The Tortilla Curtain

he managed finally to curse the engine of all this misery in a burst of profanity that would have condemned him for all time if he hadn’t been condemned already. What was it? What was it about him? All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking pinche luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.

And so, in the end, it all came tumbling down on Cándido: his daughter’s affliction, the pelirrojo with the gun, the very mountain itself. The light was flickering, the rain hissing like a box of serpents prodded with a stick. She can’t see, Cándido, she can’t see anything

at that moment something fell against the side of the shack, something considerable, something animate, and then the flap was wrenched from the doorway and flung away into the night and there was a face there, peering in.

“Maybe he tried to hit you the first time too. Maybe he’s a racist. Maybe he’s a pig. Maybe he hates us because we’re Mexican.”

When he got home, he felt ashamed of himself, felt as if he’d lost all hope, and he’d locked the thing away in a chest in the garage and forgotten all about it. Till now.

All the way out here, on what must have been ten acres, minimum, stood a three-story stone-and-plaster mansion that could have been lifted right out of Beverly Hills, or better yet, a village in the South of France.

all he cared about was this Mexican, the man who’d invaded his life like some unshakable parasite, like a disease. It was here, almost at the very spot, that he’d flung himself under the wheels of the car, everything come full circle, and this time Delaney wasn’t going to let him off, this time he had proof, photographic proof.

If they didn’t know he’d started the fire personally, they all suspected it, and where there was once tolerance and human respect, where there was the idea of community and a labor exchange and people to support it, now there was only fear and resentment. They didn’t want to hire him, they didn’t want to see him warm, they didn’t want to see him fed and clothed and with a place to sleep at night that was better than a ditch or a shack hidden in the weeds—they wanted to see him dead.

His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América—he’d boasted to her, he’d promised her things—América would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father’s house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some chingado her old man owed money to.

So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable.