T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

America would have missed him, he knew that, and the stores were closed at this hour, everything shut down. At seven, Al Lopez had bought Pepsis and _burritos__ in silver foil for him and the Indian, and so he didn't need to eat, but still he felt a flare of hunger after all those days of enforced fasting. As he limped down the dark road, flinching at the headlights of the cars, he wondered if America had kept the fire going under the stew.

It was late, very late, by the time he bundled up his clothes and waded the pool to their camp. He was glad to see the fire, coals glowing red through the dark scrim of leaves, and he caught a keen exciting whiff of the stew as he shrugged into his clothes and called out softly to America so as not to startle her. “América,” he whispered. “It's me, Cándido-I'm back.” She didn't answer. And that was strange, because as he came round the black hump of the ruined car, he saw her there, crouched by the fire in her underthings, her back to him, the dress in her lap. She was sewing, that was it, working with needle and thread on the material she kept lifting to her face and then canting toward the unsteady light of the fire, the wings of her poor thin shoulder blades swelling and receding with the busy movement of her wrists and hands. The sight of her overwhelmed him with sadness and guilt: he had to give her more, he had to. He'd buy her a new dress tomorrow, he told himself, thinking of the thrift shop near the labor exchange. There were no bargains in that shop, he knew that without looking-it was for _gringos,__ commuters and property owners and people on their way to the beach-but without transportation, what choice did he have? He fingered the bills in his pocket and promised himself he'd surprise her tomorrow.

Then he came up and put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hey, _mi vida,__ I'm back,” and he was going to tell her about the job and Al Lopez and the fifty dollars in his pocket, but she jerked away from him as if he'd struck her, and turned the face of a stranger to him. There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before, something worse, far worse, than what he'd glimpsed the night before when she left the rich man in his car. “What is it?” he said. “What's the matter?”

Her face went blank. Her eyes dropped away from his and her hands curled rigid in her lap till they were like the hands of a cripple.

He knelt beside her then and talked in an urgent apologetic whisper: “I made money, good money, and I'm going to buy you a dress, a new dress, first thing tomorrow, as soon as-once I'm done with work-and I know I'm going to get work, I know it, every day. You won't have to wear that thing anymore, or mend it either. Just give me a week or two, that's all I ask, and we'll be out of here, we'll have that apartment, and you'll have ten dresses, twenty, a whole closetful…”

But she wasn't responding-she just sat there, hanging her head, her face hidden behind the curtain of her hair. It was then that he noticed the welts at the base of her neck, where the hair parted to fall forward across her shoulders. Three raised red welts that glared at him like angry eyes, unmistakable, irrefutable. “What happened?” he demanded, masking the damage with a trembling hand. “Was it that _rico?__ Did he try anything with you, the son of a bitch-I swear I'll kill him, I will-”

Her voice was tiny, choked, the faintest intrusion on the sphere of the audible: “They took my money.”

And now he was rough, though he didn't mean to be. He jerked at her shoulders and forced her to look him in the face. “Who took your money-what are you talk”Wháare you ting about?“ And then he knew, knew it all, knew as certainly as if he'd been there: ”Those _vagos?__ It was the one with the hat, wasn't it? The half-a-_gringo?__"

She nodded. He forgot his hunger, forgot the pot on the coals, the night, the woodsmoke, the soil beneath his knees, oblivious to everything but her face and her eyes. She began to cry, a soft kittenish mewling that only infuriated him more. He clutched at her shoulders, shook her again. “Who else?”

“I don't know. An Indian.”

“Where?” he shouted. “Where?”

“On the trail.”

On the trail. His heart froze around those three words. If they'd robbed her in the parking lot, on the road, at the labor exchange, it was one thing, but _on the trail__… “What else? What else did they take? Quick, tell me. They didn't, they didn't try to-?”

“No,” she said. “No.”

“You're lying. Don't lie to me. Don't you dare lie to me.”

She broke his grip and stared into the fire, rubbed a wrist across her eyes. “They took my money.”

Cándido was ready to kill, ready to hack through every bush in the mountains till he found their camp and crushed their skulls while they lay sleeping. The image infested his brain: the tan dog's eyes, the stirring limbs and the rock coming down, again and again. “Is that all?” he hissed, fighting against the knowledge. “Is that all they took?” He gripped her arm again. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she whispered, turning to level her gaze on him, “I'm sure.”

It hurt, that's all she knew. Burned. Burned like acid in an open wound, like the corrosive at the fat man's house when it got down into the split skin at the quick of her nails. Every time she peed it was like fire passing through her. She didn't know what it was-some lingering effect of what they'd done to her that night, her insides scored and dirty, rubbed raw like a skinned knee… or was it just a new and unexpected phase of her pregnancy? Was this normal? Was this the way it was supposed to be in the beginning of the fifth month, flaming pee? Her mother would know. Her aunts, her older sisters, the village midwives. If she were home she could even have asked Señora Serrano, the neighbor lady who'd given birth to sixteen children, the oldest grown up and with children of their own, the youngest in diapers still. But here? Here there was no one, and that frightened her-frightened her now and for when her time came.

America waited there in the hut behind the wrecked car for Cándido, day after day, bored and aching-he wouldn't let her go to the labor exchange, never again-her breasts tender, her stomach queasy, needing her mother, needing to ask the questions a daughter never asks, not till she's married. But then, she and Cándido never were married, not officially, not in the church. In the eyes of the Church, Cándido was already married, forever married, to Resurrección. And America and Cándido had gone off in the night, silent as thieves, and only a note left for her mother, not a word to her face, and even then America was pregnant, though she didn't know it. She wanted to call her mother now, on the telephone, one of those outdoor phones with the little plastic bonnets lined up in a row by the Chinese store and hear her voice and tell her she was all right and ask her why it burned so when she peed. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did all women go through that? But then, even if she had the money, all lined up on the plastic shelf in all the silver denominations, she'd have to call the village pharmacy itáge pharmabecause her parents had no phone, and how was she to do that? She didn't know the number. Didn't know how to dial Mexico even.

And so she waited there in her little nook in the woods like some princess in a fairy story, protected by a moat and the sharp twisted talons of a wrecked car, only this princess had been violated and her pee burned and she jumped at every sound. Cándido had got her some old magazines in English-he'd found them in the trash at the supermarket-and six greasy dog-eared _novelas__, picture romances about El Norte and how poor village girls and boys made their fortunes and kissed each other passionately in the gleaming kitchens of their gleaming _gringo__ houses. She read them over and over again and she tried not to think of the man with the cap and the Indian and their filthy writhing bodies and the stinking breath in her face, tried not to think of her nausea and lightheadedness, of her mother, of the future, tried not to think of anything. She explored the creekbed out of boredom. She bathed in the pool. Collected firewood. Repaired her old dress and saved the new one, the one Cándido had brought home one afternoon, for when they had an apartment and she needed something nice to get work. A week passed. Then another. It got hot. Her pee burned. And then, gradually, the pain faded and she began to forget what had happened to her here in the paradise of the North, began to forget for whole minutes at a time.