The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  “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 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 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.”

  3

  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 subdivision known as Arroyo Blanco Estates. It was a private community, comprising a golf course, ten tennis courts, a community center and some two hundred and fifty homes, each set on one-point-five acres and strictly conforming to the covenants, conditions and restrictions set forth in the 1973 articles of incorporation. The houses were all of the Spanish Mission style, painted in one of three prescribed shades of white, with orange tile roofs. If you wanted to paint your house sky-blue or Provencal-pink with lime-green shutters, you were perfectly welcome to move into the San Fernando Valley or to Santa Monica or anywhere else you chose, but if you bought into Arroyo Blanco Estates, your house would be white and your roof orange.

  Delaney Mossbacher made his home in one of these Spanish Mission houses (floor plan #A227C, Rancho White with Navajo trim), along with his second wife, Kyra, her son, Jordan, her matching Dandie Dinmont terriers, Osbert and Sacheverell, and her Siamese cat, Dame Edith. On this particular morning, the morning that Cándido Rincón began to feel he’d lost control of his wife, Delaney was up at seven, as usual, to drip Kyra’s coffee, feed Jordan his fruit, granola and hi-fiber bar and let Osbert and Sacheverell out into the yard to perform their matinal functions. He hadn’t forgotten his unfortunate encounter with Cándido four days earlier—the thought of it still made his stomach clench—but the needs and wants and minor irritations of daily life had begun to push it into the background. At the moment, his attention was focused entirely on getting through the morning ritual with his customary speed and efficiency. He was nothing if not efficient.

  He made a sort of game of it, counting the steps it took him to shut the windows against the coming day’s heat, empty yesterday’s coffee grounds into the mulch bucket, transform two kiwis, an orange, apple, banana and a handful of Bing cherries into Jordan’s medley of fresh fruit, and set the table for two. He skated across the tile floor to the dishwasher, flung open the cabinets, rocketed the plates and cutlery into position on the big oak table, all the while keeping an eye on the coffee, measuring out two bowls of dog food and juicing the oranges he’d plucked from the tree in the courtyard.

  Typically, he stole a moment out in the courtyard to breathe in the cool of the morning and listen to the scrub jays wake up the neighborhood, but today he was in a rush and the only sound that penetrated his consciousness was a strange excited yelp from one of the dogs—they must have found something in the fenced-in yard behind the house, a squirrel or a gopher maybe—and then he was back in the kitchen, squeezing oranges. That was what he did, every morning, regular as clockwork: squeeze oranges. After which he would dash round the house gathering up Jordan’s homework, his backpack, lunchbox and baseball cap, while Kyra sipped her coffee and washed down her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements with half a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Then it was time to drive Jordan to school, while Kyra applied her makeup, wriggled into a form-fitting skirt with matching jacket and propelled her Lexus over the crest of the canyon and into Woodland Hills, where she was the undisputed volume leader at Mike Bender Realty, Inc. And then, finally, Delaney would head back home, have a cup of herbal tea and two slices of wheat toast, dry, and let the day settle in around him.

  Unless there was an accident on the freeway or a road crew out picking up or setting down their ubiquitous plastic cones, he would be back at home and sitting at his desk by nine. This was the moment he lived for, the moment his day really began. Unfailingly, no matter what pressures were brought to bear on him or what emergencies arose, he allotted the next four hours to his writing—four hours during which he could let go of the world around him, his fingers grazing lightly over the keyboard, the green gl
ow of the monitor bathing him in its hypnotic light. He took the phone off the hook, pulled the shades and crept into the womb of language.

  There, in the silence of the empty house, Delaney worked out the parameters of his monthly column for Wide Open Spaces, a naturalist’s observations of the life blooming around him day by day, season by season. He called it “Pilgrim at Topanga Creek” in homage to Annie Dillard, and while he couldn’t pretend to her mystical connection to things, or her verbal virtuosity either, he did feel that he stood apart from his fellow men and women, that he saw more deeply and felt more passionately—particularly about nature. And every day, from nine to one, he had the opportunity to prove it.

