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Dean’s been sweating since he woke up this morning. Actually, going by how damp the sheets of his little borrowed cot were, he sweated all night, too. He’d had a weird panicked moment where he thought he’d wet the bed, somehow. Sammy had still been passed out in the actual bed and Dean had laid there under the slow-turning fan and given himself five minutes to just be… miserable. As far as he can tell, Benson, Arizona, is the armpit of the world. Why couldn’t Dad have caught the hunt in November, or something.
Mrs. Gutierrez is kind of a hard-ass, but she knows about food. When Dean comes out of the bedroom she’d stashed them in, the hot little house already smells awesome, and she barely looks up from whatever she’s doing in her skillet, waves him to the table. He rubs at his eyes with the heel of both hands. He’s not used to these kind of hours in the summer. Ever since he turned sixteen and proved he could be trusted, Dad would take the opportunity of school being out to take him along on more hunts, the two of them running through the woods or watching through the dark of the warm nights or digging graves together, coming back to whatever motel or campsite where Sammy was waiting for them in the hours just before dawn, crashing down sore and feeling good about a job well done. He wants to be out there now. All this ridiculous heat would maybe be a little more bearable if he felt like he was doing something.
A plate clatters down in front of him and he jumps, opens his eyes. Mrs. Gutierrez raises her eyebrows at him and he says, “Thank you,” automatically, and then, “Um, I mean—gracias, ma’am.” She huffs and goes back to the stove. He completely can’t tell if she likes him or not. He’s guessing not.
That said—who cares, if she feeds them like this, holy crap. This will be their third day here, since Dad figured out where the boys were going missing and Mrs. Gutierrez offered to look after them while Dad and a few of the older guys went out looking, and like every single thing she's fed them has been amazing. This is—eggs, and pieces of tortilla, and some weird white cheese, and enough thick roasted-dark red sauce that he sweats even more, and he groans out loud.
“Respira, caballero,” Mrs. Gutierrez says, in a dry voice, and he opens his eyes again to find her leaning against the stove, cup of coffee rested on her plump belly.
He wipes his mouth of red sauce, tries to dredge up some manners. “This is really good,” he says. “Um, mucho bueno?”
“Muy bueno,” she says.
He nods. “Yeah, that,” he says, and she actually smiles a little, wow. Her face is weathered, deep lines around her eyes and mouth, and they’re deeper when she smiles. He scoops up another bite, and around a mouthful of just awesomely good, spicy eggs says, “What is it called?”
She frowns a little, and he sort of points his empty fork at the plate and makes an exaggerated confused face. “Ah. Chilaquiles.” He mouths the word, scooping up another bit of tortilla, and she says it slower for him. He knows his accent sucks, but he is kinda trying. Might as well, with them stuck here.
“Buenos días, señora,” Sam says, coming into the kitchen, and Dean rolls his eyes. Of course, Poindexter’s picking up the Spanish like a weird short sponge. “¿Cómo está usted?”
“Muy bien, mijo,” Mrs. Guitierrez says, and her smile goes wider for Sam. Dean’s really got to learn more Spanish. In short order, Sam’s installed with his own plate of—uh—
“Chilaquiles?” Sam says. “Cool. Muchas gracias, señora.” Dean sighs. Sometimes Sammy’s such a kissass, and he doesn’t even know it. He turns pink when he gets his first really spicy mouthful, though, and Dean smirks at him as he starts to cough. He gets him a glass of water, too, but still. At least he’s still got something on his little brother.
They’re long days, out here. Mrs. Gutierrez lives far enough away from town that there’s no way Dean’s walking—he’d roast before he got more than a mile. Dad’s got the Impala, of course, and Mrs. Gutierrez loaned her ancient Ford to another one of the older Mexican guys who’d gone along to help. Dean’s got his and Sam’s duffels and they’ve got a shotgun each, not that Dean would be letting Sammy help if it came to a fight. He can’t waste ammo on shooting practice, though, and it’s too hot to try to get Sam to wrestle with him, and there’s nothing to do. Sam’s been reading, of course—he picked up the summer reading list from his last school and they kinda accidentally stole a bunch of library books when Dad abruptly took them out of Boise a few weeks ago. Dean’s been reduced to watching these really terrible Mexican soap operas in the kitchen with Mrs. Gutierrez when she does her embroidery in the afternoons. He can’t understand what anyone’s saying, but the acting’s so over-the-top that he sort of gets it. Right now he thinks Rogelio is sleeping with his brother’s wife, though it might just be someone’s secretary. Mrs. Gutierrez clucks her tongue disapprovingly when Rogelio starts making out with the lady, and shakes her head. “Es una bruja,” she says, and bites off a piece of thread. “Él va a perder su corazón, y luego su pinga.”
