It was after five, and it was hot. Not as hot as it was at four. Not as hot as it can get. Let's say it was in the low three digits, in the cool hundreds. Girls held their skirts down against the prying wind.

I crossed Paisano at Stanton on the sunny side of the street. I would have crossed to the shade, but the lights weren't making it easy, so I let the sun beat on me like a thousand tiny hammers. Besides, the bars are on the east side of the street.

I turned into the Morocco and got the seat I had hoped for, at the end of the bar with my back against the wall. The Morocco's a dive bar, with broken acoustic tiles in the suspended ceiling and Genuine Draft on tap. Beer kegs, one empty and three full, sat on the floor by the pool table. I ordered a Bud, in Spanish, and made a point to show the pesos in my wallet, but I wasn't fooling anyone.

Fifteen people made the place full. The customers were just off work, in blue jeans and OSHA footwear.

The beer company reps were the exclusive interior decorators at the Morocco. Door size posters covered the doors to both bathrooms. An uncertain hand had written Women and Hombres on the posters with magic marker. The rest of the ambiance was provided by the jukebox blaring rancheras and narco-corridas. An old man spent an unlikely amount of time polishing the jukebox with an off-white terry cloth rag.

An old lady sat next to me. Maybe she was my age, or younger.

Are you FBI? she asked me.

Then, over the course of my beer she told me about her uneventful life. I drank as fast as I could.

Border Patrol? she asked as I got up to leave.

Outside the sun had let up some, so it only felt like 985 little hammers.

I turned left, to get out of the commercial district and into the neighborhood. A block in the buildings turned residential, turquoise and green and yellow, single family dwelling units and the beehives of little two room apartments that date back eighty years or more.

I turned a corner and saw two men in the shade, one sitting on an overturned milk crate and the other leaning on a late sixties Chevy pickup truck.

Hola, I said. I'm interested in the neighborhood, I said in Spanish.

Es tranquilo, the older of the two men said to me. We chatted, just a minute, the three of us, in Spanish, and then Chato, the older one, asked You want a soda?

No, thank you.

Are you sure?

Water, maybe, if it's not a bother.

None, he said.

He walked across the street to a building on the corner. La Nave Gro was painted on the wall. He came back with a plastic bottle of water.

There are good people here, he told me.

No gangs?

No, he said. There used to be, but now no. There are good people here. Well, he said, there are some . . . .

In the whole world there are some of everything, I said. I drank the cool water from the bottle.

The other one, Juan, went to the bed of the truck and picked up a can in a paper sack. He looked down the street before he took a long pull on the can.

In the sixties, this neighborhood was bad, Juan said. You couldn't walk across that intersection without someone putting you on the horns. And Los Cinco Infiernos? Puros malandrines.

The Chamizal hurt Segundo, Chato told me. It used to go to Nineteenth Street. In front of the Benito Juarez Stadium, that used to be Peyton's, he said. The slaughterhouse. He called it la matanza. The killing.

I used to work there, he said.

They say that's hard work.

When one is young and strong . . . .

Chato pointed across the street. That house there, the yellow, he pointed, there used to be a lady that lived there, and she was crazy. Not too crazy, but crazy. She sold cans, and she insisted on getting paid in silver dollars. When she died, everyone expected to find the silver dollars, but nobody did.

A lost treasure.

Yes, a lost treasure.

I'm going to get a beer, I said. Can I invite y'all a beer?

Yes, thank you, said Juan. A Coors Light, like this one. He pulled the 24 ounce can from the bag.

A Busch please, said Chato.

I walked across the street to La Nave. Inside the store was long and narrow, with old-fashioned wood and glass cabinets the length of the store, and glass front refrigerators on one side.

I walked back to the two men, and Chato pulled another milk crate from the back of his truck, and I sat down and we drank our beers, watchful for the police. We sat beside a vacant lot, and halfway back an adobe wall jutted out.

That wall looks old, I said.

Yeah, that's old, Chato said. Pregnant women come and eat the bricks.

Really?

They scrape a little bit, like this, and eat it.

It's clay.

We drank our beers.

What do you think of the plan? I asked.

The plan to knock down Segundo? They should knock down the homes of the rich people, Chato said.

Where they built the new school, Aoy, Juan said, they paid those people thirty thousand. They had lived there their whole lives.

Thirty thousand isn't enough to buy a new house, I said.

Not even a lot for thirty thousand.

I finished my beer and left the can in the bag in the back of the truck. I have to go, I said. We'll see each other.

Until then, they said. And I walked home.