even take you with me when I get my chromed-over motorcycle and go on a vacation to Puerto Penesco."

Willy felt real good to hear that. Willy was never happy when Juan and him were on bad terms and he wanted to settle that score about the Santa Claus Mine dig and his dissing Juan about it. Willy was pretty sure Juan had given up on his brother's truck anyway. The news that they were going to be together on this gold mine thing was music to his ears. Maybe they were really onto something good, he thought.

"So, what's the story? Where is this mine exactly?" Willy asked.

"Bueno—" said Juan, dropping his voice to a whisper and leaning forward as though he was ready to tell Willy everything. "Wilhelmo," said Juan seriously, "ese, we need to get the book."

Chapter Seven

"What book?" asked Willy. Now he figured they were finally getting to the story of that mine Juan had dropped hints about months earlier.

Juan paused for a moment and then whispered: "A little blue book my mom has. In it are the clues to find The Mine of the Babbling Padre."

"The Mine of the Babbling Padre?" Willy wondered later why he hadn't become suspicious of the ridiculous name. Of course, Willy had gotten interested in the Santa Claus Mine before and that had been a pretty dumb name. Later, Willy sure wished that he had never heard of the Babbling Padre or that business hadn't picked up at Bess Tacos and made it profitable so Jipson rode their asses non-stop, because they never would have thought of mining again—probably.

"My mother has the book," said Juan, going on with his story of the mine, "It tells the words of a padre who had once known another old padre who had lived out at an abandoned mission. These are the last word of the padre which were written down by an old lady in Mammoth. My mom got the book from her mother who was a good friend with this lady."

"Words about a mine?" asked Willy.

"That's what they are, Wilhelmo, my bruder, dog. Words about the most fabulous mine you ever knew about. The place is rich with gold, from two hundred years ago, and it's never been touched. And there's more. Nuggets in the roots of trees, man. But there's a big fuckin' problem."

"What's that?"

"My mother still has the book on a shelf in her bedroom. I saw it in the summer. It's blue with little black letters, and the paper is stuffed in that book somewhere, but she won't give it over to me. Changos! She never leaves me alone in the house to search for it. I need time to find it."

"How do you know she won't give it to you?"

"I already asked about it two weeks ago. She said 'You will only get trouble at that mine.' But I think she really wanted to give the book to my oldest brother, but he has no interest in anything but this chica he's after who sings cowboy music and I know he is never going to look for that mine."

"So the mine is just going to waste?" Willy suggested, trying not to sound too pushy.

"Sure."

"And so we could probably get the book and make sure that mine don't go to waste no more?"

"We could. Maybe. All we gots to do is get into her bedroom and search around in her bookshelves and it's ours, man."

"That sounds pretty easy," Willy said.

"Simple enough for us."

About a week later, Jipson had hired two extra kitchen workers because of all the extra hours he needed, Christmas coming and such, and Juan and Willy got a new schedule with two nights and three days off per week. Juan borrowed a car and the first afternoon they had off, they drove to his mother's house, which was a little brick place painted yellow with pillars and iron work in front. Every pillar had a different animal on it and it was near the banks of the dry Santa Cruz River.

"Madrecita," said Juan when they came in.

"Mijo," said Juan's mother, kissing him on a cheek, "Oye, you boys are looking rough about the edges," she said when she stepped back from them. "Get yourselves something from del refri. There's soup and some good puddings I bought. Carmel flavor with swirly stuff."

"Okay," said Juan.

"Damn, both of you look like hell," she said.

"I think maybe I'm coming down with something," said Juan.

Willy grinned. Willy considered Juan a hypochondriac.

"Check the medicine cabinet, mijo," his mother ordered.

"Thanks, I will. We got a lot of things on our minds," said Juan kind of casually. "And Jipson is making us work so many hours. But he hired some more help, so we get a break."

"Well, don't you go getting yourselves fired again, huh? And could you stay and watch the Tito's baby tonight for me? I want to play bingo at the casino. They're making a big jackpot for the holiday." By this she meant Thanksgiving which had been on Thursday and this was the Saturday after.

This was a shocking development of good luck and exactly what they had wanted—to be left in her house, but the idea of them keeping a six-month-old by themselves was ridiculous.

"I don't think that's a good idea," said Juan, not thinking fast enough of a diplomatic way to say that he and Willy couldn't take care of no babies on their own.

"Okay, but don't ask for no favors from your sister or me," his mother said sharply. She started pulling dishes out of the refrigerator and shoving them on the table. "Here, take some of this," she said, as though she really didn't care if they did or didn't.

"No, we don't mean we're not going to baby-sit," Willy explained. "What we mean is could we baby-sit an older one?" He fumbled, trying to be the friend who helps keep peace between the mother and the friend. Willy had lived with his older brother so long he had forgotten how to be with a mother. And he sure hoped his own mother was happy in Hawaii with that guy she'd met at the bowling alley.

"What do you mean? You want to pick the kid you get to baby-sit?" said Juan's mother, a little angry at his rudeness.

"No, Mom," said Juan, whose temper was rising at them always being taken wrong by his mother, "we mean could we have an older one with us who could tell us what to do and how to take care of the baby?"

"Oh. You want a kid with you that could tell you how to take care of the other kid?" said Juan's mother.

"Exactly," said Juan in relief.

"I guess your cousin Ella could probably spare her Beto. He's pretty annoy—he knows a lot."

"Okay, I know him. How old is he now?" Willy asked Juan's mother very politely.

"He's six. That should be plenty old enough to help you two out. Be here at seven because we're leaving for the casino promptly at seven-fifteen. I feel real lucky tonight with it being Thanksgiving and I want to get there earlier than usual."

They went back to Willy's house and discussed strategy. Juan said they better be watching that Beto who was a real mouthy chingadera and they had better be very careful around him. He wished they had another six year old besides Beto, but they would just have to tire him out. If they didn't get the book and he saw them trying, he'd blab to Juan's mom for sure and she would put the book away somewhere or give it to another relative for safe keeping. She wasn't going to let them go mining again.

They showed up at her house again at seven, but they had spent the afternoon discussing strategy. They planned ways to get this Beto tired and get him in bed by eight-thirty, however it turned out Beto was more than they bargained for.

"Do you know about baby diapers and wipes?" asked a suspicious Beto when Juan's mother had driven off and they had to change Ella's kid right away. They had stripped the diaper off on the carpet.

"Fuchi! Que mal huele!" cried Juan.

"You are doing it wrong. Don't you know nothing," said Beto.

"Callate, guey. Sure we do," said Juan. "What are we doing wrong?"

"You don't pick him up like that. You do it like this. And, you wait! You also need the changing mat to put under him. It's yellow and rubbery. If you put his butt down on the rug you'll get poop on my Nana's rug. And that's an especial expensive pile she picked out especial at Carpet Giant."

Beto ran across the rug and then at the tiled hall he knocked on his shoes and wheels came out of his soles and he skated to the back where they kept the diapers and the changing mat. How were they going to get a kid tired when he had wheels on his shoes?

"I'll special pile his ass," said Juan when Beto disappeared. "I knew he was a chingadera, but I don't remember this kid being so damn smart. Maybe I haven't seen him in a while." Meanwhile, the little baby was bare with his legs up in the air and Juan holding his ankles up. The baby looked scared about what they were doing to him. He clamped his bottom tightly together.

"How do we wipe your ass? like this, man?" Juan asked the baby, holding it at arm's length and wiping kind of quickly and sloppily around its butt.

"You scared the Tito's kid," said Beto looking at the baby's big eyes when he came back with the mat. "I didn't think anybody could do that." It was difficult to tell if this was a complaint or a compliment, but he was more suspicious of them than before.

After they put the baby to bed, with Beto's help, they tried everything to get Beto worn out. They tried to make him take those shoes with wheels off, but he refused. Finally, around ten, he fell asleep on the couch watching a DVD called Los Cucillos en El Agua Vampira which they had brought over.

"Mierda, I hope they are winning at bingo!" exclaimed Juan as they headed for his mother's bedroom. "We need time to go through all my mom's books!"

Juan's mother's room was dark and far at the back of the house. When they found the room, they groped their way around her bed and to the built-in bookshelves that surrounded a window that looked out on a creepy old cactus garden. Juan switched on a little flowery lamp, which was on a bedside table. Willy kept thinking there was someone out there watching them, maybe vampires with knives, and Willy wanted Juan to use a flashlight they had left in the car, but Juan said going outside to the car would waste time and the sound of the front door opening might wake up Beto.

Juan and Willy started going through the shelves, but it was hard because Juan's mother had about fifty billion little books and a lot of them were blue, the color of the book with the paper about the mine. They kept pulling more and more books out and Willy had to have Juan check all the ones he found because he had no idea what it looked like.

"Remember," said Juan, "Everything has got to go back in the same spot where you took it in case we don't find the book tonight. My mom should not know we been searching in here if we don't find it or she might take it away."

