The Tortilla Curtain

truck stopped, the _vago__ loping up to the truck for a ride, his lucky day, and the first thing Cándido could lay his hands oh, the big sledge for driving stakes, the machete for clearing brush, and if he went to prison for a hundred years it would be sweet compared to this...
    If she was lying to him it was to spare him, he knew that, and his heart turned over for her in his drunkenness. Seventeen years old, and she was the one who'd found work when he couldn't, she was the one who'd had them sniffing after her like dogs, she was the one whose husband made her live in a hut of sticks and then called her a liar, a whore and worse. But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die.
    But then dead men didn't work either, did they?

The Tortilla Curtain

3
    SMOKE ROSE FROM THE BARBECUE IN FRAGRANT ginger-smelling tufts as Delaney basted the tofu kebabs with his special honey-ginger marinade and Jordan chased a ball round the yard with Osbert yapping at his heels. Kyra was stretched out by the pool, having finished up her jog with forty laps of the crawl and her weekly glass of Chardonnay, and though her briefcase stood at her side, she seemed for the moment to be content with contemplating the underside of her eyelids. It was a Sunday in mid-August, seven in the evening, the sun fixed in the sky like a Japanese lantern. There was music playing somewhere, a slow moody piano piece moving from one lingering faintly heard note to the next, and when Delaney looked up from turning the kebabs he watched a California gnatcatcher--that rare and magical gray-bodied little bird--settle on the topmost wire of the fence. It was one of those special moments when all the mad chittering whirl of things suddenly quits, like a freeze-frame in a film, and Delaney held on to it, savored it, even as the fragrance of ginger faded into the air, the piano faltered and the bird shot away into nothingness. Things had been tough there for a while, what with the accident, the loss of Sacheverell, the theft of his car, but now life had settled back onto an easy even keel, a mundanity that allowed the little things to reveal themselves, and he was grateful for it.
    “Is it ready yet?” Kyra called in a smoky languorous voice. “Do you want me to put the dressing on the salad?”
    “Yes, sure, that would be great,” he said, and he felt blissful, rapturous even, as he watched his wife swing her legs over the side of the chair, adjust the straps of her swimsuit and stride gracefully across the patio and into the rear of the house.
    At dinner, which Delaney served on the glass-topped table by the pool, Kyra filled her glass with Perrier and announced, with a self-deprecating giggle, that she'd “cleaned up Shoup.” Jordan was toying with his tofu, separating it from the mushrooms, the mushrooms from the tomatoes and the tomatoes from the onions. Osbert was under the table, gnawing at a rawhide bone. “What?” Delaney said. “What do you mean?”
    Kyra looked down at her plate as if uncertain how to go on. “Remember I told you about all those people gathering there on the streetcorners--day laborers?”
    “Mexicans,” Delaney said, and there was no hesitation anymore, no reluctance to identify people by their ethnicity, no overlay of liberal-humanist guilt. Mexicans, there were Mexicans everywhere.
    “Mexicans,” Kyra confirmed with a nod. Beside her, Jordan stuffed a forkful of white rice in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully a moment and extruded a glistening white paste back onto the tines of his fork. “I don't know,” Kyra went on, “it was a couple of weeks ago, remember? By the 7-Eleven there?”
    Delaney nodded, dimly remembering.
    “Well I got on Mike's case about it because when it gets to be a certain number--ten maybe, ten is okay, but any more than that and you can see the buyers flinch when you drive by. That's the sort of thing they're moving out here to get away from, and you know me, I'll go out of my way, the most circuitous route, to give people a good impression of the neighborhood, but sometimes you just have to take the boulevard, it's unavoidable. Anyway, I don't know what happened, but one day I suddenly realize there's like fifty or sixty of them out there, all stretched