  Of course, some days went better than others. He tried to confine himself to the flora and fauna of Topanga Canyon and the surrounding mountains, but increasingly he found himself brooding over the fate of the pupfish, the Florida manatee and the spotted owl, the ocelot, the pine marten, the panda. And how could he ignore the larger trends—overpopulation, desertification, the depletion of the seas and the forests, global warming and loss of habitat? We were all right in America, sure, but it was crazy to think you could detach yourself from the rest of the world, the world of starvation and loss and the steady relentless degradation of the environment. Five and a half billion people chewing up the resources of the planet like locusts, and only seventy-three California condors left in all the universe.

  It gave him pause, It depressed him. There were days when he worked himself into such a state he could barely lift his fingers to the keys, but fortunately the good days outnumbered them, the days when he celebrated his afternoon hikes through the chaparral and into the ravines of the mist-hung mountains, and that was what people wanted—celebration, not lectures, not the strident call to ecologic arms, not the death knell and the weeping and gnashing of environmental teeth. The world was full of bad news. Why contribute more?

  The sun had already begun to burn off the haze by the time Jordan scuffed into the kitchen, the cat at his heels. Jordan was six years old, dedicated to Nintendo, superheroes and baseball cards, though as far as Delaney could see he had no interest whatever in the game of baseball beyond possessing the glossy cardboard images of the players. He favored his mother facially and in the amazing lightness of his hair, which was so pale as to be nearly translucent. He might have been big for his age, or maybe he was small—Delaney had nothing to compare him to.

  “Kiwi,” Jordan said, thumping into his seat at the table, and that was all. Whether this was an expression of approval or distaste, Delaney couldn’t tell. From the living room came the electronic voice of the morning news: Thirty-seven Chinese nationals were drowned early today when a smuggler’s ship went aground just east of the Golden Gate Bridge ... Outside, beyond the windows, there was another yelp from the dogs.

  Jordan began to rotate his spoon in the bowl of fruit, a scrape and clatter accompanied by the moist sounds of mastication. Delaney, his back to the table, was scrubbing the counter in the vicinity of the stove, though any splashes of cooking oil or spatters of sauce must have been purely imaginary since he hadn’t actually cooked anything. He scrubbed for the love of scrubbing. “Okay, buckaroo,” he called over his shoulder, “you’ve got two choices today as far as your hi-fiber bar is concerned: Cranberry Nut and Boysenberry Supreme. What’ll it be?”

  From a mouth laden with kiwi: “Papaya Coconut.”

  “You got the last one yesterday.”

  No response.

  “So what’ll it be?”

  Kyra insisted on the full nutritional slate for her son every morning—fresh fruit, granola with skim milk and brewer’s yeast, hi-fiber bar. The child needed roughage. Vitamins. Whole grains. And breakfast, for a growing child at least, was the most important meal of the day, the foundation of all that was to come. That was how she felt. And while Delaney recognized a touch of the autocratic and perhaps even fanatic in the regimen, he by and large subscribed to it. He and Kyra had a lot in common, not only temperamentally, but in terms of their beliefs and ideals too—that was what had attracted them to each other in the first place. They were both perfectionists, for one thing. They abhorred clutter. They were joggers, nonsmokers, social drinkers, and if not full-blown vegetarians, people who were conscious of their intake of animal fats. Their memberships included the Sierra Club, Save the Children, the National Wildlife Federation and the Democratic Party. They preferred the contemporary look to Early American or kitsch. In religious matters, they were agnostic.

  Delaney’s question remained unanswered, but he was used to cajoling Jordan over his breakfast. He tiptoed across the room to hover behind the boy, who was playing with his spoon and chanting something under his breath. “Rookie card, rookie card,” Jordan was saying, dipping into his granola without enthusiasm. “No looking now,” Delaney warned, seductively tapping a foil-wrapped bar on either side of the boy’s thin wilted neck, “—right hand or left?”

  Jordan reached up with his left hand, as Delaney knew he would, fastening on the Boysenberry Supreme bar just as Kyra, hunched over the weight of two boxes of hand-addressed envelopes—Excelsior, 500 Count—clattered into the kitchen in her heels. She made separate kissing motions in the direction of her husband and son, then slid into her chair, poured herself half a cup of coffee lightened with skim milk—for the calcium—and began sifting purposively through the envelopes.