"Okay," Willy agreed.

Willy pulled out scores of books, but none of them were the one with the Babbling Padre story.

"That's it!" exclaimed Juan when Willy called Juan's attention to two blue ones at the end of a shelf. "That little blue book with the marks on it."

"It looks like someone scribbled crayon on it," Willy said.

"That's the book. I did that when I was little."

Willy gingerly handed it over to his friend Juan.

"In the back of this book are the papers. Very old." He cracked the book open and broke its back. Pieces of the cover like big dandruff patches fell on his pants. At the back, there was nothing. "Oh," he said, disappointed.

"What? There's no paper?" Willy asked.

"Maybe at the front," said Juan.

He flipped forward in the book and frowned when nothing, no paper, old or new, appeared. Then a slip of paper fell on his lap from the center of the book.

"Chin! Ah, here. This is it, el document." He carefully opened the old sheet of typewritten paper that had yellow stains on the folds.

"What does it say?" Willy asked eagerly. Willy tried to get closer and accidentally kicked over a tin wastepaper can. The can made a lot of noise when his foot hit it. He tried to set it back up quietly and made more noise.

"Oye, get out of my Nana's stuff," said a voice from the doorway. That was one of the scariest noises Willy had ever heard. Los Cucillos en El Agua Vampira must have gotten to him or else the creepy moonlight on the cactuses outside Mrs. Verdugo's bedroom had upset him.

Juan and Willy jumped at the sound and turned around to see that damn Beto in his pajamas watching them. Juan slipped the old paper they had found in the book up under his shirt to hide it from Beto.

"What do you want in Nana's books? You can't read. Get out of her room."

"Of course we can read," said Juan.

"I bet I can read better than you," said Beto.

"Callate, guey! We ain't getting into it with you, little man, now go away," said Juan angrily. He stood up.

"Not until you leave my Nana's things alone."

"Listen, I know your Nana. She can protect her own stuff. We ain't hurting her stuff. We are just looking for something to read while you sleep. Would she let us in her house alone if she thought we were going to hurt her stuff?" asked Juan.

"She probably don't know what you're up to," said Beto, sensibly, "She thought you was taking care of the Tito's kid. She didn't know you wanted to knock over stuff in her bedroom and smash it."

Juan and Willy sort of stood there dumbfounded by the kid's accusing tone of voice and the way he stood his ground.

"We shoulda waited longer to search," whispered Willy.

"We couldn't wait this kid out! He's too smart for us!" Juan whispered back. "He is always a dirty little tough chingadera. I remember him now."

Juan stood there looking at Beto and Willy tried to look at him like he was meaning business, too. He tried to shoot steely glares at him.

"Go to bed," ordered Juan.

"Get outta my Nana's room!"

Well, it went on that way, back and forth for a while between the uncle and his nephew. That little kid Beto was pretty bossy, but Juan could be a lot bossier. Juan forced him back to the couch eventually, after he skated on those wheels and yelled about his Nana and how she would get them. They finally resorted to putting the vampire movie back on the TV, and sat in the front room with him, sternly, but it was hard to get him back to sleep after he had seen them searching through his Nana's bookshelf. At about eleven-thirty he finally drifted off, though he was still saying he would tell his Nana everything he'd seen in the morning, which really didn't matter now that they had the paper which hopefully had directions to their mine.

"Fiou!" said Juan when Beto finally fell asleep.

When Juan's mother returned they acted like nothing had happened and left for Juan's apartment with the paper. Juan rented a small one bedroom apartment in a brown stucco building that was long like a barn and had barren dirt and chicken wire surrounding it. Cars parked right in front of the apartment doors like it was a motel.

Juan was so excited when we got to his place that he could barely get his keys in the lock. "I will translate it for you," said Juan after he had read it twice by the light in his kitchen. "First pour me some coffee."

When the boiling hot black coffee was on the table in front of him, he started reading the paper to Willy. "'I am the sole witness of the words of the Babbling Padre. In his fever he said 'great fortune of gold hidden in the lost canyon which was once the property of the old priest, the old padre, a friend of our family. God save his soul. And this mine is for the taking. The nuggets are large and lying loosely in amongst the placers. If only someone should be able to go there again and bring them back to El Town.'"

"That'll be us!" said Willy.

"It's going to be us.'You shall proceed,'" read Juan and he paused, "This is the direction part."

"Okay."

"'South and east to the mountains that are known as the Massacre Mountains and then in the Depredation Gulch fourteen miles. You will see the rock in the form of a potato and you will find this rock in the Massacre Mountains. The Massacre Mountains is where you will find it. You will look for the potato rock. At the back of the potato there is the vein of silver placer and gold. And the vein of gold is behind the potato rock.'"

"He is really repeating himself there," Willy pointed out.

"Bueno, I told you he was called the babbling padre." Juan drank some more coffee and read again. "'In the Massacre Mountains, the Depredation Gulch, find the potato rock.' And the paper says he died right after."

"Is there such a range? Are there Massacre Mountains? And a Depredation Gulch?" Willy asked. He couldn't hide the excitement he felt.

"That's what's so great, man. There are. I found them once on a map! And we could go there."

"Hell! Let's go there right away!"

"Now that we have the book, we need to get a truck," said Juan. "Something that can go off-roading." He was always practical and thinking ahead.

"I know where one is," Willy said. "An old Hudson. It would take us there, wouldn't it?"

"That old Hudson of your landlady's that you told me about?"

"Yeah. If we took it she would never know the difference. She only looks at it once a month when her nephew comes over and starts it."

"No. An old Hudson would not be any good anyway." Juan tugged his goatee. "We are going to need equipment, Wilhelmo. A Hudson would not hold the mining equipment and our supplies. It's pretty cold, too. We have to make a good camp out there. Well, maybe I know of another truck. I'm not sure."

This truck Juanie thought they could get was a Bronco Two that belonged to another cousin of Juan's who was willing to give them the pink slip for nothing if they would get it outta his backyard cause it was full of all these wild cats and his wife was pissed about it. Man, they were so happy when they went by his house the next day and Juan's cousin said they were getting it for sure. For days afterward they kept asking Sonia to drive them by just to take a look at it sitting in the yard with cats hopping in and out of all the windows. The only thing wrong with it was that it had a busted tranny, but they were certain they could find a rebuilt one and drop it in pretty easy, but it turned out that was a fantasy born of their own ignorance. They rushed off to the parts houses all over town, but it turned out the parts had dried up on those old things years ago and you could not get a tranny at any price even in the junkyards.

Then Juan remembered another truck he knew of, but his memory was hazy about where that other, better truck was.

Juan first could not remember which cousin had this other old truck and what shape it was in. Since he wasn't sure, they wasted a lot of weekends during Christmas driving around in Willy's sister's car, driving around the streets of town to the different cousins' backyards and asking aunts where the cousins lived. At every aunt's house they had to stop and visit and that was real painful for both of them, except for some of the food, which was pretty good, but the conversation sucked. Driving up and down these alleys they would set all sorts of dogs barking at them and people would come out and look at them. Willy was about to go crazy searching for that thing and when they didn't even know if it was in any kind of shape to take off-roading. Willy couldn't help wishing Juan would have just called his cousins on the phone rather than making them drive by their houses, but he said it was easier to look ourselves for the truck because he would know the truck when he saw it, but if he started asking people he would just get confused about which truck they had in their backyard.

One of those days when Juan drove them down the alley behind his girl cousin Yesinia's little green adobe house which was surrounded by mesquite trees and was on a quiet little street up near the Rillito River. You could see the whole Santa Catalina Mountains laid out to the north of that house and they looked purple and dark blue with powdered frosting sifted all over the top and down in the canyons because it had snowed a few days before up there and it looked beautiful from the river. It was views like that that made Willy know why his great granddaddy came out to Arizona.

It turned out Juan didn't know it, but Yesinia was seeing a guy named B. Body O'Reilly who had a strange name and a stranger personality including wanting to murder Juan and Willy on sight with the ax he was using to chop at a big safe which was lying in the middle of his backyard along with a bunch of rusty weightlifting equipment and boxed cactuses. Willy saw him chopping at the safe through a gap in a half-dead oleander hedge when they parked in the alley. A dog somewhere starting growling and Willy was getting very scared about the whole situation that Juan was leading him into.

"Why does that man have an ax?" Willy asked Juan as they approached the back of the house.

"Huh?" said Juan, looking around for the truck, Willy guessed. Juan's head was bobbing up and down, craning over walls.

"Are we going into the yard with the man with the ax?" Willy asked, pointing at B. Body who was in a chopping position over the safe.

"Huh? I gotta see my cousin. Don't ask me about no man with an ax," said Juan, ignoring Willy's concern.

"Is that your cousin? Are we at your cousin's house?"

"Yesinia should be here somewheres. Changos!"

Juan kept looking every which way but at the man who was chopping the safe!

