The Tortilla Curtain

“The Tortilla Curtain” is the story of two couples living in Topanga Canyon: Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, residents of a new and newly gated community in the hills, and Candido and America Rincon, Mexican immigrants who have crossed the border illegally and are living in a makeshift camp along the stream bed. Unused to traffic, Candido stepped out in front of Delaney’s car and was struck and injured. In this chapter, two weeks after the accident, he is concerned about America, who is pregnant and has had to work while he’s been laid up, and about two vagos--or vagrants--who have been frequenting the labor exchange.

*

Candido had been lucky. Despite his face and his limp and the fact that it was half an hour after the labor exchange closed down for the day and everyone had gone home, he got work, good work, setting fence posts for $5 an hour, and then later painting the inside of a house till past dark. The boss was a Mexican-American who could speak English like a gringo but still had command of his native tongue. Candido had been sitting there in the dirt by the closed-down labor exchange, feeling hopeless and angry, feeling sorry for himself--his wife had got work, a 17-year-old village girl who didn’t know the first thing about anything, and he hadn’t, though he could do any job you asked him, from finish carpentry to machine work to roofing--when Al Lopez pulled into the lot. He had an Indian from Chiapas in the back of the truck and the Indian called out to him, “Quiere trabajar?” And then Al Lopez had stuck his head out the window and said, “Cinco dolares,” because his regular man, another Indian, had got sick on the job, too sick to work.

It was nearly 1 o’clock by the time they got to the place, a big house in a development of big houses locked away behind a brand-new set of gates. Candido knew what those gates were for and who they were meant to keep out, but that didn’t bother him. He wasn’t resentful. He wasn’t envious. He didn’t need a million dollars--he wasn’t born for that, and if he was he would have won the lottery. No, all he needed was work, steady work, and this was a beginning. He mixed concrete, dug holes, hustled as best he could with the hollow metal posts and the plastic strips, all the while amazed at the houses that had sprouted up here, proud and substantial, big gringo houses, where before there’d been nothing. Six years ago, the first time Candido had laid eyes on this canyon, there had been nothing here but hills of golden grass, humped like the back of some immemorial animal, and the dusty green canopies of the canyon oaks.

He’d been working up in Idaho, in the potatoes, sending all his money home, and when the potatoes ran out he made his way south to Los Angeles because his friend Hilario had a cousin in Canoga Park and there was plenty of work there. It was October and he’d wanted to go home, and the timing was right too because most of the men in the village were just then leaving to work in the citrus and he’d be cock of the walk until spring. But Hilario convinced him: You’re here already, he’d argued, so why run the risk of another crossing, and besides, you’ll make more in two months in Los Angeles than you did in the past four in Idaho, believe me. And Candido had asked: What kind of work? Gardening, Hilario told him. Gardening? He was dubious. You know, Hilario said, for the rich people with their big lawns and their flower beds and the trees full of fruit they never eat.

And so they pooled their money with four other men and bought a rusted-out 1971 Buick Electra with a balky transmission and four bald-as-an-egg tires for $375, and started south in the middle of the season’s first snowstorm. None of them except Candido had ever seen snow before, let alone experienced or even contemplated the peculiar problems of driving in it. With its bald tires on the slick surface, the Buick fishtailed all over the road while huge howling semitrailers roared past them like Death flapping its wings over the deepest pit. Candido had driven before--but not much, having learned on an old Peugeot in a citrus grove outside of Bakersfield on his first trip North--and he was elected to do the bulk of the driving, especially in an emergency, like this one. For 16 hours he gripped the wheel with paralyzed hands, helpless to keep the car from skittering like a hockey puck every time he turned the wheel or hit the brakes. Finally the snow gave out, but so did the transmission, and they’d only made it as far as Wagontire, Ore., where six indocumentados piling out of the smoking wreck of a rust-eaten 1971 Buick Electra were something less than inconspicuous.

They hadn’t had the hood up 10 minutes, with Hilario leaning into the engine compartment in a vain attempt to fathom what had gone wrong with a machine that had already drunk up half a case of transmission oil, when the state police cruiser nosed in behind them on the shoulder of the road. The effect was to send everybody scrambling up the bank and into the woods in full flight, except for Hilario, who was still bent over the motor the last time Candido laid eyes on him. The police officers--pale, big-shouldered men in sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats--shouted incomprehensible threats and fired off a warning shot, but Candido and two of the other men kept on running. Candido ran till his lungs were on fire, a mile at least, and then he collapsed in a gully outside of a farmhouse. His friends were nowhere in sight. He was terrified and he was lost. It began to rain.

