The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  Her voice was tiny, choked, the faintest intrusion on the sphere of the audible: “They took my money.”

  And now he was rough, though he didn’t mean to be. He jerked at her shoulders and forced her to look him in the face. “Who took your money—what are you talking about?” And then he knew, knew it all, knew as certainly as if he’d been there: “Those vagos? It was the one with the hat, wasn’t it? The half-a-gringo?”

  She nodded. He forgot his hunger, forgot the pot on the coals, the night, the woodsmoke, the soil beneath his knees, oblivious to everything but her face and her eyes. She began to cry, a soft kittenish mewling that only infuriated him more. He clutched at her shoulders, shook her again. “Who else?”

  “I don’t know. An Indian.”

  “Where?” he shouted. “Where?”

  “On the trail.”

  On the trail. His heart froze around those three words. If they’d robbed her in the parking lot, on the road, at the labor exchange, it was one thing, but on the trail ... “What else? What else did they take? Quick, tell me. They didn’t, they didn’t try to—?”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “You’re lying. Don’t lie to me. Don’t you dare lie to me.”

  She broke his grip and stared into the fire, rubbed a wrist across her eyes. “They took my money.”

  Cándido was ready to kill, ready to hack through every bush in the mountains till he found their camp and crushed their skulls while they lay sleeping. The image infested his brain: the tan dog’s eyes, the stirring limbs and the rock coming down, again and again. “Is that all?” he hissed, fighting against the knowledge. “Is that all they took?” He gripped her arm again. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, turning to level her gaze on him, “I’m sure.”

  It hurt, that’s all she knew. Burned. Burned like acid in an open wound, like the corrosive at the fat man’s house when it got down into the split skin at the quick of her nails. Every time she peed it was like fire passing through her. She didn’t know what it was—some lingering effect of what they’d done to her that night, her insides scored and dirty, rubbed raw like a skinned knee ... or was it just a new and unexpected phase of her pregnancy? Was this normal? Was this the way it was supposed to be in the beginning of the fifth month, flaming pee? Her mother would know. Her aunts, her older sisters, the village midwives. If she were home she could even have asked Señora Serrano, the neighbor lady who’d given birth to sixteen children, the oldest grown up and with children of their own, the youngest in diapers still. But here? Here there was no one, and that frightened her—frightened her now and for when her time came.

  America waited there in the hut behind the wrecked car for Cándido, day after day, bored and aching—he wouldn’t let her go to the labor exchange, never again—her breasts tender, her stomach queasy, needing her mother, needing to ask the questions a daughter never asks, not till she’s married. But then, she and Cándido never were married, not officially, not in the church. In the eyes of the Church, Cándido was already married, forever married, to Resurrección. And America and Cándido had gone off in the night, silent as thieves, and only a note left for her mother, not a word to her face, and even then America was pregnant, though she didn’t know it. She wanted to call her mother now, on the telephone, one of those outdoor phones with the little plastic bonnets lined up in a row by the Chinese store and hear her voice and tell her she was all right and ask her why it burned so when she peed. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did all women go through that? But then, even if she had the money, all lined up on the plastic shelf in all the silver denominations, she’d have to call the village pharmacy because her parents had no phone, and how was she to do that? She didn’t know the number. Didn’t know how to dial Mexico even.

  And so she waited there in her little nook in the woods like some princess in a fairy story, protected by a moat and the sharp twisted talons of a wrecked car, only this princess had been violated and her pee burned and she jumped at every sound. Cándido had got her some old magazines in English—he’d found them in the trash at the supermarket—and six greasy dog-eared novelas, picture romances about El Norte and how poor village girls and boys made their fortunes and kissed each other passionately in the gleaming kitchens of their gleaming gringo houses. She read them over and over again and she tried not to think of the man with the cap and the Indian and their filthy writhing bodies and the stinking breath in her face, tried not to think of her nausea and lightheadedness, of her mother, of the future, tried not to think of anything. She explored the creekbed out of boredom. She bathed in the pool. Collected firewood. Repaired her old dress and saved the new one, the one Cándido had brought home one afternoon, for when they had an apartment and she needed something nice to get work. A week passed. Then another. It got hot. Her pee burned. And then, gradually, the pain faded and she began to forget what had happened to her here in the paradise of the North, began to forget for whole minutes at a time.

