The Tortilla Curtain

over the wall, and then fell to his knees in the shrubbery.
    “Okay, Butch, okay, puppy,” a voice called from next door, and there was the woman at the back door and a huge black Alsatian romping out onto the porch and scuttering down the steps to the lawn. When it started barking--a deep-chested thundering roar of a bark--Cándido thought it was all up and he curled himself instinctively into the fetal position, protecting his head and genitals, but the dog was barking at the woman, who held a yellow tennis ball cocked behind her ear in the act of throwing it. She released the ball and the dog loped after it and brought it back. And then again. And again.
    Cándido, buried in the shrubbery next door, flattened himself to the ground. There were shouts in the distance, the sound of engines revving and dying, children's voices, more dogs: they were coming back, all of them, and it was only a matter of time--minutes maybe--till someone returned to this house and saw the roof gone from the greenhouse and came out to investigate. He had to do something and fast, and he was thinking about that, his mind racing, when a further complication occurred to him: he had no way over the wall.
    Next door the dog began barking again, a whole frenzied slobbering symphony of barking, and the woman threw the ball a final time and went back into the house. That was a break. Cándido waited till the dog had flipped the ball up in the air a few times, poked its head into the carpetless doghouse and settled down on the lawn to work the ball over as if it were a bone. Then he crawled across the greenhouse yard like a commando, pelvis to the dirt, and wriggled through a gap in an oleander hedge and into the next yard.
    This yard was quiet, nobody home, the pool as still as a bathtub, the lawn wet with dew. But he knew this place, didn't he? Wasn't this where he'd worked with Al Lopez on the fence? He remembered that oak tree, sure he did, a real grandfather of a tree, but where was the fence? He got cautiously to his feet and that was when he saw the bare spots in the lawn where they'd set the posts--_gabachos,__ they're never satisfied with anything--and then something a whole lot more interesting: a stepladder. An aluminum one. Right there against the wall. In a heartbeat he was up over the top and scrambling along the outside of the wall, hunched low over his feet, angry suddenly, raging, darting on past the plastic sheeting until he found the dog's dishes and the scrap of carpet and tucked them under his arm--and fuck the dog, he hated that dog, and fuck the fat lady who owned him too; they could buy another dish, another carpet, and who cared if a poor unlucky man and his wife and daughter died of want right under their noses? He wasn't going to worry about it anymore, he wasn't going to ask--he was just going to take.
    He secreted the rug and the dishes--cookpots, they were his cookpots now--in the underbrush till he could come back for them later, then made his way back along the wall to where the green plastic sheet had fallen in the dirt. His roof. Plastic to keep the rain out, and the rain was coming, he could smell it, even over the stink of ash and smoldering brush. A crow winged past, mocking him. The sun faded away into the gloom. And Cándido, despite his exhaustion, despite everything, began dragging the big balky sheet of plastic up through the unyielding brush, and as the branches tore at him and his fingers stiffened and the helicopters swooped overhead, he. thought of Christ with his cross and his crown of thorns and wondered who had it worse.
    Later, after he'd flung the roof over the frame and hacked down half a mountainside's worth of brush to stack atop it and hide it from view, he slept. It was a deep sleep, the sleep of utter depletion, but it wasn't without dreams. Especially toward the end of it, when night had fallen and he woke and drifted off again half a dozen times. Then his dreams were the dreams of the hunted--they chased him, faceless hordes with bright Irish hair and grasping hands, and he ran and ran till they cornered him in a little wooden box on the side of the mountain. Then he was awake, awake to the soft glow of the lantern and America and the baby sleeping at his side. He smelled fruit--the smell was so strong he thought for a minute he was fifteen again and working a juice presser in the stand at the _mercado.__ With an effort, aching all over from his ordeal, he propped himself up on his