The Tortilla Curtain

and suffered his wounds only to wake and worry and suffer again.
    It amazed him how quickly the shits came. When he'd drunk from the creek the sun had been just east of overhead and now it had settled a degree or two to the west, but it was still high and still hot. What did that add up to--two hours? Three? But there it was--the stirring in his gut, the cramping, the desperate uncontainable rush that every man, woman and child knew so intimately in his country, a poor underdeveloped place in which sanitation was a luxury and gastrointestinal infection the leading cause of death. Cándido had just enough time to get across the stream and behind the cluster of great splintered boulders he and America used as a privy before it came. And when it came, it came in an explosion, a raging cataract of shit that left him drained in an instant, and then it hit him again and again till he lost the strength of his legs and collapsed in the sand like a puppet with the strings cut.
    Lying there, coated in sweat and sand and worse, his trousers ballooning round his ankles, he heard the first sharp cries from above--_gabacho-__accented cries--and he knew it was over. They were coming for him. They'd got hold of America and she'd told them where he was. _Ay, caray!__ What a mess! How could he run? Half-crippled, bestrewn with shit--and even now he could feel his guts churning again. And América--where was America?
    He mouthed a prayer to the _Virgen Sagrada__ and became one with the rocks.
    America sat in the shade of the wall-less shelter the _gringos__ had built to keep the itinerant job-seekers out of the sun (and coincidentally off the street, out of the post office parking lot and out of sight) and brooded about Cándido. He was too stubborn to think she could help. Too much the boss, the man, the _patrón.__ He treated her like a child, a know-nothing, someone who needed to be led by the hand and protected from all the evils of the world. Well, she had news for him: she was no longer a child. Did children bear children? In five months she'd be a mother, and then what? And while this new place terrified her--the whole country, the _gringos__ with their superior ways and their almighty dollar and their new clothes and fancy hairdos, the strange customs, the language that was like the incessant braying of a four-legged beast--she was doing what she had to do and she could look out for herself. She could.
    After sitting in the corner all day yesterday, afraid to talk to anyone, she'd screwed up her courage this morning and gone straight to the man in charge and told him her name and asked for work. Of course, if he'd been a _gringo__ she never would have had the nerve to open her mouth--and he wouldn't have understood her anyway--but this man was a _campesino__ from Oaxaca, in battered jeans and a molded straw hat like the men in Tepoztlán wore, and he used the familiar with her right away and even called her “daughter.”
    There must have been fifty or sixty men there at least, and they all stopped talking when she went up to the man from Oaxaca. No one seemed to take notice of her when she was off by herself, hunched beside a stump in the dawn, miserable like theevi qle like rest of them, but now she felt as if she were onstage. The men were staring at her, every one of them, some openly, some furtively, their eyes ducking for cover beneath the brims of their _sombreros__ and baseball caps whenever she looked up. Of all that mob, she was the only woman. And though she felt uneasy under their collective gaze--and nervous too to think that women must not get jobs here if she was the only one--she felt a strange sense of peace as she spoke to the headman in his battered jeans. She didn't know what it was at first, but then it hit her: all these faces were familiar. Not literally, of course, but they were the faces of her own people, her tribe, the faces she'd grown up with, and that was a comfort in itself.
    The headman's name was Candelario Pérez. He looked to be in his forties and he was squat and work-hardened. He'd been informally elected by the others to keep order (making sure the men waited their turn instead of mobbing every pickup that pulled into the lot), clean up the trash and mediate between the workers and the _gringos__ of the community who'd donated the land and the lumber for the, sake of the hungry and homeless. “There's not much work for women here, daughter,” he said, and she could see the tug of