The calves were Herefords with cotton-white heads that looked like a herd of little floating ghosts. The boys lassoed, tackled and dragged them one by one to the fire. Wearing a leather apron over the coveralls that were his Hill uniform, Felix knelt by the coals, chose a knife with a double-wrapped rawhide handle and honed the blade on his apron. Arms and hooves converged. The fire seemed to invest Felix with a magisterial glow. “Coont-da, hitos!” While the boys held the calf still, Felix squeezed the testes to the bottom of the sac, sliced and flung them into the coals, then doused the wound with kerosene. The bright orange dogleg of a running iron dug into the calf’s flank, and the smell of burning hair joined the odors of coffee and cow manure.

In his white suit and hat, Hilario Reyes came down the fence as nimbly as a lizard. “The Chief himself. See my boy yesterday? I hear he put out a fire and saved the whole Hill.”

“He looked good.”

“You mean great. What are you doing here?”

“The Army sends me to look over the cows. What’s the lieutenant governor of the State of New Mexico doing here?”

“I have great respect for the old-fashioned ways and traditions of the people here. You know, I’ve never missed a dance in Santiago. Most of all, I love the taste of balls.”

Hilario gave a grin of open, energetic venality before going to talk to the men gathered around the coffee fire—to check Joe’s reason for being at the corral, Joe assumed. Hilario liked being the fisherman, not the fish.

Joe leaned against the rail and watched the boy with the rope try a peal, a fancy throw designed to catch a calf’s hind feet. He caught the calf by the head instead and almost flew out of his shoes and laces as the calf kept running.

Felix came over to the fence to offer Joe a stick skewering what looked like two burned chestnuts. “Joe, if you’re talking to Hilario, you need all the guevos you can get.”

Someone on the top rail threw a shaker of salt and Joe snatched it out of the dark. “Coont-da!”

“Hilario’s friend didn’t stick around long,” Felix said. “He went to look at the old cows in the pen.”

Joe peeled back the blackened skin and liberally salted the pearly insides. It was an odd ceremony, the cutting of the calves and the redistribution of their bullhood around the corral. A secret male ceremony all the more effective for the early morning hour, something basic and shameful and powerful. The roasted testes had the texture of oysters and the flavor of nuts.