The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  The man spat again. The left side of his face glistened in the harsh sunlight, ugly and wet with fluid, grit, pills of flesh and crushed vegetation. He looked at Delaney as if he were an escaped lunatic. “Dooo?” he echoed.

  Delaney shuffled his feet. The heat was getting to him. He pushed the glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He gave it one more try: “You know—help. Can I help you?”

  And then the man grinned, or tried to. A film of blood clung to the jagged teeth and he licked it away with a flick of his tongue. “Monee?” he whispered, and he rubbed the fingers of his free hand together.

  “Money,” Delaney repeated, “okay, yes, money,” and he reached for his wallet as the sun drilled the canyon and the cars sifted by and a vulture, high overhead, rode the hot air rising from below.

  Delaney didn’t remember getting back into the car, but somehow he found himself steering, braking and applying gas as he followed a set of taillights up the canyon, sealed in and impervious once again. He drove in a daze, hardly conscious of the air conditioner blasting in his face, so wound up in his thoughts that he went five blocks past the recycling center before realizing his error, and then, after making a questionable U-turn against two lanes of oncoming traffic, he forgot himself again and drove past the place in the opposite direction. It was over. Money had changed hands, there were no witnesses, and the man was gone, out of his life forever. And yet, no matter how hard he tried, Delaney couldn’t shake the image of him.

  He’d given the man twenty dollars—it seemed the least he could do—and the man had stuffed the bill quickly into the pocket of his cheap stained pants, sucked in his breath and turned away without so much as a nod or gesture of thanks. Of course, he was probably in shock. Delaney was no doctor, but the guy had looked pretty shaky—and his face was a mess, a real mess. Leaning forward to hold out the bill, Delaney had watched, transfixed, as a fly danced away from the abraded flesh along the line of the man’s jaw, and another, fat-bodied and black, settled in to take its place. In that moment the strange face before him was transformed, annealed in the brilliant merciless light, a hard cold wedge of a face that looked strangely loose in its coppery skin, the left cheekbone swollen and misaligned—was it bruised? Broken ? Or was that the way it was supposed to look? Before Delaney could decide, the man had turned abruptly away, limping off down the path with an exaggerated stride that would have seemed comical under other circumstances—Delaney could think of nothing so much as Charlie Chaplin walking off some imaginary hurt—and then he’d vanished round the bend and the afternoon wore on like a tattered fabric of used and borrowed moments.

  Somber, his hands shaking even yet, Delaney unloaded his cans and glass—green, brown and clear, all neatly separated—into the appropriate bins, then drove his car onto the big industrial scales in front of the business office to weigh it, loaded, for the newspaper. While the woman behind the window totted up the figure on his receipt, he found himself thinking about the injured man and whether his cheekbone would knit properly if it was, in fact, broken—you couldn’t put a splint on it, could you? And where was he going to bathe and disinfect his wounds? In the creek? At a gas station?

  It was crazy to refuse treatment like that, just crazy. But he had. And that meant he was iilega!—go to the doctor, get deported. There was a desperation in that, a gulf of sadness that took Delaney out of himself for a long moment, and he just stood there in front of the office, receipt in hand, staring into space.

  He. tried to picture the man’s life—the cramped room, the bag of second-rate oranges on the streetcorner, the spade and the hoe. and the cold mashed beans dug out of the forty-nine-cent can. Unrefriger- ated tortillas. Orange soda. That oom-pah music with the accordions and the tinny harmonies. But what was he doing on Topanga Canyon Boulevard at one-thirty in the afternoon, out there in the middle of nowhere? Working? Taking a lunch break?

  And then all at once Delaney knew, and the understanding hit him with a jolt: the shopping cart, the tortillas, the trail beaten into the dirt—he was camping down there, that’s what he was doing. Camping. Living. Dwelling. Making the trees and bushes and the natural habitat of Topanga State Park into his own private domicile, crapping in the chaparral, dumping his trash behind rocks, polluting the stream and ruining it for everyone else. That was state property down there, rescued from the developers and their bulldozers and set aside for the use of the public, for nature, not for some outdoor ghetto. And what about fire danger? The canyon was a tinderbox this time of year, everyone knew that.

