The Tortilla Curtain

feet. He wondered if there was a fracture somewhere in the socket or the ridge of bone above it. Or if he'd torn a ligament or something. Any way you looked at it, he couldn't work, not for the time being--hell; he could barely stand, and that was his bad luck, his stinking _mala suerte__ that had got him robbed at the border and thrown up against the bumper of some rich man's car. But if he couldn't work, how would they eat?
    And then the thing happened that he didn't want to happen, the thing he'd been dreading: America got up at first light on the fourth day after the accident and tried to slip off up the hill before he'd aroused himself. It was some sixth sense that made him wake when he did--she was silent as a cat, so he couldn't have heard her. She stood off a bit in the mist, insubstantial in the pale rinsed-out light, and he saw her arms go up over her head as she shrugged into her dress, the good one, the one with the blue flowers against the beige background that she wore when she wanted to make a good impression. But oh, she was silent, pantomiming the motions of a woman getting dressed. _“¿Adónde vas, mi vida?”__ he said. “Where are you going, my love?”
    “Hush,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
    The dew lay heavy on the blanket, on his shirt and the sling that cradled his arm. The day breathed in and out, just once, and then he repeated himself: “I said, where are you going? Don't make me ask again.”
    “Nowhere. Don't trouble yourself.”
    “You haven't started the fire,” he said.
    No answer. The mist, the trees, the birds. He heard the sound of the creek running beneath its mats of algae to the sea, and in the background, the faint automotive hum of the first commuters coming down the canyon to work. A crow called out just behind them, harsh and immediate. And then she was there, kneeling before him on the blanket, her face fresh-scrubbed, hair brushed, in her good dress. “Cándido, _queridotan Q _quer,__ listen,” she said, milking his eyes, “I'm going up the road to the labor exchange to see if I can't... see if I might... find something.”__
    _Find something.__ It was a slap in the face. What was she saying--that he was useless, impotent, an old man fit for the rocking chair? _Viejo,__ his friends called him because of the gray in his hair, though he was only thirty-three, and it was like a prophecy. What good was he? He'd taken America from her father so they could have a better life, so they could live in the North, where it was green and lush the year round and the avocados rotted on the ground, and everyone, even the poorest, had a house, a car and a TV--and now he couldn't even put food in her mouth. Worse: _she__ was going to earn _his__ keep.
    “No,” he said, and his tone was final, clamped round the harshness of the negative like a set of pliers, “I won't have it. I didn't want you to go out the other day on that wild-goose chase just because some woman gave you a tip--and you got yourself lost, didn't you? Admit it. You were nearly separated from me--forever--and how would you expect me to find you, eh? How?”
    “I'm not going to the city,” she said quietly. “Just to the exchange. Just up the street.”
    He considered that scenario--his wife, a barefoot girl from the country who didn't know a thing about the world, out there among all those men, those lowlifes who'd do anything for a buck--or a woman--and he didn't like it. He knew them. Street bums who couldn't keep their hands in their pockets, sweaty _campesinos__ from Guerrero and Chiapas who'd grown up abusing their livestock, _indios__ from Guatemala and Honduras: coochie-coochie and hey baby and then the kissing noises. At least in the garment trade she'd be among other women--but up there, at the labor exchange, she'd be like a pot of honey with a hundred bees swarming round her.
    They'd been living in the canyon three weeks now--there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L. A. or even Van Nuys--and though they didn't have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he'd felt happy for the first time since they'd left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was his, all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetcorner for work, the reek of the place, the