The Tortilla Curtain

the picnic basket, one of those portable radios playing, a little boy in short pants and a girl with ribbons in her hair, as she worked her way down the trail with her brown plastic bag. Pebbles jumped away from her feet and trickled down the path ahead of her like water down a streambed. There was a clean sharp smell of sage and mesquite and some pale indefinable essence that might have been agave. There were certainly enough agave plants scattered across the slopes, their huge flowering stalks like spears thrown from the sky. Did they have a scent? she wondered. They had to, didn't they, to attract the bees and hummingbirds? She'd have to get up close and smell one sometime.
    She had almost reached the place where the big rounded spike of rock stuck out of the ground when a sudden noise in the undergrowth startled her. Her eyes darted to the path in front of her and she caught her breath. She had a fear of snakes, especially when the light began to fail and they came out to prowl, their coarse thick evil-eyed bodies laid alongside the trail like sticks of wood, like shadows. But this was no snake, and she had to laugh at herself even as the first of the quail, slate heads bobbing, scuttered across the path with a rasp of dead leaves. Cándido was forever trying to snare the little birds but they were too quick, folding themselves into the brush or crying out like scared children as they spread their wings and shot up over the bushes and down the canyon to safety. She stopped a moment to let them pass, the chicks at their heels, and then she stepped into the deep purple shadow cast by the rock.
    He was waiting there for her, with his hoarse high voice and his skin that was like too much milk in a pan of coffee, with his hat turned backwards on his head like a _gringo__ and the raw meat of his eyes. There was another man with him, an Indian, burnt like a piece of toast. They were sitting there, perched on blunt stools of sandstone, long silver cans of beer dangling from their fingertips. “Well, well,” he said, and his face was expressionless in the smothered light, _“buenas noches__, _señorita?__--or should I say _señora?__ Yes? Right?” And he threw it back at her: “Married woman.”
    There was no time for revision, no time for remonstrance or plea. She turned and ran, uphill, toward the road she'd just escaped--they wouldn't touch her there, they couldn't. She was young and in good shape from climbing up and down out of the canyon twice a day for the last six weeks and she was fast too, the blood singing in her ears, but they were right there, right behind her, and they were grown healthy men with long leaping houndlike strides and the sinews gone tight in their throats with the pulse of the chase. They caught up with her before she'd gone a hundred feet, the tall one, the one from the South, slamming into her like some irresistible force, like the car that had slammed into Cándido.
    A bush raked her face, something jerked the bag from her wrist, and they fell together in the dust that was exactly like flour spread over the trail by some mad baker. He was on top of her, sitting on her buttocks, his iron hand forcing her face into the floury dust. She cried out, tried to lift her head, but he slammed his fist into the back of her neck once, twice, three times, cursing to underscore each blow. “Shut up,” he snarled. “Shut the fuck up.”
    The other one stood behind him, waiting. She could hear the rasp of their breathing, anything possible now, and she recoiled from the stinking graveyard breath of the one atop her. He hit her again, suddenly, once at the base of the skull and then in the small of the back. Then he eased up from her, leaning all his weight on the hand that pinned her face to the ground, and with the other hand he took hold of the collar of her dress, her only dress, and tore it down the length of her till the cool evening air pricked at her naked skin. In a frenzy, in a rage, the curses foaming on his lips, he shredded her panties and rammed his fingers into her.
    It was as if a tree had fallen on her, as if she were the victim of some random accident, powerless, unable to move. She breathed the dust. Her neck hurt. His fingers moved inside her, in her private places, and it was like he was squirting acid into her. She squirmed in the dirt and he shoved back at her, hard and unrelenting. Then he lifted his hand from the back of her neck, breathing spasmodically, and she could hear