The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.

  “Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don’t bite. I’m a friendly guy—don’t you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don’t you?”

  “All right,” she said, and she felt the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I’m a married woman and it’s not right to talk to me like that—”

  He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy, loco, demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle—just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”

  Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man—a giant of a fat man, a real guatón—stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then—miracle of miracles!—Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even—she had a job and they didn’t. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded guatón of a white man with no consciousness of how she’d gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.

  “Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman’s voice, in English.

  America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.

  The fat man, the gringo, called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn’t understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the gringa had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn’t speak any English—what do you want with her?”

  “Quiero trabajar,” América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”

  Candelario Pérez said something to the man—América was there before the gringa, first come, first served—and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment—too long—and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something—she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared—and Candelario Pérez told her, “It’s all right, six hours’ work and he’ll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary—big Mary, the drunk, the gringa maid who’d tried to cut her out—got in too.

  Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the Laboratorio Medico in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm’s way. Those boys—those teenage gabachos—had terrified him. They weren’t La Migra, no, and they weren’t the police, but the way they’d attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who’d raised them must have been even worse—and what would have happened if they’d come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?

  He’d fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he’d lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América’s dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren’t his wife at all, just somebody he’d met in the street.

  All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He’d gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end—a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter’s floods crammed into every crevice.

  Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand—if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his huaraches—they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut—and feel his way barefoot. It wasn’t a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there—snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.

  When he waded back in, clinging to the Tough canyon wall for support, the huaraches were strung around his neck and the rucksack propped up on the crown of his head. The water reached his knees, his crotch, his waist, and finally it came right up to his armpits, which meant that America would have to swim. He thought of that as his toes felt their way through the muck, of America swimming, the hair spread wet on her shoulders, her dress balled up in one slim pretty hand and held high above her, and he began to feel horny, a sure sign that he was healing.

  He found what he was looking for at the rear of the pool, just behind the wreckage of the car. There was a spit of sand there, a private beach just wide enough for a blanket and some sort of shelter—a lean-to, maybe—and then the canyon closed up like a fist. A sheer wall of stone, thirty feet or more in height, rose up out of a shallow pool to a cleft from which the stream splayed out into the air in a perpetual shower. The light was soft, filtered through the vegetation above, and what Cándido saw wasn’t stone and leaf and grain of sand, but a sitting room with a big shaded lamp dangling from the ceiling, with sofas and chairs and a polished wooden floor that gleamed beneath a burden of wax. It was a revelation. A vision. The sort of thing that might have inspired a pilgrim to build a shrine.

  Cándido set down his rucksack and rested in the warm sand till his clothes dried to a uniform dampness. Then he got up and began constructing a rude hearth, one rock at a time, one beside the other, and in his excitement, in the heat of the moment, he forgot his pain. When it was done, when the circle was complete and the battered refrigerator grill laid neatly atop it, he found he still had the strength to gather firewood—anything to keep moving—and he began to think about what America might bring home with her. If she’d found work, that is. And of course he’d have to wait at the old spot f
or her and they’d have to wade across with the groceries ... but maybe she’d have some tortillas or a piece of meat and something to cook down into a stew, some vegetables and rice or a couple of potatoes...

  There’d been no breakfast, nothing, not a twig to suck, and he was as hungry as he’d ever been in his life, but the hunger spurred him on and as the pile of water-bleached sticks began to grow an idea took hold of him: he would surprise her, that’s what he would do. With a real camp. Something solid and substantial, a place they could call home—at least till he got back on his feet and found work and they could have their own apartment in a nice neighborhood with trees and sidewalks and a space for the car he was going to buy her, and he could see the outline of that space already, fresh blacktop, all neatly laid out and marked with crisp yellow paint...

  He found some twine—or was it fishing line?—in a pile of water-run brush, and two black plastic bags that he was able to work into the thatch of the roof. His hip hurt him still, and his knee, and his ribs when he stretched, but he was a slave to the idea, and by the time the sun had passed over the lip of the canyon and left him in an artificial twilight, a sturdy lean-to of interlaced branches stood on the spit behind the rusted hulk of the car, work he could be proud of.

  He dozed, exhausted from his efforts, and when he woke a weak patina of sunlight painted the eastern rim of the ledge above him. He looked up drowsily, full of a false sense of well-being, and then it hit him: América. Where was she? She wasn’t here... but then, how could she be? This wasn’t their old camp, this wasn’t a place she knew. He got to his feet, the pain digging claws into his hip, and cursed himself. It must have been four, five o’clock. She’d be back there, downstream, looking for him, and how could she doubt that he’d run out on her for good?

  Cursing still, cursing nonstop, he plunged into the pool and slashed through the murky water, heart hammering, and never mind his clothes. He hurried along the streambed as fast as his hip would allow, frantic now, in a panic—and then he rounded the bend that gave onto their old camp and she wasn’t there. The leaves hung limp, the stream stood still. There was no trace of her, no note, no pile of stones or scribble in the sand. This was muy gacho, bad news. And fuck his stinking pinche life. Fuck it.