Willy couldn't tell if they were headed into the yard with the safe, but he certainly hoped they were not.

"He is really going at that safe," Willy said nervously when they got a little closer. "I hope he don't see us, mierda!"

Chapter Eight

Immediately after they saw B. Body chopping at the safe, he burst through a gap in the oleander hedge.

Close up, B. Body was a scary looking man with a Mohawk and tattooed arms that looked as though they were strong enough to squeeze cold steel into mush. He was swinging that big heavy ax in his strong arms as he and his horribly scarred pit bull, Bunny, jumped out of the gap in the hedge. Luckily, Bunny didn't get too far, because he was tied to a chain. Then Juan's cousin came out of the little green adobe house and started yelling at her boyfriend to leave them alone because Juanie was her favorite cousin. Of course, that was considerate of her, but a little late, because B. Body had already axed the side window of the car and the glass shattered over both Juan and Willy's collars in an uncomfortable shower. Seconds before B. Body smashed the window, they had collapsed at the side of the car with their arms thrown over their heads.

Juan and Willy jumped into the car after that. Yesinia came after them, chasing their car down the alley, yelling for Juan to stop and pay her a visit. At the end of the alley, Juan decided to listen to her. Yesinia ran to the broken side window and apologized for B. Body's ill-tempered actions. After Juan backed the car into an alley-facing carport and got out, he asked Yesinia about that truck he was looking for and she told them the truck they wanted was at her little brother's house.

B. Body turned out to be generous after he realized Juan was his girlfriend's cousin and he had no reason to fear them. He'd thought they were police or some snoopy people trying to see what he was doing in the backyard to that safe.

In fact, he was so nice to them, after he realized his mistake that he paid them in cash for the broken window of the car that they had borrowed from Willy's sister-in-law and then he gave them $800 to help him break the door of the safe. It took hours to pry and hack at the door and Juanie nearly chopped Willy's knee cap off once. When it finally opened, B. Body took a lot of money out of the safe. Juan and Willy didn't ask anything about where that safe came from, but Willy didn't believe B. Body's story that it was his and he had forgotten the combination because he looked surprised when he saw exactly how much money was inside.

After that, they felt pretty lucky and they went straight over to this other cousin's house, which was near the Air Force Base and they found the truck, an old Ford F-150, which was the one they had been looking for all along. It was okay except for needing a tranny again, but this one turned out to be easier to get.

The cousin who owned the house where the truck was parked agreed to give it up to Juan, because his wife was tired of looking at it in her backyard and this cousin didn't think he'd ever get around to replacing the tranny himself. After a couple of days working on the truck on their days off, Juan and Willy were happy because this truck was just what they needed to get to the gold Juan was so sure about, but the tranny job was not going right. Neither of them had paid much attention in auto mechanics class in high school and now it was showing. The instructions in the book they borrowed were so much meaningless nonsense to them. And boy, that tranny was heavy, too. Moving it around wasn't easy, especially for Willy with his messed up shoulder. They didn't have tools or jacks that were worth a damn. Every bolt on the truck was nothing but rust and what bolts they didn't sheer off, they lost in the weeds. They had some great fights in the backyard, but that wasted more time. The upshot was a job that should have taken a weekend lasted four.

Their work situation at Bess Tacos wasn't too good either. Jipson said they needed to work harder and he was only just covering his ass as it was. Of course, they didn't tell him they had other plans, plans about finding gold, and they would soon be leaving town.

Juan and Willy broke tool after tool working on the truck and had to borrow them off people who did not trust them with their tools because they thought they would break them or lose them.

Then one afternoon while Juan and Willy were working on the tranny, Juan came out from under the truck.

"Esta chingadera no fuciona," he said and he began itching all over his arm as though he were on fire. After he had scratched from his elbow to his wrist, he began to dig at his neck. He started groaning with the aggravation.

"I am burning up," he said to Willy, shaking his head. He got up and ran into the house to talk to his cousin who was watching his wife cooking macaroni in the kitchen.

"I'm flaming," said Juan.

"I don't know why," the wife replied.

"I mighta sprayed the weeds to make it easier for you guys to work," said the cousin apologetically. Willy, who had followed Juan inside, felt real sorry for Juan's cousin because it was clear he didn't mean to have done anything bad and he only wanted to help Juan, who Willy found out later was his all-time favorite cousin. He wanted nothing better than for Juan to be his best friend, because he was awfully lonely.

"You mighta? Did you or didn't you?" demanded Juan.

"I did. I did spray those weeds."

"Dang!" shrieked Juan.

"Don't panic. Let me go to the wash shed and see what he used," said the cousin's wife, trying to be super-helpful. "It's something we just had around. Just around for a long time, that's all." She was so eager to help her husband get out of trouble; it was kind of depressing in Willy's opinion.

"Dang!" said Juan, following her. "Chingadera!"

Everyone went with her across the little Bermuda lawn to the laundry shed and Juan was scratching himself all over and cursing like crazy. It turned out the stuff he got on him was giving him a rash. It sure seemed like the cause was the junk his cousin had sprayed on the weeds a day earlier.

"I'm flamin'," he said. "What the fucking hell is all over me? What is it? What's on me?" Juan started twisting and turning and stomping his feet. His face was contorting in all sorts of ugly ways. Willy didn't like what was happening to his friend any more than his poor cousin did.

"I'll tell you," Willy said, taking the spray bottle when his cousin's wife handed it to him. The dark brown bottle of weed killer was all filthy, and there were spider webs clinging all over it. The label had faded and puckered up with heat from being in a window for many summers, and, no doubt, from having the weed killer dribble over it. That was nasty stuff. There were little skulls here and there on the label and lots of fine print to read. "Oh oh," Willy said finally reaching the bad part of the label. "It's real dangerous. 'No skin contact under any circumstances.' We better get you to urgent care."

"Wait," said the wife of Juan's cousin. "I'll hose you off first," she offered.

That sounded sensible, so Juan stood still while she ran around the yard following the hose to the nozzle, meanwhile she pointed frantically to the place on the wall where Willy could turn on the water. Her husband was no more help than Juan because all he could do was apologize. The wife sprayed Juan everywhere it hurt, sprayed him over and over.

"It's worse!" Juan began screaming after a while. "My skin feels like it's coming off! Caramba!"

"Oh...," Juan's cousin said, turning the bottle of weed killer so that he could read more of the small print, "'it says to avoid washing the victim's skin after contact. Seek the assistance of your nearest emergency care provider!' Ay!" screamed his cousin, "I'm sorry my wife is so stupid!"

"Urgent Care!" said Juan, stumbling toward his cousin's car. "Urgent Care, please!"

After a day in the emergency ward of the hospital, and an expensive lotion, Juan got most of the rash calmed down. Willy laid a heavy plastic tarp down under the car to cover the weeds and together they finished the tranny job, but Juan's skin wasn't a pretty sight for at least a week.

At the same time that they were fixing the truck, Juan and Willy started studying everything they could about mining and working out how they could buy the equipment they would need. They had to learn everything about prospecting as fast as they could.

They found a new shop in an abandoned quick market which was in the business of selling mining equipment. The proprietor, Mr. Franklin, started them looking at the various sluices and dry washers–those with hand crank bellows or a 12-volt motor–that he had in his shop. There were so many good things to buy and he told them about them and how useful they would be in the Arizona back country. Gold nugget suction wands sounded awfully good and he had a pile of those for a pretty reasonable price. Juan and Willy could imagine sucking up the gold with those things. Then he brought out the snipe scopes he had, which they were not sure what they were but they ordered one, just to be on the safe side. For a hundred dollar deposit, he gave them his best crack jack crevice buster, and an old air compressor to go with it.

They actually did refuse to buy a few things. For example, they thought they could live without Clay Free, the gold panning aid of experts, or the Mighty Joe Concentrator with its money–back promise and gift of a free ten-inch knife with any order. Mr. Franklin thought they might be making a mistake, but they held out against that. They did borrow a bunch of his DVDs like Modern Profitable Gold Mining. Then he sold them the Big Yellow Gold Magnet, as well as the Black Sand Magnet, because it seemed like if it came to gold magnets you probably couldn't have too many of those, and Mr. Franklin cut the price for them. There were sluice carpet mats of ribbed vinyl, which they didn't need, and a Bedrock Gold Vacuum–12 volt rechargeable which he let them have for another hundred down. Finally he sold them a gas powered hi-banker which he wanted $700 for, but he took a three hundred dollar deposit and threw in a Gold Genie Spiral wheel, which they never did get to work but he told them there was something wrong with it. Willy thought they should have gotten the drywash which had a 12 volt motor. It was a lot larger than what they wanted and it cost $500 so Juan nixed the idea.

They spent an immense amount of money of the gold equipment. You could say Juan and Willy had gold fever but a better description was paralysis. They could not think of nothing else and they were hardly feeding their selves in the last days in town. But their idea of getting the minerals was really not clear, to put it in the best light, and they had not thought their search out. It don't matter how much you think, when you're imagining a gold find, your thinking is not worth an inch of piss in a tin pot.

