Read Online The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle - Free Book Online Page B

wife. In the bag: two overripe tomatoes, half a dozen hard greenish oranges and a turnip, stained black with earth. He sucked the sour oranges and ate a stew made from the turnip and tomatoes. He didn't ask her where she'd gotten them.
    And now she wanted to go again. It was the same ritual as the day before: slipping up from the blanket like a thief, pulling the one good dress over her head, combing out her hair by the stream. It was dark still. The night clung to them like a second skin. No bird had even begun to breathe. “Where are you going?” he croaked.
    Two words, out of the darkness, and they cut him to the quick: “To work.”
    He sat up and railed while she built a fire and made him coffee and some rice pap with sugar to ease the pain of his chewing, and he told her his fears, outlined the wickedness of the _gabacho__ world and the perfidy of his fellow _braceros__ at the labor exchange, tried to work the kind of apprehension into her heart that would make her stay here with him, where it was safe, but she wouldn't listen. Or rather, she listened--“I'm afraid,” she told him, “afraid of this place and the people in it, afraid to walk out on the street”--but it had no effect. He forbade her to go. Roared out his rage till his indented cheekbone was on fire, got up on unsteady legs and threatened her with his balled-up fist, but it did no good. She hung her head. Wouldn't look him in the eye. “Someone has to go,” she whispered. “In a day or two you'll be better, but now you couldn't even get up the trail, let alone work--and that's _if__ there's work.”
    What could he say? She was gone.
    And then the day began and the boredom set in, boredom that almost made him glad of the pain in his face, his hip, his arm--at least it was something, at least it was a distraction. He looked round the little clearing by the stream, and the leaves, the rocks, the spill of the slope above him and even the sun in the sky seemed unchanging, eternal, as dead as a photograph. For all its beauty, the place was a jail cell and he was a prisoner, incarcerated in his thoughts. But even a prisoner had something to read, a radio maybe, a place to sit and take a contemplative crap, work--they made license plates here in _Gringolandia,__ they broke rocks, but at least they did something.
    He dozed, woke, dozed again. And every time he looked up at the sun it was in the same place in the sky, fixed there as if time had stood still. America was out there. Anything could happen to her. How could he rest, how could he have a moment's peace with that specter before him?
    América. The thought of her brought her face back to him, her wide innocent face, the face of a child still, with the eyes that bled into you and the soft lisping breath of a voice that was like the first voice you'd ever heard. He'd known her since she was a little girl, four years old, the youngest sister of his wife, Resurrección. She was a flower girl at the wedding, and she looked like a flower herself, blossoming brown limbs in the white petals of her dress. He took the vows with Resurrección that day, and he was twenty years old, just back from nine months in _El Norte,__ working the potato fields in Idaho and the citrus in Arizona, and he was like a god in Tepoztlán. In nine months he had made more--and sent half of it home via _giros--__than his father in his leather shop had made in a lifetime. Resurrección had promised to wait for him when he left, and she was good to her word. That time, at least.
    But each year the wait got longer, and she changedsiz qshe chan. They all changed, all the wives, and who could blame them? For three quarters of the year the villages of Morelos became villages of women, all but deserted by the men who had migrated North to earn real money and work eight and ten and twelve hours a day instead of sitting in the _cantina__ eternally nursing a beer. A few men stayed behind, of course--the ones who had businesses, the