Doc said, “I can tell, from your tone, it didn’t work. What happened?”

“Music,” said Mack.

Now it is true that Joseph and Mary did know all the angles, averages, and percentages. His systems couldn’t lose, but they did. The odds are against making your point with the dice, and that law holds until magic intervenes and someone makes a run.

There were literally millions of wetbacks in the country—quiet, hard-working, ignorant men, content to bend their backs over the demanding earth. It was a setup; it couldn’t lose. How did it happen, then, that in Joseph and Mary’s crew there should be one tenor and one guitar player? Under his horrified eyes an orchestra took shape—two guitars, a guitarón, rhythm and maraca men, a tenor, and two baritones. He would have had the whole lot deported if his nephew, Cacahuete, had not joined them with his hot trumpet.

Joseph and Mary’s wetbacks abandoned the carrot and cauliflower fields for the dance floors of the little towns in California. They called themselves the Espaldas Mojadas.

The Espaldas Mojadas dressed in tight charro

“So, you see,” said Mack, “it was music done it. You can’t trust nothing no more. You take Fauna now—the Bear Flag ain’t like any hookshop on land or sea. She makes them girls take table-manner lessons and posture lessons, and she reads the stars. You never seen nothing like it. Everything’s changed, Doc, everything.”

Doc looked around his moldy laboratory, and he shivered. “Maybe I’m changed too,” he said.

“Hell, Doc, you can’t change. Why, what could we depend on! Doc, if you change a lot of people are going to cash in their chips. Why, we was all just waiting around for you to get back so we could go on being normal.”