“She’s totally going to cheat on him, too,” Dean says. And—yep, whatshername smiles all sexy over Rogelio’s shoulder at the other dude, and he and Mrs. Gutierrez sigh at the same time.
The sun in the afternoon beats down endlessly. Sam says that next month it'll start raining really hard, which sounds like bull to Dean, but Sam insisted. He hopes to hell they're not here long enough that he learns if Sam was BSing or not. Right now he's sitting on the porch, under the broad tin-sheet awning, tossing pebbles out at a weird purplish prickly pear cactus about ten yards away. Mentally he's awarding himself five points every time he hits a pad, and subtracting two points when he starts to think that he might actually sweat himself to death. He's at around thirty-seven when Mrs. Gutierrez comes out, fanning herself slowly with a magazine. "Hi," Dean says, and he sounds bored even to himself.
There aren't really chores to do. He would've offered to fix up her Ford, but obviously that ship sailed. They're all just waiting. Dad's been gone about five days now and he's not worried, of course not, because Dad's been gone way longer than this and he always comes home fine. A little beat up, sometimes, and sometimes Dean has to stitch up a few holes Dad managed to collect, but that's nothing to worry about. It's all part of the job. He taps his thumb against the rough wood of the bench, beating out a pattern, and it's a surprise when Mrs. Gutierrez runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead, a weird kind of rough-gentle. "Venga," she says, when he's startled into looking up at her, and jerks her head back at the house. "Come," she says, in a thick accent, and disappears back into the dim of the house, the screen door clanking shut behind her.
Sam's still stretched out on the bed in their tiny room, reading something with his bare feet slowly waving in the air. In the kitchen, Mrs. Gutierrez surprises him by dropping an apron over his head. "Whoa, no," he says, but she turns him around by the shoulders and ties the string behind his back. It's got little chickens printed on it, Christ.
"Tenemos que limpiar," she says, and puts a dishcloth in his hands, and points him at where the lunch dishes are soaking. Well, okay. He guesses he needs to be earning his keep, fair enough. The apron seems like overkill, though. She starts chopping up peppers while he scrubs up, and then the little TV on the counter gets flicked on. "Rogelio va a morir," she says, giving Dean a significant look. "Dead. I bet you."
"Oh, you're on," Dean says. He's pretty sure Rogelio's going to kill Ana. She totally deserves it.
Dean's finished the dishes and is putting them into the rickety cupboards (Mrs. Gutierrez just points at the right cupboard for each one, because seriously, he's never going to learn the names of any of this stuff) when a van pulls up outside. He goes to the window immediately—but no, it's not Dad, or any of the other guys. Instead a bunch of ladies spill out, all somewhere within ten years of Mrs. Gutierrez's age. She goes out to greet them and there's a chorus of mostly-cheerful sounding Spanish, hugs and cheek-kisses exchanged.
Sam pops out of the bedroom, asks, "What's going on?" and Dean can only shrug. Sam looks at him more closely. "Dude, are those chickens?" he says, starting to grin, and Dean grabs him and gives him a swift noogie right then, because you gotta nip that shit in the bud right away. If anyone's making fun of anyone here, it's not going to go that direction. Sam yelps and drops his book, shoves at Dean's grip, and of course that's when Mrs. Gutierrez comes back in. Dean lets Sam go immediately, shoves his hands into the pocket on the apron. "Chicos," she says, kind of sharp, and Sam picks up his book, says, "Lo siento, señora," with an apologetically ducked head—and when she turns her head away gets Dean with one of those sharp little elbows right in the kidney. Dean manfully sucks in the grunt and thinks maybe he can get away with dumping water over Sam's head tomorrow morning. It'd count as trying to cool him off, surely.