  It was during one of those forgetful periods, when she was lying on her back in the sand, staring up into the shifting patchwork of the leaves above her, so still and so empty she might have been comatose, that she became aware of the faintest stirring behind her. The day was high and hot, the birds silent, the distant traffic a drowsy hum. There was another sentient creature there with her in the hollow place at the base of the intermittent falls, another breathing, seeing, sensing thing. She wasn’t alarmed. Though she couldn’t see it, she could hear it, feel it, and it was no man, no snake, no thing that would do her harm. Very gradually, millimeter by millimeter, like a plant turning to the sun, she shifted her head in the sand until she could see behind her.

  At first, she was disappointed, but she was patient, infinitely patient, rooted to the ground by the boredom of the days, and then she saw movement and the thing materialized all at once, as in one of those trick-of-the-eye drawings where you can look and look forever and see nothing until you turn your head the magic way. It was a coyote. Bristle fur, tanned the precise shade of the dried hill grasses, one paw lifted, ears high. It held there, sensing something amiss, and looked right through her with eyes of yellow glass, and she saw that it had dugs and whiskers and a black slotted nose and that it was small, small as the dog she’d had as a girl, and still it didn’t move. She looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out, to know that men were her enemies—men in uniform, men with their hats reversed, men with fat bloated hands and fat bloated necks, men with traps and guns and poisoned bait—and she saw the den full of pups and the hills shrunk to nothing under the hot quick quadrupedal gait. She never moved. Never blinked. But finally, no matter how hard she stared, she realized the animal was no longer there.

  The fire snapped and fanned itself with a roar. Sparks and white flecks of ash shot straight up into the funnel of the ravine, trailing away into the night until the dark drank them up. The night was warm, the stars were cold. And Cándido, feeding the fire with one hand while skewering a sausage with the other and cradling a gallon jug of Cribari red between his thighs, was drunk. Not so drunk that he’d lost all caution—he’d observed the canyon from above, on the trail, with the fire going strong, and reassured himself that not even the faintest glimmer escaped the deep hidden nook where they’d made their camp. The smoke was visible, yes, but only in daylight, and in daylight he made sure the fire was out, or at least reduced to coals. But now it was dark and who could detect a few threads of smoke against the dark curtain of the sky?

  Anyway, he was drunk. Drunk and feeding the fire, for the thin cheer of it, for the child’s game of watching the flames crawl up a stick, and for the good and practical purpose of cooking sausages. A whole package, eight hot Italian sausages, not as good as chorizo maybe, but good nonetheless. One after another, roasting them till they split, using a tortilla like a glove to squeeze them off the stick and feed them into his mouth, bite by sizzling
bite. And the wine, of course. Lifting the jug, heavy at first but getting lighter now, the wine hot in his gut and leaking from the corners of his mouth, and then setting the jug down again, between his legs, in the sand. That was the process, the plan, the sum of his efforts. Stick, sausage, wine.

  America, grown modest in proportion to the way the baby was changing her shape, stood off in the shadows, by the hut, trying on the clothes he’d brought back for her from the Goodwill in Canoga Park. They’d been working up the street, repairing stucco on an apartment building that was changing hands, and Rigoberto—the Indian who worked for Al Lopez—told him about the store. It was cheap. And he found maternity c!othes—big flower-print shorts with an expanding waistline, dresses like sacks, corduroy pants that could have fit a clown. He’d selected one shapeless dress with an elastic waistband—pink, with green flowers all over it—and a pair of shorts. She’d asked for blue jeans, something durable to wear around the camp and save her two dresses, but there was no sense in buying her jeans that wouldn’t fit for another three or four months, and so he’d settled on the shorts as a compromise. She could always take them in later.

  All that was fine, but he was drunk. Drunk for a purpose, for a reason. Drunk because he was fed up with the whole yankee gringo dog-eat-dog world where a poor man had to fight like a conquering hero just to keep from starving to death, drunk because after three weeks of on-again, off-again work and the promise of something better, Al Lopez had let him go. Rigoberto’s brother, the one who’d been ill, was back from his sickbed and ready to work. A hernia, that’s what he had, and he’d gone to the gringo doctors to sew it up, and that was all right, because he had papers, la tarjeta verde, and he was legal. Cándido was not. “Haven’t I done good work?” he asked Al Lopez. “Haven’t I run after everything you told me to do like a human burro, haven’t I busted my balls?” “Yes, sure,” Al Lopez had said, “but that’s not the problem. You don’t have papers and Ignacio does. I could get in trouble. Big trouble.” And so Cándido had bought the sausages and the wine and come home drunk with the dress and the shorts in a paper bag, and he was drunk now and getting drunker.

  In three weeks, he’d made nearly three hundred dollars, minus some for food and the first dress he’d bought America, the pretty one, from the gringo store. That left him just over two hundred and fifty dollars, which was half what he’d need for a car and a quarter what he’d need for a decent apartment, because they all—even the Mexican landlords—wanted first and last months’ rent and a deposit too. The money was buried in a plastic peanut butter jar under a rock behind the wrecked car and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to add to it. He’d only got work once when Al Lopez hadn’t come for him, and that was just half a day at three dollars an hour, hauling rock for a wall some old lady was building around her property. It was the end of July. The dry weather would hold for four months more, and by then América would have had her baby—his son—and they would have to have a roof over their heads. The thought darkened his mood and when America stepped into the firelight to show off the big shorts with her jaguar’s smile, he snapped at her.

  “Those vagos,” he said, and the tongue was so thick in his throat he might have swallowed a snake, “they took more than just your money, didn’t they? Didn’t they?”

  Her face went numb. “You go to hell,” she said. “Borracho. I told you, I told you a thousand times,” and she turned away and hid herself in the hut.

  He didn’t blame her. But he was drunk and angry and he wanted to hurt her, wanted to hurt himself, twisting the knowledge round and round his brain like a rotten tooth rotated in its socket. How could he pretend not to know what had happened? How could he allow himself to be fooled? She hadn’t let him touch her in three weeks, and why was that? The baby, she claimed. She felt sick. She had a headache. Her digestion wasn’t right, no, Cándido, no ... well, maybe it was true. But if he ever found that son of a bitch with the raw eyes and that stupid pinche baseball cap... and he looked for him too, everywhere, every time Al’s truck took a turn and there was somebody there beside the road, a pair of shoulders, a cap, blue jeans and a stranger’s face... Cándido knew what he would do when he found him, his fist pounding on the window till the truck stopped, the vago loping up to the truck for a ride, his lucky day, and the first thing Cándido could lay his hands oh, the big sledge for driving stakes, the machete for clearing brush, and if he went to prison for a hundred years it would be sweet compared to this...

  If she was lying to him it was to spare him, he knew that, and his heart turned over for her in his drunkenness. Seventeen years old, and she was the one who’d found work when he couldn’t, she was the one who’d had them sniffing after her like dogs, she was the one whose husband made her live in a hut of sticks and then called her a liar, a whore and worse. But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die.

  But then dead men didn’t work either, did they?

