The Tortilla Curtain

the ravine as if it were a public bath, high-pitched with excitement, almost squealing: “Hey, took--didn't I tell you?”
    “What--you find something?”
    “What the fuck you think that is--a fucking fireplace--and look, a fucking blanket!”
    Cándido crouched there behind the rocks, afraid to breathe, trembling as uncontrollably as if he'd suddenly been plunged into an ice bath, and all he could think of was America. He'd been caught three times before--once in L. A., once in Arizona, and then with America just over the Tijuana fence--and the fear of that took his breath away and turned his stomach over yet again. It wasn't himself he was afraid for, it was her. For him it was nothing. A pain in the ass, sure, a bus ride to the border, his meager possessions scattered to the winds--but how would he get back to his wife? A hundred and eighty miles and no money, not a cent. There might be a beating. The _gabachos__ could be brutal--big men with little blond mustaches and hatuit qhes and e in their eyes--but usually they were just bored, just going through the motions. A beating he could take--even now, even with his face and his arm and the shit pouring out of him--but it was América he trembled for.
    What would happen to her? How would he find her? If they'd caught her already--at the labor exchange, walking along the road--she could be on a bus even now. And worse: if they hadn't caught her and she came back here, back to nothing, what then? She'd think he'd deserted her, run off from his responsibilities like a cock on the loose, and what love could survive that? They should have made a contingency plan, figured out a place to meet in Tijuana, a signal of some kind... but they hadn't. He listened to the voices and gritted his teeth.
    “Hey, dude, check this out--”
    “What?”
    “Look at this shit.”
    But wait a minute--these weren't the voices of INS agents, of the police, of grown men... no, there was something in the timbre, something harsh and callow in the way the words seemed to claw for air as if they were choking on them, something adolescent... Cándido stealthily pushed himself to a sitting position, pulled up his trousers and crept forward on hands and knees to a place where he could peer between the rocks without being detected. What he saw got him breathing again. Two figures, no uniforms. Baggy shorts, hi-top sneakers, big black billowing T-shirts, legs and arms pale in the slashing sun as they bent to his things, lifted them above their heads and flung them, one by one, into the creek. First the blanket, then the grill he'd salvaged from an abandoned refrigerator, then his rucksack with his comb and toothbrush and a change of clothes inside, and then América's things.
    “Shit, man, one of them's a girl,” the bigger one said, holding up América's everyday dress, blue cotton washed so many times it was almost white. In that moment Cándido confirmed what his ears had suspected: these weren't men; they were boys, overgrown boys. The one holding the dress out before him was six feet at least, towering, all limbs and feet and with a head shaved to the ears and _gabacho-__colored hair gone long on top--_redheads,__ did they all have to be redheads?
    “Fucking Beaners. Rip it up, man. Destroy it.”
    The other one was shorter, big in the shoulders and chest, and with the clear glassy cat's eyes so many of the _gringos__ inherited from their mothers, the _gringas__ from Sweden and Holland and places like that. He had a mean pinched face, the face of an insect under the magnifying glass--bland at a distance, lethal up close. The bigger one tore the dress in two, balled the halves and flung them at the other one, and they hooted and capered up and down the streambed like apes that had dropped from the trees. Before they were done they even bent to the rocks of the fireplace Cándido had built and heaved them into the stream too.
    Cándido waited a long while before emerging. They'd been gone half an hour at least, their shrieks and obscenities riding on up the walls of the canyon till finally they blended with the distant hum of the traffic and faded away. His stomach heaved on him again, and he had to crouch down with the pain of it, but the spasm passed. After a moment he got up and waded into the stream to try to recover his things, and it was then that he noticed their parting gift, a message emblazoned on the rocks in paint that dripped like blood. The letters were crude and the words in