The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it. Despite his headlong rush, despite the quickness of his feet and the hard-honed sinewy strength of his legs, despite his rage and determination and the chorus of howls from his wife and son, he was impotent. The coyote scaled the fence, rung by rung, as if it were a ladder, and flew from the eight-foot bar at the top like a big dun wingless bird, and then it was gone, melted into the brush with its prey. And the fence? Delaney clung to it, just a heartbeat later—at the very spot—but he had to go all the way round the house and through, the side gate to get out.

  By then, of course—and no one had to explain this to Kyra, or even to Jordan—it was too late.

  4

  AND THEN HE GOT WORK FIVE DAYS IN A ROW. BRUSH clearance. Hard hot dirty work, breathing dust and little pale flecks of crushed weed till you choked, and the sun beating at the back of your neck like a scourge and the seeds of all those incorrigible desert plants like needles, like fisherman’s hooks stabbing through your clothes and into your flesh every time you moved, and all you did was move. Three dollars and twenty-five cents an hour and he wasn’t complaining. A gabacho boss had pulled into the labor exchange lot in a truck with high wooden sides, picked Cándido and another man and pantomimed what he wanted. They got in the back of his truck, five mornings in a row, and he took them to a canyon with eight new houses in it and they cleared brush from the hillside and raked it up and loaded it into the truck. Each afternoon he paid them in cash and each morning he was there again, seven a.m., regular as clockwork. On the fifth day, when work was finished, he didn’t show them any money, but with gestures and a few garbled Spanish phrases he let them know that he was short and would pay them when he came to pick them up in the morning. Cándido wondered about that, especially since they’d scraped the hillside bare, right down to the dirt, but then maybe there was another canyon and another hillside. There wasn’t. At least not for Cándido. He never saw the man again.

  All right. He’d been cheated before—it wasn’t the first time. He would survive it. But then he didn’t get work, not that day or the next or the day after that, and he came dragging back into camp at one each afternoon, dejected and heartsick with worry, and he let America fuss over him in her big maternity shorts while the worry trailed off into boredom and the boredom into rage. But he controlled himself. America was innocent. She was everything to him. He had no one to rage at but himself and he raged internally till he had to get up and move, use his hands, do something, anything. He devised make-work projects for himself: damming the far edge of the pool to keep the water level up as the creek slowed to a trickle, adding a cut-willow veranda to the lean-to, hunting birds and lizards and anything else he could find to stretch their supplies and avoid dipping into the apartment fund in the jar beneath the rock. They had three hundred and twenty dollars in that jar and he needed to triple it at least if they were going to have a roof over their heads by the time his son was born.

  One afternoon, coming back defeated from the labor exchange with a few chilies, onions and a sack of dried pinto beans, he found a scrap of clear plastic mesh by the side of the road and stuffed it into his back pocket. He was thinking he might be able to cut a long green switch, bend the tip into a loop and sew the mesh to it so he’d have a net to snare some of the birds that were constantly flitting in and out of the chaparral. Using a length of discarded fishing line and América’s two-inch sewing needle, Cándido bent to the task. In less than an hour he’d fashioned a sturdy professional-looking net while America looked on in stony silence—her sympathies lay clearly with the birds. Then he climbed back up the trail, watched where the birds plunged into the scrub to the fortresses of their nests, and waited. The first day he got nothing, but he sharpened his technique, lying motionless in the bone-white dust and flicking his wrist to snap the net like a tennis player working on his backhand.

  No one hired him the following day either, and while America soaked the beans and reread her novelas for the hundredth time, he went back to try his luck. Within an hour he’d caught four tiny gray-bodied little birds, no longer than his thumb, pinching their heads to stifle them, and then he got lucky and stunned a scrub jay that hopped off into the undergrowth with a disarranged wing until he could run it down. He plucked the birds and rinsed them in the stream—they weren’t much, particularly the little gray ones—and then he built up the fire and fried them in lard, heads and all. America wouldn’t touch them. But Cándido ran each miniature bone through his teeth, sucking it dry, and there was a satisfaction in that, the satisfaction of the hunter, the man who could live off the land, but he didn’t dwell on it. How could he? The very taste on his lips was the taste of desperation.

