The Tortilla Curtain

Nothing. It was as if a hurricane wind had come up in the night, a tornado, and sucked the whole thing up into the sky. Cándido stood there, dumbstruck, and looked round him twice to get his bearings. Was he dreaming? Was that it?
    But no. He saw the chain then--two chains--and the signs. Posts had bme á Posts haeen driven into the ground at each of the two entrances, and they were linked by chains thick enough to anchor a boat. The signs were nailed to the posts. PRIVATE, they screamed in blazing red letters, ALL PERSONS WARNED AGAINST TRESPASS, and though Cándido couldn't read English, he got the drift. What was going on? he asked himself. What was the problem? But even as he asked he knew the answer: the _gringos__ had gotten tired of seeing so many poor people in their midst, so many Mexicans and Hondurans and Salvadoreños. There was no more work here. Not now, not ever.
    Across the street, in front of the post office, three men slunk around the butts of their cigarettes like whipped dogs. Cándido saw their eyes snatch at him as he watched for a break in the traffic and jogged across the road to them. They looked down at the ground as he greeted them. “Buenos _días,”__ he said, and then, “What's going on?”
    _“Buenos,”__ the men mumbled, and then one of them, a man Cándido recognized from the exchange, spoke up. “We don't know. It was like that”--a jerk of the head--“when we got here.”
    “Looks closed,” the man beside him put in.
    “Yeah,” the first man said, and his voice was lifeless, “looks like the _gabachos__ don't want us here anymore.” He dropped the stub of his cigarette in the street, shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don't give a shit,” he said. “I'm going to stand right here till somebody hires me--it's a free country, isn't it?”
    “Sure,” Cándido said, and the way he was feeling he couldn't hold back the sarcasm, “--as long as you're a _gringo.__ But us, we better look out.”
    It was then that Candelario Pérez's familiar white pickup separated itself from the chain of commuter cars and nosed into the post office parking lot, wheeling up so close to them they had to take an involuntary step back to avoid the inconvenience of having their toes crushed. He was alone, and his face was so heavy he couldn't seem to lift it out of the car. All four of them crowded round the driver's window. “What's going on?” the first man demanded, and they all joined in, Cándido too.
    “It's closed, over, _terminado.”__ Candelario Pérez spoke with an exhausted voice, and it was apparent he'd been overusing it, wasting it on deaf ears, on useless argument and pointless remonstrance. He waited a moment before going on, the _whoosh-whoosh-whoosh__ of the commuters' cars as steady as the beat of the waves on a beach. “It was the man that donated the property. He took it back. They don't want us here, that's the long and short of it. And I'll tell you something, a word of advice”--another pause--“if you don't have a green card you better make yourself scarce. La Migra's going to make a sweep here this morning. And tomorrow morning too.” The dead black eyes sank in on themselves like the eyes of an iguana and he lifted a thumbnail to his front teeth to dislodge a bit of food stuck there. He shrugged. “And probably the day after that.”
    Cándido felt his jaws clench. What were they going to do now? If there was no work here anymore and _La Migra__ to make sure of it, he and America would have to leave--either that or starve to death. That meant they'd have to go into the city, down to Santa Monica or Venice, or up over the canyon and into the Valley. That meant living on the streets, exposing America to the obscenity of the handout, the filth, the dumpsters out back of the supermarkets. And they were so close--another couple weeks of steady work and they could have had their apartment, could have established themselves, could have looked for work like human beings, riding the bus in freshly laundered clothes, seeking out the back rooms and sweatshops where nobody cared if you éreáared if yhad documents or not. From there, in a year or two, they could have applied for their green cards--or maybe there would be another amnesty, who could tell? But now it was over. Now there was no more safe haven, no more camp in the woods. Now it was the streets.
    In a daze, Cándido drifted away from the group gathered round the pickup, the weight of the news like a