  3

  SMOKE ROSE FROM THE BARBECUE IN FRAGRANT ginger-smelling tufts as Delaney basted the tofu kebabs with his special honey-ginger marinade and Jordan chased a ball round the yard with Osbert yapping at his heels. Kyra was stretched out by the pool, having finished up her jog with forty laps of the crawl and her weekly glass of Chardonnay, and though her briefcase stood at her side, she seemed for the moment to be content with contemplating the underside of her eyelids. It was a Sunday in mid-August, seven in the evening, the sun fixed in the sky like a Japanese lantern. There was music playing somewhere, a slow moody piano piece moving from one lingering faintly heard note to the next, and when Delaney looked up from turning the kebabs he watched a California gnatcatcher—that rare and magical gray-bodied little bird—settle on the topmost wire of the fence. It was one of those special moments when all the mad chittering whirl of things suddenly quits, like a freeze-frame in a film, and Delaney held on to it, savored it, even as the fragrance of ginger faded into the air, the piano faltered and the bird shot away into nothingness. Things had been tough there for a while, what with the accident, the loss of Sacheverell, the theft of his car, but now life had settled back onto an easy even keel, a mundanity that allowed the little things to reveal themselves, and he was grateful for it.

  “Is it ready yet?” Kyra called in a smoky languorous voice. “Do you want me to put the dressing on the salad?”

  “Yes, sure, that would be great,” he said, and he felt blissful, rapturous even, as he watched his wife swing her legs over the side of the chair, adjust the straps of her swimsuit and stride gracefully across the patio and into the rear of the house.

  At dinner, which Delaney served on the glass-topped table by the pool, Kyra filled her glass with Perrier and announced, with a self-deprecating giggle, that she’d “cleaned up Shoup.” Jordan was toying with his tofu, separating it from the mushrooms, the mushrooms from the tomatoes and the tomatoes from the onions. Osbert was under the table, gnawing at a rawhide bone. “What?” Delaney said. “What do you mean?”

  Kyra looked down at her plate as if uncertain how to go on. “Remember I told you about all those people gathering there on the streetcorners—day laborers?”

  “Mexicans,” Delaney said, and there was no hesitation anymore, no reluctance to identify people by their ethnicity, no overlay of liberal-humanist guilt. Mexicans, there were Mexicans everywhere.

  “Mexicans,” Kyra confirmed with a nod. Beside her, Jordan stuffed a forkful of white rice in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully a moment and extruded a glistening white paste back onto the tines of his fork. “I don’t know,” Kyra went on, “it was a couple of weeks ago, remember? By the 7-Eleven there?”

  Delaney nodded, dimly remembering.

  “Well I got on Mike’s case about it because when it gets to be a certain number—ten maybe,
ten is okay, but any more than that and you can see the buyers flinch when you drive by. That’s the sort of thing they’re moving out here to get away from, and you know me, I’ll go out of my way, the most circuitous route, to give people a good impression of the neighborhood, but sometimes you just have to take the boulevard, it’s unavoidable. Anyway, I don’t know what happened, but one day I suddenly realize there’s like fifty or sixty of them out there, all stretched out up and down the block, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against the walls, so I said to Mike, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and he got on the phone to Sid Wasserman and I don’t know what Wasserman did but that streetcorner is deserted now, I mean deserted.”

  Delaney didn’t know what to say. He was wrestling with his feelings, trying to reconcile the theoretical and the actual. Those people had every right to gather on that streetcorner—it was their inalienable right, guaranteed by the Constitution. But whose constitution—Mexico’s? Did Mexico even have a constitution? But that was cynical too and he corrected himself: he was assuming they were illegals, but even illegals had rights under the Constitution, and what if they were legal, citizens of the U.S.A., what then?

  “I mean,” Kyra was saying, lifting a morsel of tofu and oyster mushroom to her lips, “I’m not proud of it or anything—and I know how you feel and I agree that everybody’s got a right to work and have a decent standard of living, but there’s just so many of them, they’ve overwhelmed us, the schools, welfare, the prisons and now the streets...” She chewed thoughtfully. Took a sip of water. “Oh, by the way, did I tell you Cynthia Sinclair got engaged? At the office?” She laughed, a little trill, and set her fork down. “I don’t know what made me think of it—prisons?” She laughed again and Delaney couldn’t help joining in. “Sure. Prisons. That was it.”