Nevertheless, in two days, the truck's tranny was repaired and they were able to start the engine after an hour's effort. The gas tank and gasoline lines were not as plugged with old gasoline as they thought and they were able to drive the truck to Juan's apartment. Then they were beginning to pack up for the mine! They had asked for a week off from work to go camping and Jipson had given it to them, while hinting that he might replace them and also reminding them that he was barely covering his ass.

The night before they planned to leave, Juan and Willy threw their gear together in a pile outside Juan's apartment. They assembled a four man tent, food and water, sleeping bags, and all the gold mining equipment they had purchased from Mr. Franklin. They had begun loading it when they started a discussion about what they were about to do.

"Shouldn't we tie this stuff down?" Willy asked Juan. "With some ropes or something?"

"Naw, this shit's heavy, man. We don't need to tie it down cause it's gonna stay put on its own, mostly."

"Okay," Willy said. "Well, anyway, what we've got to do on this trip, Juan, if you'll listen to me, is trust each other," Willy said, chattering away happily as he slid their new mining equipment around in the truck bed. "That's the most important thing when you're mining with someone. If you don't have trust, you are apt to attack each other when the ore is found. I've seen a lot of movies where that happened."

"Well, I don't trust any of you Anglos," said Juan in a sort of off-hand way as though this were really nothing new and Willy probably ought to have known it already.

"What?" Willy said, stopping what he was doing to look at him. "Are you serious or are you playing with me again?" Juan liked to play with Willy's head about how they were getting along.

"None of us do trust you Anglos."

"Not your best friend? What is this shit? You don't trust any of us?" Willy stood there looking at Juan with a sense of real disappointment.

"None of you."

"That's just sad. We went to high school together," Willy reminded him. Willy shook his head and started walking out of the bed of the truck. "We went to high school, man."

"I did not go to high school with you," said Juan. He walked over to the big jumble of sleeping bags and tents and food and water, which they had made and he started tucking more stuff under each arm.

This put Willy in his place: Shockville, U.S.A.

"Huh?" Willy said, climbing down the tailgate. "Of course you did."

"No, I did not."

"You didn't? You didn't go to Pueblo High in 2004?"

"No sir. I was living in Mexico then, sir."

What was he saying? Who had Willy gone to school with anyway? He felt his world spinning out of control.

"Oye, man, you Anglos. Just like a typical Anglo. You're getting all butt-hurt about the truth. You can't take anything. You got so scared by B. Body. It was funny," said Juan, throwing his sleeping bag in the truck bed.

"What do you mean? You were running, too."

"I was just trying to make you feel better about yourself. Like when I said it didn't matter that you can't pronounce my cousin Lucinda's name right."

"Well, thank you very much for nothing." Willy could feel his eyes bugging out and the vein in his neck throbbing.

"Do you know your eyes are bugging out? And that vein in your neck, it's throbbing," said Juan. "That's another thing that's funny about you."

"Thank you very much," said Willy. "Did you know you are a fuckin hypochondriac, huh, man?"

Juan had no respect for Willy—that much was clear. Willy thought it was unfair of him to discuss his fear, making it out to be such a part of him. Why, Willy knew he wasn't any more fearful of things than Juan was. Running from the man with the ax was simply a matter of self-preservation. And Juan had run as fast as Willy had. Willy had seen that clearly. Besides, Juan was a real hypochondriac and was super sensitive, always getting hives from every little thing. How many different times had Willy had to take Juan to the emergency ward, anyway?

"I'm disappointed in you, my friend," Willy said after he had kept quiet for a while and gone on packing.

"I knew you would say something lame like that, man," said Juan.

"Who was I friends with in high school anyway?"

"How should I know?"

"Remember when I met you–for the second time–at the dealership and I said 'I wondered what happened to you after high school' and you said, you said that you wondered the same thing!"

"Sure. I wondered what happened to you after high school," said Juan in an off-hand, disinterested way.

"But that's got to mean that you knew me in high school!" Willy exclaimed. He was feeling slightly hysterical at this point.

"No, Wilhelmo, it don't. What it means is I just wondered what happened to you after high school. Only an insecure person like you are would think from me saying that that I would be saying that I knew you in high school." Juan spoke all this in a matter-a-fact voice with his arms crossed on his chest.

"You mean by saying 'I wondered what happened to you after high school' you meant–hey, wait, you said 'wondered!' Now I know you're full of it. How could you have wondered about me before you met me?"

Juan rolled his eyes. "Like this: 'I wonder what hot chica I'm going to meet next month and what they are doing now and what they did after high school.'"

"What! You wonder what a hot chick you haven't met yet did after high school? Nobody thinks like that. Nobody thinks about the past of people they haven't met yet!" Willy was completely frustrated by Juan's weird arguments.

"They ought to, man. A Mexican would. A Mexican thinks about everybody. That's the difference between us and everybody else. We think across time. All the time a Mexican is thinking across time." Juan assumed a smug look after telling Willy this. He had all these theories of how Mexicans thought. Essentially, the Mexican world view was so different it involved a whole series of future Mexicans doing all sorts of things at any given moment in the future. This bunch of future Mexicans was the peculiar slant the Mexican had on all things, according to Juan.

"My friend, that is ridiculous."

"What's ridiculous? Your future friends are as important as your present and past friends. Keep things in balance, man, by thinking of them all."

"I think you do not even remember where you went to high school," Willy concluded with a lot of anger in his voice.

"It's YOU who don't remember high school–you, you! You don't know what your Mexican friend looked like! You don't even recognize your friend, man." Juan said this in a joking manner as though it was starting to make him laugh.

"I never knew that Juan well. I never went to his house. He was an acquaintance from school. I think you tried to be that friend to fool me," Willy said. He felt the pain of rejection burning inside him, but he was trying not to let it get the better of him in front of Juan because he would just make fun of him for it.

"I felt a need in you, man. You thought what you wanted to. Take responsibility for yourself."

"It's all just crazy. Everything I thought was crazy."

"You said it, man."

So Willy was forced to realize that Juan was not the acquaintance from high school. Apparently, it was a completely different Juan that he had known back then.

Willy felt so defeated by this information that he couldn't even get up any enthusiasm for an out-and-out fight with Juan.

He had a choice about how to react to this piece of information. He could make a big deal out of it and break off their friendship and get all butt-hurt over it, as Juan would say, or he could overcome the honest mistake and say to myself 'Hell, this is a pretty nice Juan after all and I don't need to take my disappointment with him serious.' Disappointment, it's part of life, he told himself.

Besides, Juan was right, Willy could hardly remember what he did in high school most of the time. He could have been all mixed up about Juan and not have known it. He only remembered that Juan a little since they were in auto mechanics his junior year together and they both flunked out pretty early and their low grades were about the same.

Come to think of it, Willy thought, Juan and him might have ditched school together one day and smoked a big fat doobie in an arroyo or a park or something. He never remembered that so well except that at one point in the day they were sitting on some hot concrete for a while and had to get up because someone said their butt was burning and then someone busted their balls trying to jump over a metal railing, which was a stupid stunt. Willy guessed that had to be him doing that. He was always doing stuff like that in high school.

But still, Willy was pretty sure he saw Juan and not some other person outside a basketball game against Cholla High once in January their senior year. It seemed almost certain that it was this Juan who was enrolled in the same PE class with him that year, with Coach Wilson, the baseball coach who had a messed up ear that looked like a little cut up cauliflower, but Juan mostly didn't come to that class, or wait, Willy remembered, that was him.

Chapter Nine

Finally, the much anticipated morning came when Juan and Willy left town and found themselves barreling down the highway, heading east, aiming the nose of their truck directly at the red eye of the rising sun.

It felt good to be on the road and to have left their jerky jobs at Jipson's place, perhaps forever, if they would be lucky enough to discover a large quantity of gold. They liked thinking of themselves as part of the great history of Arizona and Arizona mining. Juan and Willy were ignorant of the actual great history of mining, culture and commerce in Arizona. They didn't know a thing about all its hokum and bunk, the pageant of cowboys, conquistadors and padres, the overgrazed meadows, the monstrous Kachinas, the patina of haciendas, the dusty roundups, the stallions stampeding and the fortunes made with massive machines and ball bearings crunching, crunching, all the time crunching the mountains with mighty western hammers, hammers much mightier than any sissy eastern hammers, pounding out ore, pounding by the hour, hour after hour, smashing the ore to smithereens, smelting it and pouring it into wiggling troughs of shimmering bubbles to be skimmed and fired and molded into shining ingots and later to be cast into statues of cattle and cowboys, padres and conquistadors searching ever more for their golden mines, of all of that, of the great meaningless circle of copper, cotton, cattle and commerce and the meager cultural history of their woe-begotten native state, of the larger meaning or lack of meaning of Arizona.

