The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  Inside, they were voting. The windows cut holes in the fabric of the night, bright rectilinear slashes against the black backdrop of the mountains. He heard a murmur of voices, the odd scrape and shuffle of hominid activity. He was just about to push himself up and go home when he became aware of a figure hovering at the edge of the steps. “Who is it?” he said.

  “It’s me, Mr. Mossbacher,” came the voice from the shadows, and then the figure moved into the light cast by the windows and Delaney saw that it was Jack Jardine’s son, Jack Jr.

  Jack Jr. swayed like a eucalyptus in the wind, a marvel of tensile strength and newly acquired height, long-limbed, big-footed, with hands the size of baseball mitts. He was eighteen, with mud-brown eyes that gave no definition to the pupils, and he didn’t look anything like his father. His hair was red, for one thing—not the pale wispy carrot-top Delaney had inherited from his Scots-Irish mother, but the deep shifting auburn you saw on the flanks of horses in an uncertain light. He wore it long on top in a frenzy of curls, and shaved to the bone from the crest of his ears down. “Hello, Jack,” Delaney said, and he could hear the weariness in his own voice.

  “They got one of your dogs, huh?”

  “Afraid so.” Delaney sighed. “That’s what I was trying to tell them in there—you can’t feed wild animals, that’s about the long and short of it. But nobody wants to listen.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt with the toe of one of his big leather hi-tops. In this light, the shoes seemed to grow out of the ground and meld with his body, trunks to anchor the length of him. There was a pause during which Delaney again contemplated pushing himself up and heading home, but he hesitated. Here was a sympathetic ear, an impressionable mind.

  “What they don’t realize,” Delaney began, but before he could finish the thought, Jack Jr. cut him off.

  “By the way—the other night? When you came to see my father about the Mexican?”

  The Mexican. Suddenly the man’s face floated up again to press at the edges of Delaney’s consciousness, fill him up like some pregnant ghost with images of rotten teeth and stained mustaches. The Mexican. What with Sacheverell, he’d forgotten all about him. Now he remembered. The boy had been stretched out on the sofa like a recumbent monarch when Delaney had gone over to Jack’s to confer with him about the accident, and Delaney had thought it odd that Jack didn’t offer to take him into another room or out on the patio where they could talk in private. Jack took no notice of his son—he might just as well have been part of the furniture. He put an arm round Delaney’s shoulder, made him a drink, listened to his story and assured him that he had nothing to worry about, nothing at all—if the man was legal, why would he refuse aid? And if he was illegal, what were the chances he’d find an attorney to represent him—and on what grounds? “But Jack,” Delaney had protested, “I didn’t report the accident.” Jack had turned to him, calm and complicitous. “What accident?” he said, and he was the most reasonable man in the world, judge, jury and advocate all rolled into one. “You stopped and offered to help—the man refused assistance. What more could you do?”

  Indeed. But now Jack Jr. wanted to know, and the thought of it made Delaney’s stomach sink. There were five people in the world who knew what had happened out on that road, and by luck of the draw Jack Jr. was one of them. “Yeah?” he said. “What of it?”

  “Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where it happened—you said they were camping and all.”

  “Out on the canyon road. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt. “I was just wondering. I see an awful lot of them down there lately. You said it was down below the lumberyard, right? Where that trail cuts off into the ravine?”

  For the life of him Delaney couldn’t grasp what the boy was getting at—what was it to him? But he answered the question almost reflexively—he had nothing to hide. “Right,” he said. And then he got to his feet, murmured, “Well, I’ve got to be going,” and strode off into the darkness fingering the sorry lump of flesh in his jacket pocket.

  He made a mental note to put it in the freezer when he got home. It would begin to stink before long.

  4

  THE MORNING AFTER AMÉRICA CLIMBED UP OUT OF the canyon to offer herself at the labor exchange—futilely, as it turned out—she insisted on going again. Cándido was against it. Vehemently. The day before, he’d waited through the slow-crawling morning till the sun stood directly overhead—twelve noon, the hour at which the labor exchange closed down for the day—and then he’d waited another hour, and another, torn by worry and suspicion. If she’d somehow managed to get work she might not be back till dark, and that was almost worse than if she hadn’t, what with the worry—and worse still, the shame. He kept picturing her in some rich man’s house, down on her knees scrubbing one of those tiled kitchens with a refrigerator the size of a meat locker and one of those dark-faced ovens that boil water in sixty seconds, and the rich man watching her ass as it waved in the air and trembled with the hard push of her shoulders. Finally—and it must have been three in the afternoon—she appeared, a dark speck creeping over the sun-bleached rocks, and in her hand one of those thin plastic market bags the gringos use once and throw away. Cándido had to squint to see her against the pain that filmed his eyes. “Where were you?” he demanded when she was close enough to hear him. And then, in a weaker voice, a voice of apology and release: “Did you get work?”

  No smile. That gave him his answer. But she did hand him the bag as an offering and kneel down on the blanket to kiss the good side of his face like a dutiful 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 changed. 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 congenitally rich, the crazies—and some of them, the unscrupulous ones, took advantage of the loneliness of the forlorn and itching wives to put horns on the heads of the men breaking their backs in the land of the gringos. “Señor Gonzales” is what they called these ghouls of the disinterred marriage, or sometimes just “Sancho,” as in “Sancho bedded your wife.” There was even a verb for it: sanchear, to slip in like a weasel and make a cabrón out of an unoffending and blameless man.