He couldn’t have been more at a loss if he’d been dropped down on another planet. He had money--nearly $400 sewn into the cuff of his trousers--and the first thing he thought of was the bus. But where was the bus? Where was the station and how could he hope to find it? There was no one in the entire state of Oregon who spoke Spanish. And worse: He wasn’t even sure, in terms of geography, where exactly Oregon was and what relation it bore to California, Baja and the rest of Mexico. He crouched down in the ditch, looking wistfully across the field to the farmhouse, as the day closed into night and the rain turned to sleet. He had a strip of jerky in his pocket to chew on, and as he tore into the leathery flavorless meat with quivering jaws and aching teeth, he remembered a bit of advice his father had once given him. In times of extremity, his father said, when you’re lost or hungry or in danger, ponte pared, make like a wall. That is, you present a solid unbreachable surface, you show nothing, neither fear nor despair, and you protect the inner fortress of yourself from all comers. That night, cold, wet, hungry and afraid, Candido followed his father’s advice and made himself like a wall.

It did no good. He froze just the same, and his stomach shrank regardless. At daybreak, he heard dogs barking somewhere off in the distance, and at 7 or so he saw the farmer’s wife emerge from the back door of the house with three pale little children, climb into one of the four cars that stood beside the barn, and make her way down a long winding drive toward the main road. The ground was covered with a pebbly gray snow, an inch deep. He watched the car--it was red, a Ford--crawl through that Arctic vista like the pointer on the bland white field of a game of chance at a village fiesta. Awhile later he watched a girl of 20 or so emerge from the house, climb into one of the other cars and wind her way down the drive to the distant road. Finally, and it was only minutes later, the farmer himself appeared, a g’9fero in his 40s, preternaturally tall, with the loping, patient, overworked gait of farmers everywhere. He slammed the kitchen door with an audible crack, crossed the yard and vanished through the door to the barn.

Candido was a wall, but the wall was crumbling. He wasn’t used to the North, had seen snow only twice before in his life, both times with the potatoes in Idaho, and he hated it. His jacket was thin. He was freezing to death. And so, he became a moving wall, lurching up and out of the ditch, crossing under a barbed wire fence and making his way in huaraches and wet socks across the field to the barn, where he stopped, his heart turning over in his chest, and knocked at the broad plane of painted wood that formed one-half of the door through which the farmer had disappeared. He was shivering, his arms wrapped round his shoulders. He didn’t care whether they deported him or not, didn’t care whether they put him in prison or stretched him on the rack, just so long as he got warm.

And then the farmer was standing there, towering over him, a man of huge hocks and beefy arms with a head the size of a prize calabash and great sinewy thick-fingered hands, a man who could easily have earned his living touring Mexico as the thyroid giant in a traveling circus. The man--the giant--looked stunned, shocked, as surprised as if this actually were another planet and Candido a strange new species of being. “Pleese,” Candido said through jackhammering teeth, and realizing that he’d already used up the full range of his English, he merely repeated himself: “Pleese.”

The next thing he knew he was wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a big gleaming American kitchen, appliances humming, a steaming cup of coffee clutched in his hands. The farmer moved about the kitchen on feet the size of snowshoes. All the broad geometry of his back was in motion as he fussed over his appliances, six slices of toast in the shining silver toaster, eggs and a slab of ham in the little black oven that congealed the yolks and set the meat sizzling in two minutes flat, and then he was standing there, offering the plate and trying to work his face into a smile. Candido took the plate from the huge callused hands with a dip of his hand a murmur of “Muchisimas gracias,” and the big man lumbered across the kitchen to a white telephone hanging on the wall and began to dial. The eggs went cold in Candido’s mouth: This was it, this was the end. The farmer was turning him in. Candido crouched over the plate and made like a wall.

