" Vamonos, Camello." Torez moves by me and closes the tailgate. Again it is in their mother tongue and it is over quickly because Mendez knows this crew can manage very fine without him, and he needs money for his sharob, his wine. I don't give him rest from my eyes and so now he steps to me, yelling more, and I smell him, last night's wine and today's sweating of it, and now Torez is yelling louder than Mendez. His face becomes more ugly than it already is and he yells something at me in his language and his teeth are very bad, like an old dog's. He takes up his trash spear from the orange tailgate, but my eyes look at the burn again long enough for him to see. His brothers have started to go back to work but now they stop to watch. I drink from my cup and let him look at my eyes.
He sees me looking at it as I drink my ice water and he stops his laughing, no longer does he even smile, and he to me says: "What you looking at, viejo?" He is almost as big as the radish and there is a long burn scar the color of sand upon one of his fat arms. The Panamanians have dropped their cups upon the ground around their feet and Tran is shaking his head, and saying something in his language as he stoops to pick them up with his hands. When I reach the truck, the crew has finished their water and the two Chinese light new cigarettes as they go back to the grass. But here there is no fog, only sun on your head and back, and the smell of everything under the nose: the dry grass and dirt the cigarette smoke of the Chinese the hot metal and exhaust of the passing automobiles.
Between the trees I can see out over Sausalito to the bay where there are clouds so thick I cannot see the other side where I live with my family in Berkeley, my wife and son. Some of the Panamanians remove their shirts and leave them hanging from their back pockets like oil rags, but Torez says something to them in their mother language and he makes them wear the vests over their bare backs.
We carry our small trash harpoons and we drag our burlap bags and we are dressed in vests the same color as the highway truck. All morning we have walked this highway between Sausalito and the Golden Gate Park. He works very quickly without rest, but when Torez stops the orange highway truck in front of the crew, Tran hurries for his paper cup of water with the rest of them. The fat one, the radish Torez, he calls me camel because I am Persian and because I can bear this August sun longer than the Chinese and the Panamanians and even the little Vietnamese Tran.
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