The Tortilla Curtain Read Online Free PDF Page B

You were nearly separated from me--forever--and how would you expect me to find you, eh? How?”
    “I'm not going to the city,” she said quietly. “Just to the exchange. Just up the street.”
    He considered that scenario--his wife, a barefoot girl from the country who didn't know a thing about the world, out there among all those men, those lowlifes who'd do anything for a buck--or a woman--and he didn't like it. He knew them. Street bums who couldn't keep their hands in their pockets, sweaty _campesinos__ from Guerrero and Chiapas who'd grown up abusing their livestock, _indios__ from Guatemala and Honduras: coochie-coochie and hey baby and then the kissing noises. At least in the garment trade she'd be among other women--but up there, at the labor exchange, she'd be like a pot of honey with a hundred bees swarming round her.
    They'd been living in the canyon three weeks now--there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L. A. or even Van Nuys--and though they didn't have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he'd felt happy for the first time since they'd left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was his, all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetcorner for work, the reek of the place, the roaches and the nits. Down here was different. Down here they were safe from all the filth and sickness of the streets, from _la chota__--the police--and the Immigration. Twice he'd gotten work, at three dollars an hour, no questions asked--once from a contractor who was putting up a fieldstone wall and then from a rico in a Jaguar who needed a couple of men to clear the brush from a ravine out back of his house. And each morning when he went out looking, not knowing whether he'd be back at noon or after dark, he'd warned America to douse the fire and keep out of sight.
    He hadn't wanted to frighten her, but he knew what would happen if any of those _vagos__ from above discovered her down here while he was away. It would be just like that girl in the dump at Tijuana. He could see her now, skinny legs, eyes like pits. She was a child, twelve years old, and her parents poor people who were out working all day, sifting through the mountains of trash with broomsticks fitted with a bent nail at one end, and the drunks in the place had come after her. The girl's parents had a shack made out of wooden pallets nailed together, a surprisingly sturdy little thing set amid a clutter of tumble-down shanties and crude lean-tos, and when they went off in the morning, they padlocked the girl inside. But those aniand Qt those mals--they howled outside the door and pounded at the walls to get at her, and nobody did a thing. Nobody except Cándido. Three times he snatched up a length of pipe and drove them away from the shack--junkies, _cementeros,__ bottle suckers--and he could hear the girl sobbing inside. Twelve years old. One afternoon they managed to spring the lock, and by the time Cándido got there, it was all over. The sons of bitches. He knew what they were like, and he vowed he'd never let América out of his sight if he could help it, not till they had a real house in a real neighborhood with laws and respect and human dignity.
    “No,” he said. “I can't let you do it. I was worried sick the whole day you were gone--and look at the bad luck it brought us.” He patted his arm in its sling by way of illustration. “Besides, there are no jobs for women there, only for men with strong backs. They want _braceros,__ not maids.”
    “Listen,” she said, and her voice was quiet and determined, “we have maybe a cup of rice left, half a twelve-ounce sack of dry beans, six corn _tortillas__--no eggs, no milk. We have no matches to start the fire. No vegetables, no fruit. Do you know what I would do for