being turned into green dust and Araceli watched, entranced, as the machine covered the workers’ arms and faces with a dappled chlorophyll skin that affixed itself to the sweat and soil on their faces and arms. Soon they resembled science fiction creatures, or maybe just the poorest of the poor castes of Mexico City, the people who scavenged through the trash all day until they were wearing the gooey black contents of discarded plastic cartons and boxes on their faces and arms.
By 10:30 a.m., the workers and their foreman were smoothing out the empty black soil with heavy iron rakes. They picked up their equipment and were gone, the truck pulling away as Araceli watched from her post in the kitchen. I should have offered them something to drink. But they were in such a hurry.
Forty-five minutes later Araceli was mopping one of the bathrooms when she was surprised, again, by the rumble of a truck and the squeal of brakes, followed moments later by a second rumble and squeal, and the opening and closing of doors. Once again she approached the picture window in the living room. An American woman of light complexion with oval-shaped sunglasses emerged from the first truck, followed by two mestizo-skinned men in identical forest-green uniforms. Four more men in green uniforms emerged from the second truck, and soon they were all walking up the path toward Araceli.
The doorbell rang and this time Araceli beat Maureen to the door.
“Hi, good morning!” the American woman said. “We’re from the landscape company.”
“¿Cómo?“ Maureen quickly reached the door behind her and Araceli was forced to step aside before she could ask the many questions she wanted answered: What have you come to do to my backyard? Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming? How long will you be here? Did you bring your own lunch? Araceli could only watch through the glass as this new crew of workers traipsed around the side of the house, led by Maureen to the backyard and the fallow plot where the tropical garden had once stood. Araceli opened the sliding glass door to hear what the woman was saying to her patrona and watched as the stranger opened a scroll to show a large schematic drawing to Maureen, who beamed giddily in the scroll’s creative glow. Then the stranger began to talk, in English, to one of her crew members.
“Fernando, did we bring enough base?”
“Es un espacio grande,” he answered in Spanish, surveying the space before them. “Pero sí. Creo que nos alcanza.”
“I guess we start with the willow, right?”
“Es lo que nos va a tomar más tiempo,” Fernando answered. “Y también el ocotillo. Eso va a ser todo un project.”
“I had forgotten about that one. Let’s start with the ocotillo, then.”
Fernando wore a white oval patch on his uniform that read fernando, and all the other workers had name patches too. These uniformed men didn’t whistle or shout as they walked around the backyard. Instead they examined the turned-up earth of the backyard with considered glances, sometimes kicking at a clump of soil, or picking up a stray leaf or flower stem. They worked with efficient and practiced movements, consulting with one another and their boss in short bilingual conversations like the one Araceli had just overheard. In this strange country that Araceli now called home, the market for labor in the soil was stratified, and these men were jokingly known at Desert Landscaping as “high-end Mexicans.” Most of them were natives of Guanajuato and Jalisco who had known one another for half of their adult lives; in many loyal years of work for Desert Landscaping they had developed an artisan familiarity with the root systems of the ocotillo, the saguaro, and the assorted Sonoran and African succulents that made up the Desert Landscaping catalogue. They earned triple the wages of their untrained, subcontracted morning counterparts, had some limited medical benefits, and, though Araceli did not yet know it, they had brought their own lunches, sandwiches, and burritos made by their wives and girlfriends and stored in black metal lunch boxes each had hauled to hundreds of work sites over the years.
As the men carried bags of sand from the truck to the backyard, Maureen sat on the grass, holding on to Samantha while admiring the schematic drawing, thinking that the money involved would be well spent. The nervousness of the last few days lifted away, a hair-chewing anxiety heightened by the anarchic chopping, hacking, and slicing of the first