CHAPTER 12
We had an uncomfortable night in our makeshift home in the garage--for one thing, the cots were way too short for us. Nando's "cousins" must have all been under 5ft 3". Our legs hung off the cots at the knees. Finally, we threw the mattresses on the floor. Then the faucet in the sink dripped dripped dripped, the sound amplified by the close quarters we were in. And I had a blister on my toe that hurt all night. But we were sleeping soundly when we heard Nando's voice when he knocked on the garage wall.
"Hey, is time to wake up and shine, you two. Go to work!"  he said laughing. It was still dark out when we dressed in our by now grungy clothes and went out to find Nando loading his pickup. "Come, eat first, okay?" Angelina had made bean and cheese tacos with chorizo, and coffee. We ate about six each. Nando was going to go broke just feeding us. We opted to sit in the back of the pickup while Nando drove to our first job and enjoyed seeing palm trees and the odd admixture of neighborhoods. A poor Mexican neighborhood, some houses surrounded by  chain link fences and bars on the windows would go by, followed by tracts of much newer nicer homes.

It was almost daylight when we arrived at the Las Amigas bank. Nando unloaded his push mower, gas can, shears, clippers and trimmers and sent me to dig up a dead hedge plant out front. Bob was given the job of snipping off any stray tips of foilage from the landscape plants. Nando lectured him about doing a precise job, then he mowed the grass strips. He gave me a new hedge plant to replace the dead one, telling me how to dig the hole, put in water--everything had to be exact. We swept off the sidewalks and Nando beamed. "See, everything nice and neat. Customers come at 9am, and everything look nice for them, heh?"

Next stop was the La Paloma nursing home. Nando said "nurses get the old ones up for breakfst at 7am--no matter to them how much noise we make, they already awake!" We clipped and trimmed and mowed, and the sun had us sweaty. We removed our shirts, and soon elderly men and women were at the windows looking out at us, smiling and laughing. Someone whistled. "Hey Nando, your cousins deported again?" One toothless granny called out, "Bring these two apples you got today back again next time, you hear?"

On the way back to Nando's that afternoon, Bob wasn't happy. "Look Harris, I left my father's farm in Mississippi because I didn't want to raise cattle and work in the fields and have dirty hands all my life. I'll stick this out till our first payday, then I'm gone. We're in California! I have to make enough money to pay a speech coach and get some decent clothes and get a screen test. You can stay and dig plants if you want too, but not me."

And that was our first squabble.

susil