Down and out

Pepe's wall was tall — about 15 feet high — but it came down with "just a few smacks," says Adam.
The adobe just crumbled away as we poked at it with crow bars and a hammer, pushing the old adobe out into the driveway.
Pepe told Adam how to climb the ladder and first take the wooden beams out, pulling each nail and prying the wood away.
I hauled them to the back yard, navigating around the giant rooster and his chickens. Pepe speaks no English so there were a few times when Adam couldn't remember the Spanish name for something. We got along: "Como se dice esta en Espanol," he asked, pointing to the homemade ladder.
"Una escalara."
"Ladder." Pepe would repeat it back.
In a while, they chat about playing basketball, Adam's volleyball and the community basketball league. Kellan and Pepe play on the teams and we've gone to two games, played on a court in front of the town's Catholic church.
When his niece came along, we helped pick out which music to play on their little radio and laughed about who found the weirdest thing in the old adobe. I think I won, with the rat skeleton, although a half of a scorpion skin came a close second.
By afternoon, we'd taken down the wall, shoveled all of the dirt into wheelbarrows and dumped them in the background navigating around the giant rooster, and begun to make the iron bars that will support the brick wall, Adam laughing as they taught him to bend metal into squares.
Simple exhanges that bond us. It's what being in El Sauce is all about.