The Tortilla Curtain

“Thank you,” she whispered.
    He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again--there was something rotting inside of him. _“Me llamo José,”__ he said, holding out a hand to shake, _“José Navidad. ¿Y tú__? ¿_Cómo te llamas, pretty?”__
    This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.
    “Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don't bite. I'm a friendly guy--don't you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don't you?”
    “All right,” she said, and she fel pl' and she t the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I'm a married woman and it's not right to talk to me like that--”
    He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy, _loco,__ demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle--just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”
    Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man--a giant of a fat man, a real _guatón--__stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then--miracle of miracles!--Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even--she had a job and they didn't. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded _guatón__ of a white man with no consciousness of how she'd gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.
    “Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman's voice, in English.
    America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.
    The fat man, the _gringo,__ called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn't understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the _gringa__ had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn't speak any English--what do you want with her?”
    _“Quiero trabajar,”__ América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”
    Candelario Pérez said something to the man--América was there before the _gringa,__ first come, first served--and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment--too long--and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something--she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared--and Candelario Pérez told her, “It's all right, six hours' work and he'll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary--big Mary, the drunk, the _gringa__ maid who'd tried to cut her out--got in too.
    Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the _Laboratorio Medico__ in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm's way. Those boys--those teenage _gabachos--__had terrified him. They weren't _La Migra,__ no,