The Tortilla Curtain

talk to him. It was all his fault, everything, from the stale air in the bus on the ride from Cuernavaca to Tijuana and the smell of the dump to this place, this vacancy of leaves and insects and hot naked air where men did dirty things to her and made her pee burn like fire. She looked through her peephole at the gray leaves of the gray trees and thought of Soledad Ordóñez, the stooped old shapeless woman from the San Miguel barrio who didn't speak to her husband for twenty-two years because he sold their pig in San Andrés and was drunk for a week on the proceeds. He was dying, stretched out on his deathbed with the priest and their three sons and four daughters there and all their seventeen grandchildren and his brother too, and he could barely croak out the words, “Soledad, talk to me,” and her face was stone and the priest and the brother and all the grandchildren held their breath, and she said one word, “Drunkard,” and he died.
    America missed her mother with a pain of longing so intense it was as if some part of her body had been removed. She missed her sisters and her bed in the comer of the back room with the posters of rock stars and las reinas del cine above it and Gloria Iglesias and Remedios Esparza and the other girls she used to go around with. She missed human voices, laughter, the smells of the street and marketplace, the radio, TV, dances and shops and restaurants. And who had deprived her of all this? Cándido. And she hated him for it. She couldn't help herself.
    But then one day, lying there by the desolate stream like some dead thing, America heard a bird calling, three high-pitched notes and then a quavering sustained low-throated whistle that broke her heart with the sadness of it, over and over, that sad beautiful bird calling for her mate, her love, her husband, and América felt the sun touch her face like the hand of God, and the peephole snapped open like the shutter of a camera. It wasn't much, just a fraction, the tiniest opening, but from that day on she began to recover. Her baby was coming. Cándido loved her. She made coffee the next morning, cooked him a meal. When he was gone she dug out the peanut butter jar and counted the limp gray bills there, the silver hoard of change, and she thought: Soon, soon. She wouldn't talk to him yet. She wouldn't smile at him. She hurt with a disappointment so yawning and wide she couldn't help spilling him into it, holding his head down in the black bitter waters, and that was true and unchanging and ongoing, but each day now the gulf inside her began to close even as the peephole widened.
    And now, today, when he came back with the turkey that had dropped down out of heaven, the _Tenksgeevee__ turkey, she couldn't make him suffer anymore. She was no Señora Ordóñez, she couldn't live a life of accusation and hatred, serving the coffee in a funereal dress, throwing down sir matoutthe plate of eggs and beans as if it were a weapon, always biting her lip and cursing in her head. She laughed to see him there, wet to the waist, the clink of the beer bottles, the big naked bird and gobble, gobble, gobble. He clowned for her, danced round the sandspit with the bird atop his head, doing a silly jogging _brinco__ step like a man strapped to a jackhammer. The leaves were green again, the sky blue. She got up and held him.
    And the fire, when it leapt to the trees like the coming of the Apocalypse, didn't affect her, not at first, not for a minute anyway. She was so intent on driving the sharp green stake of oak through the frozen carcass of the bird, so fixated on the image of crackling brown skin and rice with drippings, so happy to be alive again, that the roar didn't register. Not until she looked, up and saw Cándido's face and every living leaf and branch and bole wrapped in a vesture of flame. That was half a second before the panic set in, half a second before the numbing crazy bone-bruising flight up the hill, but half a second in which she wished with all her heart that she'd been strong enough to let the peephole close down forever.
    For Cándido, it was a moment of pure gut-clenching terror, the moment of the fatal mistake and the reaping of the consequences. What would he liken it to? Nothing, nothing he'd ever seen, except maybe the time in Arizona when the man they called Sleepy burned to death under the tractor when his cigarette ignited a spill of gasoline from the tank. Cándido had been up his ladder in a lemon tree, picking,