The Tortilla Curtain

this week only,” the girl said, her voice a breathless trill playing over the wad of pink gum Delaney could just catch a glimpse of when she opened her mouth to say “special.”
    “If your order totals over fifty dollars you get a free twelve-pound turkey, one to a customer.”
    “But we already--” Delaney began, and Kyra cut him off. “Yes,” she said, looking up from her compact, “thank you.”
    “Carlos!” the girl sang out, shouting toward the distant fluorescent glare of the meat department at the back of the store. “Bring me another turkey, will you?”
    For his part, Cándido Rincón didn't exactly welcome the season either. That it was hot, that the winds blew and the sweat dried from your skin almost before it had a chance to spill from the pores, was fine and good, ideal even--if only it could be sustained indefinitely, if only the sun would grace him for another two or three months. But he knew that the winds would soon blow themselves out and the sky would blacken and rot far out over the ocean and then come ashore to die. He couldn't smell the rains yet, but he knew they were coming. The days were truncated. The nights were cold. And where was his son going to be born--in a bed with a doctor looking on or in a hut with the rain driving down and nobody there but Cándido with a pot of water and his rusty knife?
    None of this sat easy with him as he trudged up the rutted trail to the market. América was down below, in a funk--she wouldn't leave the lean-to, no matter how much he might beg or plead. She was like a deranged person, sitting there over her swollen belly, rocking back and forth and chanting to herself. She scared him. No matter what he did, no matter what he brought her--magazines, clothes, things to eat, a rattle and a pair of booties for the baby--she'd just give him the same numbed look, as if she didn't recognize him--or didn't want to recognize him.
    It was this place, he knew it. The defeat of having to come back here, of having to live like vagos after the promise of that day in Canoga Park, after the luncheonette and the flush toilet and all those rich things and the houses with the cars out front and the peace and security inside. She'd had a breakdown then, like nothing he'd ever seen--even on the streets of Tijuana, even in the worst and lowest places. He'd seen women in hysterics before, but this was something else altogether, this was like a fit, a spell, as if somebody had put a curse on her. She wouldn't stand up. Wouldn't walk. Wouldn't eat the chicken he'd found for her, perfectly good pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken the _gabachos__ had thrown away untouched, and he'd had to drag her back down to their camp, fighting her all the way. Yes, they were desperate. Yes, they'd lost everything. Yes, he was a fool and a liar and he'd failed her yet again. But still they had to make the best of it, had to survive, didn't she see that?
    She didn't. For the first few days she just sat there, immobilized, catatonic. He'd leave to go out scrounging for food, for work, for the cans he found along the roadway and turned in for a handful of nickels and pennies, and when he came back, whether it was two hours later or six or eight, there she'd be, just as he'd left her, sometimes in the same pose even. She wouldn't talk to him. She refused to cook. She stopped washing her hair and her body and within the week she stank like one of the homeless, like a wild thing, like a corpse. Her eyes gored him. He began to think he hated her.
    Then he met Señor Willis. It was serendipity, good luck instead of bad. He'd got work a few times over the course of the first two weeks after the Canoga Park idiocy, standing out front of the post office with a knot of other men, not so many now, and keeping a sharp eye out for the INS or some vigilante _gabacho,__ defying them, yes, but what choice did he have? The labor exchange was gone. Someone had come in and planted some pepper trees, little sticks six or eight feet high with a puff of foliage at the top, black plastic hose running from tree to tree like a lifeline. That was the labor exchange now: saplings in the ground and the dead blasted earth. So he stood there outside the post office and took his chances, breathing hard every time a car slowed--was it a job or a bust?--and he was there late one howling hot dry-as-a-bone day, two o'clock probably, and a sledgehammered old Corvair pulled into the lot like some arthritic bird, and there,