Ram’s gloves tattered and finally tore. He threw them aside. Twist and pull. Twist and pull. Sometimes, pull and cut. The cantaloupe skin grew painful to touch; the fine hairs rubbed his palms raw. Still he clasped the roundness, the sandpaper skin and pulled toward him. He kept his eye on the fair-skinned girl. She was fast and worked hard, carrying more fruit in her sack than the teenage boys. He knew where she stood, when she drank water, when she emptied her sack, but their eyes never met. Her skirt rustled around her legs. Her hand swept the hair from her face. All of this disturbed him. He forced himself to think of Padma.

At noon, they stopped to rest. The workers knelt at the pond and splashed water on their faces. They sat under the ramada or inside their tents with the flaps thrown open to the breeze.

They did not resume work until three thirty, long after the sun had begun its descent. Even so, one of the teenage boys approached Jivan when the foreman could not see, holding his head. “Me voy a desmayar, señor.” Jivan noted the wan face, how the boy swayed unsteadily on his feet. He told him to rest for a while. He would still pay him the wage. At nightfall, the workers prayed inside the Virgin’s tent. The accordion and guitar remained silent and the lamps were snuffed out soon afterward.

High above them, cool air from the Pacific lay atop the warm wind rising from the Superstition Hills. Thunder rumbled. Lightning jittered through the clouds, flashing a shadow of Mount Signal on the soil of Baja, but no rain reached the Valley’s soil or the Colorado’s waters.

In the dark of early morning, a tent collapsed in a warm gust. The Mexican men righted and pinned it again, but they did not return to sleep. They ate breakfast quickly and joined the Punjabis in the field. The wind blew in their hair like a blessing. But when the sun broke the horizon, they felt the burning finger of its first ray.

Before lunch one of the workers leaned over a vine, convulsed, vomited, stumbled, then collapsed in the eastern field. Ram dropped his sack and ran to him. Amarjeet reached him at the same time. He is too old to work, Ram thought when he realized who he was. Grabbing the man’s ankles and armpits, they carried him to the shade of the packing shed. Other workers ran to see. From a distant corner of the field, crouched over a vine, Karak yelled, “What is happening?”

They laid the old man on the shed’s wooden floor and Ram slipped a folded sack under his head. One of the workers came to kneel by the old man. With shaking fingers, he unbuttoned the man’s shirt. “Ángel, Ángel . . . soy yo, Alejandro. Le habla Alejandro.”