  Delaney felt his guilt turn to anger, to outrage.

  God, how he hated that sort of thing—the litter alone was enough to set him off. How many times had he gone down one trail or another with a group of volunteers, with the rakes and shovels and black plastic bags? And how many times had he come back, sometimes just days later, to find the whole thing trashed again? There wasn’t a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains that didn’t have its crushed beer cans, its carpet of glass, its candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and it was people like this Mexican or whatever he was who were responsible, thoughtless people, stupid people, people who wanted to turn the whole world into a garbage dump, a little Tijuana ...

  Delaney was seething, ready to write his congressman, call the sheriff, anything—but then he checked himself. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Who knew who this man was or what he was doing? Just because he spoke Spanish didn’t make him a criminal. Maybe he was a picnicker, a bird-watcher, a fisherman; maybe he was some naturalist from South of the Border studying the gnatcatcher or the canyon wren ...

  Yeah, sure. And Delaney was the King of Siam.

  When he came back to himself, he saw that he’d managed to reenter the car, drive past the glass and aluminum receptacles and into the enormous littered warehouse with its mountains of cardboard and paper and the dark intense men scrabbling through the drifts of yesterday’s news—men, he saw with a shock of recognition, who were exactly like the jack-in-the-box on the canyon road, right down to the twin pits of their eyes and the harsh black strokes of their mustaches. They were even wearing the same khaki workshirts and sacklike trousers. He’d been in Los Angeles nearly two years now, and he’d never really thought about it before, but they were everywhere, these men, ubiquitous, silently going about their business, whether it be mopping up the floors at McDonald’s, inverting trash cans in the alley out back of Emilio’s or moving purposively behind the rakes and blowers that combed the pristine lawns of Arroyo Blanco Estates twice a week. Where had they all come from? What did they want? And why did they have to throw themselves under the wheels’ of his car?

  He had the back door open and was shifting his tightly bound bundles of paper from the car to the nearest pile, when a shrill truncated whistle cut through the din of machinery, idling engines, slamming doors and trunks. Delaney looked up. A forklift had wheeled up beside him and the man driving it, his features inscrutable beneath the brim of his yellow hard hat, was gesturing to him. The man said something Delaney couldn’t quite catch. “What?” he called out over the noise of the place:

  A hot wind surged through the warehouse doors, flinging dust. Ads and supplements shot into the air, Parade, Holiday, Ten Great Escapes for the Weekend. Engines idled, men shouted, forklifts beeped and stuttered. The man looked down on him from his perch, the bright work-polished arms of the vehicle sagging beneath its load of newsprint, as if it were inadequate to the task, as if even sheet metal and steel couldn’t help but buckle under the weight of all that news.

  “Ponlos allá,” he said, pointing to the far corner of the building.

  Delaney stared up at him, his arms burdened with paper. “What?” he repeated.

  For a long moment, the man simply sat there, returning his gaze. Another car pulled in. A pigeon dove from the rafters and Delaney saw that there were dozens of them there, caught against the high open two-story drift of the roof. The man in the hard hat bent forward and spat carefully on the pavement. And then sud
denly, without warning, the forklift lurched back, swung round, and vanished in the drifts of printed waste.

  “So what’d you hit—a deer? Coyote?”

  Delaney was in the showroom of the Acura dealership, a great ugly crenellated box of a building he’d always hated—it didn’t blend with the surrounding hills, didn’t begin to, not at all—but somehow, today, he felt strangely comforted by it. Driving up with his cracked lens and disarranged signal housing, he’d seen it as a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets. There were desks, telephones, the air was cool, the floors buffed to brilliance. And the cars themselves, hard and unassailable, so new they smelled of wax, rubber and plastic only, were healing presences arranged like heavy furniture throughout the cavern of the room. He was sitting on the edge of Kenny Grissom’s desk, and Kenny Grissom, the enthusiastic moon-faced thirty-five-year-old boy who’d sold him the car, was trying to look concerned.

