The Tortilla Curtain

barrel. América felt as if she'd come home.
    Then Cándido took her into a restaurant, a little hole in the wall with five stools at the counter and a couple of Formica tables stuck in a corner, and she could have wept for joy. She fussed with her hair before they went in--she should have braided it--and tried to smooth down her dress and pick the fluff out of it. “You never told me,” she said. “I must look like a mess.”
    “You look fine,” he said, but she didn't believe him. Hingálieve himow could she? She'd been camping in the woods without so much as a compact mirror for as long as she could remember.
    The waiter was Mexican. The chef behind the grill was Mexican. The dishwasher was Mexican and the man who mopped the floor and the big swollen mother with her two _niñitos__ and the five men sitting on the five stools blowing into their cups of coffee. The menu was printed in Spanish. “Order anything you want, _mi vida,”__ Cándido said, and he tried to smile, but the look of worry never left his face.
    She ordered _huevos con chorizo__ and toast, real toast, the first she'd had since she left, home. Butter melted into the toast, sweet yellow pools of it, the _salsa__ on the table was better than her mother had ever made and the coffee was black and strong. The sugar came in little packets and she poured so much of it into her coffee the spoon stood up straight when she tried to stir it. Cándido ordered two eggs and toast and he ate like an untamed beast let out of its cage, then went up to the counter and talked to the men there while she used the bathroom, which was dirty and cramped but a luxury of luxuries for all that. She looked at herself in the mirror through a scrim of triangular markings and slogans scratched into the glass and saw that she was pretty still, flushed and healthy-looking. She lingered on the toilet. Stripped to the waist and washed the top half of her body with the yellow liquid soap and let the water run in the basin long after she'd finished with it, just let it run to hear it.
    Later, Cándido stood on the streetcorner with two hundred other men while she shrank by his side. The talk was grim. There was a recession. There was no work. Too many had come up from the South, and if there was work for them all six years ago, now there were twenty men for every job and the bosses knew it and cut the wage by half. Men were starving. Their wives and children were starving. They'd do anything for work, any kind of work, and they'd take what the boss was paying and get down on their knees and thank him for it.
    The men slouched against buildings, sat on the curb, smoked and chatted in small groups. America watched them as she'd watched the men at the labor exchange and what she saw made her stomach sink with fear: they were hopeless, they were dead, as bent and whipped and defeated as branches torn from a tree. She and Cándido stood there for an hour, not so much in the hope of work--it was ridiculous even to think of it with two hundred men there--but to talk and probe and try to get the lay of the land. Where could they stay? Where was the cheapest place to eat? Was there a better streetcorner? Were they hiring at the building supply? In all that time, a full hour at least, she saw only two pickups pull in at the curb and only six men of all that mob climb in.
    And then they started walking. They walked all day, up and down the streets, through the back alleys, down the boulevards and back again, Cándido gruff and short-tempered, his eyes wild. By suppertime nothing had been settled, except that they were hungry again and their feet hurt more than ever. They were sitting on a low wall out in front of a blocky government buitding--the post ofnce?--when a man in baggy pants and with his long hair held in place by a black hairnet sat down beside them. He looked to be about thirty and he wore a bold-check flannel shirt buttoned at the neck though the air was like a furnace. He offered Cándido a cigarette. “You look lost, _compadre,”__ he said, and his Spanish had a North American twang to it.
    Cándido said nothing, just pulled on the cigarette, staring off into space.
    “You looking for a place to stay? I know a place,” the man said, leaning forward now to look into América'ey ánto Améris face. “Cheap. And clean. Real clean.”
    “How much?” Cándido asked.
    “Ten bucks.” The man breathed smoke out his nostrils. America saw that he had a tattoo circling his