  The next morning he was up at first light, as usual, blowing into his coffee while America fried eggs, chilies and tortillas over a smokeless fire, and then he made his way up the hill to the labor exchange, feeling optimistic, lucky even, the wings of the little birds soaring in his veins. The limp was gone now—or almost gone—and though his face would never look quite the same again, at least the crust of scab had fallen away, giving back some of the flesh beneath. He wasn’t planning on entering any beauty contests anyway, but at least now the patrones in the trucks wouldn’t automatically look past him to the next man. The sky swelled with light. He began to whistle through his teeth.

  Out of habit he kept his head down as he walked along the side of the road, not wanting to risk making eye contact with any of the gringos or gringas on their way to work in their unblemished new Japanese cars. To them he was invisible, and that was the way he wanted to keep it, showing himself only in the lot at the labor exchange, where they could see what he was and what he had to offer. He barely glanced up at the tumult in the lot at the Chinese grocery—the sweet buns, coffee in styrofoam cups, frantic cigarettes—and he didn’t really lift his head until he felt the gravel of the labor exchange lot under his feet. He was wondering idly if he’d be first in line, thinking of the day ahead, whistling a radio tune he hadn’t heard in years, when he looked up and it hit him: there was nothing there. No pillars, no roof, no campesinos in khaki shirts and straw hats. Nothing. It was as if a hurricane wind had come up in the night, a tornado, and sucked the whole thing up into the sky. Cándido stood there, dumbstruck, and looked round him twice to get his bearings. Was he dreaming? Was that it?

  But no. He saw the chain then—two chains—and the signs. Posts had been driven into the ground at each of the two entrances, and they were linked by chains thick enough to anchor a boat. The signs were nailed to the posts. PRIVATE, they screamed in blazing red letters, ALL PERSONS WARNED AGAINST TRESPASS, and though Cándido couldn’t read English, he got the drift. What was going on? he asked himself. What was the problem? But even as he asked he knew the answer: the gringos had gotten tired of seeing so many poor people in their midst, so many Mexicans and Hondurans and Salvadoreños. There was no more work here. Not now, not ever.

  Across the street, in front of the post office, three men slunk around the butts of their cigarettes like whipped dogs. Cándido saw their eyes snatch at him as he watched for a break in the traffic and jogged across the road to them. They looked down at the ground as he greeted them. “Buenos días,” he said, and then, “What’s going on?”

  “Buenos,” the men mumbled, and then one of them, a man Cándido recognized from the exchange, spoke up. “We don’t know. It was like that”—a jerk of the head—“when we got here.”

  “Looks closed,” the man beside him put in.

  “Yeah,” the first man said, and his voice was lifeless, “looks like the gabachos don’t want us here anymore.” He dropped the stub of his cigarette in the street, shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. “I’m going to stand right here till somebody hires me—it’s a free country, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Cándido said, and the way he was feeling he couldn’t hold back the sarcasm, “—as long as you’re a gringo. But us, we better look out.
”

  It was then that Candelario Pérez’s familiar white pickup separated itself from the chain of commuter cars and nosed into the post office parking lot, wheeling up so close to them they had to take an involuntary step back to avoid the inconvenience of having their toes crushed. He was alone, and his face was so heavy he couldn’t seem to lift it out of the car. All four of them crowded round the driver’s window. “What’s going on?” the first man demanded, and they all joined in, Cándido too.

  “It’s closed, over, terminado.” Candelario Pérez spoke with an exhausted voice, and it was apparent he’d been overusing it, wasting it on deaf ears, on useless argument and pointless remonstrance. He waited a moment before going on, the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the commuters’ cars as steady as the beat of the waves on a beach. “It was the man that donated the property. He took it back. They don’t want us here, that’s the long and short of it. And I’ll tell you something, a word of advice”—another pause—“if you don’t have a green card you better make yourself scarce. La Migra’s going to make a sweep here this morning. And tomorrow morning too.” The dead black eyes sank in on themselves like the eyes of an iguana and he lifted a thumbnail to his front teeth to dislodge a bit of food stuck there. He shrugged. “And probably the day after that.”

