by T. C. Boyle
“An apartment?”
“Apartment? What’s the matter with you?” His voice jumped up the register. “You know we can’t afford an apartment—how many times do I have to tell you?” He turned to look at her. His eyes were dangerous. “Sometimes I just can’t believe you,” he said.
“Maybe a motel,” she said, “—just for a night. We could take a shower, ten showers, shower all night. This water’s dirty, filthy, full of scum and bugs. It stinks. My hair smells like an old dog.”
Cándido looked away. He said nothing.
“And a bed to sleep in, a real bed. God, what I wouldn’t give for a bed—just for one night.”
“You’re not going with me.”
“Yes I am.”
“You’re not.”
“You can’t stop me—what are you going to do, hit me again? Huh? Big man? I don’t hear you?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
She saw the bed, the shower, a taqueria maybe. “You can’t leave me here, not anymore. Those men... What if they come back?”
There was a long silence, and she knew they were both thinking about that inadmissible day and what she couldn’t tell him and how he knew it in his heart and how it shamed him. If they lived together a hundred years she could never bring that up to him, never go further than she just had. Still, how could he argue with the fact of that? This was no safe haven, this was the wild woods.
“Indita,” he said, “you’ve got to understand—it’s ten miles each way, and I’ll be on the streets, maybe getting work, maybe finding someplace for us, someplace to camp closer in to the city. You’re safe here. Nobody would come up this far.” He’d been looking her in the face, but now he dropped his eyes and turned away again. “It’s the trail that’s dangerous,” he murmured, “just stay off the trail.”
Indita. She hated it when he called her that: his little Indian. He passed it off as an endearment, but it was a subtle dig at her, a criticism of her looks, her Indian blood, and it made her feel small and insignificant, though she knew she was one of the beauties of Tepoztlán, celebrated for her figure, her shining hair, her deep luminous eyes and her smile that all the boys said was like some rich dessert they could eat with a spoon, bite by bite. But his skin was lighter and he had the little hook in his nose that his family had inherited from the conquistadores, though his stepmother was black as a cane cutter and his father didn’t seem to mind. Indita. She sprang up suddenly and flung the novela into the water, splash, and he was wet again. “I won’t stay here,” she said, and her voice rose in her throat till it shattered, “not one more day.”
In the morning—it was early, three a.m. maybe, she couldn’t tell—she folded bean paste, chiles and slivers of cheese into corn tortillas and wrapped them up in newspaper for the trip out of the canyon. They’d agreed to leave their things behind, just in case and because they’d attract less attention without them, and to try their luck overnight at least. Cándido had even promised they’d find a room for the night, with a shower and maybe even a TV, if it wasn’t too dear. América worked by the glow of the coals and the tinfoil light of the moon that hung like an ornament just over the lip of the gorge. She was giddy with excitement, like a girl waking early on her saint’s day. Things would work out. Their luck was bound to improve. And even if it didn’t, she was ready for a change, any change.
Cándido unearthed the peanut butter jar; removed twenty dollars and shoved it deep into his pocket; then he flared up the fire with a handful of kindling and had her sew the remaining three hundred dollars into the cuff of his trousers. She pulled on her maternity dress—the pink one with the big green flowers that Cándido had bought her—tucked the burritos into her string purse and made them coffee and salted tortillas for breakfast. Then they started up the hill.
There was almost no traffic at all at this hour, and that was a pleasant surprise. Darkness clung to the hills, and yet it was mild and the air smelled of the jasmine that trailed from the retaining walls out front of the houses along the road. They walked in silence for an hour, the occasional car stunning them with its headlights before the night crept back in. Things rustled in the brush at the side of the road—mice, she supposed—and twice they heard coyotes howling off in the hills. The moon got bigger as it dipped behind them and America never let the weight of the baby bother her, or its kicks either. She was out of the canyon, away from the spit of sand and that ugly wrecked hulk of a car, and that was all that mattered.
