The Tortilla Curtain

grab the dead weight of it, rock-hard and cold through to the bone, and he almost dropped his bottles of beer, his precious beer, and still he didn't understand.
    “Happy Thanksgiving, dude,” the one with the rings said, and then the two of them were out the door, their long gringo legs scissoring the light, and the hot wind rushed in.
    Cándido was dazed, and he just stood there looking at all those white faces looking at him, trying to work out the permutations of what had just happened. Then he knew and accepted it in the way he would have swallowed a piece of meat without cutting it up, gulping it down because it was there on the tines of the fork. He cradled the lump of the frozen bird under one arm and hurried out the door and across the lot before someone came and took it away from him. But what luck, he thought, skittering down the road, what joy, what a coup! This would put a smile on América's face, this would do it, the skin crusted and basted in its own juices, and he would build up the coals first, make an inferno and let it settle into a bed of coals, and then he would roast the _pavo__ on a spit, slow-roast it, sitting right there and turning the spit till it was brown all over and not a blackened spot on it.
    He hurried down the trail, and nothing bothered him now, not his hip or his cheekbone or the wind in his face, thinking of the beer and the turkey and América. “Gobble, gobble,” he called, sloshing across the pool to where she sat like a statue in the sand, “gobble, gobble, gobble, and guess what _papacito's__ got for you!”
    And she smiled. She actually smiled at the sight of the thing, stripped of its head and its feet and its feathers, rolled up into one big ball of meat, turkey meat, a feast for two. She took a sip of beer when he offered it to her and she pressed his bicep with her hand as he told her the insuperable tale of the turkey, and already the flames were rising, the wind sucking them higher as it tore through the canyon, and should he get up from the sand and the beer and America and all the birds in the trees and the frogs croaking at the side of the pool and feed it some more?
    He got to his feet. The wind snatched at the fire and the fire roared. He went up and down the streambed in search of wood, rapping the bigger branches against the trunks of the trees to break them down, and every time he came back to feed the fire America was sitting there cradling the pale white bird as if she'd given birth to it, kneading the cold flesh and fighting to work the thick green spit through the back end of it. Yes, he told her, yes, that's the way, and he was happy, as happy as he'd ever been, right up to the moment when the wind plucked the fire out of its bed of coals and with a roar as loud as all the furnaces of hell set it dancing in the treetops.

The Tortilla Curtain

PART THREE
    Socorro

The Tortilla Curtain

1
    “BUT IT'S ONLY A COUPLE OF BLOCKS,” DELANEY WAS saying to the steamed-over bathroom mirror while Kyra moved behind him in the bedroom, trying on clothes. He'd towel-dried his hair and now he was shaving. Even with the hallway door closed he could smell the turkey, the entire house alive with the aroma of roasting bird, an aroma that took him back to his childhood and his grandparents' sprawling apartment in Yonkers, the medley of smells that would hit him in the stairwell and grow increasingly potent with each step of the three flights up until it exploded when the door swung open to reveal his grandmother standing there in her apron. Nothing had ever smelled so good--no French bakery in the first hour of light, no restaurant, no barbecue or clambake. “It seems ridiculous to take the car.”
    Kyra appeared in the bathroom doorway. She was in a black slip and she'd put her hair up. “Hurry, can't you,” she said, “I need the mirror. And yes, we're taking the car, of course we're taking the car--with this wind? My hair would be all over the place.”
    Jordan was in the living room, occupied with the tape-delayed version of the Macy's parade, Orbalina was scrambling to set the table and clean up the culinary detritus in the kitchen, and Kyra's mother--Kit--was in the guest room, freshening up. Delaney cracked the blinds. The day was clear, hot, wind-driven. “You've got a point,” he conceded.
    Back then, he'd always worn a suit, tie and overcoat, even when he was five or six, as the yellowed black-and-white photos testified. But those were more formal