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a mango now--or even an orange?”
    “All right,” he snarled, “all right,” and he pushed himself up from the blanket and stood shakily, all his weight on his good leg. The aspirin bottle was nearly empty, but he shook half a dozen tablets into his palm and ground them between his teeth. “I'll go myself. Nobody can tell me I can't feed my own wife--”
    She wasn't having it. She sprang to her feet and took hold of his forearm in a grip so fierce and unyielding it surprised him. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe the next day. What happened to you would have killed an ordinary man. You rest. You'll feel better. Give it a day or two.”
    He was woozy on his feet. His head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. The crow mocked him from an invisible perch. “And what do you plan to do for work?”
    She grinned and made a muscle with her right arm. “I can do anything a man can do.”
    He tried for a stern and forbidding look, but it tortured his face and he had to let it go. She was tiny, like a child--she _was__ a child. She couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds, and the baby hadn't begun to show yet, not at all. What could she hope to accomplish at a labor exchange?
    “Pick lettuce,” she said. “Or fruit maybe.”
    He had to laugh. He couldn't help himself. “Lettuce? Fruit? This isn't Bakersfield, this is L. A. There's no fruit here. No cotton, no nothing.” His face tightened on him and he winced. “There's nothing here but houses, houses by the millions, roof after roof as far as you can see...”
    She scratched at a mosquito bite on her arm, but her eyes were alive, shining with the image, and her lips compressed round a private smile. “I want one of those houses,” she said. “A clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator, and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden and make a place for the chickens. That's what you promised me, didn't you?”
    She wanted. Of course she wanted. Everybody who'd stayed behind to dry up and die in Tepoztlán wanted too--hell, all of Morelos, all of Mexico and the Indian countries to the south, they all wanted, and what else was new? A house, a yard, maybe a TV and a car too--nothing fancy, no palaces like the _gringos__ built--just four walls and a roof. Was that so much to ask?
    He watched her lips--pouting, greedy lips, lips he wanted to 3“> Q wanted kiss and own. ”Well?“ she demanded, and she wasn't teasing now, wasn't bantering or joking. ”Didn't you?"
    He'd promised. Sure he had. He'd held up the lure of all those things, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the glitter of the North like a second Eden; sure, a young girl like her and an old man like himself with gray in his mustache--what else was he going to tell her? That they would get robbed at the border and live under two boards at the dump till he could make enough on the streetcorner to get them across? That they'd hide out like rats in a hole and live on a blanket beside a stream that would run dry in a month? That he'd be hammered down on the road so he could barely stand or make water or even think straight? He didn't know what to say.
    She let go of his arm and turned away from him. He watched the morning mist enclose her as she began to pick her way over the boulders that cluttered the ravine like broken teeth. When she got to the foot of the trail she swung round and stood there a moment, the mist boiling beneath her. “Maybe somebody will need a floor mopped or a stove cleaned,” she said, the words drifting down to him over the hum of the invisible cars above.
    It took him a long moment, and when he spoke it was as if the air had been knocked out of him. “Yeah,” he said, sinking back down into the blanket. “Maybe.”

The Tortilla Curtain

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    HIGH UP THE CANYON, NESTLED IN A FAN-SHAPED depression dug out of the side of the western ridge by the action of some long-forgotten stream, lay the