The Tortilla Curtain

hill. Stood out front of the post office and sweated the police. And where was Señor Willis? He'd died, that must have been it. Sleeping in his car because his wife hounded him so much he couldn't take it, drinking out of the one bottle and pissing in the other, seventy-six years old with bad hips and an irregular heart and who could survive that? He was dead. Sure he was. But then, one hopeless hot wind-tortured afternoon, there came the Corvair, drifting down the road like a mirage, and there was Señor Willis with one eye bruised purple and swollen shut like some artificial thing grafted to his face, a rubber joke you'd find in a novelty shop. “Hey, _muchacho,”__ he said, “we got work. Get in.”
    Three days this time. Installing new gates with gravity feed on an old iron fence around a swimming pool, then replacing the coping. And then Señor Willis was drunk, and then there was more work, and now, now that they had nearly five hundred dollars in the jar, there was a month's worth of work coming up, a whole big job of work, putting an addition on a young couple's living room in Tarzana, and what was wrong with that? America should jump for joy. They'd be out of here any day now, out of here and into an apartment where Señor Willis could come by and knock at the door and Cándido could come out and just get into the Corvair and not have to worry about La Migra snatching him off the street. But América wasn't jumping for joy. She wasn't jumping at all. She wasn't even moving. She was just sitting there by the moribund stream and the dwindling pool, bloated and fat and inanimate.
    Cándido went up the hill. He was worried, always worried, but then life had its ups and downs and this time they were on the upswing, no doubt about it. He was making plans in his head and when he passed the big stubbed-toe rock where he'd encountered that son of a bitch of a _half-a-gringo__ with the hat turned backwards on his head, he refused even to think about him. There was no work today or tomorrow either. It was a holiday, Señor Willis had told him, a four-day weekend, and they would start in on the new project, the big job, on Monday. But what holiday was it? Thanksgiving, Señor Willis had said, _El Día de las Gracias, El Tenksgeevee.__
    Well that was all right. Cándido would rather be working, he'd rather be putting his first and last months' rent down on an apartment, any apartment, anywhere, and bringing his wife up out of the hole she was in, but it could wait another week at sixty-four dollars a day--or at least he hoped and prayed it could. América was due soon--she looked like an unpoked sausage swelling on the grill. But he had no control over that--sure, he'd stood out there by the post office this morning, but nobody came by, nobody, it was like the whole canyon was suddenly deserted--and now he was coming back up the hill, three o'clock in the afternoon, to buy rice, stewed tomatoes in the can, a two-quart cardboard container of milk for his wife and maybe a beer or two, Budweiser or Pabst Blue Ribbon, in the tall brown one-liter bottle, for _El Tenksgeevee.__
    He kept his head up on the road. La _Migra__ wouldn't be working today, not on _El Tenksgeevee,__ the lazy overfed fat-assed bastards, but you could never tell: it would be just like them to pick you up when you least expected it. There wasn't a lot of traffic--more than in the morning, but still it was nothing compared to a working day. Cándido crossed the road--careful, careful--made his way through the maze of shopping carts and haphazardly parked vehicles in the lot, and entered the _paisano's__ market, stooping to pick up a red plastic handbasket just inside the door.
    The place was the same as always, changeless, as familiar to him now as the market in his own village, and still there wasn't a scent of food, not even a stray odor, as if the smell of a beefsteak or a cheese or even good fresh sawdust was somehow obscene. The light was dead. The shoppers were the same as always, the same changeless bleached-out faces, and they gave him the same naked stares of contempt and disgust. Or no, they weren't the same, not exactly: today they were all dressed up in their finery for _El Tenksgeevee.__ Cándido made his way down the canned-vegetable aisle, thinking to save the beer cooler for last, so as to keep the beer cold to the last possible moment--and he would reach way in back too, to get the maximally chilled ones. He smelled plastic wrap,