They were also ignorant of the basic operation of this earth, which is pretty hard to figure out and maybe it's smarter to think that some wonderful ingot might just stand in the way of your big toe than to think that it won't. You could say that it's part of man's nature to be a miner and scrape the earth's crust and trudge around glaring at the rocks and the soil beneath him for a treasure that he thinks might be lying there waiting just for him to trip over. Of course, some early miners got eaten by big cats or killed by their enemies because they were looking at the ground instead of the trail ahead or because they were poking around in a canyon or a cave. But early man must have stared at rocks a lot and must have done that a long time ago or he wouldn't have gone through all those ages named for metals such as the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Yes, man will go into a hole after a metal only to fall into an open shaft quite happily, well, not exactly happily, but feeling satisfaction at having found it: his mine.

The only bad thing about their departure had been that Jipson seemed relieved to see them take a week off, and before they left, he talked of nothing but how much better the two, new dishwashers were. Sometimes he had no loyalty toward his cousin. Sonia hardly said anything about their week long camping trip, though she admired the truck and seemed relieved that she would not be cajoled into giving them rides home any more.

"It don't matter," said Juan. "We are on our ways to getting rich. I will soon have my chromed-over motorcycle to go to Puerto Penesco and take you along with me, guey. We'll have a real vacation and stay in the finest hotel in the upper gulf. We'll find some nice chicas down there, my friend, sweet ladies. Puerto Penesco has some of the best ladies, the nicest personalities. I might spend a whole month down there when I'm rich. I will eat in the best restaurant and order whatever I want off the menu. We could order big steaks; they have them there."

After a few hours travel, when they had passed the halfway mark to the border with New Mexico, they came to their exit and headed the truck off the highway onto a paved road, a little-used road that had long cracks across it. A sign noted their twenty-five mile proximity to the Massacre Mountains, and Juan and Willy smiled broadly at that. They were relieved, and frankly a little astonished, that the truck had run at speed without a glitch.

A beat-up, washboard dirt road branched off of the paved road about an hour later and they found themselves banging along an area with scrub oaks covering the low hills. For the umpteenth time, Juan consulted their map, from the U.S. Geological Survey, and the little scrap of paper they had found in the blue book they had stolen from his mother. "Soon we will be in the vicinity of the Mine of the Babbling Padre," Juan said. "We have to figure out which turn leads us into this," Juan pointed with his finger where he had drawn a circle, "Depredation Gulch. There don't seem to be markers."

Turning, turning, turning, the roads they took seemed to be leading them toward the hills ahead, the Massacre Mountains, named by the Babbling Padre. They were surprised, however, a few times when, at a junction, the road they chose led them plunging into a dead end in an arroyo. Then, backtracking, they seemed to be getting somewhat closer to the mountains. The roads in the foothills were even rougher than those in the flats and the truck tossed them around to no end.

In the midst of fighting the wheel to control the truck, a terrible thing happened. As they bottomed out in a dry stream bed, their metal detector flew right off the back of the truck and broke into three pieces! When they got out they noticed two boxes of food must have flown off before. When they backtracked they couldn't find that food. Yes, they should have strapped it down; Juan admitted that was a big screw-up of his.

"You fuckin idiot," said Willy, falling on Juan's neck.

"Ayeeeee! Get off me, you chango fucker!"

They fought each other, as was their custom, by throwing things from the truck at each other. They also threw each other into bushes and tried to knock the other one off their feet. They broke some more equipment and wasted daylight.

Finally, they gave up the fight and returned, happily, to the truck.

Willy, who still didn't have his license reinstated, took a turn at the wheel, but neither of them were experienced off-roaders so they jarred their backs and sides. Willy was afraid he had bent the axle about ten times and he stopped so he could check it over and over again. Of course, Juan made comments about how much of a worrier Willy was and how all Anglos were like that and of course none of that went over well with Willy who was still smarting from the high school mix-up.

Finally, late that afternoon of the first day, the Massacre Mountains, which they were heading into, took better shape. They looked desolate. Juan and Willy hadn't seen a human home, even an abandoned one, in hours.

Here was a perfect example of the ruined Arizona you never see in Arizona Roadways Magazine. The photos in that magazine show nothing but pretty pictures here, and beautiful spots there, with a bunch of way sick waterfalls splashing around heaping boulders and lots of attractive leaves floating on bubbly turquoise water. That magazine makes the reader think 'Oh snap! moving to Arizona will land me in clean oak canyons with candy-striped cliffs and the whole place will be some kind of Dream State and if I move there, I will have a clear shot at heaven on earth and will reach a bunch of my lifetime goals while enjoying the great outdoors.' But in Arizona Roadways they don't show the worn out shacks some in Arizona live in and the rusty appliances heaped up to form garden walls and they sure as hell don't show the ruined holes, the open pits, where the copper mines once were and left after dumping mercury and acids over most of the soil. They don't shoot pictures of the rusting mine equipment and the weeds growing over the abandoned towns that are supposed to be so damn picturesque, and they don't tell how the big land speculators took land away from people left, right, and center across the state. They don't show that in Arizona Roadways.

A lot of people actually living in Arizona think the place is glamorous but that is because they never go anywhere off the beaten track to the really wrecked places or they are living off the fruits of the earlier bastards who were here a long time ago. The truth is there are more down and outs altogether in Arizona than anyone would care to know. Mexicans and Anglo bastards like Juan and Willy and their great granddaddies, who were out in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico a hundred years ago when the Natives were busy trying to get rid of them, and there were no air conditioners, they see the whole set-up different. They see through the sham of it. Most who were from Arizona and had been from Arizona for a long time hadn't got any air conditioners still because they haven't got money to pay the big effin electricity bills you get when you get an air conditioner. And why don't they swing that and get air conditioners? That is as a result of getting every bit of ambition zapped out of them by all the sweat they sweated every summer when it was one hundred degrees for one hundred days and they were working balls out without effin air conditioning. Check it out! Yes, poor Mexicans and poor Americans sweating without air conditioning have been friends for a long time in Arizona but they had to put up with each other.

But Juan and Willy's great-great-grandparents somehow made it to Southern Arizona. To their misfortune. Arizona has been a right-to-work state and what that really means is a poor person has gotta right, and maybe even a duty, to starve. All the fine views, the fine rides, and the no-work jobs belong to the wealthy sons-of-bitches who move here each year from someplace else. They close off the trails into the mountains and drive up the price of living in the hills or any other choice layouts they find. Then, with right-to-work in place, nobody can make any union dues get paid and help the wages go up a teensy bit with a strike.

Is there a way out of this sucking place they were born in, you might ask? Well, if you are a poor man in this state you might start thinking 'Oh snap! how sick it would be if I could strike it rich in the hills someday before I keel over and die on a one hundred degree day.' Because Arizona is hiding minerals and valuable crystal specimens all over the place, under mountains and way up in rocky far-away canyons, and person like Juan or Willy might have visions of an El Dorado or something and imagine that the living will be easy for him and his friends and his family when his fabulous mine is found and the tons of gold brought in and weighed and well, they might strike it rich, maybe, and Juan and Willy thought that but that is basically total crap. The stuff might be there, and it is, but no poor man is going to get it easily, not easily. The world doesn't work that way for Juans or Willys.

The truth is that while he is living and breathing and walking around on this earth, a man has got to find a way to survive from day to day. That is his biggest job from sunup to sundown. Since some of us don't got the breaks of others and we have to do some dangerous things to survive. We have got to do some dangerous things to get ahead or even to get along in a so-so fashion, but actually a poor man has to do a lot worse things than you can imagine, although a rich man will always find a way to make what should be a safe idea unsafe for everybody else through his natural greed. The ideas for getting rich left for a poor man after the rich man has taken his share are pretty much all unsafe anyway, unsafe for him and unsafe for the rest of humanity that have to be around when the invention explodes or the mineshaft collapses or the crane falls ten stories, Ka-boom, on some fool's head.

The lure of gold in ancient times was about as strong as it is today. With the price going up past sixteen hundred bucks the lure was even stronger and Juan and Willy were not the only ones in Arizona to fall under its spell. Certain people nowadays in Arizona are eager to fall into mineshafts and to become suspicious of their fellow man always thinking he's got the jump on them and wants his digs which he probably does, but actually with Juan and Willy they ended up wanting someone to find them because where Juan took Willy was so far back in the effin boonies that they couldn't get help when they needed it, but that's getting ahead of the story.

Mining attracted Juan and Willy for all the usual reasons such as sounding like easy work compared to what Jipson wanted from them at Bess Tacos. Mining appeals to people who think, work? Not today, thank you kindly. The fun of pulling out a big fat golden lump of gold caught in the knot of a root of a cottonwood tree just about exceeds the pain in the ass when your boss rips you another asshole over your nonstop screw-ups. This has been the case since time immemorial.

