The Tortilla Curtain

their clothes and cooking things--ieft behind in their apartments for the scavengers and the garbagemen.
    Six a. m. Cándido was among the throng, dressed for work, a hundred and ten dollars in his string bag under the sink in the apartment behind him, the darkness broken only by the ugly yellow light of the streetlamps and the harsh glowing eyes of the buses. It was cold. A woman was crying softly beside him; a man argued with one of the Spanish-speaking Immigration agents, a hard high nagging whine: “My things,” he said, over and over, “what about my things?” Cándido had just left his apartment to wait out front for Arturo to swing by for him in the boss's pickup when _La Migra__ nailed him, and now he stood in line with all the hopeless others. Eight Immigration agents, two of them female, worked their way down the line of Mexicans, one by one, and the Mexicans, as if they were shackled together, joined at the elbow, rooted to the pavement, never thought to run or flex a muscle or even move. It was the Mexican way: acquiesce, accept. Things would change, sure they would, but only if God willed it.
    Cándido was listening to the woman cry softly beside him and thinking about that fatalism, that acquiescence, the inability of his people to act in the face of authority, right or wrong, good or bad, when a voice cried out in his head: _Run! Run now, while the fat-faced overfed__ pendejo _from the Immigration is still five people up the line with his flashlight and his pen and his clipboard and the green-eyed bitch behind him. Run!__
    He broke for the line of pepper trees across the street, and seeing him run, two other men broke from the line and fled with him, the whole _macho__ corps of the Immigration crying out in unison anhináin unisond flowing toward them in a wave. “Stop!” they shouted. “You're under arrest!”--things like that, the words of English every Mexican knew--but Cándido and the two men who had broken with him didn't stop. They went across the road and into the trees, struggling up the refuse-choked bank to the freeway fence, and then, with _La Migra__ right behind them, they went up and over the fence and onto the shoulder of the freeway.
    The cars streamed by in a rush, even at this hour. Four lanes in each direction, the torrent of headlights, sixty-five and seventy miles an hour: suicide. Cándido shot a glance at the two men beside him--both young and scared--and then he began to jog up the shoulder, against the traffic, looking to make it to the next exit and disappear in the bushes, no thought but that. The two men--they were boys really, teenagers--followed his lead and the three of them ran half a mile or more, two hard-nosed men from the Immigration flinging themselves up the shoulder behind them, the traffic raging, thundering in their ears, and when they came in sight of the exit they saw that _La Migra__ had anticipated them and stationed a green van on the shoulder ahead. The boys were frantic, their breathing as harsh as the ragged roaring whine of the engines as the headlights picked them out and the first of the police sirens tore at the air. Was it worth dying for this? Half the people on those buses would be back in a day, back in forty-eight hours, a week. It wasn't worth it. It wasn't.
    Cándido would never forgive himself for what happened next. He was the one, he should have known, and they were only boys, scared and directionless. It wasn't worth it, but when the agents came panting up to them, their faces contorted and ugly with their shouts and threats, something uncoiled inside of him and he sprang out into the traffic like a cornered rabbit leaping from a cliff to avoid the dogs. The boys followed him, both of them, and they gave up their lives. All he could remember was the shrieking of the brakes and the blare of the horns and then the sound of all the glass in the world shattering. Pulp, that's what those boys were--they were nothing forever--and they could have been back in forty-eight hours. The first boy went down like a piston, torn off his legs at the hip, down and gone, and the second made it nearly to Cándido in the third lane over when he was flung into the air in one whole pounded piece. The fourth lane was free and Cándido was across it while the apocalypse of twisted metal and skating cars blasted the world around him till even the traffic across the divider was stopped dead in horror. He climbed the divider, walked to the far side on