When they reached the top and the San Fernando Valley opened up beneath them like an enormous glittering fan, she had to stop and catch her breath. “Come on,” Cándido urged, leaning over her as she sat there in a patch of stiff grass, “there’s no time to rest.” But she’d overestimated herself, and now she felt it: a pregnant woman grown soft in that prison by the stream. Her feet were swollen. She could smell her own sweat. The baby was like a dead weight strapped to the front of her. “Un momento,” she whispered, gazing out on the grounded constellations of the Valley floor, grid upon grid of lights, and every one a house, an apartment, a walk-up or flat, every one the promise of a life that would never again be this hard.
Cándido crouched beside her. “Are you okay?” he whispered, and he, bent forward to hold her, press her head to his shoulder the way her father used to do when she was little and his favorite and she skinned her knee or woke with a nightmare. “It’s not much farther,” he said, his breath warm on her cheek, “just down there,” and she made him point to a place beyond where the office buildings rose up like stony monoliths to a double band of lights running perpendicular to the great long vertical avenues that stretched on into the darkness of the mountains on the far side of the Valley. “That’s it,” he said. “That string of lights there—see it? Sherman Way.”
Sherman Way. She held the words in her head like a talisman, Sherman Way, and then they were moving again, along the black swatch of the road that chased its own tail down the side of the hill. Cándido knew the shortcuts, steep narrow trails that plunged through the brush to pinch off the switchbacks at the neck, and he held her hand and helped her through the worst places. Her feet were like stone, clumsy suddenly. Needlegrass stabbed through her dress and things caught at her hair. And now, every time they made the pavement again, there were the cars. It wasn’t yet light and already they were there, the first sporadic awakening of that endless stream, roaring up the road opposite them, and there was no joy in that. America kept her head down and skipped along as fast as she could go, eaten up with the fear of La Migra and the common accidents of the road.
By the time the sun was up, the ordeal was behind them. They were walking hand in hand up a broad street overhung with trees, a sidewalk beneath their feet, pretty houses with pretty yards stretching as far as they could see. America was exhilarated, on fire with excitement. All the fatigue of the past hours dropped magically away from her. Clinging to Cándido’s arm, she peered in at the windows, examined the cars in the driveways and the children’s things in the yards with the eye of an appraiser, gave a running commentary on each house as they passed it by. The houses were adorable, linda, simpatica, cute. That color was striking, didn’t he think so? And the bougainvillea—she’d never seen bougainvillea so lush. Cándido was mute. His eyes darted everywhere and he looked troubled—he was troubled, worried sick, she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. Oh, look at that one! And that!
They turned next onto a commercial boulevard, the main one in this part of the city, Cándido explained, and this was even better. There were shops, wall-to-wall shops, restaurants—was that a Chinese, was that what that writing was?—a supermarket that sprawled out over a lot the size of a fútbol stadium with thirty shops more clustered round it. After Tepoztlán, Cuernavaca even, after the Tijuana dump and Venice and the leafy dolorous hell of the canyon, this was a vision of paradise. And when she came to the furniture store—the couches and settees and rugs and elegant lamps all laid out like in the Hollywood movies—Candido
couldn’t budge her. “Come on, it’s getting late, you can look at this junk some other time, come on,” he said, tugging at her arm, but she wouldn’t move. Not for ten whole minutes. It was almost as if she were in a trance and she didn’t care. If she could have done it, she would have moved right into the store and slept on a different couch every night and it wouldn’t have bothered her a whit if the whole world was looking in at the window.
Canoga Park was different.
It was pinched and meaner, a lot of secondhand shops and auto-parts stores, dirty restaurants and cantinas with bars on the windows, but there were people just like her all over the streets and that made her feel better, made her feel for the first time that she too could live here, that it could be done, that it had been done by thousands before her. She heard Spanish spoken on the streets, nothing but Spanish. Children shot by on skateboards and bicycles. A street vendor was selling roasted ears of corn out of a barrel. América felt as if she’d come home.
Then Cándido took her into a restaurant, a little hole in the wall with five stools at the counter and a couple of Formica tables stuck in a corner, and she could have wept for joy. She fussed with her hair before they went in—she should have braided it—and tried to smooth down her dress and pick the fluff out of it. “You never told me,” she said. “I must look like a mess.”