So it comes to be that Juan and Willy needed to know the history of mining in Arizona, which is very interesting, and which they didn't know any of, actually. Not where gold and silver had been found, or what the mountains were like where gold could be found, or the type of minerals you need to find to find gold and so on. They were ignorant of all that. Nor did they really know much about how to recognize minerals, not which minerals stick together or how to pull them apart or where they had already been yanked out of the ground. Mr. Franklin's DVD's were not much help, either. Juan and Willy would also have been surprised to know the amount of equipment that they needed to mine that they didn't know about. Most of Mr. Franklin's equipment was actually crap.

Their understanding of chemicals and geology was hopeless and all they were going on was some murky hope that they would stub their toes of a big gob of gold. And they were using that book of the babbling padre with the scribbled Spanish on the page. They were trusting that crazy page that had fallen out of the book they had taken from Juan's mother.

The place they headed to, Depredation Gulch, was hot and dry, even in January. The day's wintry shadows shrunk away from Juan and Willy as though they had a grudge against the place.

Of course, this mine was not near the border, Juan said. There was very little chance that someone bringing up drugs would stumble upon them. This was mostly good. When Willy said something about how lonely the place was Juan explained. "Pollo," said Juan, "if this mine had been nearer the border a coyote or narco guy would have found the gold by now."

"True, but we are really going to the back of beyond," said Willy.

"Okay, don't let it worry you, homeboy," said Juan, grinning.

Willy didn't want to start another argument about Anglos being afraid of danger, so he let things stand as they were, but he was feeling a bit strange about going out so far from people without telling anyone. He had told his brother that he was camping in the Whetstone Mountains, which was nowhere near where they actually were. Juan said it would throw off anyone who would try to follow them if they gave out the camping story.

When they got to Depredation Gulch, they were in the foothills of the Massacre Mountains and around them were hundreds of old tailings. The tailing mountains had all sorts of colors on them, like rainbows. Some had gray at the top, then green, then reddish pink, then a broad stroke of bright greenish turquoise at the base. Others were purple and then mustard colored and ended with a big splash of blue. They had dribble lines down them but the crust on the outside was tough. Willy stopped the truck at one point so Juan could find a tool in the back of the truck that was capable of breaking the tailing crust. The biggest pick they had brought barely scratched the surface. Nothing much grew on them, either.

"None of the really big nuggets will be in these hard tailings," Juan said after his back seemed to have loosened up in dangerous manner from swinging the pick over his head and jamming the shovel into the brick-hard soil.

Around four o'clock that first day, they reached a hill where there was a wall, an old pile of rocks with some trees coming out of it and that must have been a smelter a long time ago. To Willy it was kind of spooky being in that long lost mine alone with Juan and both of them disliked the hot wind that blew on their necks. They noticed that the shiny sharp black slag lumps piled up here and there made it look like the devil himself had sat down on the wall and clipped his ugly toenails. At one place the slag was shining right out on a ledge. The ground was hot from the black surface even at four in the afternoon in the winter. Leading up to the hill there were more piles of tailings of every color.

"Hey," Willy said when the truck rounded one large tailings pile, "Is that a big old lake? Or is it a mirage?"

"I don't know, man," said Juan, who was driving. He parked the truck in front of the pond. "It ain't a mirage," he said.

Magenta sand edged one portion of the pond and in another spot an oily froth lapped up on a crust of turquoise. Something went plop and Willy got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the pond in time to see a three-legged frog plopping around in some mucky moss. What a freak! Then there were skeletons of a deer and a couple squirrels which they thought were dead cholla cactus, until they looked closely at them. Actually no plants were growing near the water which was a clue that the pond was dangerous. A clue which they missed. Sure-Locked Homes and What's Son, they weren't.

"Look at the bubbles on that thing," Willy said, speaking of the tailings pond.

"That's gas, Wilhelmo," Juan explained. "Fuchi! Que mal huele!"

"Phewy. Gas, huh?"

"Comes out of the underground mines. Bubbles up through the water. Changos, I've seen it plenty."

"Maybe it's dangerous. Maybe we should leave."

"Okay." Juan was smiling as they headed back to the cab of their truck.

"Why are you smiling?" Willy asked as Juan drove them away from the pond.

"There you go, running away again, Anglo."

"Oh, man," said Willy. Juan braked at the crest of the hill and Willy looked back at the big pond. "You sure those aren't fish, pollo?"

"They ain't no fish. That is gas."

There seemed to be something, though, as Willy looked back over his shoulder, something swarming around in that big old pond. Something that was surely alive.

They found a level spot back in the hills, raised a tent, and rested as the sun went down. That night Juan and Willy studied the map by the light of a lamp that they had borrowed from Willy's brother. It seemed they had found Depredation Gulch because the map had noted the old abandoned smelter, which they had found. They had driven fourteen miles further into Depredation Gulch, so the Babbling Padre's potato rocks and surface silver placers with gold nuggets mixed in should be close by their casual reckoning.

The next day they ate breakfast and walked up into the canyon with the scopes, magnets and wands that Mr. Franklin had sold them. They tried to pin down the location of this fabulous gold.

Now, they were in the deepest canyon of the Massacre Mountains, as the old babbling padre's instructions required. They discovered plenty of rocks but the question was which one was the potato rock? Funny thing was a lot of rocks in the mountains of Southern Arizona look like potatoes when you get right down to it. Some were long skinny potatoes and some were stout and fat potatoes. Some had broken open, as though they were steamed or baked and pressed apart on a plate for you to eat, and some were smooth and solid like a thin-skinned boiling potato. Some even seemed to have eyes, like potatoes you kept too long. But which was the padre's special potato rock? Which ones had placers behind them with gold in among silver?

Willy was thinking, "If only there was something more telling that the babbling padre had described like a rock that looked like a Snoopy head or one painted, chipped, and engraved with a sign saying 'Here I am, the special potato rock, and by the way, the gold you want is over there.'"

There were potatoes here and potatoes there. There were potatoes everywhere Juan and Willy looked. There must have been hundreds of rocks that could have been the potato rock. They tried their magnets and then their wands and finally their scopes on all the soil behind rocks but they hit upon nothing.

They searched around like that for a whole day and the next. The following day, the third, was promising to be about the same. Sitting under one of the tall oaks, they discussed which direction they should try to walk toward. But what they didn't say to each other was that they thought they were not going to find the gold. They both thought they had had it with searching.

They had looked for three days almost non-stop in those hills and all they found was a small graveyard, with about thirteen wooden grave makers in it and a fence that was broken and falling down.

"You know something, Wilhelmo," said Juan when they left the graveyard and started back to their truck and camp.

"What Juanie, my friend."

"These hills in a month, when it is really spring out here, these hills will be covered with snakes, I think. We will have to come back in the fall, if we come back."

"Mierda. I hate snakes. There is nothing more in the world that I hate more than a bunch of chingadera snakes," Willy confessed.

"I can see the holes of the mouses." Juan kicked at a hole and Willy noticed what he meant.

"Dang," he said.

"So if we're going to find gold we better hop to it, comprende?"

"I just don't know if I trust those notes from the babbling padre."

"Spoken like an Anglo," said Juan.

Just about when they were all turned around, and had thought about going back, fate gave them a turn. As usual for them, it was a turn in the wrong direction.

It was the next afternoon, late in the day, when they were feeling very weak and down and out and had come back into their camp from exploring in the hills, looking for potato rocks, and had about decided to drive out of there, come what may, and give up on their dream of gold, or delay it, that the small figure of a man appeared coming down a hill.

They noticed him walking down that hill toward their camp a long time before he got close enough to talk to them, and they could see he was a tattered old coot, wearing some kind of greasy leather vest and baggy jeans. When he was closer, they noticed the pants had stains all over them and there was lots of dust and mud on his black cowboy boots. He had little gleaming brown eyes and was nearly toothless, but friendly.

"Hallo," he hollered. As he approached up a little meadow of yellowy weeds, he took off his hat which was also leather, and someone had adorned its band with large teeth. "Hallo, fellers. What are you boys doing out here in the goddamn end of nowhere?" He shot a quick glance at their tent and their truck under a tree.

They were so shocked to see him, to see anyone out there where they had been alone for days, that they could hardly form a sentence. It never occurred to them to ask who he was and why he was there. They felt guilty about what they were doing and only thought of explaining themselves.

"Just camping," said Juan, lying quickly about their purpose.

"Camping?" replied the old fellow in a surprised voice.

Willy noticed a big knife stuck in the man's belt. The greasy vest had hidden the knife up until then and he had a funny feeling about the man, which he really should have paid attention to, because that friendly old man was up to no damn good as they were about to find out.

"We're just a coupla campers," Willy said. "Camping out in the fresh air. Ah," Willy said, breathing out deeply, "there ain't enough fresh air up north where we come from. City life. Ain't it a pile?"

