The bodies had been taken away. The inspectors had left the scene. What was left of the house was cordoned off with danger tape. The smell of the fire would linger in the neighborhood for weeks.
         In the morning the city dropped off a dumpster. What wasn’t needed for evidence was hauled from the house and thrown away. When Daniel drove by that afternoon it was already piled high, with scorched couches and chairs visible above the lip of it. Part of a baby’s crib. That evening some of the local boys went diving and took away some junk, including a charred Nintendo and a perfectly good baseball bat. They left stuff strewn on the sidewalk, and that’s where Daniel, the next morning, first saw the toys.
         Half a dozen dolls in various stages of disintegration: some Barbies, or Barbie-like things, but the plastic had mostly melted. The fabric ones had survived better for some reason: they reeked, they were blackened, but few were missing more than a limb or two. Most rugged of all were a set of half a dozen wooden soldiers, impressively carved, at least a foot high, their red coats stained and bubbled and discolored into umber, but each complete, lying on the grass as if felled all at once by enemy cannon.
         The next day the toys were gone, then the dumpster, and soon enough the house as well, demolished, the basement dug out and filled with earth, sod laid atop it all and a realtor’s sign planted optimistically in the cheerful new-green lot. It was as if the Trujillos, and their lives, had never been.
         When the immigration raids increased, the neighborhood reacted in force. Whistles sounded every day before dawn. Groceries were bought and distributed to those people too afraid to leave their homes. Men in masks were pursued and shamed as they brutalized. The weather turned cold; there was a blizzard or two. The men with masks were screamed at, hit by snowballs. Hysterically they teargassed. They painted the snowdrifts with pepper spray. They found their tires slashed, their electricals ripped out from under their hoods. Tiny footprints in the snow, flecks of soot and a sharp odor of matches. One agent ran his car off an overpass and broke his neck.
         In the predawn cold, booted, gloved, double-jacked, with his passport and birth certificate in his pocket and a whistle around his neck, Daniel drove around looking for the trouble. And there it was, a dark SUV, idling, driver’s and passenger’s doors ajar, pulled up in front of the mercado. He was about to roll down his window and give the signal, but hesitated. Movement in the alley, near the garbage? He parked and got out to take a look.
         There, in the shadow behind the dumpster, two men twitching in the ruddy snow, and surrounding them a dozen small dark figures armed with rusty nails and shards of glass. Everywhere the smell of burning—a real dumpster fire, he thought, but he wouldn’t remember the joke afterward.
         He backed away. They meant well, he knew, but this was going to lead to a lot of problems.
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