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness. The farmer motioned him to the phone, and on the other end of the line there was an angelic voice, the sweet lilting gently lisping voice of Graciela Herrera, a chicana from a town five miles away, talking to him in the language of their ancestors. Graciela picked him up in her bright yellow Volkswagen and dropped him off at the bus station, where she translated for the ticket agent so he could purchase his ticket. Candido wanted to raise a shrine to her. He kissed her fingertips and gave her the only thing he had to give: the laminated picture card of the Virgin of Guadalupe he carried for luck.

In Canoga Park, Candido was able to find Hilario’s cousin with no problem--the town was like a Mexican village writ large--and he got work right away, with an English-speaking boss who managed half a dozen gardening crews of three men each. The cousin’s name was Arturo, and he showed Candido what to do--it was nothing: pull the cord on the mower, walk behind the air blast of the blower, cultivate the flower beds and trim the shrubs--while they both awaited news of Hilario. Weeks went by. Candido shared a place off Shoup in Woodland Hills with six other men. He sent money home to his wife and wired that he’d be home by Christmas. News came finally that Hilario was back in Guerrero, deported from Oregon and stripped of everything he owned by the Federal Judicial Police the minute he re-entered Mexico.

Things were good for a while. Candido was making $160 a week, spending $200 a month on rent, another hundred on food, beer, the occasional movie, and sending the rest home. Arturo became a good friend. The work was like play compared to struggling through the mud of the potato fields like a human burro or picking lemons in 120-degree heat. He began to relax. Began to feel at home. Wagontire, Ore., was a distant memory.

And then the roof fell in. Someone tipped off La Migra and they made a sweep of the entire area, 6 o’clock in the morning, snatching people off the street, from in front of the 7-Eleven and the bus stop. A hundred men and women were lined up on the sidewalk, even a few children, staring at their feet while the puke-green buses from the Immigration pulled up to the curb to take them one-way to Tijuana, the doors locked, the window barred, all their poor possessions--the eternally rolling TVs, the mattresses on the floor, their clothes and cooking things--left behind in their apartments for the scavengers and the garbage men.

Six a.m. Candido was among the throng, dressed for work, $110 in his string bag under the sink in the apartment behind him, the darkness broken only by the ugly yellow light of the street lamps and the harsh glowing eyes of buses. It was cold. A woman was crying softly beside him; a man argued with one of the Spanish-speaking Immigration agents, a hard, high, nagging whine: “My things,”he said, over and over, “what about my things?” Candido had just left his apartment to wait out front for Arturo to swing by for him in the boss’s pickup when La Migra nailed him, and now he stood in line with all the hopeless others. Eight Immigration agents, two of them female, worked their way down the line of Mexicans, one by one, and the Mexicans, as if they were shackled together, joined at the elbow, rooted to the pavement, never thought to run or flex a muscle or even move. It was the Mexican way: acquiesce, accept. Things would change, sure they would, but only if God willed it.

Candido was listening to the woman cry softly beside him and thinking about that fatalism, that acquiescence, the inability of his people to act in the face of authority, right or wrong, good or bad, when a voice cried out in his head: Run! Run now, while the fat-faced overfed pendejo from the Immigration is still five people up the line with his flashlight and his pen and his clipboard and the green-eyed bitch behind him. Run!

He broke for the line of pepper trees across the street, and seeing him run, two other men broke from the line and fled with him, the whole macho corps of the Immigration crying out in unison and flowing toward them in a wave. “Stop!” they shouted, “You’re under arrest!”--things like that, the words of English every Mexican knew--but Candido and the two men who had broken with him didn’t stop. They went across the road and into the trees, struggling up the refuse-choked bank to the freeway fence, and then, with La Migra right behind them, they went up and over the fence and onto the shoulder of the freeway.

The cars streamed by in a rush, even at this hour. Four lanes in each direction, the torrent of headlights, 65 and 70 miles an hour: suicide. Candido shot a glance at the two men beside him--both young and scared--and then began to jog up the shoulder, against the traffic, looking to make it to the next exit and disappear in the bushes, no thought but that. The two men--they were boys really, teen-agers--followed his lead and the three of them ran half a mile or more, two hard-nosed men from the Immigration flinging themselves up the shoulder behind them, the traffic, raging, thundering in their ears, and when they came in sight of the exit they saw that La Migra had anticipated them and stationed a green van on the shoulder ahead. The boys were frantic, their breathing as harsh as the ragged roaring whine of the engines as the headlights picked them out and the first of the police sirens tore at the air. Was it worth dying for this? Half the people on those buses would be back in a day, back in 48 hours, a week. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t.