“You look fine,” he said, but she didn’t believe him. How could she? She’d been camping in the woods without so much as a compact mirror for as long as she could remember.
The waiter was Mexican. The chef behind the grill was Mexican. The dishwasher was Mexican and the man who mopped the floor and the big swollen mother with her two niñitos and the five men sitting on the five stools blowing into their cups of coffee. The menu was printed in Spanish. “Order anything you want, mi vida,” Cándido said, and he tried to smile, but the look of worry never left his face.
She ordered huevos con chorizo and toast, real toast, the first she’d had since she left, home. Butter melted into the toast, sweet yellow pools of it, the salsa on the table was better than her mother had ever made and the coffee was black and strong. The sugar came in little packets and she poured so much of it into her coffee the spoon stood up straight when she tried to stir it. Cándido ordered two eggs and toast and he ate like an untamed beast let out of its cage, then went up to the counter and talked to the men there while she used the bathroom, which was dirty and cramped but a luxury of luxuries for all that. She looked at herself in the mirror through a scrim of triangular markings and slogans scratched into the glass and saw that she was pretty still, flushed and healthy-looking. She lingered on the toilet. Stripped to the waist and washed the top half of her body with the yellow liquid soap and let the water run in the basin long after she’d finished with it, just let it run to hear it.
Later, Cándido stood on the streetcorner with two hundred other men while she shrank by his side. The talk was grim. There was a recession. There was no work. Too many had come up from the South, and if there was work for them all six years ago, now there were twenty men for every job and the bosses knew it and cut the wage by half. Men were starving. Their wives and children were starving. They’d do anything for work, any kind of work, and they’d take what the boss was paying and get down on their knees and thank him for it.
The men slouched against buildings, sat on the curb, smoked and chatted in small groups. America watched them as she’d watched the men at the labor exchange and what she saw made her stomach sink with fear: they were hopeless, they were dead, as bent and whipped and defeated as branches torn from a tree. She and Cándido stood there for an hour, not so much in the hope of work—it was ridiculous even to think of it with two hundred men there—but to talk and probe and try to get the lay of the land. Where could they stay? Where was the cheapest place to eat? Was there a better streetcorner? Were they hiring at the building supply? In all that time, a full hour at least, she saw only two pickups pull in at the curb and only six men of all that mob climb in.
And then they started walking. They walked all day, up and down the streets, through the back alleys, down the boulevards and back again, Cándido gruff and short-tempered, his eyes wild. By suppertime nothing had been settled, except that they were hungry again and their feet hurt more than ever. They were sitting on a low wall out in front of a blocky government buitding—the post ofnce?—when a man in baggy pants and with his long hair held in place by a black hairnet sat down beside them. He looked to be about thirty and he wore a bold-check flannel shirt buttoned at the neck though the air was like a furnace. He offered Cándido a cigarette. “You look lost, compadre,” he said, and his Spanish had a North American twang to it.
Cándido said nothing, just pulled on the cigarette, staring off into space.
“You looking for a place to stay? I know a place,” the man said, leaning forward now to look into América’s face. “Cheap. And clean. Real clean.”
“How much?” Cándido asked.
“Ten bucks.” The man breathed smoke out his nostrils. America saw that he had a tattoo circling his neck like a collar; little blue numbers or letters, she couldn’t tell which. “Apiece.”
Cándido said nothing.
“It’s my aunt’s place,” the man said, something nasal creeping into his voice, and America could hear the appeal there. “It’s real clean. Fifteen bucks for the two of you.” There was a pause. Traffic crawled by. The air was heavy and brown, thick as smoke. “Hey,” he said, “compadre, what’s the problem? You need a place to stay, right? You can’t let this pretty little thing sleep on the street. It’s dangerous. It’s no good. You need a place. I’ll give you two nights for twenty bucks—I mean, it’s no big deal. It’s just around the corner.”