  Cándido felt his jaws clench. What were they going to do now? If there was no work here anymore and La Migra to make sure of it, he and America would have to leave—either that or starve to death. That meant they’d have to go into the city, down to Santa Monica or Venice, or up over the canyon and into the Valley. That meant living on the streets, exposing America to the obscenity of the handout, the filth, the dumpsters out back of the supermarkets. And they were so close —another couple weeks of steady work and they could have had their apartment, could have established themselves, could have looked for work like human beings, riding the bus in freshly laundered clothes, seeking out the back rooms and sweatshops where nobody cared if you had documents or not. From there, in a year or two, they could have applied for their green cards—or maybe there would be another amnesty, who could tell? But now it was over. Now there was no more safe haven, no more camp in the woods. Now it was the streets.

  In a daze, Cándido drifted away from the group gathered round the pickup, the weight of the news like a stone crushing his chest. Why not kill himself now and get it over with? He couldn’t go back to Mexico, a country with forty percent unemployment and a million people a year entering the labor force, a country that was corrupt and bankrupt and so pinched by inflation that the farmers were burning their crops and nobody but the rich had enough to eat. He couldn’t go back to his aunt, couldn’t live off her again, butt of the entire village, couldn’t face América’s parents when he gave her back to them like some precious heirloom he’d borrowed and sullied. And he had a son coming, un hijo, the son he’d been yearning for since the day he’d met Resurrección, and what legacy did he have to leave him? Three hundred and twenty dollars in a peanut butter jar? A house of sticks even the prehistoric Indians would have rejected? A broken-down father who couldn’t feed himself, let alone his family?

  He staggered past the post office, his feet like lead, past the storefronts, the bright windows, the cars lined up like ciphers of the wealth that bloomed all around him, unattainable as the moon. And what was it all about? Work, that was all. The right to work, to have a job, earn your daily bread and a roof over your head. He was a criminal for daring to want it, daring to risk everything for the basic human necessities, and now even those were to be denied him. It stank. It did. These people, these norteamericanos: what gave them the right to all the riches of the world? He looked round him at the bustle in the lot of the Italian market, white faces, high heels, business suits, the, greedy eyes and ravenous mouths. They lived in their glass palaces, with their gates and fences and security systems, they left half-eaten lobsters and beefsteaks on their plates when the rest of the world was starving, spent enough to feed and clothe a whole country on their exercise equipment, their swimming pools and tennis courts and jogging shoes, and all of them, even the poorest, had two cars. Where was the justice in that?

  Angry, frustrated,, his face twisted into an expression that would have terrified him if he’d caught sight of himself in one of the windows he passed, Cándido shambled aimlessly through the lot. What should he do? Buy a sack of food and hole up in the canyon for a week until the Immigration lost interest and moved on? Risk hitchhiking the ten miles up into the Valley and stand on a streetcorner in the faint hope of work? Or should he just die on the spot and save the gringos the embarrassment of having to look at him? He was on his second circuit of the lot, drifting past the ranks of cars without purpose or direction, muttering to himself and refusing to look away from the startled eyes that swooped at him in alarm, when he came upon the blue-black Lexus sitting at the curb with the windows rolled down.

  He was moving still, moving past it, but he couldn’t help noticing the lady’s purse on the passenger seat and the black leather briefcase wedged in beside it. What was in that purse—checks, cash, house keys, a little wallet with pictures and more cash? Hundreds of dollars maybe. Hundreds. Enough to take him and América right out of the woods and into an apartment in Canoga Park, enough to solve all his problems in a single stroke. And the briefcase? He imagined it crammed full of bills like in the movies, neat stacks of them bound with little strips of bank paper. To the owner of a car like that a few hundred dollars was nothing, like pennies to an ordinary person. They could just go to the bank and get more, call their insurance company, flash a credit card. But to Cándido it was the world, and in that moment he figured the world owed him something.

