The Tortilla Curtain

at him like angry eyes, unmistakable, irrefutable. “What happened?” he demanded, masking the damage with a trembling hand. “Was it that _rico?__ Did he try anything with you, the son of a bitch--I swear I'll kill him, I will--”
    Her voice was tiny, choked, the faintest intrusion on the sphere of the audible: “They took my money.”
    And now he was rough, though he didn't mean to be. He jerked at her shoulders and forced her to look him in the face. “Who took your money--what are you talk”Wháare you ting about?“ And then he knew, knew it all, knew as certainly as if he'd been there: ”Those _vagos?__ It was the one with the hat, wasn't it? The half-a-_gringo?__"
    She nodded. He forgot his hunger, forgot the pot on the coals, the night, the woodsmoke, the soil beneath his knees, oblivious to everything but her face and her eyes. She began to cry, a soft kittenish mewling that only infuriated him more. He clutched at her shoulders, shook her again. “Who else?”
    “I don't know. An Indian.”
    “Where?” he shouted. “Where?”
    “On the trail.”
    On the trail. His heart froze around those three words. If they'd robbed her in the parking lot, on the road, at the labor exchange, it was one thing, but _on the trail__... “What else? What else did they take? Quick, tell me. They didn't, they didn't try to--?”
    “No,” she said. “No.”
    “You're lying. Don't lie to me. Don't you dare lie to me.”
    She broke his grip and stared into the fire, rubbed a wrist across her eyes. “They took my money.”
    Cándido was ready to kill, ready to hack through every bush in the mountains till he found their camp and crushed their skulls while they lay sleeping. The image infested his brain: the tan dog's eyes, the stirring limbs and the rock coming down, again and again. “Is that all?” he hissed, fighting against the knowledge. “Is that all they took?” He gripped her arm again. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes,” she whispered, turning to level her gaze on him, “I'm sure.”
    It hurt, that's all she knew. Burned. Burned like acid in an open wound, like the corrosive at the fat man's house when it got down into the split skin at the quick of her nails. Every time she peed it was like fire passing through her. She didn't know what it was--some lingering effect of what they'd done to her that night, her insides scored and dirty, rubbed raw like a skinned knee... or was it just a new and unexpected phase of her pregnancy? Was this normal? Was this the way it was supposed to be in the beginning of the fifth month, flaming pee? Her mother would know. Her aunts, her older sisters, the village midwives. If she were home she could even have asked Señora Serrano, the neighbor lady who'd given birth to sixteen children, the oldest grown up and with children of their own, the youngest in diapers still. But here? Here there was no one, and that frightened her--frightened her now and for when her time came.
    America waited there in the hut behind the wrecked car for Cándido, day after day, bored and aching--he wouldn't let her go to the labor exchange, never again--her breasts tender, her stomach queasy, needing her mother, needing to ask the questions a daughter never asks, not till she's married. But then, she and Cándido never were married, not officially, not in the church. In the eyes of the Church, Cándido was already married, forever married, to Resurrección. And America and Cándido had gone off in the night, silent as thieves, and only a note left for her mother, not a word to her face, and even then America was pregnant, though she didn't know it. She wanted to call her mother now, on the telephone, one of those outdoor phones with the little plastic bonnets lined up in a row by the Chinese store and hear her voice and tell her she was all right and ask her why it burned so when she peed. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did all women go through that? But then, even if she had the money, all lined up on the plastic shelf in all the silver denominations, she'd have to call the village pharmacy itáge pharmabecause her parents had no phone, and how was she to do that? She didn't know the number. Didn't know how to dial Mexico even.
    And so she waited there in her little nook in the woods like some princess in a fairy story, protected by a moat and the sharp twisted talons of a wrecked car, only this princess had been violated and her pee burned and she jumped at every sound. Cándido had