The Tortilla Curtain

the door, down the steps and into the rich new car with the airtight doors.
    Mary sat up front with the _patrón;__ America had the broad plane of the rear seat to herself, like a queen or a movie star. She sank back in the seat and let her eyes play over the blue-green lawns with their bursts of flowers--flowers everywhere, the very trees on the streets in bloom--and the tall angular houses that rose out of the hills behind them, every one striped and striped again with windows, as if they were expecting an invasion from the seage 'from the. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of those houses, gazing out the kitchen window at the sunstruck crags of the canyon while the machine for the dishes did your work for you and the radio played the soft sad music of violins and cellos. She studied the back of the fat man's neck for clues. It was unrevealing. Thick, pinkish, with little puckered mouths of flesh at the nape and a riot of hacked stiff hairs, it could have been anybody's neck. And then she wondered about his wife--what was she like? Was she fat too? Or was she one of those women you saw in the ads with a leotard clinging to her puffed-up breasts and her eyes staring out from the page like an animal's?
    They went through a gate--two broad pastel-colored steel grids that swung back automatically as the car approached. The gate hadn't been there in the morning--América was sure of that. It had been ten-thirty or so when they came through and she was alive to everything, to every nuance, to the houses, the cars, the people in them, and she remembered seeing half a dozen of her own people there, with picks and shovels and a cement mixer--she thought she recognized one of the men from the labor exchange but the car went by too quickly to be sure. Two stone pillars had framed the road under a wrought-iron bonnet with a Spanish inscription--ARROYO BLANCO--and then a word in English she couldn't decipher, and there was a little booth there, like the ticket booth in the movies, but no one was inside and the fat man didn't stop. Now the gate was up. America looked over her shoulder and saw that the steel bars extended on the outside of the two main pillars to a series of smaller stone columns that were only half-built. She saw a wheelbarrow, three shovels lined up neatly, a pick, and then they were out on the canyon road and heading back down the hill to the labor exchange.
    Mary was saying something to the _patrón,__ waving her hands, pointing--directions, that was it--and he turned off onto a side street that wound through a stand of dusty oaks to a cluster of little cottages tucked under the arches of the trees. The cottages were in need of paint, but they were fine, charming even, with their wooden shingles, sturdy porches and beams gone gray with age. Pickup trucks and foreign sports cars sat out front of them. There were flowers in pots, cats all over the place, the smell of barbecue. This was where Mary lived, the _gringa__ maid.
    The fat man pulled to a stop in front of a redwood bungalow at the end of the lane, Mary said something, and he shifted in the seat to reach for his wallet. America couldn't see what he was paying her but from the way the big worthless cow of a drunken _gringa__ was acting she was sure it was for the full eight hours and not just the twenty-five dollars she'd been promised--or had Mary been promised more? The thought stabbed at America as she sat there in the car and watched a boy of twelve or so burst into view on a dirt bike and vanish round the side of the bungalow in a mirage of exhaust. Candelario Pérez had said twenty-five dollars, but maybe Mary was getting thirty or thirty-five, plus the extra two hours, because she was white, because she spoke English and wore a ring through her nose. America was sure of it. She watched the two big heads, complicitous, watched the shoulders dip as the money changed hands, and then Mary was out of the car and the _patrón__ was leaning over the seat saying something in his breathless cut-up incomprehensible garble of a language.
    He wanted her to sit in front, that was it. The contortions of his face, the gestures of his swollen hands told her as much. All right. America got out and slid into the cupped seat beside him. The fat man backed around and shot up the road in an explosion of dust.
    He turned on the radio. No violins, no cellos: guitars. She knewet.'rs. She k the song vaguely--_Hotel California__ or something like that,