The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  On up the street, careful, careful, look both ways and cross. Nobody was coming down the canyon, but they were all going up, endlessly, relentlessly, enough cars to fill twenty big boats going back to Japan where they’d all come from in the first place. There was a little shopping plaza here, the one with the larger market and the paisano from Italy. This was where America would be if she’d missed him down below, or if—and the idea hit him with the sudden force of inspiration—if she was working. Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d been worrying for nothing. Maybe she would have money and they could buy food.

  Food. His stomach clenched at the thought of it and he felt faint for just a moment—a moment, that was all, but it was enough to make him lurch into a big beefy gabacho with sideburns that ate up half his face and hair all piled up slick on his head like Elvis in one of those black velvet tapestries. The man shoved him away, a violent thrust of the arms, and said something harsh, something hateful, his face exploding with it. “Escuse, escuse,” Cándido blurted, throwing up his hands and backing away, but they were all watching now, all the gabachos in the parking lot, and he would have run but his legs wouldn’t carry him.

  At six p.m., with the sun starting to slant down in the west and the shadows of the trees swelling against the windows like images out of a dream, America was working. Still working. Though the six hours were up and the fat man was nowhere to be found. Candelario Pérez had said six hours’ work, twenty-five dollars, and this was eight hours now and she was wondering, did this mean the fat man would pay her more? Six divided into twenty-five was four dollars and sixteen cents an hour, and so, for two extra hours she should get, what—eight dollars and thirty-two cents more. She glowed with the thought of it. She was earning money, money for food, for Cándido and her baby—she, who’d never earned a centavo in her life. She’d worked in her father’s house, of course, cooking and cleaning and running errands for her mother, and he gave her an allowance each week, but it was nothing like this, nothing like earning a wage from a stranger—and a gringo, no less. Cándido would be surprised. Of course he would have guessed by now that she was working, but wait till he saw her tonight, coming down that trail into the canyon with all the groceries she could carry, with meat and eggs and rice and a can of those big sardines, the ones in oil so rich you lick it from the tips of your fingers...

  She thought of that, held the image in her brain till it was imprinted there, and her hands were quick and nimble even after eight hours, and the fumes hardly bothered her. They bothered Mary, though. Bothered her plenty. The big gringa with the ring through her nose hadn’t shut up about it since the fat man had led them into this great long beautiful room of his house lined with windows and given them each a pair of yellow latex gloves and the plastic bottles of the corrosive. America didn’t understand what the woman was saying, of course, and she tried to block her out too, but the drift of it was inescapable. Mary didn’t like the work. Mary didn’t need the work. Mary had a house with a roof and four walls and a refrigerator with food in it. She didn’t like the fumes or the fat man or his beautiful house or life on this planet. She tipped back a pint of that liquor she had with her and as the day went on she got slower and slower till practically all she did at the end was sit there and complain.

  The work was hard, no doubt about it. The man had hundreds of straw cases lining the walls of the room and stacked up to the ceiling in the back, and in each case was a stone figurine of the Buddha, gone black with mold and age. They were all the same: two feet high, heavier than lead, the bald head and pregnant gut and the stupid grin that was meant to be a look of wisdom but could as easily have been senility or constipation. And each Buddha had to be scrubbed with the corrosive to take the discoloration off the brow, under the eyelids and lips, in the crevices beneath the arms and the tiny blackened indentation of the navel. When it was cleaned, when the corrosive had devoured the mold and the wire brushes had dug their deepest, the Buddha took on a rosy sheen, and then it was time to affix the glossy gold strip of paper with the glue already on it that read JIM SHIRLEY IMPORTS.

  America didn’t care about the fumes or the tired nasal rant of the gringa or the stiffening in her fingers and the ache in her back from lifting statue after statue out of its cradle and setting it on the table before her—all she cared about was pleasing this healthy big bearded fat man who’d given her the chance to earn the money she needed to stay alive till things got better. She worked hard. Worked like two women. And she never stopped, not even to stretch her aching back or massage her cramping fingers, not even for a minute.