  “Why can’t I have Sugar Pops or Honey Nut Cheerios like other kids? Or bacon and eggs?” Jordan pinched his voice. “Mom? Why can’t I?”

  Kyra gave the stock response—“You’re not other kids, that’s why”—and Delaney was taken back to his own childhood, a rainy night in the middle of an interminable winter, a plate of liver, onions and boiled potatoes before him.

  “I hate granola,” Jordan countered, and it was like a Noh play, timeless ritual.

  “It’s good for you.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Jordan made an exaggerated slurping sound, sucking the milk through his teeth.

  “Think of all the little children who have nothing to eat,” Kyra said without looking up, and Jordan, sticking to the script, came right back at her: “Let’s send them this.”

  Now she looked up. “Eat,” she said, and the drama was over.

  “Busy day?” Delaney murmured, setting Kyra’s orange juice down beside the newspaper and unscrewing the childproof caps of the sturdy plastic containers that held her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements. He did the little things for her—out of love and consideration, sure, but also in acknowledgment of the fact that she was the chief breadwinner here, the one who went off to the office while he stayed home. Which was all right by him. He had none of those juvenile macho hang-ups about role reversal and who wore the pants and all of that—real estate was her life, and he was more than happy to help her with it, so long as he got his four hours a day at the keyboard.

  Kyra lifted her eyebrows, but didn’t look up. She was tucking what looked to be a small white packet into each of the envelopes in succession. “Busy?” she echoed. “Busy isn’t the word for it. I’m presenting two offers this morning, both of them real low-ball, I’ve got a buyer with cold feet on that Calabasas property—with escrow due to close in eight days—and I’m scheduled for an open house on the Via Escobar place at one ... is that the dogs I hear? What are they barking at?”

  Delaney shrugged. Jordan had shucked the foil from his hi-fiber bar and was drifting toward the TV room with it—which meant he was going to be late for school if Delaney didn’t hustle him out of there within the next two minutes. The cat, as yet unfed, rubbed up against Delaney’s leg. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’ve been yapping since I let them out. Must be a squirrel or something. Or maybe Jack’s dog got loose again and he’s out there peeing on the fence and driving them into a frenzy.”

  “Anyway,” Kyra went on, “it’s going to be hell. And it’s Carla Bayer’s birthday, so after work a bunch of us—don’t you think this is a cute idea?” S
he held up one of the packets she’d been stuffing the envelopes with. It was a three-by-five seed packet showing a spray of flowers and printed with the legend Forget-Me-Not, Compliments of Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, Mike Bender Realty, Inc.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he murmured, wiping at an imaginary speck on the counter. This was her way of touching base with her clients. Every month or so, usually in connection with a holiday, she went through her mailing list (consisting of anyone she’d ever sold to or for, whether they’d relocated to Nome, Singapore or Irkutsk or passed on into the Great Chain of Being) and sent a small reminder of her continued existence and willingness to deal. She called it “keeping the avenues open.” Delaney reached down to stroke the cat. “But can’t one of the secretaries do this sort of thing for you?”

  “It’s the personal touch that counts—and moves property. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  There was a silence, during which Delaney became aware of the cartoon jingle that had replaced the voice of the news in the other room, and then, just as he was clearing Jordan’s things from the table and checking the digital display on the microwave for the time—7:32-the morning fell apart. Or no: it was torn apart by a startled breathless shriek that rose up from beyond the windows as if out of some primal dream. This was no yip, no yelp, no bark or howl—this was something final and irrevocable, a predatory scream that took the varnish off their souls, and it froze them in place. They listened, horrified, as it rose in pitch until it choked off as suddenly as it had begun.

  The aftereffect was electric. Kyra bolted up out of her chair, knocking over her coffee cup and scattering envelopes; the cat darted between Delaney’s legs and vanished; Delaney dropped the plate on the floor and groped for the counter like a blind man. And then Jordan was coming through the doorway on staccato feet, his face opened up like a pale nocturnal flower: “Delaney,” he gasped, “Delaney, something, something—”