  Delaney shrugged, already reaching for the phone. “A dog, I think it was. Might have been a coyote, but kind of big for a coyote. Must have been a dog. Sure it was. Yeah. A dog.”

  Why was he lying? Why did he keep thinking of shadowy black-and-white movies, men in creased hats leaning forward to light cigarettes, the hit-and-run driver tracked down over a few chips of paint—or a cracked headlight? Because he was covering himself, that’s why. Because he’d just left the poor son of a bitch there alongside the road, abandoned him, and because he’d been glad of it, relieved to buy him off with his twenty dollars’ blood money. And how did that square with his liberal-humanist ideals?

  “I hit a dog once,” Kenny Grissom offered, “when I was living out in Arizona? It was this big gray shaggy thing, a sheepdog, I guess it was. I was driving a pickup at the time, Ford half-ton with a four-sixty in it, and my girlfriend was with me. I never even seen the thing—one minute I’m cruising, and the next minute my girlfriend’s all in tears and there’s this thing that looks like an old rug in the middle of the road in back of me. I don’t know. So I back up and the dog like lurches to his feet, but he’s only got three legs and I thought like holy shit I blew his leg right off, but then Kim gets out and we kind of look and there’s no blood or anything, just a stump.”

  Kenny’s face was working, as if there were something trapped under the skin trying to get out. “Friggin’ thing only had three legs to begin with,” he suddenly shouted, “no wonder he couldn’t get out of the way!” His laugh reverberated through, the vast hollow spaces of the room, a salesman’s laugh, too sharp-edged and pleased with itself. And then his face came back to the moment, sober suddenly, composed round the pale tawny bristle of his mustache. “But it’s a bitch, I know it is,” he observed in a sort of yodel. “And don’t you worry, we’ll have your car for you any minute now, good as new. Feel free to use the phone.”

  Delaney just nodded. He’d dialed Kyra at work and was listening to the number ring through.

  “Hello?” Her voice was bright, amplified, right there with him.

  “It’s me, honey.”

  “What’s wrong? Is it Jordan? Something’s happened to Jordan?”

  Delaney took a deep breath. Suddenly he felt hurt, put-upon, ready to let it all spill out of him. “I had an accident.”

  Now it was her turn—the sharp insuck of breath, the voice gone dead in her throat. “Jordan’s hurt, isn’t he? Tell me, tell me the worst. Quick! I can’t stand it!”

  “Nobody’s hurt, honey, everybody’s okay. I haven’t even gone to pick Jordan up yet.”

  A numb silence, counters clicking, synapses flashing. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “The Acura dealer. I’m getting the headlight fixed.” He glanced up, lowered his voice, Kenny Grissom nowhere in sight: “I hit a man.”

  “Hit a man?” There was a flare of anger in her voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “A Mexican. At least I think he was a Mexican. Out on the canyon road. I was on my way to the recycler.”

  “My god. Did you call Jack?”

  Jack was Jack Jardine, their friend, neighbor, adviser and lawyer, who also happened to be the president of the Arroyo Blanco Estates Property Owners’ Association. “No”—Delaney sighed—“I just got here and I wanted to tell you, to let you know—”

  “What are you thinking? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what one of these shyster personal-injury lawyers would do to get hold of something like this? You hit a man? Was he hurt? Did you take him to the hospital? Did you call the insurance?”

  Delaney tried to gather it all in. She was excitable, Kyra, explosive, her circuits so high-wired she was always on the verge of overload, even when she was asleep. There were no minor issues in her life. “No, listen, Kyra: the guy’s okay. I mean, he was just ... bruised, that was all. He’s gone, he went away. I gave him twenty bucks.”

  “Twenty—?”

  And then, before the words could turn to ash in his mouth, it was out: “I told you—he was Mexican.”

