The Tortilla Curtain

_vagos__ from the labor exchange, that's what he was. And he'd have a knife in his pocket or tucked into the back of his belt.
    _“Buenas,”__ Cándido murmured, keeping an eye on him, though God knew he had nothing worth stealing but the clothes on his back--and they'd been washed and mended so many times they wouldn't fetch more than a few _centavos__ at a rag shop. But you could never tell: sometimes they'd steal your shirt just for pure meanness.
    “What's it like down there, brother?” the man asked, indicating the ravine with a flick of his eyes. The sun glanced off his face. His skin was the color of a dirty bar of soap--not white, but not brown either. “Comfortable? Quiet? There's water, right?”
    When the stranger swiveled his shoulders to scan the ravine, Cándido saw that he had a bedroll wound up tight and slung across his back with a length of twine. Cándido didn't want to give him any encouragement--if word got out, the whole labor exchange would be down there. “Not much,” he said.
    This was funny. The man let out a little bark of a laugh and grinned to show off a cheap set of fake teeth. “Judging from the look of you, _carnal,__ there's enough to go swimming in, eh?”
    Cándido held the man's eyes. He shrugged. “It's an unlucky place. I had a camp down there but they raided it three days ago. _Gabachos.__ They painted things on the rocks with their spray cans. You won't catch me down there again.”
    Birds flitted from bush to bush. The sun stood still. The man was taking his time. “That what happened to your face? And that arm?”
    “Yeah. Or no--not then.” Cándido shrugged again, conscious of the tattered sling that cradled his left arm. The arm was better, a whole lot better, but that still gave him an arm and a half to the stranger's two--if it came to that. “It's a long story,” he said.
    The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido's ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass--he was in control, and he knew it. “So where's your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”
    “They took it all,” Cándido lied. _“Pinche gabachos.__ I hid in the bushes.”
    A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into hithe'hand intos pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he'd got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret--; he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now--“it's been good talking to you, always good to talk to a _compañero,__ but I've got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight... you don't know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”
    No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido's head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.
    “I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn't have a little bite of something on you, would you?”
    The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him--he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.
    “Sorry, _'mano,”__ the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed down the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn't be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.
    Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the