  Finally, at quarter past seven by the bronze sunburst clock on the wall, the fat man slammed through the door, running sweat, and gave them a wild-eyed look. He was panting, and the big T-shirt he wore—Mickey Mouse poised on the steps of the Magic Kingdom—was wet under the arms. He barked out something in a roaring deep voice and Mary sprang to her feet, roaring something back at him. America had her head down, raking the wire brush across the belly of the nearest Buddha as if she were trying to saw it in two. She was tired and hungry and she had to pee, but at the same time she wanted to stay here forever in the big clean open room earning four dollars and sixteen cents for every hour the blood flowed through her veins and the air swelled her lungs. She scrubbed at the statue. Scrubbed furiously.

  The patrón didn’t seem to notice. His words were truncated, clipped off as if he couldn’t spare the breath for them—“Okay, that’s it, let’s go”—and he clapped his hands twice, two short impatient bursts as abrupt as a cannonade. America didn’t dare look up. Her fingers flew, the brush rasped. He was standing right over her now—“Come on, let’s go, I’m in a hurry here”—and she felt a quick surge of panic. It was time to go, yes? Eight hours and more—of course it was. And yet she couldn’t escape the feeling that he was criticizing her, urging her to work faster, harder, to ply the brush and pour the corrosive and make every Buddha in the room shine as if it had just emerged from the mold.

  “Jesus,” he said, letting the air hiss over his teeth, and she understood him now. She wanted to apologize—the words were on her lips—but she didn’t have the chance. The next thing she knew he had her by the elbow and he was pulling her roughly from the seat—“Finish now, finish,” he was saying—while Mary, a cigarette clamped between her lips, called out “Vamos” in a drunken slur and they were moving, all three of them, out the door, down the steps and into the rich new car with the airtight doors.

  Mary sat up front with the patrón; America had the broad plane of the rear seat to herself, like a queen or a movie star. She sank back in the seat and let her eyes play over the blue-green lawns with their bursts of flowers—flowers everywhere, the very trees on the streets in bloom—and the tall angular houses that rose out of the hills behind them, every one striped and striped again with windows, as if they were expecting an invasion from the sea. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of those houses, gazing out the kitchen window at the sunstruck crags of the canyon while the machine for the dishes did your work for you and the radio played the soft sad music of violins and cellos. She studied the back of the fat man’s neck for clues. It was unrevealing. Thick, pinkish, with little puckered mouths of flesh at the nape and a riot of hacked stiff hairs, it could have been anybody’s neck. And then she wondered about his wife—what was she like? Was she fat too? Or was she one of those women you saw in the ads with a leotard clinging to her puffed-up breasts and her eyes staring out from the page like an animal’s?

  They went through a gate—two broad pastel-colored steel grids that swung back automatically as the car approached. The gate hadn’t been there in the morning—América was sure of that. It had been ten-thirty or so when they came through and she was alive to everything, to every nuance, to the houses, the cars, the people in them, and she remembered seeing half a dozen of her own people there, with picks and shovels and a cement mixer—she thought she recognized one of the men from the labor exchange but the car went by to
o quickly to be sure. Two stone pillars had framed the road under a wrought-iron bonnet with a Spanish inscription—ARROYO BLANCO—and then a word in English she couldn’t decipher, and there was a little booth there, like the ticket booth in the movies, but no one was inside and the fat man didn’t stop. Now the gate was up. America looked over her shoulder and saw that the steel bars extended on the outside of the two main pillars to a series of smaller stone columns that were only half-built. She saw a wheelbarrow, three shovels lined up neatly, a pick, and then they were out on the canyon road and heading back down the hill to the labor exchange.

  Mary was saying something to the patrón, waving her hands, pointing—directions, that was it—and he turned off onto a side street that wound through a stand of dusty oaks to a cluster of little cottages tucked under the arches of the trees. The cottages were in need of paint, but they were fine, charming even, with their wooden shingles, sturdy porches and beams gone gray with age. Pickup trucks and foreign sports cars sat out front of them. There were flowers in pots, cats all over the place, the smell of barbecue. This was where Mary lived, the gringa maid.

