The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  There was a year-round stream he’d been meaning to explore up off the main canyon, a sharp brushy ascent cut into the face of the rock, and the extra two and a half hours would enable him to do it. It would require parking along the canyon road, in an area of heavy morning and afternoon traffic and narrow shoulders, hiking down into the main canyon and following the creekbed until he hit the smaller, unnamed canyon, and finally making his way up it. The prospect invigorated him. He pulled on his shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots, and he added two cream-cheese-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches to the bota bag of water, snakebite kit, sunblock, map, compass, windbreaker and binoculars he always kept in his blue nylon daypack and unfailingly carried with him, no matter how short the hike. He didn’t leave a note. He figured he’d be back in plenty of time to pick up Jordan from the summer activities program at the elementary school, after which he’d fix the boy a snack, and then when Kyra got home they’d go out to Emilio’s. He just didn’t feel like cooking. Not after last night.

  It was clear and dry, the last day of June, the coastal fog that had lingered through the spring giving way to the high arching skies of summer. Delaney enjoyed the drive. The traffic was minimal at this hour and the Acura clung effortlessly to the road as he looped through the canyon, cutting cleanly through one curve only to accelerate into the next. He passed Gitello’s, the lumberyard, the place where he’d hit the Mexican, and he didn’t think twice about it—he was free of his desk and heading out into the wild and he felt blessed and unconquerable. He rolled down the window to catch the breeze in his face.

  From here he could see where the previous year’s firestorm had cut the canyon in two, the naked bones of the trees and bushes painted in black against the hillside, but even that cheered him. The canyon had already recovered, and he noted with satisfaction that the pyromaniac who’d set the blaze couldn’t have conceived of the abundance of vegetation that would succeed it. Fertilized by ash, the grasses and wildflowers had put out a bumper crop, and the hills stood waist-deep in stiff golden grass, all part of the cycle, as undeniable as the swing of the earth over its axis.

  After a while he began slowing to look for a safe place to pull over, but there were several cars behind him, including one of those pickups that sit about six feet off the ground and are invariably driven by some tailgating troglodyte—as this one was—and he had to go all the way down to the bottom of the canyon before swinging round in a gas station on the Coast Highway and starting back up. The ocean was there momentarily, filling the horizon, and then it was in his rearview mirror, reduced to a nine-by-three-inch strip. The first curve erased it.

  There was a road crew up ahead on the right, just beyond the bridge where the road crossed the creek at the lower mouth of the canyon. He’d been slowed by them on his way down, and now, impulsively, he swung off the road just beyond the line of big yellow earthmovers. Why not start out here, he was thinking, where the banks were only twenty or thirty feet above the streambed? He’d have to work his way all the farther upstream, but he would save himself the long hike down from above. Of course, he didn’t really like leaving the car at the side of the road, but there wasn’t much choice. At least the road crew would slow traffic down some and hopefully keep the drunks and sideswipers at bay. He shouldered the pack, took a last admiring look at the car and the way its sleek white lines were set off against the chaparral, as if in one of those back-to-nature car commercials, then turned to plunge down the gravelly slope and into the cool dapple of the streambed.

  The first thing he saw, within sixty seconds of reaching the stream and before he’d had a chance to admire the light in the sycamores or the water uncoiling over the rocks like an endless rope, was a pair of dirty sleeping bags laid out on the high sandy bank opposite. Sleeping bags. He was amazed. Not two hundred feet from the road, and here they were, brazen, thoughtless, camping under the very nose of the authorities. He climbed atop a rock for a better look and saw a blackened ring of stones to the immediate right of the sleeping bags and a moth-eaten khaki satchel hanging from the low branch of a tree. And refuse. Refuse everywhere. Cans, bottles, the shucked wrappers of ready-made sandwiches and burritos, toilet paper, magazines—all of it scattered across the ground as if dropped there by a dying wind. Delaney sucked in his breath. The first thing he felt wasn’t surprise or even anger—it was embarrassment, as if he’d broken into some stranger’s bedroom and gone snooping through the drawers. Invisible eyes locked on him. He looked over his shoulder, darted a quick glance up and down the streambed and then peered up into the branches of the trees.

  For a long moment he stood there, frozen to the spot, fighting the impulse to cross the stream, bundle the whole mess up and haul it back to the nearest trash can—that’d send a message, all right. This was intolerable. A desecration. Worse than graffiti, worse than anything. Wasn’t it enough that they’d degraded the better part of the planet, paved over the land and saturated the landfills till they’d created whole new cordilleras of garbage? There was plastic in the guts of Arctic seals, methanol in the veins of the poisoned condor spread out like a collapsed parasol in the Sespe hills. There was no end to it.

  He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. He tried to calm himself. He was no vigilante. It wasn’t his place to enforce the law, no matter how flagrant the abuse—that was what he paid taxes for, wasn’t it? Why let a thing like this ruin his day? He’d take his hike, that’s what he’d do, put miles between him and this sordid little camp, this shithouse in the woods, and then, when he got back home, he’d call the Sheriff’s Department. Let them handle it. At night, preferably, when whoever had created this unholy mess was sunk to their elbows in it, nodding over their dope and their cheap wine. The image of his Mexican rose up yet again, but this time it was no more than a flicker, and he fought it down. Then he turned and moved off up the stream.

  It was rough going, clambering over boulders and through battlements of winter-run brush, but the air was clean and cool and as the walls of the canyon grew higher around him the sound of the road faded away and the music of running water took over. Bushtits flickered in the trees, a flycatcher shot up the gap of the canyon, gilded in light. By the time he’d gone a hundred yards upstream, he’d forgotten all about the sleeping bags in the dirt and the sad tarnished state of the world. This was nature, pure and unalloyed. This was what he’d come for.

  He was making his way through a stand of reeds, trying to keep his feet dry and watching for the tracks of raccoon, skunk and coyote in the mud, when the image of those sleeping bags came back to him with the force of a blow: voices, he heard voices up ahead. He froze, as alert suddenly as any stalking beast. He’d never encountered another human being down here, never, and the thought of seeing anyone was enough to spoil his pleasure in the day, but this was something else altogether, something desperate, dangerous even. The sleeping bags behind him, the voices ahead: these were transients, bums, criminals, and there was no law here.

  Two voices, point/counterpoint. He couldn’t make out the words, only the timbre. One was like the high rasp of a saw cutting through a log, on and on till the pieces dropped away, and then the second voice joined in, pitched low, abrupt and arrhythmic.

  Some hikers carried guns. Delaney had heard of robberies on the Backbone Trail, of physical violence, assault, rape. The four-wheel-drive faction came up into the hills to shoot off their weapons, gang members annihilated rocks, bottles and trees with their assault rifles. The city was here, now, crouched in the ravine. Delaney didn’t know what to do—slink away like some wounded animal and give up possession of the place forever? Or challenge them, assert his rights? But maybe he was making too much of it. Maybe they were hikers, day-trippers, maybe they were only teenagers skipping school.

  And then he remembered the girl from the birding class he’d taken out of boredom. It was just after he’d got to California, before he met Kyra. He couldn’t recall her name now, but he could see her, bent over the plates in Clarke’s
An Introduction to Southern California Birds or squinting into the glow of the slide projector in the darkened room. She was young, early twenties, with thin black hair parted in the middle and a pleasing kind of bulkiness to her, to the way she moved her shoulders and walked squarely from the anchors of her heels. And he remembered her cheeks—the cheeks of an Eskimo, of a baby, of Alfred Hitchcock staring dourly from the screen, cheeks that gave her face a freshness and naivete that made her look even younger than she was. Delaney was thirty-nine. He asked her out for a sandwich after class and she told him why she never hiked alone, never, not ever again.

  Up until the year before she’d been pretty blithe about it. The streets might have been unsafe, particularly at night, but the chaparral, the woods, the trails no one knew? She had a passion for hiking, for solitary rambles, for getting close enough to feel the massive shifting heartbeat of the world. She spent two months on the Appalachian Trail after graduating from high school, and she’d been over most of the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mexican border to San Francisco. One afternoon in May she went out for a short hike up one of the feeder streams of the Big Tujunga Creek, in the San Gabriels. She’d worked past two, waitressing for the lunch crowd at a grill in Pasadena, but she thought she’d get two or maybe three hours in before dinner. Less than a mile up there was a pool she knew at the base of a cliff that rose to a thin spray of water—she’d never been beyond the pool and planned to climb round the cliff and follow the stream to its source.

  They were Mexicans, she thought. Or maybe Armenians. They spoke English. Young guys in baggy pants and shiny black boots. She surprised them at the pool, the light faded to gray, a faint chill in the air, their eyes glazed with the beer and the endless bullshit, stories about women and cars and drugs. There was an uncomfortable moment, all five of them drilling her with looks that automatically appraised the shape of her beneath the loose sweatshirt and jeans and calculated the distance to the road, how far a scream would carry. She was working her way around the cliff, unsteady on the loose rock, her back to them, when she felt the grip of the first hand, right there—she showed him—right there on her calf.

  Delaney held his breath. The voices had stopped abruptly, replaced by a brooding silence that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity before they started up again, lazy now, contented, the buzz of a pair of flies settling down on the sidewalk. And then, through some auditory quirk of the canyon walls, the voices suddenly crystallized and every word came to him true and distinct. It took him a moment, and then he understood: Spanish, they were talking Spanish.

  He was already angry with himself, angry even before he turned away and tried to slink out of the reeds like a voyeur, angry before the choice was made. The hike was over, the day ruined. There was no way he was just going to waltz out of the bushes and surprise these people, whoever they were, and the defile was too narrow to allow him to go round them undetected. He lifted one foot from the mud and then the other, parting the reeds with the delicacy of a man tucking a blanket under the chin of a sleeping child. The sound of the creek, which to this point had been a whisper, rose to a roar, and it seemed as if every bird in the canyon was suddenly screaming. He looked up into the face of a tall raw-boned Latino with eyes like sinkholes and a San Diego Padres cap reversed on his head.

  The man was perched on a boulder just behind and above Delaney, no more than twenty feet away, and how he’d got there or whether he’d been there all along, Delaney had no idea. He wore a pair of tight new blue jeans tucked into the tops of his scuffed workboots, and he sat hunched against his knees, prying a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket with exaggerated care. He attempted a smile, spreading his lips in a show of bravado, but Delaney could see that the man was flustered, as confounded by Delaney’s sudden appearance as Delaney was by his. “Hey, amigo, how’s it going?” he said in a voice that didn’t seem to fit him, a voice that was almost feminine but for the rasp of it. His English was flat and graceless.

  Delaney barely nodded. He didn’t return the smile and he didn’t reply. He would have moved on right then, marching back to his car without a word, but something tugged at his pack and he saw that one of the reeds had caught in his shoulder strap. He bent to release it, his heart pounding, and the man on the rock sprawled out his legs as if he were sinking into a sofa, folded the stick of gum into his mouth and casually flicked the wrapper into the stream. “Hiking, huh?” the man said, and he was smiling still, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Me,” he said, “I’m hiking too. Me and my friend.” He jerked his head to indicate the friend, who appeared behind Delaney now, just beyond the reeds.

  The friend regarded Delaney out of an expressionless face. His hair hung in coils to his shoulders and a thin wisp of beard trailed away from the base of his chin. He was wearing some sort of poncho or serape, jagged diamonds of color that leapt out against the quiet greens of the streambed. He had nothing to add to the first man’s description. They were hiking, and that was it.

  Delaney looked from the first man to his companion and back again. He wasn’t alarmed, not exactly—he was too angry for that. All he could think of was the sheriff and getting these people and their garbage heap out of here, of hustling them right back to wherever they’d come from, slums, favelas, barrios, whatever they called them. They didn’t belong here, that was for sure. He jerked the reed out of the ground and flung it away from him, adjusted his pack and began picking his way back down the streambed.

  “Hey, amigo”—the man’s voice came at him in a wild high whinny—“you have a nice day, huh?”

  The walk to the road was nothing—it barely stretched his muscles. The anticipation had gone sour in his throat, and it rankled him—it wasn’t even noon yet and the day was shot. He cursed as he passed by the sleeping bags again, and then he took the bank in five strides and he was out in the glare of the canyon road. He had a sudden impulse to continue on down the stream, under the bridge and around the bend, but dismissed it: this was where the creek fanned out into its floodplain before running into the ocean, and any idiot who could park a car and clamber down a three-foot embankment could roam it at will, as the successive layers of garbage spread out over the rocks gave testimony. There was no adventure here, no privacy, no experience of nature. It would be about as exciting as pulling into the McDonald’s lot and counting the starlings.

  He turned and walked back up the road, past the line of cars restrained by a man in a yellow hard hat with a portable sign that read STOP on one side and SLOW on the reverse. The trucks and bulldozers were quiet now—it was lunchtime, the workers sprawled in the shade of the big rippled tires with their sandwiches and burritos, the dust settling, birds bickering in the scrub, chamise and toyon blooming gracefully alongside the road with no help from anyone. Delaney felt the sun on his face, stepped over the ridges of detritus pushed into the shoulder by the blades of the earthmovers and let the long muscles of his legs work against the slope of the road. In one of his first “Pilgrim” columns he’d observed that the bulldozer served the same function here as the snowplow back East, though it was dirt rather than snow that had to be cleared from the streets. The canyon road had become a virtual streambed during the rainy season and Caltrans had been hard-pressed to keep it open, and now, in early summer, with no rain in sight for the next five months, they were just getting round to clearing out the residual rubble.

  That was fine with Delaney, though he wished they’d chosen another day for it. Who wanted to hear the roar of engines and breathe diesel fuel down here—and on a day like this? He was actually muttering to himself as he passed the last of the big machines, his mood growing progressively blacker, and yet all the defeats and frustrations of the morning were nothing compared to what awaited him. For it was at that moment, just as he cleared the last of the Caltrans vehicles and cast a quick glance up the road, that he felt himself go numb: the car was gone.

  Gone. Vanished.

  But no, that wasn’t where he’d parked it, against the g
uardrail there, was it? It must be around the next bend, sure it was, and he was moving more quickly now, almost jogging, the line of cars across the road from him creeping down toward the bridge and a second man in hard hat and bright orange vest flagging his SLOW sign. Every eye was on Delaney. He was the amusement, the sideshow, stiff-legging it up the road with the sweat stinging his eyes and slicking the frames of his glasses. And then he made the bend and saw the tight shoulderless curve beyond it and all the naked space of the canyon spread out to the horizon, and knew he was in trouble.

  Dumbstruck, he swung reluctantly round on his heels and waded back down the road like a zombie, tramping back and forth over the spot where he’d parked the car and finally even going down on one knee in the dirt to trace the tire tracks with his unbelieving fingertips. His car was gone, all right. It was incontrovertible. He’d parked here half an hour ago, right on this spot, and now there was nothing here, no steel, no chrome, no radial tires or personalized license plates. No registration. No Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.

  The first thing that came into his head was the police. They’d towed it. Of course. That was it. There was probably some obscure regulation about parking within two hundred feet of a road crew or something—or they’d posted a sign he’d missed. He rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the faces in the cars across from him, and approached a group of men lounging in the shade of the nearest bulldozer. “Did anybody see what happened to my car?” he asked, conscious of the barely restrained note of hysteria in his voice. “Did they tow it or what?”

  They looked up at him blankly. Six Hispanic men, in khaki shirts and baseball caps, arrested in the act of eating, sandwiches poised at their lips, thermoses tipped, the cans of soft drink sweating between their fingers. No one said a word.