  Then it was up the hill, each step a crucifixion, and what choice did he have?—up the hill for the first time since the accident. He hadn’t gone a hundred feet before he had to stop and catch his breath. The clothes hung sodden from his frame—and he’d lost weight, he had, lying there in the stinking sand with nothing but scraps and vegetables to eat for the last nine days like some wasted old sack of bones in a nursing home. He spat in the dirt, gritted his teeth, and went on.

  The sun was hot still, though it must have been six o’clock at least, higher and hotter than down below. Despite his wet clothes he began to sweat, and he had to use his hands—or his one good hand—to help him over the rough places. When he was halfway up, at a spot where the trail jogged to the right and dodged round a big reddish chipped tooth of a boulder, he had a surprise. A nasty surprise. Turning the corner and throwing a quick glance up the trail ahead, he saw that he wasn’t alone. A man was coming down from above, a stranger, long strides caught up in the mechanics of a walk that threw his hips out as if they belonged to somebody else. Cándido’s first reaction was to duck into the bushes, but it was too late: the man was on top of him already, leaning back against the pitch of the slope like an insect climbing down a blade of grass.

  “Hey, ’mano,” the man said, his voice as high and harsh as a hawk’s call. “¿Qué onda? What’s happening?” He’d stopped there in the middle of the trail that was no more than two feet wide, a tall pale man made taller by the slope, speaking the border Spanish of the back alleys and cantinas of Tijuana. He was wearing a baseball cap turned backwards on his head and his eyes were a color Cándido couldn’t identify, somewhere between yellow and red, like twin bruises set in his skull. He was one of the vagos from the labor exchange, that’s what he was. And he’d have a knife in his pocket or tucked into the back of his belt.

  “Buenas,” Cándido murmured, keeping an eye on him, though God knew he had nothing worth stealing but the clothes on his back—and they’d been washed and mended so many times they wouldn’t fetch more than a few centavos at a rag shop. But you could never tell: sometimes they’d steal your shirt just for pure meanness.

  “What’s it like down there, brother?” the man asked, indicating the ravine with a flick of his eyes. The sun glanced off his face. His skin was the color of a dirty bar of soap—not white, but not brown either. “Comfortable? Quiet? There’s water, right?”

  When the stranger swiveled his shoulders to scan the ravine, Cándido saw that he had a bedroll wound up tight and slung across his back with a length of twine. Cándido didn’t want to give him any encouragement—if word got out, the whole labor exchange would be down there. “Not much,” he said.

  This was funny. The man let out a little bark of a laugh and grinned to show off a cheap set of fake teeth. “Judging from the look of you, carnal, there’s enough to go swimming in, eh?”

  Cándido held the man’s eyes. He shrugged. “It’s an unlucky place. I had a camp down there but they raided it three days ago. Gabachos. They painted things on the rocks with their spray cans. You won’t catch me down there again.”

  Birds flitted from bush to bush. The sun stood still. The man was taking his time. “That what happened to your face? And that arm?”

  “Yeah. Or no—not then.” Cándido shrugged again, conscious of the tattered sling that cradled his left arm. The arm was better, a whole lot better, but that still gave him an arm and a half to the stranger’s two—if it came to that. “It’s a long story,” he said.

  The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido’s ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass—he was in control, and he knew it. “So where’s your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”

  “They took it all,” Cándido lied. “Pinche gabachos. I hid in the bushes.”

  A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into his pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he’d got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret—;he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now—“it’s been good talking to you, always good to talk to a compañero, but I’ve got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight... you don’t know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”

  No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido’s head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.

  “I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn’t have a little bite of something on you, would you?”

  The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him—he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.

  “Sorry, ’mano,” the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed d
own the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn’t be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.

  Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the trail. Now he had to worry about this stinking crack-toothed pendejo nosing around down in the canyon, as if he didn’t have enough problems already. And what if he found their camp? What then? Cándido felt jealous suddenly, possessive: the son of a bitch. There was a whole range of mountains here, canyons all over the place—too many to count—and why did he have to pick this one? Anger spurred him on—and worry. He was breathing hard and his hip hurt, his knee, the throbbing crust of scab that masked the left side of his face. He kept going, forcing himself on, until a sudden screech of tires let him know that the road was just above him, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.

  And then he emerged from the bushes and he was out on the road, the traffic hurtling past him in a crazy gringo taillight-chasing rush—and what was the hurry, the constant hurry? Making a buck, that’s what. Building their glass office towers and adding up the figures on their dark little TV screens, getting richer—that’s what the hurry was. And that was why the gabachos had cars and clothes and money and the Mexicans didn’t. He walked along the highway, feeling strange—this was just where he’d been hit, just here—and he felt the cold steel rush of a passing car at his back and someone leaned on the horn and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He watched the taillights and cursed under his breath.

  He looked first in the parking lot at the Chinese store, but America wasn’t there. There were no Mexicans around at this hour, not a one—you’d think they’d all vanished into the earth, like those toad-stools that spring up after a rainfall and disappear by sunset. The place was swarming with norteamericanos though, hordes of them, jumping in and out of their cars, hustling into the store and hustling back out again with their brown paper bags full of beer and wine and little sweet things to put in the mouth. They looked at Cándido like he was a leper.