America watched Cándido’s face. She didn’t dare enter into the negotiations, no matter how tired and fed up she was. That wasn’t right. This was between the two men. They were feeling each other out, that was all, bargaining the way you bargained at the market. The baby moved then, a sharp kick deep inside her. She felt nauseated. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them Cándido was on his feet. So was the other man. Their eyes told her nothing. “You wait here,” Cándido.said, and she watched him limp up the street with the stranger in the hairnet and baggy trousers, one block, two, the stranger a head taller, his stride quick and anxious. Then they turned the corner and they were gone.
5
PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK
As I sit here today at the close of summer, at the hour when the very earth crackles for the breath of moisture denied it through all these long months of preordained drought, I gaze round my study at the artifacts I’ve collected during my diurnal wanderings—the tail feathers of the Cooper’s hawk, the trilobite preserved in stone since the time the ground beneath my feet was the bed of an ancient sea, the owl pellets, skeletons of mouse and kangaroo rat, the sloughed skin of the gopher snake—and my eye comes to rest finally on the specimen jar of coyote scat. There it is, on the shelf over my desk, wedged between the Mexican red-kneed tarantula and the pallid bat pickled in formalin, an innocuous jar of desiccated ropes of hair the casual observer might take for shed fur rather than the leavings of our cleverest and most resourceful large predator, the creature the Indians apotheosized as the Trickster. And why today do my eyes linger here and not on some more spectacular manifestation of nature’s plethora of wonders? Suffice it to say that lately the coyote has been much on my mind.
Here is an animal ideally suited to its environment, able to go without water for stretches at a time, deriving the lion’s share of its moisture from its prey, and yet equally happy to take advantage of urban swimming pools and sprinkler systems. One coyote, who makes his living on the fringes of my community high in the hills above Topanga Creek and the San Fernando Valley, has learned to simply chew his way through the plastic irrigation pipes whenever he wants a drink. Once a week, sometimes even more frequently, the hapless maintenance man will be confronted by a geyser o
f water spewing out of the xerophytic ground cover the community has planted as a firebreak. When he comes to me bewildered with three gnawed lengths of PVC pipe, I loan him a pair of Bausch & Lomb 9x35 field glasses and instruct him to keep watch at dusk along the rear perimeter of the development. Sure enough, within the week he’s caught the culprit in the act, and at my suggestion, he paints the entire length of the irrigation system with a noxious paste made of ground serrano chilies. And it works. At least until the unforgiving blast of the sun defuses the chilies’ potency. And then, no doubt to the very day, the coyote will be back.
Of course, a simpler solution (the one most homeowners resort to when one of these “brush wolves” invades the sanctum sanctorum of their fenced-in yard) is to call in the Los Angeles County Animal Control Department, which traps and euthanizes about 100 coyotes a year. This solution, to one who wishes fervently to live in harmony with the natural world, has always been anathema (after all, the coyote roamed these hills long before Homo sapiens made his first shaggy appearance on this continent), and yet, increasingly, this author has begun to feel that some sort of control must be applied if we continue to insist on encroaching on the coyote’s territory with our relentless urban and suburban development. If we invade his territory, then why indeed should we be surprised when he invades ours?
For Canis latrans is, above all, adaptable. The creature that gives birth to four or fewer pups and attains a mature weight of twenty-five pounds or less in the sere pinched environment in which it evolved has spread its range as far as Alaska in the north and Costa Rica in the south, and throughout all the states of the continental U.S. Nineteen subspecies are now recognized, and many of them, largely because of the abundant food sources we’ve inadvertently made available to them (dogs, cats, the neat plastic bowls of kibble set just outside the kitchen door, the legions of rats and mice our wasteful habits support), have grown considerably larger and more formidable than the original model, the average size of their litters growing in proportion. And the march of adaptability goes on. Werner Schnitter, the renowned UCLA biologist, has shown in his radio-collaring studies that the coyotes of the Los Angeles basin demonstrate a marked decline in activity during periods coinciding with the morning and evening rush hour. This is nothing less than astonishing: you would think the coyotes were studying us.