The women have come with bags of food, and dishes, and one has a crock-pot of something that releases a stupid-good smell as soon as the lid comes off. Dean gets tasked with pulling the little kitchen table off the wall, so there's room to move around it, and the ladies start unpacking their bags. Sam watches, interested, until Mrs. Gutierrez shoos him back out into the bedroom. "¿Quién es el gringo?" one of the women says, nodding at Dean where he's stacking the chairs out of the way, and he hears Mrs. Gutierrez say, "Es el hijo del cazador," and he doesn't know why that makes the lady look at him with kind of sad eyes.
"Hi," one lady says, and smiles at Dean. She's maybe forty, a little silver in her hair, though not nearly as much as Mrs. Gutierrez has. "Dean, right?"
"Yeah," Dean says. She's pretty, in a mom way. He's acutely aware of his chicken apron. "And my little nerd brother in the other room is Sam."
"Elena says you're good boys," the lady says, and Dean doesn't know who she means for a minute, and then obviously looks surprised, because she laughs. "I guess you're probably a troublemaker most of the time, caballero."
The other women have been busy, setting up something all around the table, and Dean looks at that instead of looking at her. "Most of the time," he says, shrugging.
"My Francisco is the same way," she says, in a tone like she's telling him a secret. He hates it when teachers do that, like they're trying to pretend that they're his friend, but when he looks she's got this weird expression on her face, and he puts a few things together real quick. One of the older women puts a quick hand to her shoulder and she shakes her head, smiles at Dean. "We're going to make a dinner for when the hunters come back. Elena tells me that you have some things to learn in the kitchen."
"Cooking's not really my thing," Dean says.
The lady tugs on his apron. He is really starting to hate the stupid apron. "Cooking is everybody's thing," she says. "When you have mouths to feed."
He thinks back to mac and cheese with ketchup in it, Sammy trying not to complain, and—okay, so maybe she has a point.
It turns out they're making tamales, which Dean's heard of but hasn't ever seen before. He doesn't see how corn husks are going to be good to eat, but he figures if anyone can do it, Mrs. Gutierrez will. The women all form a circle around the table and go total assembly line: soaking the corn husks in warm water, unfolding, smearing the weird corn dough into the center, and then a spoon of the shredded meat from the crock pot (turkey, it turns out, when he sneaks a bite, and Mrs. Gutierrez thwacks him on the shoulder immediately), and then folding the neat little package, and tying with a string. Dean gets put on soaking duty, probably because it's the hardest thing to screw up. The lady who speaks English—Graciela, apparently—stands at his right side, and Mrs. Gutierrez at his left, and it's tight work around the little table with their elbows all jostling together, but it's kind of fun, too. He's good at following routines.
They're all talking in Spanish, but that's okay. He can't follow the words, but he can kinda catch the rhythm of it, just like watching the soap operas. His job is so easy that he barely even has to look at what he's doing, and so he watches the women, instead. There's five of them, including Mrs. Gutierrez, and Dean thinks back to when Dad was reading that newspaper article—five teenage boys missing in Southern Arizona, no leads, and how when Dad showed up at the first house the man hadn't even wanted to talk to him, had been drunk before noon sitting there on his porch. It had been the mother who'd stepped forward, started talking to Dad low and urgent, and Dean couldn't hear anything from where he was waiting in the car, but he saw the look on her face. She's the one who made the turkey. Her face is drawn, now, and there are dark circles beneath her eyes, but she's chatting, too, and smiles at something the woman next to her says. Not a big smile, but a smile. Dean doesn't know how she can do it.
"It's good to have a job to do," Graciela says, quiet. Dean hands her a softened husk and watches her spread the corn into it with deft, small hands. "When your dad hunts, you take care of your brother, yes?"
"Yeah," Dean says, and dips a new husk. "I mean, I go on hunts, too. I'm pretty good. I couldn't go on this one though, 'cause—um."
