The Tortilla Curtain

And she saw the tree in her mind, the great ancient ahuehuete tree beside the road, with the crowds of pilgrims around it and the vendors and the hundreds upon hundreds of dried birth cords hanging from the branches like confetti. Socorro would never know that tree; she'd never be blessed. América had to catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it. “I hate it here,” she whispered. “God, how I hate it.”
    Cándido didn't answer. He made coffee with sugar and condensed milk and they drank it out of _frijole__ cans, and then he cut up an onion, some _chiles__ and a tomato and cooked the rice, and she wouldn't get up, wouldn't help him, even if he'd tried to force her.
    It rained the next day too, all day, and when she went out to relieve herself and bury the baby's diaper, the earth was like glue. For all this time it had been powder and now it was glue. She stood there in the rain, looking out over the misted canyon, the roofs of the houses, the barren scar of Cándido's fire, and the rain smelled good, smelled of release and reprieve--smelled, ever so faintly, of home. She had to get away, even if it meant bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border, and if she starved along the way, then that was God's will.
    It was dark inside, dark as a hole in the ground, and when the rain slackened to a drizzle, she brought the baby outside for a breath of air. Sitting there high on the hillside, watching the clouds roll out over the canyon all the way to the sea and the cars creep like toys up the slick canyon road, she felt better. This was America and it was a beautiful place, drier and hotter than Tepoztlán in the dry season and colder in the wet, but she felt that there was peace here if only she could find it. Peace and prosperity too.
    She looked down then into her daughter's face and the baby was staring past her, staring up and away into a distance she couldn't possibly contain, and it was in that moment that America felt the naked sharp claws of apprehension take hold bf her. She passed a hand over her daughter's face and her daughter didn't blink. She bent her own face to Socorro's and tugged at those dull black irises with her own and they only stared, as if there were a wall between them. And then the baby blinked and sneezed and the eyes stared at nothing.
    Cándido told her they were eating rabbit, but rabbit was hard to come by up here. Those other little four-legged beasts, the ones with the bells on their collars to warn away the birds, they were easier to catch. All you had to do was wait till midnight, slip over the wall and whisper, “Kitty, here, kitty.” So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable. He'd stared so long and so hard at that strip of road out front of the post office, waiting for the apparition of Señor Willis's Corvair, that it wasn't a real place anymore, but a scene he'd devised in his brain--if he blinked, it wouldn't exist. There were no braceros there, not a one, and the word must have been out. Cándido didn't dare show himself and if he didn't show himself how could he get work? And if he couldn't get work, no matter how many things he borrowed from the houses beyond the wall or how many cans he collected in the bushes, sooner or later they would starve. If only he could call Señor Willis, but Señor Willis didn't have a phone. He could go back to Canoga Park, but there was no work there, he knew that already, and a hundred men ready to kill for whatever work might turn up. A little money, that was all he needed--with a little money he might think about going back to Tepoztlán, at least for the winter. His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América-he'd boasted to her, he'd promised her things--America would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father's house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some _chingado__ her old man owed money to.
    Cándido took the risk. He waited till the rain began to crackle on the pavement and the hair hung wet in his eyes, and then he stepped out of the bushes, crossed the road and stood beneath the overhang out front of the post office, stamping his feet and hugging his shoulders to keep