  And so, after seven seasons away and six cold winters at home during which he felt like half a man because Resurrección would not take his seed no matter what they tried—and they tried Chinese positions, chicken fat rubbed on the womb during intercourse, herbs and potions from the curandera and injections from the doctor—Cándido came home to find that his wife was living in Cuernavaca with a Sancho by the name of Teófilo Aguadulce. She was six months pregnant and she’d spent all the money Cándido had sent her on her Sancho and his unquenchable thirst for beer, pulque and distilled spirits.

  America was the one who broke the news to him. Cándido came to the door at his father-in-law’s place, bearing gifts, jubilant in his return, the all-conquering hero, benefactor of half the village, the good nephew who’d built his mother’s sister a new house and had a brand-new boombox radio in his bag for her even now, and there was no one home but America, eleven years old and shy as a jaguar with a pig clenched in its jaws. “Cándido!” she screamed, throwing herself in his arms, “what did you bring for me?” He’d brought her a glass Christmas ball with the figure of a gabacho Santa Claus imprisoned in it and artificial snow that inundated him with a blizzard when you turned it upside down—but where was everybody? A pause, release of the limbs, a restrained dance round the room with the inverted Christmas ball: “They didn’t want to see you.” What? Didn’t want to see him? She was joking, pulling his leg, very funny. “Where’s Resurrecci6n?”

  Then came his season in hell. He took the first bus to Cuernavaca, sought out Teófilo Aguadulce’s house and beat on the closed shutters till his hands were raw. He prowled the streets, haunted the cantinas, the markets, the cinema, but there was no sign of them. Finally, a week later, Cándido got word that Teófilo Aguadulce was coming to Tepoztlán to see his ailing grandfather, and when he crossed the plaza at twelve noon, Cándido was waiting for him. With half the village looking on, Cándido called him out, and he would have had his revenge too, and his honor, if the son of a bitch hadn’t got the better of him with a perfidious wrestling move that left him stunned and bleeding in the dirt. No one said a word. No one reached down a hand to help him up. His friends and neighbors, the people he’d known all his life, simply turned their backs on him and walked away. Cándido got drunk. And when he sobered up he got drunk again. And again. He was too ashamed to go back to his aunt’s and so he wandered the hills, sleeping where he fell, till his clothes turned to rags and he stank like a goat. Children pelted him with rocks and made up songs about him, rhymes to skip rope by, and the keening of their voices burned into him like a rawhide whip. He made for the border finally, to lose himself in the North, but the coyote was a fool and the U.S. Immigration caught him before he’d gone a hundred yards and pitched him back into the dark fastness of the Tijuana night.

  He was broke, and he danced for people on the streets there, begged change from turistas, got himself a can of kerosene and became a tragafuegos, a streetcorner firebreather who sacrificed all sensation in his lips, tongue and palate for a few centavos and a few centavos more. What he made, he spent on drink. When his fall was complete, when he’d scraped every corner of himself raw, he came back to Tepoztlán and moved in with his aunt in the house he’d built for her. He made charcoal for a living. Climbed into the hills every morning, cut wood and slow-burned it for sale to housewives as fuel for their braziers and the stoves they’d made out of old Pemex barrels. He did nothing else. He saw no one. And then one day he ran across America in the street and everything changed. “Don’t you know me?” she demanded, and he didn’t know her, not at first. She was sixteen and she looked exactly like her sister, only better. He set down the bundle of sticks he was carrying and straightened out his back with an abbreviated twist. “You’re América,” he said, and then he gave it a minute as a car came up the road, scattering chickens and sending an explosion of pigeons into the air, “and I’m going to take you with me when I go North.”

  That was what he thought about as he lay there in the ravine, fragile as a peeled egg, that was what America meant to him—just his life, that was all—and that was why he was worried, edgy, afraid, deeply afraid for the first time in as long as he could remember. What if something should happen to her? What if the Immigration caught her? What if some gabacho hit her with his car? What if one of the vagos from the labor exchange... but he didn’t like to think about them. They were too close to him. It was too much to hold in his aching head.

  The sun had ridden up over the eastern ridge. The heat was coming on faster than it had during the past week, the mist burning off sooner—there would be winds in the afternoon and the canyon walls would hold the heat like the walls of an oven. He could feel the change of the weather in his hip, his elbow, the crushed side of his face. The sun crept across the sand and hit him in the crotch, the chest, his chin, lips and ravaged nose. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.

  When he woke he was thirsty. Not just thirsty—consumed with thirst, maddened by it. His clothes were wet, the blanket beneath him damp with his sweat. With an effort, he pushed himself up and staggered into the shade where America kept their drinking water in two plastic milk jugs from which he’d cut the tops with his worn-out switchblade. He snatched up the near jug and lifted air to his lips: it was empty. So was the other one. His throat constricted.

  He knew better than to drink the water straight from the stream—and he’d warned America about it too. Every drop had to be boiled first. It was a pain in the ass—gathering wood, stoking the fire, setting the blackened can on the coals—but it was necessary. America had balked at first—why go to the trouble? This was the U.S.A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the gringo fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He’d been here before, in this very spot, and he’d been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains? he demanded. Or how many houses were packed up there all the way to the asshole of the canyon, and every one of them leaching waste out into the gullies and streams that fed into the creek?

  He knew better than to drink the water, but he did. He was dying. He was dried out like
the husk of something washed up at high tide and left for a 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?