The farmhouse was next, another fifty yards down the road, where three small children-two boys and a little girl-were standing in the hard-packed yard, watching the pickup drive past, and a woman was hanging wash on a clothesline that extended out from the side of the house. The children waved and Nancy put her hand out the window to wave back at them.

"Are they yours, too?"

"My foreman, Larry Mendoza's," Majestyk said. "That's my house way down there, by the trees."

She could see the place now, white against the dark stand of woods, a small, one-story farmhouse with a porch, almost identical to the foreman's house. She could see the blue school bus standing in the road ahead and, off to the left beyond the ditch, the melon fields, endless rows of green vines that were familiar to the girl and never changed, hot dusty rows that seemed to reach from Texas to California, and were always waiting to be picked.

"You must have a thousand acres," she said. "More than that."

"A hundred and sixty. The man that owned this land used to have a big operation, but he subdivided when he sold out. This is my second crop year, and if I don't make it this time-"

When he stopped, the girl said, "What?"

She turned to see him staring straight ahead through the windshield, at the school bus they were approaching and the men standing in the road. She could see the car now, a new model of some kind shining golden in the sunlight, parked beyond the bus. Beyond the car was a stake truck. At the same time she was aware of the figures out in the melon field, at least twenty or more, stooped figures dotted among the rows.

She said, "You have two crews working?"

"I only hired one," Majestyk said.