T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido's ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass-he was in control, and he knew it. “So where's your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”

“They took it all,” Cándido lied. _“Pinche gabachos.__ I hid in the bushes.”

A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into hithe'hand intos pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he'd got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret-; he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now-“it's been good talking to you, always good to talk to a _compañero,__ but I've got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight… you don't know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”

No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido's head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.

“I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn't have a little bite of something on you, would you?”

The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him-he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.

“Sorry, _'mano,”__ the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed down the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn't be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.

Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the trail. Now he had to worry about this stinking crack-toothed _pendejo__ nosing around down in the canyon, as if he didn't have enough problems already. And what if he found their camp? What then? Cándido felt jealous suddenly, possessive: the son of a bitch. There was a whole range of mountains here, canyons all over the place-too many to count-and why did he have to pick this one? Anger spurred him on-and worry. He was breathing hard and his hip hurt, his knee, the throbbing crust of scab that masked the left side of his face. He kept going, forcing himself on, until a sudden screech of tires let him know that the road was just above him, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.

And then he emerged from the bushes and he was out on the road, the traffic hurtling past him in a crazy _gringo__ taillight-chasing rush-and what was the hurry, the constant hurry? Making a buck, that's what. Building their glass office towers and adding up the figures on their dark little TV screens, getting richer-that's what the hurry was. And that was why the _gabachos__ had cars and clothes and money and the Mexicans didn't. He walked along the highway, feeling strange-this was just where he'd been hit, just here-and he felt the cold steel rush of a passing car at his back and someone leaned on the horn and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He watched the taillights and cursed under his breath.

He looked first in the parking lot at the Chinese store, but America wasn't there. There were no Mexicans around at this hour, not a one-you'd think they'd all vanished into the earth, like those toad-stools that spring up after a rainfall and disappear by sunset. The place was swarming with _norteamericanos__ though, hordes of them, jumping in and out of their cars, hustling ins f' hustlingto the store and hustling back out again with their brown paper bags full of beer and wine and little sweet things to put in the mouth. They looked at Cándido like he was a leper.

On up the street, careful, careful, look both ways and cross. Nobody was coming down the canyon, but they were all going up, endlessly, relentlessly, enough cars to fill twenty big boats going back to Japan where they'd all come from in the first place. There was a little shopping plaza here, the one with the larger market and the _paisano__ from Italy. This was where America would be if she'd missed him down below, or if-and the idea hit him with the sudden force of inspiration-if she was working. Maybe that was it. Maybe he'd been worrying for nothing. Maybe she would have money and they could buy food.

Food. His stomach clenched at the thought of it and he felt faint for just a moment-a moment, that was all, but it was enough to make him lurch into a big beefy _gabacho__ with sideburns that ate up half his face and hair all piled up slick on his head like Elvis in one of those black velvet tapestries. The man shoved him away, a violent thrust of the arms, and said something harsh, something hateful, his face exploding with it. “Escuse, escuse,” Cándido blurted, throwing up his hands and backing away, but they were all watching now, all the _gabachos__ in the parking lot, and he would have run but his legs wouldn't carry him.

At six p. m., with the sun starting to slant down in the west and the shadows of the trees swelling against the windows like images out of a dream, America was working. Still working. Though the six hours were up and the fat man was nowhere to be found. Candelario Pérez had said six hours' work, twenty-five dollars, and this was eight hours now and she was wondering, did this mean the fat man would pay her more? Six divided into twenty-five was four dollars and sixteen cents an hour, and so, for two extra hours she should get, what-eight dollars and thirty-two cents more. She glowed with the thought of it. She was earning money, money for food, for Cándido and her baby-she, who'd never earned a _centavo__ in her life. She'd worked in her father's house, of course, cooking and cleaning and running errands for her mother, and he gave her an allowance each week, but it was nothing like this, nothing like earning a wage from a stranger-and a _gringo,__ no less. Cándido would be surprised. Of course he would have guessed by now that she was working, but wait till he saw her tonight, coming down that trail into the canyon with all the groceries she could carry, with meat and eggs and rice and a can of those big sardines, the ones in oil so rich you lick it from the tips of your fingers…

She thought of that, held the image in her brain till it was imprinted there, and her hands were quick and nimble even after eight hours, and the fumes hardly bothered her. They bothered Mary, though. Bothered her plenty. The big _gringa__ with the ring through her nose hadn't shut up about it since the fat man had led them into this great long beautiful room of his house lined with windows and given them each a pair of yellow latex gloves and the plastic bottles of the corrosive. America didn't understand what the woman was saying, of course, and she tried to block her out too, but the drift of it was inescapable. Mary didn't like the work. Mary didn't need the work. Mary had a house with a roof and four walls and a refrigerator with food in it. She didn't like the fumes or the fat man or his beautiful house or life on this planet. She tipped back a pint of that liquor she had with her and as the day went on she got slower and slower till practically all she did at the end was sit there and complain.