Candido would never forgive himself for what happened next. He was the one, he should have known, and they were only boys, scared and directionless. It wasn’t worth it, but when the agents came panting up to them, their faces contorted and ugly with their shouts and threats, something uncoiled inside of him and he sprang out into the traffic like a cornered rabbit leaping from a cliff to avoid the dogs. The boys followed him, both of them, and they gave up their lives. All he could remember was the shrieking of the brakes and the blare of the horns and then the sound of all the glass in the world shattering. Pulp, that’s what those boys were--they were nothing forever--and they could have been back in 48 hours. The first boy went down like a piston, torn off his legs at the hip, down and gone, and the second made it nearly to Candido in the third lane over when he was flung into the air in one whole pounded piece. The fourth lane was free and Candido was across it while the apocalypse of twisted metal and skating cars blasted the world around him till even the traffic across the divider was stopped dead in horror. He climbed the divider, walked to the far side on melting legs, vaulted the fence and became one with the shadows.

And after that? After that the trauma drove him from yard to yard, from green strip to green strip, and finally up over the dry Valley-side swell of Topanga Canyon and into the cleft of the creek bed. He bought food and two pints of brandy with the money in his pockets and he lay by the trickling creek for seven days, turning the horror over in his mind. He watched the trees move in the wind. He watched the ground squirrels, the birds, watched light shine through the thin transparent wings of the butterflies, and he thought: Why can’t the world be like this? Then he picked himself up and went home.

That was the first time he’d seen the canyon, and now he was here again, feeling good, working, protecting America from all that was out there. His accident had been bad, nearly fatal, but si Dios quiere, he would be whole again, or nearly whole, and he understood that a man who had crossed eight lanes of freeway was like the Lord who walked on the waters, and that no man could expect that kind of grace to descend on him more than once in a lifetime. And so he worked for Al Lopez and painted till nearly 10 at night, and then Al Lopez dropped him off at the darkened labor exchange, $50 richer.

It was late, very late, by the time he bundled up his clothes and waded the pool to their camp. He was glad to see the fire, coals glowing red through the dark scrim of leaves, and he caught a keen, exciting whiff of the stew as he shrugged into his clothes and called out softly to America so as not to startle her. “America,” he whispered. “It’s me, Candido--I’m back.” She didn’t answer. And that was strange, because as he came round the black hump of the ruined car, he saw her there, crouched by the fire in her underthings, her back to him, her only dress in her lap. She was sewing, that was it, working with needle and thread on the material she kept lifting to her face and then canting toward the unsteady light of the fire, the wings of her poor thin shoulder blades swelling and receding with the busy movement of her wrists and hands. The sight of her overwhelmed him with sadness and guilt: He had to give her more, he had to. He’d buy her a new dress tomorrow, he told himself, thinking of the thrift shop near the labor exchange. There were no bargains in that shop, he knew that without looking--it was for gringos, commuters and property owners and people on their way to the beach--but without transportation, what choice did he have? He fingered the bills in his pocket and promised himself he’d surprise her tomorrow.

Then he came up and put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hey, mi vida, I’m back,” and he was going to tell her about the job and Al Lopez and the $50 in his pocket, but she jerked away from him as if he’d struck her, and turned the face of a stranger to him. There was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Her face went blank. Her eyes dropped away from his and her hands curled rigid in her lap till they were like the hands of a cripple.

He knelt beside her then and talked in an urgent apologetic whisper: “I made money, good money, and I’m going to buy you a dress, a new dress, first thing tomorrow, as soon as--once I’m done with work--and I know I’m going to get work, I know it, every day. You won’t have to wear that thing anymore, or mend it either. Just give me a week or two, that’s all I ask, and we’ll be out of here, we’ll have that apartment, and you’ll have 10 dresses, 20, a whole closetful. . . .”

But she wasn’t responding--she just sat there, hanging her head, her face hidden behind the curtain of her hair. It was then that he noticed the welts at the base of her neck, where the hair parted to fall forward across her shoulders. Three raised red welts that glared 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 talking 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.”

Candido 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. “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.”