It's not like she doesn't know. He's just the right age to be taken, by whatever's doing the taking. Graciela says something he can't quite hear, and Mrs. Gutierrez jostles his elbow, catches his attention. They've filled four great big steam baskets, one right after the other, and it's now like a million degrees in here since the first batch has been cooking. She brings him over and lifts the lid on the basket—thick gouts of steam plume up but she just ignores it, even though she's sweating too now. She plucks out one of the neat little packages with her bare hand, apparently made of asbestos, and then puts it on a plate and hands it to him.
"For me?" he says, holding it in both hands. He glances at Graciela, who's wearing half a smile. "I thought we were making dinner for when the guys get back. Shouldn't we save it?"
Graciela leans her hip on the table. Sweat has gathered at her temple, has darkened her pink dress. "Mijo, the men will get their share," she says. She nods at the little corn package on his plate. "Something you need to learn: when you make the food, you take the first taste."
He looks at Mrs. Gutierrez, who nods at him, and he shrugs. He's not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth—or, uh, nice lady, either. It does smell awesome. "Sammy!" he calls, taking the plate with him, and Sam pops out of the bedroom immediately when Dean comes out into the tiny sitting room. He was probably sitting there moping about why he didn't get to sweat his butt off making dinner. "Come on, squirt, try a tamale. Wanna see if it's poisoned."
"Ha ha," Sam says, but he sits down next to Dean on the couch anyway. They poke at it together, and from the doorway Graciela says, "Open it up first, boys," in a soft voice, and oh, duh, and Dean snaps the string with his pocketknife and peels open the husk, and between them with careful fingers they take bites of the soft corn, saturated through with the spicy turkey, and holy crap is it good.
"Holy crap," Dean says, through his full mouth, and Sam nods, scooping up another bite almost immediately. "Hey, don't eat it all," Dean says, and Sam rolls his eyes but hands the plate back to Dean.
"You think you can figure out how to make these?" Sam says, licking his thumb clean.
Dean shoves at his shoulder, gentle so he just rocks a little. "What, you think I'm gonna be your personal chef, Sammy?"
"Yeah," Sam says, grinning at him. "Tamales and mac and cheese and 7-11 hot dogs, that'll be your menu."
Dean pushes Sam over onto the couch and takes the plate with its empty husk back into the kitchen. "Really good," he says, to Mrs. Gutierrez. "Um, mucho—no, muy bien."
"Muy bueno," she says, correcting him again, but her eyes are soft. She cups his cheek in her hand for a few seconds and he stands still under it, doesn't know why she's looking at him like he's a puppy—but then she takes the plate and puts it in the sink, and hands him the dishrag again, and he sighs. There's way more dishes now.
Dad and the few men who went with him come back two days later, with four of the five boys who'd gone missing. Dean wonders if Graciela's boy came back, or if he was the one left behind, but he doesn't want to ask. The tamales get distributed to all the houses and Dad even stays for an extra hour to eat his own share. "Pretty damn good," he says, smiling at Mrs. Gutierrez, and she puts a warm hand on Dean's shoulder and smiles back. Dean does do a quick tune-up her old Ford, while Dad finishes up eating and washes up a little, because he owes her. Rogelio did end up getting killed by Ana, and Dean said a few choice words that Mrs. Gutierrez understood even through the language barrier and got smacked upside the head for it. Sammy had a good laugh over that one.
"Ready to go, kid?" Dad says, behind him.
Dean finishes locking the carburetor cap into place and drops the hood on the truck. Nine o'clock at night and it's still hot as hell out here. He nods at Dad, and Dad nods back and starts loading up the trunk with their bags. Dean goes back inside to grab Sammy, and Dad says one last thank you to Mrs. Gutierrez for looking after them. Always makes Dean feel like a little kid. Mrs. Gutierrez nods, says, "Adiós," and when Dad turns away she presses a heavy little package into Dean's hands, wrapped in a flimsy grocery bag, and kisses him once on the forehead. He has to work hard to hide his surprise. Then he's not all that surprised, when Dad gets them a motel outside of Kingman later that night and he finally gets a chance to open up the package, to find a tupperware, filled with eight perfect little tamales, and a tub of thick red sauce.