The Tortilla Curtain

raging under the bridge earlier that day. It was a river, a torrent that rode right up over the bridges and the streets and everything else. There was no escaping it. The pallet bucked and spun, and finally it threw him.
    They hit something, something so big it was immovable, and Cándido lost his grip on America and the raft at the same time; he was in the water suddenly with nothing to hold on to and the water was as cold as death. He went under, and it felt as if an enormous fist were pinning him down, crushing him, but he kicked out against it, slammed into a submerged log and then the jagged tearing edge of a rock, and somehow the surface was there. “América!” he cried. “América!” In the next instant it had him again, the furious roiling water forced up his nostrils and rammed down his throat, the current raking him over a stony washboard, hump after hump of unyielding rock, and he saw his mother pounding the clothes back and forth in a froth of suds, he must have been three years old, and he knew he was going to die, Go to the devil, mijo, and he cried out again.
    Then a voice spoke beside him, right in his ear--“Candido!”--and there was his wife, there was America, holding out a hand to him. The water churned and sucked at him, throwing him forward only to jerk him away again, and where was she? There, clinging to the slick hard surface of the washboard where it rose dizzily out of the current. He fought with all he had and suddenly the water spat him up in his wife's arms.
    He was saved. He was alive. There was no sky, there was no earth and the wind drove at them with pellets of rain and the water crashed at his feet, but he was alive and breathing and huddled in the arms of his wife, his thin beautiful shivering girl of a wife. It took him a moment, interpreting the humped rock beneath him with his numbed and bleeding fingers, before he understood where they were--they'd been saved by the United States Post Office and this was the tile roof and the building beneath them was the cut bank of the river as it swirled round the bend to the swamped bridge and the gorge beyond. “América” was all he could say, gasping it, moaning it, over and over. He fell into a spasm of coughing and brought up the cocido, sour and thin, and he felt as if he were being slowly strangled. “Are you okay?” he choked. “Are you hurt?”
    She was sobbing. Her body and his were one and the sobs shook him till he was sobbing himself, or almost sobbing. But men didn't sob, men endured; they worked for three dollars a day tanning hides till their fingernails fell out; they swallowed kerosene and spat out fire for tourists on streetcorners; they worked till there was no more work left in them. “The baby,” he gasped, and he wasn't sobbing, he wasn't. “Where's the baby?”
    She didn't answer, and he felt the cold seep into his veins, a coldness and a weariness like nothing he'd ever known. The dark water was all around him, water as far as he could see, and he wondered if he would ever get warm again. He was beyond cursing, beyond grieving, numbed right through to the core of him. All that, yes. But when he saw the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles, he reached down and took hold of it.
    The End

About the Author
    T. C. Boyle is the author of _The Inner Circle, Drop City__ (a finalist for The National Book Award), _A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East Is East, World's End__ (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), _Budding Prospects, Water Music,__ and seven collections of stories. In 1999, he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including _The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire,__ and _Playboy.__ He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T. C. Boyle's Web site is www.tcboyle.com.