Free The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle Page B

month in the sun, dried out like a fig, a soda cracker. It was beyond him even to contemplate gathering up twigs, searching for a scrap of paper, the matches, waiting till the water boiled for five full minutes and then waiting for it to cool—way beyond him. Mad with thirst, crazed, demented, he threw himself down in the sand, plunged his face into the algal scum of the pool beneath him and drank, drank till he nearly drowned himself. Finally, his stomach swollen like a bota bag, he lay back, sated, and the afternoon went on and he dozed and worried and suffered his wounds only to wake and worry and suffer again.
    It amazed him how quickly the shits came. When he’d drunk from the creek the sun had been just east of overhead and now it had settled a degree or two to the west, but it was still high and still hot. What did that add up to—two hours? Three? But there it was—the stirring in his gut, the cramping, the desperate uncontainable rush that every man, woman and child knew so intimately in his country, a poor underdeveloped place in which sanitation was a luxury and gastrointestinal infection the leading cause of death. Cándido had just enough time to get across the stream and behind the cluster of great splintered boulders he and America used as a privy before it came. And when it came, it came in an explosion, a raging cataract of shit that left him drained in an instant, and then it hit him again and again till he lost the strength of his legs and collapsed in the sand like a puppet with the strings cut.
    Lying there, coated in sweat and sand and worse, his trousers ballooning round his ankles, he heard the first sharp cries from above— gabacho- accented cries—and he knew it was over. They were coming for him. They’d got hold of America and she’d told them where he was. Ay, caray! What a mess! How could he run? Half-crippled, bestrewn with shit—and even now he could feel his guts churning again. And América—where was America?
    He mouthed a prayer to the Virgen Sagrada and became one with the rocks.
     
     
     
    America sat in the shade of the wall-less shelter the gringos had built to keep the itinerant job-seekers out of the sun (and coincidentally off the street, out of the post office parking lot and out of sight) and brooded about Cándido. He was too stubborn to think she could help. Too much the boss, the man, the patrón. He treated her like a child, a know-nothing, someone who needed to be led by the hand and protected from all the evils of the world. Well, she had news for him: she was no longer a child. Did children bear children? In five months she’d be a mother, and then what? And while this new place terrified her—the whole country, the gringos with their superior ways and their almighty dollar and their new clothes and fancy hairdos, the strange customs, the language that was like the incessant braying of a four-legged beast—she was doing what she had to do and she could look out for herself. She could.
    After sitting in the corner all day yesterday, afraid to talk to anyone, she’d screwed up her courage this morning and gone straight to the man in charge and told him her name and asked for work. Of course, if he’d been a gringo she never would have had the nerve to open her mouth—and he wouldn’t have understood her anyway—but this man was a campesino from Oaxaca, in battered jeans and a molded straw hat like the men in Tepoztlán wore, and he used the familiar with her right away and even called her “daughter.”
    There must have been fifty or sixty men there at least, and they all stopped talking when she went up to the man from Oaxaca. No one seemed to take notice of her when she was off by herself, hunched beside a stump in the dawn, miserable like the rest of them, but now she felt as if she were onstage. The men were staring at her, every one of them, some openly, some furtively, their eyes ducking for cover beneath the brims of their sombreros and baseball caps