The Tortilla Curtain

caught him before he'd gone a hundred yards and pitched him back into the dark fastness of the Tijuana night.
    He was broke, and he danced for people on the streets there, begged change from _turistas,__ got himself a can of kerosene and became a _tragafuegos,__ a streetcorner firebreather who sacrificed all sensation in his lips, tongue and palate for a few _centavos__ and a few _centavos__ more. What he made, he spent on drink. When his fall was complete, when he'd scraped every corner of himself raw, he came back to Tepoztlán and moved in with his aunt in the house he'd built for her. He made charcoal for a living. Climbed into the hills every morning, cut wood and slow-burned it for sale to housewives as fuel for their braziers and the stoves they'd made out of old Pemex barrels. He did nothing else. He saw no one. And then one day he ran across America in the street and everything changed. “Don't you know me?” she demanded, and he didn't know her, not at first. She was sixteen and she looked exactly like her sister, only better. He set down the bundle of sticks he was carrying and straightened out his back with an abbreviated twist. “You're América,” he said, and then he gave it a minute as a car came up the road, scattering chickens and sending an explosion of pigeons into the air, “and I'm going to take you with me when I go North.”
    That was what he thought about as he lay there in the ravine, fragile as a peeled egg, that was what America meant to him--just his life, that was all--and that was why he was worried, edgy, afraid, deeply afraid for the first time in as long as he could remember. What if something should happen to her? What if the Immigration caught her? What if some _gabacho__ hit _her__ with his car? What if one of the _vagos__ from the labor exchange... but he didn't like to think about them. They were too close to him. It was too much to hold in his aching head.
    The sun had ridden up over the eastern ridge. The heat was coming on faster than it had during the past week, the mist burning off sooner--there would be winds in the afternoon and the canyon walls would hold the heat like the walls of an oven. He could feel the change of the weather in his hip, his elbow, the crushed side of his face. The sun crept across the sand and hit him in the crotch, the chest, his chin, lips and ravaged nose. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.
    When he woke he was thirsty. Not just thirsty--consumed with thirst, maddened by it. His clothes were wet, the blanket beneath him damp with his sweat. With an effort, he pushed himself up and staggered into the shade where America kept their drinking water in two plastic milk jugs from which he'd cut the tops with his worn-out switchblade. He snatched up the near jug and lifted air to his lips: it was empty. So was the other one. His throat constricted.
    He knew better than to drink the water straight from the stream--and he'd warned America about it too. Every drop had to be boiled first. It was a pain in the ass--gathering wood, stoking the fire, setting the blackened can on the coals--but it was necessary. America had balked at first--why go to the trouble? This was the U. S. A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the _gringo__ fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He'd been here before, in this very spot, and he'd been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains? he demanded. Or how many houses were packed up there all the way to the asshole of the canyon, and every one of them leaching waste out into the gullies and streams that fed into the creek?
    He knew better than to drink the water, but he did. He was dying. He was dried out like the husk of something washed up at high tide and left for a month irin qr a montn the sun, dried out like a fig, a soda cracker. It was beyond him even to contemplate gathering up twigs, searching for a scrap of paper, the matches, waiting till the water boiled for five full minutes and then waiting for it to cool--way beyond him. Mad with thirst, crazed, demented, he threw himself down in the sand, plunged his face into the algal scum of the pool beneath him and drank, drank till he nearly drowned himself. Finally, his stomach swollen like a _bota__ bag, he lay back, sated, and the afternoon went on and he dozed and worried