A moment later, return fire from the Marines sounded distant, like firecrackers under metal cans. The blue sky lay across his dying eyes like a shroud.

In the evenings, after all but Tesoro dine together at the table, their father listens to an AM radio station that broadcasts the news in Spanish. He sits in his chair, worn and tired; lines like wrinkled leather punctuate his face. His finger taps against his lips as he listens.

The radio announcer reads the police reports, and sometimes their father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the victims have been the children of undocumented workers — killed by a bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death, mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think of his son’s late nights. He fights against the horrible visions of those victims — bodies that must share a raw, red color with the beef carcasses hanging in the plant cooler.

In the kitchen, their mother scrubs the sink, pushing hard with the wire brush to blot the sound of the announcer’s voice while Saul sits at the little table and ignores his homework. The kitchen stings of bleach before she is through. Tesoro’s truck rumbles in the yard — the ’62 Ford that he promises to paint one day and their father once joked was dead and resurrected. The joke died when Tesoro came back with the bullet around his neck. The truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.