T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

He wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it. Despite his headlong rush, despite the quickness of his feet and the hard-honed sinewy strength of his legs, despite his rage and determination and the chorus of howls from his wife and son, he was impotent. The coyote scaled the fence, rung by rung, as if it were a ladder, and flew from the eight-foot bar at the top like a big dun wingless bird, and then it was gone, melted into the brush with its prey. And the fence? Delaney clung to it, just a heartbeat later-at the very spot-but he had to go all the way round the house and through, the side gate to get out.

By then, of course-and no one had to explain this to Kyra, or even to Jordan-it was too late.

AND THEN HE GOT WORK FIVE DAYS IN A ROW. BRUSH clearance. Hard hot dirty work, breathing dust and little pale flecks of crushed weed till you choked, and the sun beating at the back of your neck like a scourge and the seeds of all those incorrigible desert plants like needles, like fisherman's hooks stabbing through your clothes and into your flesh every time you moved, and all you did was move. Three dollars and twenty-five cents an hour and he wasn't complaining. A _gabacho__ boss had pulled into the labor exchange lot in a truck with high wooden sides, picked Cándido and another man and pantomimed what he wanted. They got in the back of his truck, five mornings in a row, and he took them to a canyon with eight new houses in it and they cleared brush from the hillside and raked it up and loaded it into the truck. Each afternoon he paid them in cash and each morning he was there again, seven a. m., regular as clockwork. On the fifth day, when work was finished, he didn't show them any money, but with gestures and a few garbled Spanish phrases he let them know that he was short and would pay them when he came to pick them up in the morning. Cándido wondered about that, especially since they'd scraped the hillside bare, right down to the dirt, but then maybe there was another canyon and another hillside. There wasn't. At least not for Cándido. He never saw the man again.

All right. He'd been cheated before-it wasn't the first time. He would survive it. But then he didn't get work, not that day or the next or the day after that, and he came dragging back into camp at one each afternoon, dejected and heartsick with worry, and he let America fuss over him in her big maternity shorts while the worry trailed off into boredom and the boredom into rage. But he controlled himself. America was innocent. She was everything to him. He had no one to rage at but himself and he raged internally till he had to get up and move, use his hands, do something, anything. He devised make-work projects for himself: damming the far edge of the pool to keep the water level up as the creek slowed to a trickle, adding a cut-willow veranda to the lean-to, hunting birds and lizards and anything else he could find to stretch their supplies and avoid dipping into the apartment fund in the jar beneath the rock. They had three hundred and twenty dollars in that jar and he needed to triple it at least if they were going to have a roof over their heads by the time his son was born.

One afternoon, coming back defeated from the labor exchange with a few chilies, onions and a sack of dried pinto beans, he found a scrap of clear plastic mesh by the side of the road and stuffed it into his back pocket. He was thinking he might be able to cut a long green switch, bend the tip into a loop and sew the mesh to it so he'd have a net to snare some of the birds that were constantly flitting in and out of the chaparral. Using a length of discarded fishing line and América's two-inch sewing needle, Cándido bent to the task. In less than an hour he'd fashioned a sturdy professional-looking net while America looked on in stony silence-her sympathies lay clearly with the birds. Then he climbed back up the trail, watched where the birds plunged into the scrub to the fortresses of their nests, and waited. The first day he got nothing, but he sharpened his technique, lying motionless in the bone-white dust and flicking his wrist to snap the net like a tennis player working on his backhand.

No one hired him the following day either, and while America soaked the beans and reread her _novelas__ for the hundredth time, he went back to try his luck. Within an hour he'd caught four tiny gray-bodied little birds, no longer than his thumb, pinching their heads to stifle them, and then he got lucky and stunned a scrub jay that hopped off into the undergrowth with a disarranged wing until he could run it down. He plucked the birds and rinsed them in the stream-they weren't much, particularly the little gray ones-and then he built up the fire and fried them in lard, heads and all. America wouldn't touch them. But Cándido ran each miniature bone through his teeth, sucking it dry, and there was a satisfaction in that, the satisfaction of the hunter, the man who could live off the land, but he didn't dwell on it. How could he? The very taste on his lips was the taste of desperation.

The next morning he was up at first light, as usual, blowing into his coffee while America fried eggs, chilies and tortillas over a smokeless fire, and then he made his way up the hill to the labor exchange, feeling optimistic, lucky even, the wings of the little birds soaring in his veins. The limp was gone now-or almost gone-and though his face would never look quite the same again, at least the crust of scab had fallen away, giving back some of the flesh beneath. He wasn't planning on entering any beauty contests anyway, but at least now the _patrones__ in the trucks wouldn't automatically look past him to the next man. The sky swelled with light. He began to whistle through his teeth.

Out of habit he kept his head down as he walked along the side of the road, not wanting to risk making eye contact with any of the _gringos__ or _gringas__ on their way to work in their unblemished new Japanese cars. To them he was invisible, and that was the way he wanted to keep it, showing himself only in the lot at the labor exchange, where they could see what he was and what he had to offer. He barely glanced up at the tumult in the lot at the Chinese grocery-the sweet buns, coffee in styrofoam cups, frantic cigarettes-and he didn't really lift his head until he felt the gravel of the labor exchange lot under his feet. He was wondering idly if he'd be first in line, thinking of the day ahead, whistling a radio tune he hadn't heard in years, when he looked up and it hit him: _there was nothing there.__ No pillars, no roof, no _campesinos__ in khaki shirts and straw hats. Nothing. It was as if a hurricane wind had come up in the night, a tornado, and sucked the whole thing up into the sky. Cándido stood there, dumbstruck, and looked round him twice to get his bearings. Was he dreaming? Was that it?

But no. He saw the chain then-two chains-and the signs. Posts had bme á Posts haeen driven into the ground at each of the two entrances, and they were linked by chains thick enough to anchor a boat. The signs were nailed to the posts. PRIVATE, they screamed in blazing red letters, ALL PERSONS WARNED AGAINST TRESPASS, and though Cándido couldn't read English, he got the drift. What was going on? he asked himself. What was the problem? But even as he asked he knew the answer: the _gringos__ had gotten tired of seeing so many poor people in their midst, so many Mexicans and Hondurans and Salvadoreños. There was no more work here. Not now, not ever.

Across the street, in front of the post office, three men slunk around the butts of their cigarettes like whipped dogs. Cándido saw their eyes snatch at him as he watched for a break in the traffic and jogged across the road to them. They looked down at the ground as he greeted them. “Buenos _días,”__ he said, and then, “What's going on?”