  The fat man pulled to a stop in front of a redwood bungalow at the end of the lane, Mary said something, and he shifted in the seat to reach for his wallet. America couldn’t see what he was paying her but from the way the big worthless cow of a drunken gringa was acting she was sure it was for the full eight hours and not just the twenty-five dollars she’d been promised—or had Mary been promised more? The thought stabbed at America as she sat there in the car and watched a boy of twelve or so burst into view on a dirt bike and vanish round the side of the bungalow in a mirage of exhaust. Candelario Pérez had said twenty-five dollars, but maybe Mary was getting thirty or thirty-five, plus the extra two hours, because she was white, because she spoke English and wore a ring through her nose. America was sure of it. She watched the two big heads, complicitous, watched the shoulders dip as the money changed hands, and then Mary was out of the car and the patrón was leaning over the seat saying something in his breathless cut-up incomprehensible garble of a language.

  He wanted her to sit in front, that was it. The contortions of his face, the gestures of his swollen hands told her as much. All right. America got out and slid into the cupped seat beside him. The fat man backed around and shot up the road in an explosion of dust.

  He turned on the radio. No violins, no cellos: guitars. She knew the song vaguely—Hotel California or something like that, Welcome, welcome—and she thought about the strangeness of it all, sitting here in this rich man’s car, earning money, living in the North. She never dreamed it would actually happen. If someone had told her when she was a girl at school she wouldn’t have believed them—it would have been a fairy tale like the one about the charmaid and the glass slipper. And when the fat man laid his hand casually across her thigh, even before he cheated her of the extra two hours and pushed her rudely from the car, she wanted to fling it away from her, hack it off with a machete and bury it in some bruja’s yard, but she didn’t. She just let it lie there like a dead thing, though it moved and insinuated itself and she wanted to scream for the car to stop, for the door to open and for the hard dry brush of the ravine to hide her.

  7

  DELANEY WAS IN A HURRY. HE’D BEEN COOKING DOWN his marinara sauce since two and the mussels were already in the pot and steaming when he discovered that there was no pasta in the house. The table was set, the salad tossed, Kyra due home any minute, Jordan transfixed by his video game, the pasta water boiling. But no pasta. He decided to take a chance, ten minutes down the road, ten minutes back up: Jordan would be okay. “Jordan,” he called, poking his head in the door of the boy’s room, “I’m going down to Gitello’s for some pasta. Your mother’ll be here any minute. If there’s an emergency, go next door to the Cherrystones’. Selda’s home. I just talked to her. Okay?”

  The back of the boy’s head was reedy and pale, the seed pod of some exotic wildflower buffeted by the video winds, a twitch here, a shoulder shrug there, the forward dip of unbroken, inviolable concentration.

  “Okay?” Delaney repeated. “Or do you want to come with me? You can come if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what? Are you coming or staying?”

  There was a pause during which Delaney adjusted to the room’s dim artificial light, the light of a cell or dungeon, and felt the fierce unyielding grip of the little gray screen. The shades were down and the rapid-fire blasts and detonations of the game were the only sounds, relieved at intervals by a canned jingle. He thought then of the house burning down with Jordan in it, Jordan aflame and barely aware of it—ten minutes down the road, ten minutes back up—and realized he couldn’t leave him even for a second, even with Selda right next door and the mussels getting tough and the water boiling and Kyra due home. The kid was six years old and the world was full of nasty surprises—look what had happened to the dog in their own backyard. What was he thinking?

  Jordan never even turned his head. “Stay,” he murmured.

  “You can’t stay.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “You have to go.”

  “Mom’ll be home in a minute.”

  “Get in the car.”

  No traffic coming down the hill at this hour—it was nearly six—and Delaney made it in eight minutes, despite having to sit behind two cars at the gate that had gone up this afternoon to keep the riffraff out of the Elysian Groves of Arroyo Blanco Estates. The parking lot was crowded though, commuters with strained looks shaking the stiffness out of their joints as they lurched from their cars and staggered through the door in search of the six-pack, the prechopped salad (just add the premixed dressing) and the quart of no-fat milk. Jordan sat in the front seat, securely belted in, bent over his Game Boy. “You coming in?” Delaney asked.

