The Tortilla Curtain

A kick in the ass when I'm down.” He spat at her feet. “You're no better than your sister, no better than a whore.”
    But you couldn't eat grass, and for all his bluster, he must have realized that. He was healing, but he was still in no shape to climb up out of the canyon and throw himself back into _la lucha,__ the struggle to find a job, to be the one man picked out of a crowd, and then to work like ten men to show the _patrón__ you wanted to come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. She understood his frustration, his fear, and she loved him, she did, to the bottom of her heart. But it hurt to be the target of those hard and filthy words, hurt more than the blow itself. And when it was all over, when the birds had started in again and the stream made its noise against the rocks and the cars clawed at the road above, what had been accomplished? Bitterness, that was all. She turned her back on him and made her way up that crucible of a hill for the fifth useless time in as many useless days.
    Somebody handed her a cup of coffee. A man she'd seen the last two mornings, a newcomer--he said he was from the South, that was all. He was tall--nearly six feet, she guessed--and he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head like one of the _gringos__ in the supermarket. His skin was light, so light he could almost have passed for one of them, but it was his eyes that gave him away, hard burnished unblinking eyes the color of calf's liver. He'd been damaged somehow, she could see that, damaged in the way of a man who has to scrape and grovel and kiss the hind end of some irrecusable yankee boss, and his eyes showed it, jabbing out at the world like two we thnd grd bapons. He was Mexican, all right.
    She had to turn away from those eyes, and she knew she shouldn't have accepted the coffee--steaming, with milk and so much sugar it was like a confection, in a styrofoam cup with a little plastic lid to keep the heat in--but she couldn't help herself. There was nothing in her stomach, nothing at all, and she was faint with the need of it. She was in her fourth month now, and the sickness was gone, but she was ravenous, mad with hunger, eating for two when there wasn't enough for one. She dreamed of food, of the _romeritos__ stew her mother made on Holy Thursday, _tortillas__ baked with chopped tomatoes, _chiles__ and grated cheese, chicken heads fried in oil, shrimp and oysters and a _mole__ sauce so rich and piquant with _serranos__ it made the juices come to her mouth just to think about it. She stood there in the warm flowing flower-scented dawn and sipped the coffee, and it only made her hungrier.
    By seven, three pickup trucks had already swung into the lot, Candelario Pérez had separated out three, four and three men again, and they were gone. The stranger from the South was not chosen, and there were still ten men who'd arrived before him. Out of the corner of her eye, America watched him contend with Candelario Pérez--she couldn't hear the words, but the man's violent gestures and the contortions of his scowling pale half-a-_gringo'__s face were enough to let her know that he wasn't happy waiting his turn, that he was a grumbler, a complainer, a sorehead. “Son of a bitch,” she heard him say, and she averted her eyes. _Please,__ she was praying, _don't let him come over to me.__
    But he did come over. He'd given her a cup of coffee--she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop--and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some _gringo__ or _gringa__ pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he'd been poked in the throat, “--enjoy the coffee?”
    She wouldn't look at him. Wouldn't speak.
    “I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, 'There's a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,' and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh, _linda?”__ And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.
    Miserable, guilty--she'd taken the coffee, hadn't she?--she didn't resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers.