The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  Delaney set the milk down on the floor. He was in a hurry, dinner on the stove, Jordan in the car, Kyra about to walk in the door, but in the heat of the moment he forgot all about it. “I can’t believe you,” he said, and he couldn’t seem to control his free arm, waving it in an expanding loop. “Do you realize what you’re saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country—we’re a nation of immigrants—and neither of us would be standing here today if it wasn’t.”

  “Clichés. There’s a point of saturation. Besides which, the Jardines fought in the Revolutionary War—you could hardly call us immigrants.”

  “Everybody’s an immigrant from somewhere. My grandfather came over from Bremen and my grandmother was Irish—does that make me any less a citizen than the Jardines?”

  A woman with frosted hair and a face drawn tight as a drumskin ducked between them for a jar of olives. Jack worked a little grit into his voice: “That’s not the point. Times have changed, my friend. Radically. Do you have any idea what these people are costing us, and not just in terms of crime; but in real tax dollars for social services? No? Well, you ought to. You must have seen that thing in the Times a couple weeks ago, about the San Diego study?”

  Delaney shook his head. He felt his stomach sink, heard the thump of phantom speakers. Suddenly the horned lizard sprang back into the forefront of his consciousness: what good was squirting blood from your eyes? Wouldn’t that just be gravy for whatever was about to clamp down on you?

  “Look, Delaney,” Jack went on, cool, reasonable, his voice in full song now, “it’s a simple equation, so much in, so much out. The illegals in San Diego County contributed seventy million in tax revenues and at the same time they used up two hundred and forty million in services—welfare, emergency care, schooling and the like. You want to pay for that? And for the crime that comes with it? You want another crazy Mexican throwing himself under your wheels hoping for an insurance payoff? Or worse, you want one of them behind the wheel bearing down on you, no insurance, no brakes, no nothing?”

  Delaney was trying to organize his thoughts. He wanted to tell Jack that he was wrong, that everyone deserved a chance in life and that the Mexicans would assimilate just like the Poles, Italians, Germans, Irish and Chinese and that besides which we’d stolen California from them in the first place, but he didn’t get the chance. At that moment Jack Jr. appeared from behind the cranberry juice display, the great fluttering sail of his T-shirt in motion, his pants wide enough to bankrupt the factory. Two liters of Pepsi sprouted from his knuckles and he cradled a bag of nachos the size of a pillow under his arm. The bag had been torn raggedly open. Delaney could see flecks of MSG, food coloring and salt crystals caked in the corners of the boy’s mouth. “Hey, Dad,” Jack Jr. murmured, ducking his head to avoid a display banner and greeting Delaney with a dip of his eyes and an awkward croak of salutation. “Got to go, Dad,” he prodded, his voice aflame with hormonal urgency. “Steffie’s waiting.”

  And then they were moving in the direction of the cash registers—all three of them, as a group—and Jack, the conciliatory Jack, Jack the politician, Jack the soother of gripes, grievances and hurts real or imaginary, put an arm over Delaney’s shoulder and warbled his sweetest notes: “Listen, Delaney, I know how you feel, and I agree with you. It’s not easy for me either—it’s nothing less than rethinking your whole life, who you are and what you believe in. And trust me: when we get control of the border again—if we get control of it—I’ll be the first to advocate taking that gate down. But don’t kid yourself: it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

  Though there were three checkers, people were lined up six deep at the registers. Delaney gave Jack a weak smile and got in line beside him. He gazed out over the mob of his fellow shoppers, past the checkout girl and the banners and baubles and slogans to the parking lot, where his Acura stood gleaming in the sun, and remembered that he was in a hurry—or had been. He could see the crown of Jordan’s head bobbing and weaving just above the dashboard and pictured the electronic Armageddon raging in that confined space, the boy’s nimble fingers sending intergalactic invaders to their doom even as the next ship landed.

  Delaney opted for the paper bag—recycle, save the environment—and waited for the girl to ring up Jack and Jack Jr.’s purchases, the rack behind her bright with batteries, Slim Jims, toenail clippers and gum. He was thinking he could work that horned toad into his next column—it was symbolic somehow, deeply symbolic, though he wasn’t sure of exactly what.

  “Sorry for the lecture,” Jack crooned in his ear. “You see my point though?”

  Delaney turned to him as the checkout girl swept Jack Jr.’s Pepsi bottles over the scanner with a practiced flick of her wrist. “All right, Jack,” he said finally, conceding the field, “I don’t like the gate—I’ll never like it—but! I accept it. None of us want urban crime up here—that’d be crazy. And if I got a little carried away at the meeting it was because this feeding of the predator species has got to stop, I mean people have to realize—”

  “You’re right,” Jack said, giving his elbow an affirmative squeeze. “Absolutely.”

  “And I tell you, Kyra was really heartbroken over that dog—and I was too. You live with a pet all that time...”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  They moved toward the door, bags cradled in their arms, Jack Jr. looming over them like a distorted shadow. The door slid back and they were out in the lot, all three of them, the sun glancing off the windshields of the cars, the hills awash in light. Jack said he was sorry to hear about the dog and wondered if Delaney had ever thought about putting out a little newsletter for the community, the sort of thing that would alert them to the dangers of living on the edge of the wild and maybe even reprint one or two of his columns? People would love it. They would.

  But Delaney wasn’t listening. Across the short span of the lot, over by the gift shop, there was some sort of altercation going on—a fat-faced truck-driver type with an elaborate hairdo going ballistic over something... was it a fight? The three of them froze just behind Delaney’s car as the trouble came toward them—You wetback motherfucker, watch where the fuck you’re going or I swear I’ll kick your sorry ass from here to Algodones and back—and Delaney got a look at the other man involved. He saw the sideways movement, the scuttling feet in their dirty tire-tread sandals, the skittish red-flecked eyes and graying mustache, and experienced a shock of recognition: here it was all over again.

  He felt anger and shame at the same time—the man was a bum, that was all, hassling somebody else now, and yet the look of him, the wordless plea in his eyes and the arm in a sling and the side of his face layered with scab like old paint brought all Delaney’s guilt back to the surface, a wound that refused to heal. His impulse was to intercede, to put an end to it, and yet in some perverse way he wanted to see this dark alien little man crushed and obliterated, out of his life forever. It was then, in the moment of Delaney’s vacillation, that the big man lurched forward and gave the Mexican a shove that sent him staggering into the rear of Delaney’s car. There was the dull reverberation of sheet metal, a soft cry from the Mexican, and the big man, his face inflamed, spat out a final curse and swung round on his heels.

  Jack Jr. stood rooted to the spot by the black leather blocks of his hi-tops, clenching his fists. Unruffled, Jack Sr. had stepped neatly aside, the pleats of his pants like two plumb lines, his mouth pursed in distaste. Delaney was reaching for his keys when the altercation swept toward them, and now he stood poised over the trunk of his car, groceries pressed like a shield to his chest, keys dangling limply from his fingers, looking on numbly as the dark man got shakily to his feet, muttering apologies in his own dark language. The Mexican seemed dazed—or maybe deranged. He lifted his heavy eyes to focus blearily on Jack, then Jack Jr. and finally Delaney. Faintly, from inside the car, came the thin tinny sound effects of Jordan’s electronic war. The man stood there a long moment, squinting into Delaney’s eyes, the rag o
f a sling hanging from his arm, his face sunk in its helmet of bruises, and then he turned away and limped across the lot, hunched under a rain of imaginary blows.

  “See what I mean?” Jack said.

  “What would you do with all this space?” Kyra heard herself asking, and even before the question passed her lips she knew it was wrong. She should have exclaimed, And look at all this space! with the rising inflection of a cheerleader, but somehow she’d put a negative spin on it, the very question implying that the expanse of brilliantly buffed floors and high beamed ceilings was excessive, de trop, somehow too much, that the living room was the size of a basketball court and the master bedroom bigger than most people’s houses—and who needed all that? Who but a monster of ego, a parvenu, a robber baron? It wasn’t the sort of question a closer should ask.

  Louisa Greutert gave her a curious look—nothing more than the briefest darting glance of surprise—but it was enough. Kyra knew what she was thinking.

  Louisa’s husband, Bill—thin, nervous, with a tonsure of silver hair and the face of an ascetic—was wandering through the immensity of the dining room, hands clasped behind his back. He was president of his own company, Pacific Rim Investments, and he’d lived in Bel Air for the past twenty years, the majority of that time with his first wife, who’d kept the house as part of the divorce settlement. Kyra pegged him for sixty-five or so, though he looked younger; Louisa was in her late forties.

  “You know we know the Da Roses socially,” Louisa murmured, running a jeweled hand over the surface of a built-in mahogany china cabinet, “or we did, that is, before Albert took his life... They made some bad investments, is what I hear...” This wasn’t so much a statement of fact as a supposition, an opening: she wanted gossip. And gossip was a commodity Kyra readily served up, if it suited her purposes. This time, though, she merely said: “She’s living in Italy.”

  “Italy?”

  “Her family has an estate there. Near Turin. Didn’t you know?” In fact, Kyra barely knew Patricia Da Ros—the referral had come to her from an associate at the Beverly Hills office, and aside from two long-distance calls, all the arrangements had been made via fax.

  Louisa was silent a moment, lingering over some ceramic figurines displayed on a brightly painted Gothic Revival dresser; then she lifted her head like a hunting dog attuned to the faintest distant sound. It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the curtains of the big central room were aflame with light. “They were funny about this house. Did you know they never entertained. I mean never?”

  Kyra let a small vaguely interrogatory noise escape her. This was her signal to talk the place up, rhapsodize over the views, the privacy, the value and exclusivity, but something held her back. She was reticent today, not herself at all, and as she watched this lithe busy woman stalk through the corridors and poke into the cupboards she had a revelation that took her by surprise—she realized that deep down she didn’t want to sell the place. She wanted the listing, yes, and she was born to move property and the commission would put her over the top and ensure her of the sales crown for the fourth consecutive year, but she’d never felt this way about a house before. The more time she spent in it, cushioned from the hot, dry, hard-driving world, the more she began to feel it was hers—really hers, and not just in some metaphorical sense. How could these people even begin to appreciate it the way she did? How could anyone?

  “Of course,” the woman went on now, trying the lower drawer of a locked sideboard, “they were a bit out of the way up here... and yet it’s a terrific location, I don’t mean to say that, right on the edge of Malibu and only, what, twenty minutes from Santa Monica? Still, I wonder who’d want to schlepp all the way out here even if they were the type to entertain...”

  Kyra had nothing to say to this, one way or the other. Bill Greutert had already confided to her that he and his wife were looking for something out of the way and had specifically asked about this house. It’s just so crowded down there, he said, you get this feeling of the city closing in on you, even in Bel Air. There’s just so many—he’d waved his hand in exasperation, searching for the judicious term—people, you know what I mean?

  Kyra knew. Since the riots she’d met dozens of couples like the Greuterts. They all wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe—something removed from people of whatever class and color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants pouring in from Mexico and Central America, from Dubai, Burundi and Lithuania, from Asia and India and everywhere else in the known world. Brown people. Colored people. People in saris, serapes and kaffiyehs. That was what Bill Greutert meant. He didn’t have to say anything more.

  An hour later, Louisa Greutert was still making the rounds of the house, poking through drawers like a detective at the scene of a crime, while her husband paced back and forth against the backdrop of the canyon, hands clasped rigidly behind his back. Kyra tried to remain attentive, tried her best to look sincere and helpful, but her heart wasn’t in it. She stood to make a commission on both ends of the deal—there was no other realtor involved—but still she just couldn’t seem to motivate herself. By the end of the second hour she’d settled into a leather wing chair in the library, gazing out into the hazy sunstruck distance, idly thumbing through one of Albert Da Ros’s leather-bound volumes—poetry, as it turned out. Louisa Greutert had to come looking for her finally, her voice echoing through the vast empty space of the house, the sound of her heels like gunshots coming up the corridor. “Through already?” Kyra murmured, rising guiltily from the chair.

  And there was that look again, the head tilted to one side, the cold hard eyes fixing her with a look of amusement and disdain. “We’ve been here nearly two and a half hours.”

  “Oh, well, I didn’t mean—I didn’t realize it had been that long.” Kyra let her gaze wander over the shelves of books, the leather-backed chairs, the wainscoting, the lamps in their sconces, and it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. “It’s just that the place is so restful—”

  She was aware in that moment of the presence of the husband in the hallway behind her, a ghostly figure like some unsettled spirit of the place. He crossed the room to his wife, there was a brief whispered consultation, and then the wife’s voice came back at her with the suddenness of a twig snapping underfoot: “I’m afraid it’s not for us.”

  In the morning, Delaney sat at his keyboard, his face illuminated by the pale glow of the monitor. Over breakfast, he’d watched a pair of starlings crowding out the wrens and finches at the bird feeder, and an idea came to him: why not do a series of sketches on introduced species? The idea excited him—the whole thrust of the “Pilgrim” columns was that he himself was a recent transplant, seeing the flora and fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte, and a series on creatures like the opossum, the escargot, the starling and the parakeet would be perfect. The only problem was, the words wouldn’t come, or the images either. When he tried to envision the canyon, the white dust trails threaded through stands of mesquite and yucca till the very bones of the mountains lay exposed, or even the parking lot at the Woodland Hills McDonald’s, swarming with one-legged blackbirds and rumpled, diseased-looking starlings, he saw only the Mexican. His Mexican. The man he had to forget all over again.

  He’d wanted to shout out an indictment—“That’s him! That’s the one!”—but something held him back. What, exactly, he didn’t know. Misplaced sympathy? Guilt? Pity? It was a wasted opportunity because Jack was there to see for himself how blameless Delaney was—the man was a nuisance, a bum, a panhandler. If anything, Delaney was the victim, his twenty dollars separated from him through a kind of extortion, an emotional sleight of hand that preyed on his good nature and fellow feeling. He’d read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn’t this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in fro
nt of a car for the thin hope of twenty bucks?

  Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he’d turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty. Jordan wasn’t hungry. Kyra was dreamy and distant. Osbert mourned his lost sibling, crouching behind the sofa for the better part of the evening, and even the cat lapped halfheartedly at a can of Tuna & Liver Flavor Complete Feline Dinner. A gloom seemed to hang over the household, and they turned in early.

  But now it was another day and the house was quiet and Delaney had nothing to occupy him but nature and the words to contain it, yet there he sat, staring into the screen. After several false starts, he poked halfheartedly through his natural-history collection and discovered that the starlings he saw in the McDonald’s lot were descendants of a flock released in Central Park a hundred years ago by an amateur ornithologist and Shakespeare buff who felt that all the birds mentioned in the Bard’s works should roost in North America, and that the snails ravaging his garden and flowerbeds were imported by a French chef who’d envisioned them roasting in their own shells with a sauce of garlic and butter. It was rich material, fascinating in its way—how could people be so blind?—and he could feel the germ of it growing in him, but ultimately he was too unsettled to work. Though it was barely half-past ten, he shut down the computer and went out early for his afternoon hike.