Free Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants by Ted Conover Page A

endurance, though perhaps because he made the others look slow, he was generally disliked.
    He looked startled to see me, but quickly recovered: “Ah, I didn’t know this tree was yours,” he lied, turning to continue with his now-full bag toward the trailer.
    “ Bastard! Keep to your own tree!” I shouted after him. Raul didn’t look back. “Pinche coyote,” I added under my breath. Of course, it was just another test. My first had come a week earlier, when a man had placed his ladder against the heavily laden tree I was already on. “There’s room for two on this one,” he had assured me when our eyes met. I might have fallen for it, had not Carlos and company warned me previously: there’s never room for two. The tree you pick is your own. My loud protests had provoked some laughter from other men in the vicinity—I think they were laughing at him—and the man had finally left. It had not happened again. The orchards, at times, were a very macho world.
    Some time around noon Nate decided he would break for lunch and we, by necessity, did the same. Carlos and I, our legs dangling into a dry concrete irrigation culvert, pulled off our gloves and unwrapped the foil around the burritos we had made that morning from the tortillas and sauce of the night before. Nothing was said for a long time, as we caught our breaths and restoked our stomachs. I was staring blankly at my gloves, lying on the dirt, when I noticed that the palms were reflecting the sun. Suddenly I focused. “What the ...” I began in English, reaching over to pick one up. The inside of the leather work gloves, the part that touched the fruit, had a dull gray gloss, the color you get when you blacken paper with pencil lead.
    I held the glove up and looked quizzically at Carlos. “What’s this stuff?”
    "Pesticidas," he replied. I thought about that for a moment. The tree leaves were all covered with a flaky white residue. When you reached into a tree, you almost always got snowed on by a small shower of dusty white flakes. Some stoical pickers wore bandannas over their mouths, banditlike, in order to avoid breathing the stuff. But most of the others, hot enough already, resigned themselves to inhaling it. These substances, I had been told, were dropped on the orchard by airplanes on Sundays, days "when everything stinks," as they put it. Good days, I supposed, to be somewhere else. "That's why we wear gloves," Carlos added.
    These pesticides, I had noticed, affected more than just gloves. Among the trees you never saw things you might expect to see: bees, spiders, mosquitoes, flies, never a single bird or nest. Not even any snakes or ground animals. This was convenient, as none of these things could bother you. But, the more you thought about it, the creepier it seemed. These orchards, oases in the desert, were gardens where every thing but one was killed. They seemed half dead.
    For me the afternoon began like any other: fatigue came more quickly and bags filled more slowly; my eyes didn’t focus quite as sharply as they had in the morning. But for Nate it seemed to be going worse. Turning the tractor-train too quickly, he tore two big branches off trees at the end of a row—where the ranch foreman would certainly see it. With that gaffe, his mood, bad since the morning, reached new levels of sourness.
    Ismael speculated that perhaps the dog he slept with had wet the bed the night before, or that Nate had been surprised during breakfast by a worm in his chaw. Whatever the reasons, Nate’s bile was approaching intolerable levels, for when he saw Victor drop to the ground a grapefruit he was trying to empty into a crate, he started visibly. When Victor, unaware that he was being watched, playfully picked the fruit up and lobbed it into the crate behind his back, Nate exploded.
    “ Pinche Mexican! What the fuck do you think you’re doin’? Think you can just toss these things around? Huh? Do ya?”
    Surprised, Victor looked back at him