Gabriel Luñez stood leaning against the squat, whitewashed one-story square that had served as home to him and his two brothers for the past three years since they had come up from Tijuana to work the California fields. Four a.m. on a late June morning in Fresno and the sky was still—for another half hour, maybe a little more—irrepressibly black. The stars begin to recede as dawn encroaches and it was true that out here the night was thick and deep. No light pollution like in L.A. where it was never truly dark, even in the hills. Here on the outskirts of Fresno the night enveloped you in a caress surprisingly soft, achingly real. Here, as Gabriel leaned back with a long sigh against the flaking stucco wall behind which his brothers slept, here as Gabriel ran his strong, tanned, work-roughened hands first slowly, then more urgently over the cock stiffening in his loose jersey shorts and pinched his dark nipples again and again until they began to hurt a bit, the heady night was the only thing holding him. It wouldn’t take long for him to come, unless he drew it out, made it last, like he had the night he had seen that boy, that blond Anglo, Joey, the one who hauled the carnations out by truck across from where Gabriel was walking home from the orchard. That Joey, slender and tall, like the flowers he hauled up Route 85, too blond, too gringo blanco to be out in the full sun every day. But there he was, Joey, in the twilight, on his knees, in his jeans and the white T-shirt that always had little streaks of color from the flower petals smeared here and there. There he was, Joey, that sweet, supple Anglo, sucking the dick of the field manager, Mr. Adamos, in the half-light outside the office on the edge of the carnation field. Sucking his cock like he knew how it was done and liked doing it. Sucking Mr. Adamos’s dick with his hands pressed up against his balls and his knees spread wide in the soft brown dirt. Gabriel had stood and watched. Just stopped in the twilit lanes of the carnation field as the colors bled out of the flowers and into the night and tried not to grip his own hardening cock as he watched young blond Joey suck his boss’s dick till the older man pulled it out of Joey’s mouth and jerked it fast onto Joey’s petal-smeared T-shirt, all the while urging Joey in Spanish to rub his balls harder and faster. Gabriel had run his hand over his dick then, exhaled deeply into the sharp-scented night, felt a small damp spot on his pants near the head of his cock, and had watched as the scene ended outside the office with Mr. Adamos reaching down and touching Joey’s face. Then he folded his cock back into his pants, pulled some bills from his wallet, and walked away as Joey got up from his knees, took a cigarette out from behind his ear, lit it, and smoked as he leaned against the back of the truck.

*

The carnation farm came flush up against the orchard Gabriel worked with his brothers. Gabriel like to cross through it some nights on his way home, letting Diego and Luis take the old Corolla back home or out to meet with some chicas down from the canning factory over past Alameda bodega. Sometimes they’d rag him, make him come along, tell him he needed to get laid, get some nice mestiza pussy, take some of the ache of the day away. If they pushed, he’d go. But that night, the night he’d seen Joey, Gabriel had begged off, claimed exhaustion and too much irritation with the day to be around people. Walking back to the sweaty box of a house through the sharp-smelling lanes of the carnation farm, feeling an ache of need and emptiness, he had come upon Joey on his knees, Joey, pulling on Mr. Adamos’s cock the same way he had sucked on the Corona at the bar that night they had shot a few rounds of pool with some of the other workers.

That’s where he had seen Joey before, spoken to him a few times. They had run into each other at the bodega and the little low-rent bar the field workers went to after work on Fridays, had a few Coronas. Gabriel’s English was good—much better than Diego’s or Luis’s. His mother had pressed him, over and over, to try and learn before he left Tijuana, to help his brothers out. Gabriel, who could read, which his brothers could not; Gabriel, who wanted out of Tijuana to make some money and make some life that didn’t include days spent breaking his back like his father had done till the day he died. Gabriel had taken his mother’s advice and had gone in search of teachers. He had hung out at a dank little club just in from the border where Anglos came across seeking drugs and sex—foreign pussy and hot cock—and he had learned first some passing English which he shared with his pleased mother and then better English which he stored for later, for when he would cross the border.

Gabriel learned a lot from the turistas. He had learned how to let an Americano teach him words and then suck his dick and squeeze his balls and lick his ass for a hundred pesos, maybe more, maybe less. They liked the lessons, these turistas, liked the idea that they were making something out of this boy from Tijuana who they could imagine tending their gardens or cleaning their pools, shirtless, his skin slick with sweat just ready to be licked off by an eager Anglo tongue. At twenty-two, tall and lean with the muscled body of a laborer who split rocks at the quarry all day long, with the deep, glowing bronze tan of a man who stood baking against the harsh white rock from five a.m. until four in the afternoon with barely a siestina at midday, with the sleek black hair that fell across his forehead and the eyes so dark they seemed to have no discernable pupils, Gabriel had learned just how to ply his language-learning trade, had learned that men thought him rough, but beautiful. And he learned what it meant when they said to him that he was a gorgeous animal, a sexy beast, learned that they didn’t really see him like themselves, that he was like something they found along the seaside—a shiny bit of glass, a pretty shell—he was treasure, but treasure that didn’t need to be protected or even coveted. He was something to ooh and ahh over for as long as it took to have a drink, get hard, and get off. No more, no less.

Gabriel had learned the language, all right, had learned just how much he liked having his cock licked and sucked by strange white men he’d never see again. Learned how to say in his roughly accented English, Wait, not yet, don’t let me come yet, and he would pull his cock away from the gringo, breathing por favor, and hold it tight for a minute, press his fingers to the head and pretend that it ached not to come, but that he could take it, this strong Mexicano could take it, because he knew that little bit of play, using their words back at them, taking away his big, Latino cock, made them want to shoot right then and there, made them want him more, made them want to pay him more, made them grab for it back and then they would suck him with mucho gusto, make him come that much harder, that much better.

But by the time Gabriel got to Fresno a few years later, well versed in his now not-too-thickly accented English and gleaning jobs for his brothers and himself, he had wanted more than strangers, wanted more than just to have his dick sucked hard and rough for pesos in a bar where no one ever knew anyone for more than an evening. Gabriel had wanted more than another back-breaking job in the unrelenting heat, wanted more than the endless line of chicas he wasn’t interested in and the yearning for man after man that he couldn’t have. When he crossed over into California he had believed his days of doing anything for a peso, anything to escape his grim barrio in Tijuana, were over. Not yet.