  2

  HE’D HAD HEADACHES BEFORE-HIS WHOLE LIFE was a headache, his whole stinking worthless pinche vida-but never like this. It felt as if a bomb had gone off inside his head, one of those big atomic ones like they dropped on the Japanese, the black roiling clouds pushing and pressing at his skull, no place to go, no release, on and on and on. But that wasn’t all—the throb was in his stomach too, and he had to go down on his hands and knees and vomit in the bushes before he’d even got halfway to the camp in the ravine. He felt his breakfast come up—two hard-cooked eggs, half a cup of that weak reheated piss that passed for coffee and a tortilla he’d involuntarily blackened on a stick held over the fire-all of it, every lump and fleck, and then he vomited again. His stomach heaved till he could taste the bile in the back of his throat, and yet he couldn’t move, that uncontainable pressure fighting to punch through his ears, and he crouched there for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by a single strand of saliva that dangled endlessly from his lips.

  When he got to his feet again, everything had shifted. The shadows had leapt the ravine, the sun was caught in the trees and the indefatigable vulture had been joined by two others. “Yes, sure, come and get me,” he muttered, spitting and wincing at the same time, “that’s all I am—a worn-out carcass, a walking slab of meat.” But Christ in Heaven, how it hurt! He raised a hand to the side of his face and the flesh was stiff and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head. What had happened to him? He was crossing the road, coming back from the grocery after the labor exchange closed—the far grocery, the cheaper one, and what did it matter if it was on the other side of the road? The old man there at the checkout—a paisano, he called himself, from Italy—he didn’t look at you like you were dirt, like you were going to steal, like you couldn’t keep your hands off all the shiny bright packages of this and that, beef jerky and nachos and shampoo, little gray-and-black batteries in a plastic sleeve. He’d bought an orange soda, Nehi, and a package of tortillas to go with the pinto beans burned into the bottom of the pot ... and then what? Then he crossed the road.

  Yes. And then that pink-faced gabacho ran him down with his flaming gabacho nose and the little lawyer glasses clenched over the bridge of it. All that steel, that glass, that chrome, that big hot iron engine—it was like a tank coming at him, and his only armor was a cotton shirt and pants and a pair of worn-out huaraches. He stared stupidly round him—at the fine tracery of the brush, at the birds lighting in the branches and the treetops below him, at the vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky. America would help him when she got back, she’d brew some tea from manzanita berries to combat the pain, bathe his wounds, cluck her tongue and fuss over him. But he needed to go down the path now, and his hip was bothering him all of a sudden, and the left knee, there, where the trousers were torn.

  It hurt. Every step of the way. But he thought of the penitents at Chalma
, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh, and he went on. Twice he fell. The first time he caught himself with his good arm, but the second time he tasted dust and his eyes refused to focus, the whole hot blazing world gone cool and dark all of a sudden, as if he’d been transposed to the bottom of the ocean. He heard a mockingbird then, a whistle and trill in the void, and it was as if it had drowned in sunlight too, and then he was dreaming.

  His dreams were real. He wasn’t flying through the air or talking with the ghost of his mother or vanquishing his enemies—he was stalled in the garbage dump in Tijuana, stalled at the wire, and America was sick with the gastro and he didn’t have a cent in the world after the cholos and the coyotes had got done with him. Sticks and cardboard over his head. The stink of burning dogs in the air. Low man in the pecking order, even at the dompe. Life is poor here, an old man—a garbage picker—had told him. Yes, he’d said, and he was saying it now, the words on his lips somewhere between the two worlds, but at least you have garbage.

  America found him at the bottom of the path, bundled in the twilight like a heap of rags. She’d walked nearly eight miles already, down out of the canyon to the highway along the ocean where she could catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized, and then back again, and she was like death on two feet. Two dollars and twenty cents down the drain and nothing to show for it. In the morning, at first light, she’d walked along the Coast Highway, and that made her feel good, made her feel like a girl again—the salt smell, people jogging on the beach, the amazing narrow-shouldered houses of the millionaires growing up like mushrooms out of the sand—but the address the Guatemalan woman had given her was worth nothing. All the way there, all,the way out in the alien world, a bad neighborhood, drunks in the street, and the building was boarded up, deserted, no back entrance, no sewing machines, no hard-faced boss to stand over her and watch her sweat at three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, no nothing. She checked the address twice, three times, and then she turned round to retrace her steps and found that the streets had shuffled themselves in the interim, and she knew she was lost.