"What are all those picks and that old hi-banker and broken metal detector for? You wouldn't be mining here would you?" asked the old coot, squinting at them and smiling. He turned a little and the big knife blade caught the sun and gleamed at Willy the same way the old coot's eyes were gleaming. He seemed to sense that Willy had seen the knife, and without letting on to anything he used one hand to carefully close the vest so the knife wasn't visible any more.

"Oh no, no, no," said Juan urgently, denying the mining observation. "Not us."

"Shit, no," seconded Willy.

Juan and Willy stood around awkwardly, holding their elbows. This old coot could be a scout for the owner of the land they were on, and they didn't want to be discovered mining someone else's claim. It was best to stick with the story that they were camping.

"What would we be doing mining? We don't know nothing about how you do mining," said Juan, laughing nervously, and running his hand through his hair. "We're just a couple of campers. Are we camping in a bad spot?"

"Maybe," said the coot. He looked around and studied the hi-banker and the picks.

"That's funny. You got a lot of picks leaning against your truck over there, and that's a hi-banker set up beside your tent. You use that for separating ore, but you say you don't know nothing about mining? Might be, just might be." He scratched his jaw line slowly. "On the other hand you don't need to know much about mining–if you're lucky. However, I would bet...," he said, lifting his filthy shirt suddenly and pulling a gun on them, "...that you're not so lucky. Give me the keys to that truck. Now!"

Chapter Ten

Juan had the keys to the truck stuffed in the front pocket of his jeans. It took a few seconds for him to pull them out—he was fishing for them with two fingers and his pants were tight—but the old man didn't want to wait any longer.

"Hurry up or I'll shoot you," he threatened. "And don't you try nothing stupid, stupid."

"Oye, man, this is muy messed-up," said Juan in protest of their treatment.

"Shut up. Give them keys to me or I'll shoot both of you and leave you out here to die." He pointed the gun at Willy and waved it around.

"Okay, man. Okay." Juan dragged the keys out and held them toward the old man, all the while cursing.

The tattered robber managed to snatch the keys away from Juan and still keep the gun trained on them. Then he scrambled backwards with the gun on them in a crazy happy way like some chicken with a bread crust. He was practically kicking up his heels with joy at how he had fooled them.

"Goddamn," he was saying happily, "Goddamn!"

When he got behind the wheel of their truck, he acted like he had not driven a car in a hell of a long time, and Willy was hoping the truck wouldn't start—as it sometimes wouldn't for them—but the robber was still pointing the gun at them out the window as the engine roared and he drove off. All their picks that they had left leaning against the truck collapsed on each other in a heap as the truck pulled away.

The old robber didn't say anything as he left. He just smiled a toothless grin.

Juan, cursing and kicking rocks, ran after the truck. The man kept waving the gun lazily out the window, but not even turning to look; he used the rear-view mirror to see what Juan and Willy were doing. The relaxed way he waved the gun was like he was teasing a five-year-old, a five-year-old you kept passing over and over while you were enjoying yourself riding on a merry-go-round.

When Juan realized the truck was gone for good, he expelled energy in a last desperate burst of running and then fell to the dirt. Willy had never seen Juan so discouraged by their bad luck. Not in anything that had happened had he acted like this; B. Body attacking them, the rash he had suffered from the weed killer, or the smashed metal detector. Willy was shocked to think that Juan might even be crying.

Willy walked to where Juan had collapsed and talked to him. "Juanie, come on, you got to get up. We gotta think. You never let all those hives of yours get you down. Think of that. Think of all that you and I have been through."

"Thank you so shitting much for reminding me," said Juan, speaking into the dust.

"You can't pout like this. It's not like you. You've got to get up. You are strong, man. You can do it. We can't let a set-back get us down. We have to keep our hopes alive."

"I can't. I can't stand to see our truck go away after all the trouble we had finding it and all that work we did replacing the tranny," was all Juan said. "I want to die. I know I am never going to get no chromed-over motorcycle. It's killing me."

Willy watched the dust from the truck's progress rise over the mountains in little light puffs. That old devil seemed to be driving like there was no tomorrow.

"I think he's going into Mexico," Willy said, when Juan finally sat up.

"Yeah, Mexico is where he's going with our truck, that's pretty certain." Juan sniffed and he pulled a clump of weeds out and threw it.

"I thought you said we weren't very near to Mexico," Willy said, catching Juan in another lie.

"Not very close," said Juan, not missing a beat and not even upset at being accused of lying.

Juan and Willy watched the truck's dust disappearing in a gap between the distant hills.

"Hope he knows the way out," Willy said.

"Yes. Changos, I don't want him back here with that gun."

"No. I was thinking we could watch him leave and figure out the quickest way out," Willy pointed out.

"Oye, that too."

After a while both of them forgot to watch the dust from their truck as it drove away but it got dark more quickly than they thought it would anyway and the wind was blowing the dust this way and that, drifting it so far that the road the robber took with their truck couldn't be seen.

"He looked like a nice old fogey. Nasty looking clothes, but a nice personality at first," Willy said, when they went back to their tent. "Very friendly and stuff."

"You Anglos are easily fooled, Wilhelmo."

Willy didn't want to get into it with Juan about Anglos right then so he ignored what he was saying. "Oye, you know something I just realized?" said Willy, "I think the truck bed had almost all our water. We forgot to unpack that last box and left it in the bed of the truck. That was so fucking stupid of us."

"Oh, God! You're right, pollo. We're in deeper shit than I thought," said Juan.

And they were. They checked around the camp and sure enough, almost all their water had gone with the truck and that wasn't all. It turned out the truck had half of the food which hadn't fallen off somewhere on the way in too, so now their food was nearly out. They might have gotten some water from some of the fruit cans, if those had been left, but they checked and they weren't.

Try as they would to not let the situation panic them, that night they both became slightly hysterical. They thought their time on earth would be over if they had to stay out there by themselves without water. They were not guys who could live off the land when they were dropped by helicopter in the back of beyond. They were not the type that could find all sorts of things around them to eat and locate water. Juan almost drove Willy mad as he kept saying, "I sure wish I had those cans of peaches I packed."

The next morning they had formed a plan. They laid out the remaining supplies under a tree and split them into two packs. They took their sleeping bags, camp stove, remaining water, and tent with them in backpacks. They decided to try and walk back to the tailings pond. Even though it was at least ten miles away, they thought it was possible they could get back to it and drink the water, if they boiled it first. With an effort, they started to walk toward the pond.

Having the truck stolen was sort of the last straw for them. It had deflated all their confidence.

"I don't know how to get outta here," said Juan.

"We went a long way in," Willy pointed out, "And we never saw nobody." At the time, that had seemed like a great thing, because they thought the gold would be easy to find. Now they were wishing the place had been full of people. All their thoughts of gold had disappeared and all they could wonder was why had people made so many roads into this place going off in all directions.

After a day of wandering, they rediscovered the tailings pond and they were delighted when they saw its waters, even with many strange colors and the crusty surface near the shore. But as they stood at the edge looking at the ugly water for a few minutes, they realized something even stranger, and wonderful. Willy had been right; the bubbles they had seen the first time were actually from live fish, a native species.

Fish! Si senor, these fish were there waiting to be caught. Of course, they would come out of a gloppy old tailings pond, but hot dang, Juan said, it was great. They congratulated each other for their smart thinking in coming back to the pond. Boy, oh boy, what a golden opportunity awaited and it was just out there for the taking. They could harvest the fish, drink the boiled water, and survive. Hooray! Scooping up fish would be easy in the shallow tailings pool. All those wiggly bodies seemed to be laid out for the taking.

The fish clearly were breeding in the pond or there wouldn't have been so many of them and their size was tremendous. When they waded in and pulled the first fish out, that thing flopped around madly. It was huge, but the strange thing was that it had three eyes.

"What's the problem?" asked Willy when he noticed Juan looking at the fish in disgust.

"That ain't no normal fish, is it?" said Juan.

"What? Does the extra eye bother you?" Willy asked.

"Yes, it does," said Juan.

"I'm gonna fillet it up, anyways. Wait till you taste it," Willy bragged. "You're going to love the way it cooks. This here fish is going to fry up great. Open up a can of corn, too, will you?"

They set up their camp near the tailings pond and Willy fried the fish on the camp stove Juan set up. They also took a big can of tailings water and set it on the stove to boil.

"I don't like this," said Juan," I don't like the look of that fish."

"Okay," said Willy, "go on harping and harping on the fact that the fish shouldn't have an extra eye but I gotta ask you why are you harping on it? You are just being a know-it-all. And you know nobody likes a know-it-all. I want to eat and I want to enjoy my fish. I'm starving for meat after all that walking."

Willy fried the big fish and he thought the flavor marvelous and the flesh moist and succulent. It had turned out the way a fish should. With Willy going on and on about how good the fish was, Juan broke down and ate some too. Neither of them got sick right away. It would have been so much simpler that way, if they had gotten sick quickly, because they would have known something was wrong with the fish for sure and, believe me, they wouldn't have gone on eating them.

