The Tortilla Curtain

knees and vomit in the bushes before he'd even got halfway to the camp in the ravine. He felt his breakfast come up--two hard-cooked eggs, half a cup of that weak reheated piss that passed for coffee and a tortilla he'd involuntarily blackened on a stick held over the fire-all of it, every lump and fleck, and then he vomited again. His stomach heaved till he could taste the bile in the back of his throat, and yet he couldn't move, that uncontainable pressure fighting to punch through his ears, and he crouched there for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by a single strand of saliva that dangled endlessly from his lips.
    When he got to his feet again, everything had shifted. The shadows had leapt the ravine, the sun was caught in the trees and the indefatigable vulture had been joined by two others. “Yes, sure, come and get me,” he muttered, spitting and wincing at the same time, “that's all I am--a worn-out carcass, a walking slab of meat.” But Christ in Heaven, how it hurt! He raised a hand to the side nevd a han†of his face and the flesh was stiff and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head. What had happened to him? He was crossing the road, coming back from the grocery after the labor exchange closed--the far grocery, the cheaper one, and what did it matter if it was on the other side of the road? The old man there at the checkout--a _paisano,__ he called himself, from Italy--he didn't look at you like you were dirt, like you were going to steal, like you couldn't keep your hands off all the shiny bright packages of this and that, beef jerky and _nachos__ and shampoo, little gray-and-black batteries in a plastic sleeve. He'd bought an orange soda, Nehi, and a package of _tortillas__ to go with the pinto beans burned into the bottom of the pot... and then what? Then he crossed the road.
    Yes. And then that pink-faced _gabacho__ ran him down with his flaming _gabacho__ nose and the little lawyer glasses clenched over the bridge of it. All that steel, that glass, that chrome, that big hot iron engine--it was like a tank coming at him, and his only armor was a cotton shirt and pants and a pair of worn-out _huaraches.__ He stared stupidly round him--at the fine tracery of the brush, at the birds lighting in the branches and the treetops below him, at the vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky. America would help him when she got back, she'd brew some tea from manzanita berries to combat the pain, bathe his wounds, cluck her tongue and fuss over him. But he needed to go down the path now, and his hip was bothering him all of a sudden, and the left knee, there, where the trousers were torn.
    It hurt. Every step of the way. But he thought of the penitents at Chalma, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh, and he went on. Twice he fell. The first time he caught himself with his good arm, but the second time he tasted dust and his eyes refused to focus, the whole hot blazing world gone cool and dark all of a sudden, as if he'd been transposed to the bottom of the ocean. He heard a mockingbird then, a whistle and trill in the void, and it was as if it had drowned in sunlight too, and then he was dreaming.
    His dreams were real. He wasn't flying through the air or talking with the ghost of his mother or vanquishing his enemies--he was stalled in the garbage dump in Tijuana, stalled at the wire, and America was sick with the _gastro__ and he didn't have a cent in the world after the _cholos__ and the _coyotes__ had got done with him. Sticks and cardboard over his head. The stink of burning dogs in the air. Low man in the pecking order, even at the _dompe. Life is poor here,__ an old man--a garbage picker--had told him. Yes, he'd said, and he was saying it now, the words on his lips somewhere between the two worlds, _but at least you have garbage.__
    America found him at the bottom of the path, bundled in the twilight like a heap of rags. She'd walked nearly eight miles already, down out of the canyon to the highway along the ocean where she could catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized, and then back again, and she was like death on two feet. Two dollars and twenty cents down the drain and nothing to show for it. In the morning, at first light, she'd walked along the Coast Highway, and that made her feel good, made her feel like a girl again--the salt smell, people jogging on the beach, the amazing