America waited there in the hut behind the wrecked car for Candido, day after day, bored and aching--he wouldn’t let her go to the labor exchange, never again--her breasts tender, her stomach queasy. 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 she jumped at every sound. Candido had got her some old magazines in English--he’d found them in the trash at the supermarket--and six greasy dog-eared novelas, picture romances about El Norte and how poor village girls and boys made their fortunes and kissed each other passionately in the gleaming kitchens of their gleaming gringo houses. She read them over and over again and she tried not to think of the man with the cap and the Indian and their filthy writhing bodies and the stinking breath in her face, tried not to think of her nausea and lightheadedness, of her mother, of the future, tried not to think of anything. She explored the creek bed out of boredom. She bathed in the pool. Collected firewood. Repaired her old dress and saved the new one, the one Candido had brought home one afternoon, for when they had an apartment and she needed something nice to get work. A week passed. Then another. It got hot. And then, gradually, she began to forget what had happened to her here in the paradise of the North, began to forget for whole minutes at a time.

It was during one of those forgetful periods, when she was lying on her back in the sand, staring up into the shifting patchwork of the leaves above her, so still and so empty she might have been comatose, that she became aware of the faintest stirring behind her. The day was high and hot, the birds silent, the distant traffic a drowsy hum. There was another sentient creature there with her in the hollow place at the base of the intermittent falls, another breathing, seeing, sensing thing. She wasn’t alarmed. Though she couldn’t see it, she could hear it, feel it, and it was no man, no snake, no thing that would do her harm. Very gradually, millimeter by millimeter, like a plant turning to the sun, she shifted her head in the sand until she could see behind her.

At first she was disappointed, but she was patient, infinitely patient, rooted to the ground by the boredom of the days, and then she saw movement and the thing materialized all at once, as in one of those trick-of-the eye drawings where you can look and look forever and see nothing until you turn your head the magic way. It was a coyote. Bristle fur, tanned the precise shade of the dried hill grasses, one paw lifted, ears high. It held there, sensing something amiss, and looked right through her with eyes of yellow glass, and she saw that it had dugs and whiskers and a black slotted nose and that it was small, small as the dog she’d had as a girl, and still it didn’t move. She looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out, to know that men were her enemies--men in uniform, men with their hats reversed, men with fat bloated hands and fat bloated necks, men with traps and guns and poisoned bait--and she saw the den full of pups and the hills shrunk to nothing under the hot quick quadrupedal gait. She never moved. Never blinked. But finally, no matter how hard she stared, she realized the animal was no longer there.

The fire snapped and fanned itself with a roar. Sparks and white flecks of ash shot straight up into the funnel of the ravine, trailing away into the night until the dark drank them up. The night was warm, the stars were cold. And Candido, feeding the fire with one hand while skewering a sausage with the other and cradling a gallon jug of Cribari red between his thighs, was drunk. Not so drunk that he’d lost all caution--he’d observed the canyon from above, on the trail, with the fire going strong, and reassured himself that not even the faintest glimmer escaped the deep hidden nook where they’d made their camp. The smoke was visible, yes, but only in daylight, and in daylight he made sure the fire was out, or at least reduced to coals. But now it was dark and who could detect a few threads of smoke against the dark curtain of the sky?

Anyway, he was drunk. Drunk and feeding the fire, for the thin cheer of it, for the child’s game of watching the flames crawl up a stick, and for the good and practical purpose of cooking sausages. A whole package, eight hot Italian sausages, not as good as chorizo maybe, but good nonetheless. One after another, roasting them till they split, using a tortilla like a glove to squeeze them off the stick and feed them into his mouth, bite by sizzling bite. And the wine, of course. Lifting the jug, heavy at first but getting lighter now, the wine hot in his gut and 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 clothes--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. Candido 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 Candido 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 $300, minus some for food and the first dress he’d bought America, the pretty one, from the gringo store. That left him just over $250, 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 $3 an hour, hauling rock for a wall some old lady was building around her property. It was the end of July. The dry weather would hold for four months more, and by then America 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, Candido, 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. . . . Candido knew what he would do when he found him, his fist pounding on the window till the truck stopped, the vago loping up to the truck for a ride, his lucky day, and the first thing Candido could lay his hands on, 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 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?