The Tortilla Curtain

sitting at the wheel, was a man in the same shape as the car, an old white man with a sunken chest and turtle-meat arms, white hairs growing out of his nose and ears. He just sat there, looking at Cándido out of watery old gray-blue eyes that were distended by the lenses of his glasses till they didn't look like eyes at all, till they looked like mouths, grasping crazy wide-open gray-blue mouths. He was drunk. You could see that from twenty feet away. “Hey, _muchacho,”__ he called out of the passenger's-side window, which still had the sparse teeth of broken glass sprouting from the frame, the rest a vacancy. _“¿Quieres trabajar?”__
    It was a joke. It had to be. They let the old gabachos out of the nursing home and sent them down here to taunt honest men, that's what it was, Cándido was sure of it, and he felt his jaws clench with hate and anger. He didn't move a muscle. Just stood there rigid.
    _“Muchacho,”__ the old man said after a minute, and the wind, the tireless Santa Ana, pinched his voice till it was barely there, _“¿qué pasa? ¿Eres sordo?__ Are you deaf? I said, do you want to work?”
    The car rumbled and farted through its crippled exhaust. The wind blew. The mouths of the old man's eyes beckoned. What the hell, Cándido said to himself, what have I got to lose? and he made his way round the car to the driver's-side window and leaned in. “What work?” he asked in Spanish.
    There was a bottle on the seat next to the old man--two bottles, one of vodka, with a red label and clear liquid, the other with the same label but filled with a yellowish fluid, which Cándido later learned was urine. The old man didn't smell good. When he opened his mouth to smile there were only three teeth visible, two on the bottom and one on the top. “Building,” the old man said, “construction. You got a strong back, you work for me, no pissing around, eight bucks an hour.”
    _Eight bucks?__ Was he kidding? It was a joke. It had to be.
    “Get in the car,” the old man said, and Cándido went back round to the passenger's side, nothing to lose, jerked open the door--it was battered shut--and slid into the seat beside the two capped bottles, the clear and the tinted.
    That was Señor Willis, and Señor Willis proved to be a surprise, a big surprise, the best surprise Cándido had had since he left Tepoztlán with his seventeen-year-old bride. The Corvair took the canyon road at about thirty miles an hour, the front end ratcheting and swaying, the tires gasping, black smoke pouring so thickly from the exhaust that Cándido was afraid the thing was on fire, but it made the crest and wound down into Woodland Hills, where Señor Willis pulled up in front of a house that was the size of three houses, and the bald nervous-looking _gringo__ who owned it came out and shook his hand. That was Señor Willis.
    Cándido worked past dark, doing what Señor Willis told him, lifting this, pulling that, fetching a wrench, a hammer, the screw gun and two boxes of tile from the trunk of the car. Señor Willis _was__ remodeling one of the six bathrooms in this grand hushed house that was like a hotel with its potted plants and rich Persian carpets and leather chairs, and Señor Willis was a genius. An old genius. A drunken genius. A worn-out, battered and decrepit genius. But a genius all the same. He'd built hundreds of houses in his day, built whole developments, and not only in California, but in Panama too, where he'd picked up his Spanish that was so bad it made Cándido feel the way he had as a kid when the teacher would scratch her nails on the blackboard to get the attention of the class.
    Cándido worked a full week with Señor Willis and then the job was done and the old man disappeared, drunk for a week more. But Cándido had money now, and he bought America things to try to cheer her, little delicacies from the grocery, white bread and sardines in oil, and the apartment fund began to grow again in the little plastic peanut butter jar. Two weeks went by. There was no work. _La Migra,__ rumor had it, had snatched six men from in front of the post office, and the agents were in an unmarked car, black, plain black, and not the puke-green you could see a mile away. Cándido stayed away for a while. He dipped into the money he'd made. America was like a stranger and she was getting bigger by the day, so big he was afraid she'd burst, and she ate everything he could bring her and kept wanting more.
    He climbed the