by T. C. Boyle
“I parked right there.” Delaney was pointing now and the six heads dutifully swiveled to regard the vacant shoulder and the scalloped rim of the guardrail set against the treetops and the greater vacancy of the canyon beyond it. “A half hour ago? It was an Acura—white, with aluminum wheels?”
The men seemed to stir. They looked uneasily from one to the other. Finally, the man on the end, who seemed by virtue of his white mustache to be the senior member of the group, set his sandwich carefully down on a scrap of waxed paper and rose to his feet. He regarded Delaney for a moment out of a pair of inexpressibly sad eyes. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later Delaney was having his hike after all, though it wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned. After questioning the boss of the road crew—We haven’t towed nothin’ here, not to my knowledge—he started back up the canyon road on foot. It was three miles or so to the near grocery and the telephones out front, but it was all uphill and the road wasn’t designed for pedestrians. Horns blared, tires screeched, some jerk threw a beer can at him. For fear of his life he had to hop the guardrail and plow through the brush, but it was slow going and the burrs and seedheads caught in his socks and tore at his naked legs, and all the while his head was pounding and his throat gone dry over the essential question of the day: what had happened to the car?
He called the police from the pay phone and they gave him the number of the towing service and he called the towing service and they told him they didn’t have his car—and no, there was no mistake: they didn’t have it. Then he called Kyra. He got her secretary and had to sit on the curb in front of the pay phone in a litter of Doritos bags and candy wrappers for ten agonizing minutes till she rang him back. “Hello?” she demanded. “Delaney?”
He was bewildered, immobilized. People pulled into the lot and climbed casually out of their cars. Doors slammed. Engines revved. “Yes, it’s me.”
“What is it? What’s the matter? Where are you?” She was wound tight already.
“I’m at Li’s Market.”
He could hear her breathing into the receiver, and he counted the beats it took her to absorb this information, puzzle over its significance and throw it back at him. “Listen, Delaney, I’m in the middle of—”
“They stole my car.”
“What? What are you talking about? Who stole it?”
He tried to dredge up all he’d heard and read about car thieves, about chop shops, counterfeit serial numbers and theft to order, and he tried to picture the perpetrators out there in broad daylight with hundreds of people driving obliviously by, but all he could see was the bruised face and blunted eyes of his Mexican, the wheel clutched between his hands and the bumper gobbling up the fragments of the broken yellow line as if the whole thing were one of those pulse-thumping games in the arcade. “You better call Jack,” he said.
8
IT WAS LIKE BEING HAUNTED BY DEVILS, RED-HAIRED devils and rubios in eighty-dollar running shoes and sunglasses that cost more than a laboring man could make in a week. What had he done to deserve such a fate? Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball, first the big jerk with the Elvis hair and then the pelirrojo who’d run him down in the road, the very one, and his gangling tall awkward pendejo of a son who’d hiked all the way down into the canyon to violate a poor man’s few pitiful possessions. It was too much. He needed to go to confession, do penance, shrive himself somehow. Even Job would have broken down under an assault like this.
For the next hour he hid himself in a clump of shrubbery at the far end of the parking lot, watching the door of the supermercado for América. This was where she’d look for him—it was the only place she knew besides the Chinese store, and she must have known he wouldn’t hang around there any longer than he had to. So he waited in the bushes, out of sight, and though his concealment made him feel better—at least now no one was going to push him around—he was still in a fever of worry. What if he’d missed her and she was down below in the canyon, staring numbly at the bleak pile of rocks where their camp used to be? What if the patrón of the job he hoped she’d gotten forced her to do something with him? What if she was lost, hurt or worse?
The traffic was thinning on the road now and fewer cars were pulling in and out of the lot. His tormentors—the gabachos young and old—had shoved into their cars and driven off without so much as a backward glance for him. He was about to give it up and cross the road to the labor exchange and look hopelessly round the empty lot there and then maybe head back down the road to where the path cut into the brush and shout out her name for every living thing in the canyon to hear, when a Mercedes sedan pulled up in front of the grocery and America stepped out of it.
He watched her slim legs emerge first, then her bare arms and empty hands, the pale flowered dress, the screen of her hair, and he was elated and devastated at the same time: she’d got work, but he hadn’t. They would have money to eat, but he hadn’t earned it. No: a seventeen-year-old village girl had earned it, and at what price? And what did that make him? He crouched there in the bushes and tried to read her face, but it was locked up like a strongbox, and the man with her, the rico, was like some exotic animal dimly viewed through the dark integument of the windshield. She slammed the door, looked about her indecisively for a moment as the car wheeled away in a little blossom of exhaust, and then she squared her shoulders, crossed the lot and disappeared into the market.
Cándido brushed down his clothes, made good and certain that no one was looking his way, and ambled out of the bushes as if he’d just come back from a stroll around the block. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with the gringos he passed as he crossed the lot and ducked into the grocery. After a week and a half of living on so little that his stomach had shrunk and his pants were down around his hips, the effect of all that abundance was devastating. There was no smell of food here, no hint of the rich stew of odors you’d find in a Mexican market—these people sanitized their groceries just as they sanitized their kitchens and toilets and drove the life from everything, imprisoning their produce in jars and cans and plastic pouches, wrapping their meat and even their fish in cellophane—and yet still the sight and proximity of all those comestibles made his knees go weak again.
Candy, there was a rack of candy right by the door, something sweet and immediate to feed the hunger. Little cakes and things, Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s. And there, there were the fruits and vegetables lit up as on an altar, the fat ripeness of tomatoes, mangoes, watermelon, corn in its husk, roasting ears that would sweeten on the grill. He swallowed involuntarily. Looked right and then left. He didn’t see America. She must be down one of the aisles pushing a basket. He tried to look nonchalant as he passed by the checkers and entered the vast cornucopia of the place.
Food in sacks for pets, for dogs and cats and parakeets, seltzer water in clear bottles, cans of vegetables and fruit: God in Heaven, he was hungry. He found América poised in front of one of the refrigerated displays, her back to him, and he felt shy suddenly, mortified, the unwanted guest sitting down at the starving man’s table. She was selecting a carton of eggs—huevos con chorizo, huevos rancheros, huevos hervidos con pan tostado—flicking the hair out of her face with an unconscious gesture as she pried open the box to check for fractured shells. He loved her in that moment more than he ever had, and he forgot the Mercedes and the rich man and the gabachos in the parking lot assailing him like a pack of dogs, and he thought of stew and tortillas and the way he would surprise her with their new camp and the firewood all stacked and ready. Things would work out, they would. “América,” he croaked.
The face she turned to him was joyful, proud, radiant—she’d earned money, her first money ever, and they were going to eat on it, stuff themselves, feast till their stomachs swelled and their tongues went thick in their throats—but her eyes, her eyes dodged away from his, an
d he saw the traces there of some shame or sorrow that screamed out at him in warning. “What’s the matter?” he demanded, and the shadowy form of that rich man in the Mercedes rose up before him. “Are you all right?”
She bowed her head. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out three clean fresh newly minted bills, two tens and a five, and her smile came back. “I worked all day,” she said, “and there’s more work tomorrow, scrubbing Buddhas.”
“What? Scrubbing what?”
The gabachos were watching them now, from every corner of the market, darting glances at them as they hustled by with their quick strides and dry-cleaned clothes, little baskets clutched to their chests, staring at a poor man and his wife as if they were diseased, as if they were assassins plotting a murder. America didn’t answer him. She laid the eggs in the cart, on the little wire rack some gabacho genius had designed for them, and looked up at him with widening eyes. “But you’re here,” she said. “I mean, you’re walking. You made it up out of the canyon.”
He shrugged. Felt his face tighten in its twisted mask. “I was worried.”
Her smile bloomed and she fell into his arms and he hugged her tight and to hell with every gringo in the world, he thought. And then they shopped—the discount tortillas, the pound of hamburguesa meat, the eggs, the sacks of rice and beans, the coffee and the powdered milk, and before long they were walking back down the road in the hush of the falling night, the shared sweetness of a chocolate bar with almonds seeping into the secret recesses of their mouths.
The light held for them till they reached the bottom of the trail, and then it thickened into darkness. Cándido clutched his wife’s hand as they groped along the streambed, a plastic sack of groceries dangling from the crook of his bad arm. He was breathing hard, aching all over, but he felt buoyant and hopeful for the first time since the accident. He was mending and he would go up the hill to the labor exchange in the morning, America had earned money today and she would earn more tomorrow, they would fill their stomachs and lie on the blanket in their hut and make love hidden away from the world. They would eat the sardines with the white bread first, while the fire settled and the hamburguesa meat snapped and hissed in the bottom of the pot, and then they would dip into the hot grease with their tortillas to take the edge off their hunger, and the meat would form the foundation of the stew till at eleven or maybe even twelve midnight they would pour steaming cups of it from the pot. All that.
He was able to find his way with his fingers, the night like pitch, moonless and with that ugly yellow urban sky clamped like a lid over their heads. The stream soughed through the rocks, something pounded its wings in the dark and flapped through the trees. He suppressed his fear of rattlesnakes and went on, trying to erase the memory of the thick coiled whiplash of a thing he’d encountered somewhere along here last month and the mala suerte that hung over the killing, skinning and roasting of it. And where was its mate? Its mother? Its mother’s mother? He tried not to think about it.
When they came to the pool he told America she was going to have to take her clothes off and she giggled and leaned into him, brushing her lips against his cheek. He could just make out the pale hovering presence of her face against the absence of her hair and clothes. The water was black, the trees were black, the walls of the canyon black as some deep place inside a man or woman, beneath the skin and bones and all the rest. He felt strangely excited. The crickets chirred. The trees whispered.
Cándido stripped, balled up his clothes and stuffed them in the plastic sack with the eggs. His wife was there, right there against him, and he helped her off with her dress in the dark and then he pulled her to him and tasted the chocolate on her lips. “Take your shoes off too,” he warned, running a hand down her leg to her ankle and back up again. “It’s not deep, but the bottom’s slippery.”
The water was warm, heated by the sun as it trickled down through the canyon, traveling all those tortuous miles to get here, to this pool, and the air on their wet skin was cool and gentle. Cándido felt his way, step by step, and America followed him, the water lapping at her breasts—she was so short, so skinny, such a flaca—the groceries and her bundled dress held up high above her head. He stumbled only once, midway across. It was almost as if a human hand had jerked his foot out from under him, but it must have been a branch, slick with algae and waving languidly in the current, some trick of the bottom—still, it caused him to fling out his arm in reaction and when he did the bag of eggs slammed against the rock wall like a lesson in fragility. “Are you all right?” America whispered. And then: “The eggs? Are they broken?”
But they weren’t—except for two, that is, and he and America lapped them from the shells for strength even as he bent to light the fire and show off the fastness of the place and the hut he’d built with its stick-frame entrance and thatched roof. The fire caught and swelled. He knelt in the sand, feeding sticks into the grasping greedy fingers of flame, the smell of woodsmoke pricking his memory through the nostalgia of a thousand mornings at home, and he saw his mother burning a handful of twigs to get the stove going, corn gruel and toast and hot coffee smothered in sugar, and then he turned his head from the fire and watched his wife’s limbs and hips and breasts fill with light. She was squatting, so busy with the meat, the pot, the onions and chiles and rice that she had no consciousness of her nudity, and he saw now, for the first time, that her pregnancy was a reality, as solid and tangible a thing as dough rising in a pan. She glanced up, saw him looking, and reached automatically for her dress. “No,” he said, “no, you don’t need it. Not here, not with me.”
A long slow look, the hair hanging wet on the ends, and then she smiled again to show off her big square honest teeth. The dress stayed where it was.
They cooked the meat, the knots in their stomachs pulled tighter and tighter by the smell of it, the hamburguesa meat working with the onions and chiles to enrich the poor neutral breath of the canyon. They sat side by side in the sand, warmed by the fire, and shared the tin of sardines and ate half the loaf of store bread, North American bread baked in a factory and puffed up light as air. She held the last sardine out for him and he put his hands on her breasts and let her feed it into his mouth, the fire snapping, the night wrapped round them like a blanket, all his senses on alert. He took the sardine between his lips, between his teeth, and he licked the golden oil from her fingers.
In the morning, just before first light, they squatted over the pot and dipped tortillas into the lukewarm stew. They drank their coffee cold, took a package of saltines and a slice of cheese each for lunch, and went naked into the pool. The water felt chilly at this hour and it was a trial to slosh through it like penitents in the penitential dawn, cursed by birds and harassed by insects. Their clothes felt clammy and damp and they looked away from each other’s nudity as they hurriedly dressed on the cold shore. Still, as America followed Cándido’s familiar compact form up the narrow dirt trail, she felt a surge of hope: the worst of it was behind them now. She would work, no matter what the fat man demanded of her, and Cándido would work too, and they’d take out just what they needed for food and necessities and the rest would go under a stone in the ground. In a month, maybe two, they could go up the canyon and into the city she barely knew. There was an apartment waiting there for them, nothing fancy, not for now—a single room with a hot shower and a toilet, some trees on the street and a market, someplace she could buy a dress, some lipstick, a brush for her hair.
Cándido was limping and he had to stop three times to catch his breath, but he was improving, getting better by the day, and that was an answer to her prayers too. They waited till there was a break in the traffic before emerging from the bushes and they kept their heads down and their feet moving as they hurried up the shoulder of the road. The cars terrified her. There was a chain of them, always a chain—ten, twenty, thirty—and they sucked the air with them, tore it from her lungs, and left a stink of exhaust behind. The tires hissed. The faces stared.
/> It was early, very early, and they were the first ones at the labor exchange, there even before Candelario Pérez. Most of the men took buses or hitched rides to get there, some coming from twenty and thirty miles away. And why go so far? Because they were country people and they hated the city streets, hated lining up on las esquinas, the street corners, where there were gangs and dirt and filthy things written on the walls. America didn’t blame them. She remembered her trip to Venice, the terror and disconnectedness of it, and as she settled into her customary spot against the pillar, drawing her legs up under her, she looked out into the heavy ribs of the trees and felt glad to be there.
Cándido sat heavily beside her, the good half of his face turned toward her in soft focus. He was fidgeting with his hands, snatching twigs from the dirt, snapping them in two and flicking the pieces away from him, over and over again. He’d removed the sling from his arm, but he still carried it awkwardly, and some of the crust had fallen away from the wound on his face, pale splotches of flesh like paint flecks showing through. He was quiet, moody, all the high spirits of the previous night dissolved in a look of silent fury that reminded her of her father, bent at night over the fine print of the newspaper, his back aching and his feet twisted from the confinement of the shoes they made him wear in the restaurant. Cándido was brooding, she could see that, afraid no one would choose him for work because of his face and the limp he couldn’t disguise—even though he was first in line and would work his heart out. And though he hadn’t said a word, neither of apology nor of thanks, she knew it hurt him to have a woman earning his keep. She made small talk to distract him—It was going to be warm, wasn’t it? The stew had turned out well, hadn’t it? Would he be sure to remind her to pick up a little soap powder so she could wash their clothes tonight?—but no matter what she said he responded only with a grunt.