  No one was watching him. He glanced right, left, swung round on his heels and strolled past the car again. The blood was like fire in his veins. He thought his head would explode with the pressure in his temples. There it is, you idiot, he told himself, take it. Take it now. Quick!

  And he might have, suspended in the moment between conception and action, all his glands discharging their complicated loads, but for the woman with the pale blond hair and see-through eyes making straight for him with a styrofoam cup clutched in her white, white hand. He froze. Stood there paralyzed in front of her car while she hid her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses, her heels clicking on the pavement, her skirt as tight as any whore’s. She came right for him, and before he could move aside, before he could protest his innocence or fade back into invisibility, he felt the touch of her hand and his fingers closing involuntarily on the coins.

  Her touch annihilated him. He’d never been more ashamed in his life, not when he was a drunk in the streets, not when Teófilo Aguadulce took his wife from him and threw him down in the square with the whole village looking on. He hung his head. Let his arms drop to his sides. He stood rooted to the spot for what seemed like hours after she’d ducked into the car, backed out of the lot and vanished, and only then did he open his hand on the two quarters and the dime that clung there as if they’d been seared into the flesh.

  When she heard the news—“They closed down the labor exchange,” Cándido told her, his eyes defiant, spoiling for a fight—America had to struggle to keep a neutral face. She felt relief, joy, a surge of hope like nothing she’d experienced since the night she lay in bed at her father’s house waiting for Cándido to tap at the window and take her away to the North. Finally, she thought, letting the breath escape her in a long exhalation that Cándido would have taken for grief. She kept her features rigid, let the hair fall across her face. Cándido was bitter, angry, ready to erupt. He was worried too, she could see that, and for a moment she felt the uncertainty take hold of her and she was scared. But then it came back to her: there was no choice now, no doubt but that they were going to have to leave this prison of trees, this dirt heap where she’d been robbed and hurt and brutalized, where the days crept by like the eternal years. She had no love for this place. Insects bit her. The ground was hard. Every time she wanted a
cup of coffee she had to gather twigs and start a fire. What kind of life was that? She’d have been better off in Morelos, in her father’s house, waiting on him like a servant till she was an old maid dried up like a fig.

  “We’ll have to leave,” she murmured, and the city she knew—alien, terrifying, a place where blacks roamed the streets and gabachos sat on the sidewalk and begged—gave way to the city she dreamed of. There would be shops, streets lined with trees, running water, toilets, a shower: They had three hundred and twenty dollars—maybe they could share a place with another couple, somebody like themselves, Tepoztecos or Cuernavacans, pool their resources, live like a big family. No matter how small the place, no matter how dirty it was, with rats and cockroaches and gunshots outside the windows, it had to be better than this. All this time Cándido had been stalling because he was afraid—they couldn’t go yet, they needed more money, have patience, mi vida, have patience—but now he could stall no longer.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Not yet? She wanted to jump up and shout in his face, pummel him with her fists. Was he crazy? Did he intend to live down here like a caveman for the rest of his life? She controlled herself, sat there in the sand hunched over the novela she’d read so many times she could recite it from memory, and waited. He was like her father, just like him: immovable, stubborn, the big boss. There was no use in arguing.

  Cándido sat at the edge of the pool in his undershorts, his skin glistening with beads of water. He’d just come back from above, just stepped out of the pool and thrown himself down beside her with his momentous announcement. It was the hottest hour of the day. Everything was still. America could feel the sweat under her arms and down below, where she itched, itched constantly, though at least her pee no longer burned. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to walk up the canyon,” he said, “early, while it’s still dark, before La Migra comes nosing around the post office and the labor exchange. I’m going to keep my eyes open—I was thinking of Canoga Park maybe—and see if I can find anything.”