The Tortilla Curtain

and they weren't the police, but the way they'd attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in e b'al teeth it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who'd raised them must have been even worse--and what would have happened if they'd come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?
    He'd fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he'd lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América's dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren't his wife at all, just somebody he'd met in the street.
    All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He'd gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end--a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter's floods crammed into every crevice.
    Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand--if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his _huaraches__--they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut--and feel his way barefoot. It wasn't a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there--snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.
    When he waded back in, clinging to the Tough canyon wall for support, the _huaraches__ were strung around his neck and the rucksack propped up on the crown of his head. The water reached his knees, his crotch, his waist, and finally it came right up to his armpits, which meant that America would have to swim. He thought of that as his toes felt their way through the muck, of America swimming, the hair spread wet on her shoulders, her dress balled up in one slim pretty hand and held high above her, and he began to feel horny, a sure sign that he was healing.
    He found what he was looking for at the rear of the pool, just behind the wreckage of the car. There was a spit of sand there, a private beach just wide enough for a blanket and some sort of shelter--a lean-to, maybe--and then the canyon closed up like a fist. A sheer wall of stone, thirty feet or more in height, rose up out of a shallow pool to a cleft from which the stream splayed out into the air in a perpetual shower. The light was soft, filtered through the vegetation above, and what Cándido saw wasn't stone and leaf and grain of sand, but a sitting room with a big shaded lamp dangling from the ceiling, with sofas and chairs and a polished wooden floor that gleamed beneath a burden of wax. It was a revelation. A vision. The sort of thihen' sort of ng that might have inspired a pilgrim to build a shrine.
    Cándido set down his rucksack and rested in the warm sand till his clothes dried to a uniform dampness. Then he got up and began constructing a rude hearth, one rock at a time, one beside the other, and in his excitement, in the heat of the moment, he forgot his pain. When it was done, when the circle was complete and the battered refrigerator grill laid neatly atop it, he found he still had the strength to gather