The Tortilla Curtain

activity. It was here, just past the auto-parts store, that she turned left, following Cándido's lead, and found herself on a side street, but a busy one, cars hurtling by against a yellow light, springs rattling, tires squealing. She saw groups of men in the lot out back of the auto-parts store, _gringos__ and _Latinos__ alike, the sprawl of their cars, hoods up, engines running, the music pounding from their stereos till the pavement shook with it. They hardly gave her a glance, and she was too timid, too afraid to ask them if they'd seen Cándido, her husband, her lost husband, and that other man. Then there was a bookstore, a few more storefronts, and the street turned residential.
    It was getting dark. Streetlights blinked on. The windows of the houses had begun to glow softly against the shadowy shrubs, the flowers drained of color, the bougainvillea and wisteria gone gray in the fading light. She didn't see Cándido anywhere. Not a trace of him. The baby moved inside her and her stomach dipped and fluttered. All she wanted was to belong in one of those houses, any of them, even for a night. The people who lived in those houses had beds to stretch out on, they had toilets that flushed and hot and cold running water, and most important of all, they were home, in their own private space, safe from the world. And where was Cándido? Where was the room he'd promised her, the bed, the shower? This was shitty, really shitty. Worse than her father's house, a hundred times worse. She was a fool to have left, a fool to have listened to the stories, watched the movies, read the _novelas,__ and more of a fool to ever for a second have envied the married girls in Tepoztlán whose husbands gave them so much when they came home from the North. Clothes, jewelry, a new TV--that wasn't what you got. You got this. You got streets and bums and burning pee.
    Finally, after she'd searched even the side streets off of the side street, she went back to the wall in front of the post office. She didn't know what had happened to Cándido--she was afraid even to think about it--but this was where he would look for her, and she would just have to sit here and be patient, that was all. But now it was fully dark, now it was night, and the foot traffic had begun to pick up again--teenagers in groups, men in their twenties and thirties, out on the prowl. There was no one to protect her, no one to care. All she could see was the image of those animals at the border, the half-a-_gringo__ and his evil eyes and filthy insinuating fingers, the fat white man with his fat white hands, and she withdrew into herself, dwelled there deep inside where nobody could touch her. “Hey, baby,” they called when they saw her there trying to melt into the darkness, “hey, _ruca,__ hey, sexy, _¿quieres joder conmigo?”__
    It was nearly midnight and she'd nodded off--she couldn't help it, couldn't keep her eyes open a second longer--when she felt a touch at her shoulder. She woke with a start--nearly jumped out of her skin--and there he was, Cándido. Even in the bleak half-light of the streetlamps she could see the blood on his face, slick and black and without color. It could have been oil, molasses, could have been coal tar or makeup for some fright-house play in the theater, but it wasn't and she knew it the minute she saw him. “They hit me with something,” he said, his voice so pinched and hoarse she thought at first he'd been strangled. “A baseball bat, I think. Right here.” He lifted a hand to his hairline and touched the place where the blood was blackest. “They got everything. Every penny.”
    And now she saw that his shirt was torn and the cuffs of his trousers hacked away till it looked as if some animal had been chewing its way up his legs. _They got everything.__ She looked into his eyes in the dim subterranean glow of the streetlamp and let the words sink in. There would be no bed, no shower, no dinner even. And in the future: no apartment, no shops, no restaurants, no toys and blankets and diapers for her baby. Her mind raced ahead and back again, and then she thought of the woods, of the canyon, of that shitpile of sticks, and she wanted to die.
    His head ached, but that was nothing new. For a while there, his eyes had been playing tricks on him, everything doubled and doubled again, two walls, two windows, two streetlamps, then four and eight and sixteen, till he had to clamp his lids shut and start all over again. The world was