The Tortilla Curtain

there in the utter absence of light, and her baby was coming and she was thirsty and tired and scared.
    The wind had shifted yet again and that meant the flames were climbing back toward them, relentless, implacable, eating up the canyon despite all that the _gringos__ and their airplanes could do. It was hard to breathe and he could smell nothing but smoke and cinders and the burning stench of destruction--worse, far worse, than anything the Tijuana dump could offer. Even the smell of the dead burning flesh of the dogs was preferable to this, because this was his smell, his creation, and it was out of control. He kept going, faster now, patting furiously at the wall, the copper taste of panic rising in his throat. And what was behind the wall? Houses, he guessed. The houses of the rich. Or maybe a ranch--one of those big squared-off places with a single house set squarely in the middle of it. He wasn't sure exactly where he was--the flight up the canyon and across the road had disoriented him--but they wouldn't have built a wall around nothing. He had to get inside, had to find out.
    And then the shed was there, announced by a sharp pain in his knee and the dull booming reverberation of aluminum. He felt his way around it to the back and the door that opened on the black hole of the interior. It was hot inside, baked by the sun all day till it was like one of the sweat lodges the reservation Indians used in their rituals, and the aluminum ceiling was low. There was a sharp smell of chlorine and of grass clippings, gasoline and manure--even before he let his hands interpret the place for him, Cándido knew what it was. He felt around the walls like a blind man--he _was__ a blind man, but a blind man in a hurry, a rush, life and death--and the tools were all there, the shovels and the shears and the weed whippers. His hands darted over the lawn mower, one of those ones you sit in, like a little tractor, the plastic buckets of chlorine and muriatic acid and all the rest of it. And then he found the shelves and felt over the boxes of seed and gopher pellets until, _milagro de milagros,__ his fingers closed round the throat of a kerosene lantern. Half a minute and it was lit, and the shed was a place of depth and color. He stepped outside with the lantern and there, tucked in against the wall right at his feet, was a faucet and a green hose coiled up against the plastic pipe of the irrigation system.
    He found a cup in the shed and drank off three cups of water before filling it for America, and then he went off to get her, the lantern puddling light at his feet and throwing a dim halo into the bushes before him. He followed the wall back to where he'd jammed a stick in the ground to guide him and went off at a right angle from that, calling out to her as he went. The dirt was pale, the bushes paler. Smoke rolled over the hill like a deadly fog. “Here,” she called. “Over here!”
    It was hot. It smelled bad. She was scared. She couldn't believe she was having her baby in a place like this, with the whole world on fire and nobody to help her, no midwife, no doctor, not even a _curandera.__ And the pain. Everything was so tight down there, squeezing in, always in, when it should be pushing out. She was in a shed, floating in a sea of rustling plastic sacks of grass seed, the sweat shining all over her like cooking oil and Cándido fussing around with his knife--sharpening it now on a whetstone--as if he could be of any use at all. The pains came regularly now, every minute or so, and they took away her breath. She wanted to cry out, wanted to cry out for her mother, for Tepoztlán, for everything she'd left behind, but she held it all in, everything in, always in and why not out, and then again and again.
    She was dreaming, awake and dreaming, but the dreams were full of teeth and claws and the howls of animals. Outside, beyond the thin skin of the shed, the inferno rushed toward them and the winds rattled the walls with a pulse like a drumbeat and Cándido's face was a glowing ball of sweat and worry. She knew what he was thinking: should they run and how could they run with the baby coming now and why did it have to come now of all times and who had elected him the sole target of all the world's calamities? But she couldn't help him. She could barely move and the pains were gripping her and then releasing again till she felt like a hard rubber ball slammed against a wall over and over. And then, in the middle of it