Juan and Willy stayed at the tailings pond that night and the next day. At nightfall on the second day, as they finished their third fish, Juan walked to the top of a big purple tailings hill and there he saw it—their truck stuck in a ditch!

Juan ducked down and looked every which way in case he had been observed by the man with the gun.

"Willy!" he said running back to their camp, "Our truck is over the top of the hill. I don't see the man with the gun. He hi-sided it and left it! It must have been there all this time while we was camping right over the hill from it. All along it was here!"

Juan and Willy ran to the hilltop. The sat watching the truck for a half an hour before they got brave enough to go down to it. Then they ran toward their truck so fast they almost stabbed themselves with the cholla cactus that was growing over some of the dirt-covered tailings. Their legs were running pell-mell down to their precious truck.

"Hello! Hello!" said Willy pounding the hood. "Hello, old truck of ours!"

It took them a day to get the truck out of the spot the old robber had left it in. They were scared the whole time that the robber would return, but he'd taken off for good and they traced his boot prints heading for some far-away mountains.

When they got the truck out of the ditch, they decided to go back to their original camp for their gold mining supplies which they had left, and they took a few more fish out of the tailings pond and kept them in a bucket with water on the way back to town.

They prayed that their truck wouldn't break down on the highway and luck was with them. They arrived back from their second gold mining adventure (the Santa Claus Mine had been their first) safely, without damaging the truck they had worked so hard to find and repair, but without any fabulous riches.

Immediately when they were home they phoned Jipson, who was angry that they were several days late, but he told them to come in at their regular hours the next day. He was mad at them, but willing to let them continue washing dishes for him.

Otis slammed pots around the first night they worked, but Jipson told them Otis hadn't liked the other kitchen help any better. At the end of their shift, they sat in their usual booth with their usual beers.

"Howdy, boys," said a voice.

"Frank the Fart," said Willy, looking around the side of the booth at the old geezer as he came their way.

"I heard you was back. How did the mining go? Is the two of you still buddies or did it spit you apart?"

"We're still buddies. We didn't find nothing," said Juan. Willy told Frank about having their truck stolen and being left out in the desert and they said they were never going searching for gold again.

"Well, it don't matter. Gold isn't what you need. You need family and...hey, while you was gone I up and found my brother," said Frank.

"You did?" asked Spigot right away, for this was news to him and he was coming up to say hi to Juan and Willy, "Is he secretly a billionaire? Is your long lost brother going to help you out with all your problems with the sagging walls of your adobe that used to be a candy store? Or is he going to give Juan and Willy a living for life? And sponsor Sonia her own restaurant because she's your big brother's favorite waitress? And get Bess Tacos back on its feet where his little brother ate all the time and help me, Spigot, cause I'm so good looking?"

"Naw. None of that. He's in the Florence pen," said Frank. His bleary eyes stared forward blankly, but happily.

The Florence pen was the Arizona State Penitentiary. That news was met with stony silence.

"It don't matter," said Frank impulsively, breaking in on their shock. "I don't want his money! And he hasn't got none. I want my brother. Before I die I wanna go up and see his face every week and I'm going to do it, too. Warts an all. Wherever man is, there is love...pure love. Who-ee for man! I'm the number one cheerleader of man. He makes dynamite and outta that—pure love. This is his noble nature. You can see this everywhere. The Old West is gone but the struggle for tomorrow continues. You hafta give it to man. Don't he mean something? The Pock-o-lisp may come, but he means something. He may sully this world and worlds to come, but he has rise up for good. He can do good, he can do bad. That's two sides of the same coin...two sides of the...ah...hey? Where was I at?"

"You seem to be lost, old timer," said Spigot.

"But I want to hear about you boys getting lost and robbed. I'm glad you found your truck, so you didn't starve out there," said Frank, focusing his blue eyes on them.

"Shit, we wasn't in danger of starving out here," Willy said. "We remembered this tailings pond and came back to it to drink the water. We didn't know it had fish in it. We thought that was gas bubbles coming up," Willy said, looking over at Juan who was shrugging. "But then we saw the fish. Boy, they were good eating." Willy patted his stomach. "We brought a few back, too. I got one in my freezer still."

"And they was easy to catch because they was kind of disabled like," added Juan.

"What! I should say they would be disabled, boys. Are you telling me you drank water and ate fish out of a tailings pond?" said Frank. "You ain't gonna live to see the Pock-o-lisp! People practically die from eating fish out of a tailings pond. The Arizona fish in a tailing pond are mostly poisoned! They're bound to be full of mobibleums and trifibulums, you know," Frank explained.

"Mobibleums? Poison! You can practically die from eating them?" said Juan. He was already feeling faint.

"That's what I said. A tailings pond is a dangerous thing. Anybody knows that. You boys better bring what remains of that fish to a doctor, pronto. If I was you two, I'd stop by the emergency ward tonight on the way home."

Juan insisted they leave their beers on the table and drive to the hospital emergency waiting room, swinging by to get that frozen fish sample.

It turned out those fish they had eaten were full of so many different toxins, heavy metals, and known cancer-causing agents that those fish were walking time bombs as far as eating them goes, so said the people who tested the flesh of the fish. They said it was the most contaminated food product ever tested in their laboratory and they notified the EPA and state officials so that something could be done immediately for Juan and Willy who had consumed the fish and to get those fish out of the food chain as soon as possible. Juan and Willy were given a course of expensive drugs to take in order to clean their livers from the poisons and they were called into a state health office to answer all sorts of questions about where those fish came from. They told the authorities all about the tailings pond and how to find it.

After the officials interviewed Juan and Willy, the state sent a team down there to Depredation Gulch. They went in and killed every last fish in the pond so that no one else could get poisoned from eating them. Then the whole place was fenced off with a chicken wire topped with razor wire and warning signs in English and Spanish were placed on the fence every few feet saying that the pond was very dangerous and not to drink or bathe in the water. The state planned to clean the pond up completely, sucking up the horrible liquid and carting away the polluted soil to some safe place or other, but the money ran out for that kind of operation.

The first day off, Juan and Willy tried to take their crappy mining equipment back to Mr. Franklin to get some money back, but his shop was empty and there was a 'For Rent' sign in the window. Because of all their health expenses and the money they had spent on mining, Juan's finances failed and he decided to move in with his mother and Beto who was really hard on his uncle nonstop and kept saying he could read better than Juan and stuff. As soon as he worked a few more months, Juan was sure he'd probably be able to get his own apartment again and Willy said he could give Juan a loan.

Juan was happy with the way Willy took him to the emergency ward right away. In hard times, Juan said, Anglos and Mexicans could get along. According to Juan they had a long history together in Arizona and they had put up with a lot of nonsense and hot days with each other and that was a bond. Their cultures weren't that different. It's like that with most people—you can find more in common with them than you ever think when you first meet them. And when you have to share a really hard time together, when you've both been poisoned, it pulls you together.

"Whaddup ese?" Juan asked Willy one day when they were out of the hospital and back working at Bess Tacos. They had several weeks of pills ahead to see if they could rid their livers of the poisons they had in them and both of them were hanging out together at Juan's mother's place watching scary movies.

"This morning was so weird. I woke up on the couch and I was naked and there was a taco and a drink sitting right in front of me," Willy said to Juan.

"Is that so? Where do you suppose they came from?" Juan said in a sort of lazy voice that did not tell Willy anything. "Did you meet a kickass girl, maybe?"

"Don't know. Thought you might know if I did. You were with me last night."

"No, I do not know nothing."

Willy was pretty sure Juan did know, but he was fooling him. He just seemed bound and determined to spend his time fooling Willy.

Later, after the movie was over and they were bored, Juan's mother came home from work at the ballpark and found them arguing about what had happened with the mine. They were both so sick from the poisoned fish and so tired from work that they didn't have the energy to fight a proper fight, not even for old time's sake.

"Mijo, you boys should stop fighting and stick together," said Juan's mother, "I don't like to see you disagreeing. After all, remember, you two knew each other even at Pueblo High School and that's a long time already."

Aw, fuck! Willy thought, looking toward Juan who was smiling as broad as he pleased, Juan had fooled him again.

"What in the fuck?" Willy exclaimed, "Juan, why did you say all that crap about future Mexicans and past Mexicans and keeping them in perspective? You were cold!"

"Oh, there you go, Anglo, getting all butt-hurt," said Juan, sniggering softly.

Being fooled felt awful, but not awful enough for Willy to abandon his friendship with Juan. Being poisoned felt awful, too, but apparently not awful enough, because even after their failure finding the Santa Claus Mine and the Babbling Padre Mine, Juan and Willy had not completely abandoned their dreams of picking up gold in the desert.

And after a few weeks of being Otis and Jipson's bitches at Bess Tacos, they found themselves wishing that they had come across their own riches. They vowed that when their livers got completely better they were going to quiz Frank the Fart some quiet night and ask him for the details of that Keystroke Mine of his.

###

THE END

MEET THE AUTHOR

Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.

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