The Tortilla Curtain

were crossing against the light, no cars coming in either direction, when it came to her: they were back on the canyon road, right back where they'd started, where the shade trees overhung all those pretty little unattainable houses and the yards that were thick with swing sets and tricycles. She felt her heart sink. What were they doing here? He wasn't going to make her walk all the way back up the road and down into that miserable hole tonight, was he? He couldn't. He was crazy. Insane. She'd throw herself down right here on the sidewalk and die first.
    She was about to say something, when he stopped suddenly just outside a restaurant she remembered from the morning, a little place set apart on its own paved lot, with plate-glass windows, a candy-striped roof and a big illuminated red-and-white bucket revolving round a pole atop it. The place was closed, dark inside, but the lot on either side of it was lit up like brightest day. “You hungry?” Cándido whispered, and they hadn't spoken in so long her voice sounded strange in her own ears when she said yes, yes she was. “Okay,” he said, shooting a nervous glance up and down the street, “follow me and be quick about it--and keep your voice down.”
    She wasn't thinking. She was too tired to think, too depressed. There must have been some vague wonder in the back of her brain, some sort of puzzlement--did he know someone who worked here or was he going to lift something, supplies they delivered late at night?--but it never came to the surface and she just followed him stupidly into the harsh flood of the lights. They were in the back lot now, hidden from the street, fenced in on three sides. A big gray metal bin stood there, just outside the rear door, and it gave off an odor that told her immediately what it was.
    Cándido astonished her. He strode right up to the thing and threw back the lid and he never noticed the dark quick shadow that shot out from beneath the bin and disappeared between the slats of the fence. All at once she understood: garbage, they were going to eat garbage. Sift through it like the _basureros__ at the dump, take somebody else's filthy leavings, full of spit and maggots and ants. Was he crazy? Had he gone mad with the knock on his head? Even at their lowest, even in Tijuana in the' dump they'd been able to scrape together a few _centavos__ to buy steamed corn and _caldo__ from the street vendors. She stood there frozen at the edge of the lot, watched in shock and disbelief as Cándido leaned into the bin till his legs came up off the ground and he began to kick for balance. She could feel the outrage burning in her, fueled by all the cruel disappointments of the day, a rising white-hot blaze of it that pushed her forward to sink her nails into his leg. “What are you doing?” she demanded in a whisper she could barely contain. “What in the name of Jesus do you think you're doing?”
    His legs kicked. She heard him grunt from deep inside the bin. Somewhere out on the street an engine roared to life and she flinched and let go of him. What if someone caught them? She'd die of shame. “I'm not touching that, that shit,” she hissed at the flailing legs, at his fat floundering rear. “I'd rather starve.” She moved a step closer, outraged, and the smell hit her again, mold, rot, decay, filth. She wanted to shove him into the bin and slam the lid down on him, she wanted to break things, pound her fists against the walls. “Maybe you can live like this, but not me,” she said, fighting to keep her voice down. “My family's respectable, miles above the likes of you and your aunt, and my father, my father--” She couldn't go on. She was breathless and weak and she thought she was going to cry.
    There was a prolonged grunt from the depths of the bin, and then Cándido resurfaced, feeling his way with his feet, backing out of the mouth of the dumpster like a hermit crab emerging from its shell. He turned to her with his face ironed gray under the blast of the floodlights and she saw that his arms were spilling over with red-and-white-striped cardboard boxes, little things, like candy or cigar boxes. Grease, she smelled grease. Cooking grease. Cooking grease gone cold. “Your father,” he said, holding out one of the boxes to her, “is a thousand miles away.”
    He looked round him quickly, that worried look on his face, tensed a moment, then relaxed. His voice softened. “Eat, _mi vida,”__ he said. “You're going to need