The Tortilla Curtain

anything around here?”
    The man looked at him then, really looked at him, but all he said was “This isn't a good place for you to be.”
    Dispirited, Cándido crossed the road and shambled over the bridge in the direction of the Chinese market and the lumberyard beyond it. He'd hardly even noticed the bridge before--it was just a section of the road suspended over the dead brush of the streambed--but now its function was revealed to him as the churning yellow water pounded at its concrete abutments and the boulders slammed into it with a rumble that was like the grinding of the earth's molars--all through the summer and fall there had been no water, and now suddenly there was too much. Cándido stood for a while outside the Chinese store, though he was nervous about that, and sure enough, the old Chinaman, the one with the goggle glasses and the suspenders to hold the pants up over his skinny hips, came out to shoo him away in his weird up-and-down language. But Cándido wouldn't give up and so he stood just down the street from the lumberyard, hoping some contractor picking up materials might see him there and give him work. It wasn't a propitious place, even in the best of times, and Cándido had never seen a single _bracero__ hunkered over his heels here. Rumor had it that the lumberyard boss would call the cops the minute he saw a Mexican in the lot.
    Cándido stood there for two hours, trying to attract the attention of every pickup that pulled into the lumberyard, so desperate now he didn't care if La _Migra__ picked him up or not, but no one gave him even so much as a glance. His feet hurt and his stomach rumbled. He was cold. It must have been about half-past four when he finally gave it up and started back along the road, looking for cans to redeem and thinking he would watch for his chance to stick his head in the dumpster out back of the _paisano's__ market--he had to bring something back with him, anything. Every once in a while they would throw out a bag of onions with nothing worse than a few black spots on them or potatoes that had sprouted eyes--you never knew. He was keeping his head down and watching his feet, thinking maybe there'd be some meat that wouldn't be so bad if you boiled it long enough or some bones and fat from the beef they'd trimmed out, when a car swerved in across the shoulder just ahead of him.
    He froze, thinking of the accident all over again, wet roads, _norteamericanos__ in a hurry, always in a hurry, and the next car blared its horn in a shrill mechanical curse because the rear end of the first car, the one right there on the shoulder, was sticking out into the roadway and all the endless line of cars coming up the hill with their wipers clapping and headlights glaring had to break the flow to swerve around it. But now the door was swinging open and another horn blared and Cándido was poisoned with déjà vu: this inescapable white, the fiery red brake lights and the yellow blinker, it was all so familiar. Before he had a chance to react, there he was, the _pelirrojo__ who'd run him down all those months ago and then sent his gangling ugly _pelirrojo__ of a son down into the canyon to harass and torment him, and the look on his face was pure malice. “You!” he shouted. “You stay right there!”

The Tortilla Curtain

7
    “You!” DELANEY SHOUTED. “YOU STAY RIGHT THERE!” He'd been coming up the road from the nursery on the Coast Highway, the trunk crammed with bags of ammonium sulfate and fescue seed, his view out the back partially obscured by a pair of areca palms for the front hallway, when he spotted the hunched shoulders, the weather-bleached khaki shirt and the pale soles of the Mexican's dark feet working against the straps of his sandals. He slowed automatically, without thinking--could this be the man, was this him?--and then he jerked the wheel and felt the rear tires yaw away from him even as the driver behind him hit the horn, and he was up on the shoulder spewing gravel, his rear end sticking out in the road. Delaney didn't care. He didn't care about the hazard, didn't care about the other drivers or the wet road or his insurance rates--all he cared about was this Mexican, the man who'd invaded his life like some unshakable parasite, like a disease. It was here, almost at the very spot, that he'd flung himself under the wheels of the car, everything come full circle, and this time Delaney wasn't going to let him off, this time he had proof,