T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

But he did come over. He'd given her a cup of coffee-she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop-and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some _gringo__ or _gringa__ pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he'd been poked in the throat, “-enjoy the coffee?”

She wouldn't look at him. Wouldn't speak.

“I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, 'There's a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,' and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh, _linda?”__ And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.

Miserable, guilty-she'd taken the coffee, hadn't she? — she didn't resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again-there was something rotting inside of him. _“Me llamo José,”__ he said, holding out a hand to shake, _“José Navidad. ¿Y tú__? ¿_Cómo te llamas, pretty?”__

This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.

“Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don't bite. I'm a friendly guy-don't you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don't you?”

“All right,” she said, and she fel pl' and she t the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I'm a married woman and it's not right to talk to me like that-”

He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy, _loco,__ demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle-just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”

Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man-a giant of a fat man, a real _guatón-__stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then-miracle of miracles! — Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even-she had a job and they didn't. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded _guatón__ of a white man with no consciousness of how she'd gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.

“Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman's voice, in English.

America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.

The fat man, the _gringo,__ called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn't understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the _gringa__ had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn't speak any English-what do you want with her?”

_“Quiero trabajar,”__ América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”

Candelario Pérez said something to the man-América was there before the _gringa,__ first come, first served-and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment-too long-and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something-she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared-and Candelario Pérez told her, “It's all right, six hours' work and he'll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary-big Mary, the drunk, the _gringa__ maid who'd tried to cut her out-got in too.

Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the _Laboratorio Medico__ in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm's way. Those boys-those teenage _gabachos-__had terrified him. They weren't _La Migra,__ no, and they weren't the police, but the way they'd attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in e b'al teeth it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who'd raised them must have been even worse-and what would have happened if they'd come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?

He'd fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he'd lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América's dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren't his wife at all, just somebody he'd met in the street.

All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He'd gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end-a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter's floods crammed into every crevice.

Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand-if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his _huaraches__-they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut-and feel his way barefoot. It wasn't a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there-snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.