Chintolas Jones had crossed the country at all kinds of angles. He
was leaving the patchwork fields where his uncle had left most of
his life and sweat. As he looked back at the fields they looked
more and more like a large plate of refried black beans, textured
with a fork. It was the time of the day when God amuses himself by
the reds and the purples he uses to cover the edge of the sky. The
cranes appeared again to Chintolas. The same cranes he saw in the
Albuquerque dawn when his life was about to end. The same cranes
that fed him water when he was lost in the Oaxaca hills. He would
never be able to outrun the cranes.