  Zip, bang, zing-zing-zing. “Uh-uh.”

  And then Delaney was in full flight, springing up off his toes—and what else did they need: milk? bread? coffee?—his shoulders hunched defensively as he sought the gaps between the massed flesh and dilatory carts of his fellow shoppers. He had the pasta tucked under his arm—perciatelli, imported, in the blue-and-yellow box—and two baguettes, a wedge of Romano, a gallon of milk and a jar of roasted peppers clutched to his chest, when he ran into Jack Jardine. He’d been thinking about the horned lizard he’d seen on his afternoon hike (or horned toad, as most people erroneously called it) and its wonderful adaptation of ejecting blood from its eye sockets when threatened, and he was right on top of Jack before he noticed him.

  It was an awkward moment. Not only because Delaney was practically jogging down the aisle and almost blundered into him, but because of what had happened at the meeting a week and a half ago. Looking back on it, Delaney had a nagging suspicion that he’d made a fool of himself. “Jack,” he breathed, and he could feel his face going through all the permutations before settling on an exculpatory smile.

  Jack was cocked back on one hip, his jacket buttoned, tie crisp, a plastic handbasket dangling from his fingertips. Two bottles of Merlot were laid neatly in the basket, their necks protruding from one end. He looked good, as usual, in a pale double-breasted suit that set off his tan and picked up the color of his tight blond beard. “Delaney,” he said, leaning forward to reach for a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, his own smile lordly and bemused. He set the jar in his basket and straightened up. “You were pretty exercised the other night,” he observed, showing his teeth now, the full rich jury-mesmerizing grin. “You even took me by surprise.”

  “I guess I got carried away.”

  “No, no: you were right. Absolutely. It’s just that you know as well as I do what our neighbors are like—if you don’t keep to the agenda you’ve got chaos, pure and simple. And the gate thing is important, probably the single most important agendum we’ve taken up in my two years as president.”

  For a moment Delaney saw the phantom car again, creeping down Piñon Drive with its speakers t
humping like the pulse of some monstrous heart. He blinked to drive the image away. “You really think so? To me, I say it’s unnecessary—and, I don’t know, irresponsible somehow.”

  Jack gave him a quizzical look. “Irresponsible?”

  Delaney shifted his burden, milk from the right hand to the left, baguettes under the arm, pasta to his chest. “I don’t know. I lean more to the position that we live in a democracy, like the guy in the shorts said at the meeting... I mean, we all have a stake in things, and locking yourself away from the rest of society, how can you justify that?”

  “Safety. Self-protection. Prudence. You lock your car, don’t you? Your front door?” A cluck of the tongue, a shift from one hip to the other, blue eyes, solid as stone. “Delaney, believe me, I know how you feel. You heard Jack Cherrystone speak to the issue, and nobody’s credentials can touch Jack’s as far as being liberal is concerned, but this society isn’t what it was—and it won’t be until we get control of the borders.”

  The borders. Delaney took an involuntary step backwards, all those dark disordered faces rising up from the streetcorners and freeway on-ramps to mob his brain, all of them crying out their human wants through mouths full of rotten teeth. “That’s racist, Jack, and you know it.”

  “Not in the least—it’s a question of national sovereignty. Did you know that the U.S. accepted more immigrants last year than all the other countries of the world combined—and that half of them settled in California? And that’s legal immigrants, people with skills, money, education. The ones coming in through the Tortilla Curtain down there, those are the ones that are killing us. They’re peasants, my friend. No education, no resources, no skills—all they’ve got to offer is a strong back, and the irony is we need fewer and fewer strong backs every day because we’ve got robotics and computers and farm machinery that can do the labor of a hundred men at a fraction of the cost.” He dropped his hand in dismissal. “It’s old news.”