The Tortilla Curtain

leaking from the corners of his mouth, and then setting the jug down again, between his legs, in the sand. That was the process, the plan, the sum of his efforts. Stick, sausage, wine.
    America, grown modest in proportion to the way the baby was changing her shape, stood off in the shadows, by the hut, trying on the clothes he'd brought back for her from the Goodwill in Canoga Park. They'd been working up the street, repairing stucco on an apartment building that was changing hands, and Rigoberto--the Indian who worked for Al Lopez--told him about the store. It was cheap. And he found maternity c! othes--big flower-print shorts with an expanding waistline, dresses like sacks, corduroy pants that could have fit a clown. He'd selected one shapeless dress with an elastic waistband--pink, with green flowers all over it--and a pair of shorts. She'd asked for blue jeans, something durable to wear around the camp and save her two dresses, but there was no sense in buying her jeans that wouldn't fit for another three or four months, and so he'd settled on the shorts as a compromise. She could always take them in later.
    All that was fine, but he was drunk. Drunk for a purpose, for a reason. Drunk because he was fed up with the whole yankee gringo dog-eat-dog world where a poor man had to fight like a conquering hero just to keep from starving to death, drunk because after three weeks of on-again, off-again work and the promise of something better, Al Lopez had let him go. Rigoberto's brother, the one who'd been ill, was back from his sickbed and ready to work. A hernia, that's what he had, and he'd gone to the gringo doctors to sew it up, and that was all right, because he had papers, _la tarjeta__ verde, and he was legal. Cándido was not. “Haven't I done good work?” he asked Al Lopez. “Haven't I run after everything you told me to do like a human _burro,__ haven't I busted my balls?”
    “Yes, sure,” Al Lopez had said, “but that's not the problem. You don't have papers and Ignacio does. I could get in trouble. Big trouble.” And so Cándido had bought the sausages and the wine and come home drunk with the dress and the shorts in a paper bag, and he was drunk now and getting drunker.
    In three weeks, he'd made nearly three hundred dollars, minus some for food and the first dress he'd bought America, the pretty one, from the gringo store. That left him just over two hundred and fifty dollars, which was half what he'd need for a car and a quarter what he'd need for a decent apartment, because they all--even the Mexican landlords--wanted first and last months' rent and a deposit too. The money was buried in a plastic peanut butter jar under a rock behind the wrecked car and he didn't know how he was going to be able to add to it. He'd only got work once when Al Lopez hadn't come for him, and that was just half a day at three dollars an hour, hauling rock for a wall some old lam sá some olddy was building around her property. It was the end of July. The dry weather would hold for four months more, and by then América would have had her baby--his son--and they would have to have a roof over their heads. The thought darkened his mood and when America stepped into the firelight to show off the big shorts with her jaguar's smile, he snapped at her.
    “Those _vagos,”__ he said, and the tongue was so thick in his throat he might have swallowed a snake, “they took more than just your money, didn't they? Didn't they?”
    Her face went numb. “You go to hell,” she said. _“Borracho.__ I told you, I told you a thousand times,” and she turned away and hid herself in the hut.
    He didn't blame her. But he was drunk and angry and he wanted to hurt her, wanted to hurt himself, twisting the knowledge round and round his brain like a rotten tooth rotated in its socket. How could he pretend not to know what had happened? How could he allow himself to be fooled? She hadn't let him touch her in three weeks, and why was that? The baby, she claimed. She felt sick. She had a headache. Her digestion wasn't right, no, Cándido, no... well, maybe it was true. But if he ever found that son of a bitch with the raw eyes and that stupid _pinche__ baseball cap... and he looked for him too, everywhere, every time Al's truck took a turn and there was somebody there beside the road, a pair of shoulders, a cap, blue jeans and a stranger's face... Cándido knew what he would do when he found him, his fist pounding on the window till the