The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  Then it was the second hour and she was lost and abandoned. The sun was setting, the sky streaked with dying light, the storefronts trembling with a watery silver glow like puddles stood on end all up and down the street. There were fewer people on the sidewalks now, and America no longer found them amusing or even interesting. She wanted Cándido to come back, that was all, and what if he’d had an accident? What if he was hurt? What if La Migra had snatched him? For the first time since she’d sat herself down on that wall, the reality of her situation hit her: she had no money, knew no one, couldn’t even find her way back to that miserable pile of sticks in the canyon. What if Cándido never came back, what if he’d died of a heart attack or got hit by another car? What then?

  After an hour and a half had gone by and there was still no sign of him, América pushed herself up from the wall and started down the street in the direction he’d taken with the chicano, turning to look over her shoulder every few steps to see if by some miracle he might have come back to the wall from another direction. She passed antique stores, gloomy depthless places full of old gloomy furniture; a store that sold fish in every color swimming in water so pure it was like air; a closed and shuttered luncheonette; an auto-parts store that was a hub of activity. It was here, just past the auto-parts store, that she turned left, following Cándido’s lead, and found herself on a side street, but a busy one, cars hurtling by against a yellow light, springs rattling, tires squealing. She saw groups of men in the lot out back of the auto-parts store, gringos and Latinos alike, the sprawl of their cars, hoods up, engines running, the music pounding from their stereos till the pavement shook with it. They hardly gave her a glance, and she was too timid, too afraid to ask them if they’d seen Cándido, her husband, her lost husband, and that other man. Then there was a bookstore, a few more storefronts, and the street turned residential.

  It was getting dark. Streetlights blinked on. The windows of the houses had begun to glow softly against the shadowy shrubs, the flowers drained of color, the bougainvillea and wisteria gone gray in the fading light. She didn’t see Cándido anywhere. Not a trace of him. The baby moved inside her and her stomach dipped and fluttered. All she wanted was to belong in one of those houses, any of them, even for a night. The people who lived in those houses had beds to stretch out on, they had toilets that flushed and hot and cold running water, and most important of all, they were home, in their own private space, safe from the world. And where was Cándido? Where was the room he’d promised her, the bed, the shower? This was shitty, really shitty. Worse than her father’s house, a hundred times worse. She was a fool to have left, a fool to have listened to the stories, watched the movies, read the novelas, and more of a fool to ever for a second have envied the married girls in Tepoztlán whose husbands gave them so much when they came home from the North. Clothes, jewelry, a new TV—that wasn’t what you got. You got this. You got streets and bums and burning pee.

  Finally, after she’d searched even the side streets off of the side street, she went back to the wall in front of the post office. She didn’t know what had happened to Cándido—she was afraid even to think about it—but this was where he would look for her, and she would just have to sit here and be patient, that was all. But now it was fully dark, now it was night, and the foot traffic had begun to pick up again—teenagers in groups, men in their twenties and thirties, out on the prowl. There was no one to protect her, no one to care. All she could see was the image of those animals at the border, the half-a-gringo and his evil eyes and filthy insinuating fingers, the fat white man with his fat white hands, and she withdrew into herself, dwelled there deep inside where nobody could touch her. “Hey, baby,” they called when they saw her there trying to melt into the darkness, “hey, ruca, hey, sexy, ¿quieres joder conmigo?”

  It was nearly midnight and she’d nodded off—she couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep her eyes open a second longer—when she felt a touch at her shoulder. She woke with a start—nearly jumped out of her skin—and there he was, Cándido. Even in the bleak half-light of the streetlamps she could see the blood on his face, slick and black and without color. It could have been oil, molasses, could have been coal tar or makeup for some fright-house play in the theater, but it wasn’t and she knew it the minute she saw him. “They hit me with something,” he said, his voice so pinched and hoarse she thought at first he’d been strangled. “A baseball bat, I think. Right here.” He lifted a hand to his hairline and touched the place where the blood was blackest. “They got everything. Every penny.”

  And now she saw that his shirt was torn and the cuffs of his trousers hacked away till it looked as if some animal had been chewing its way up his legs. They got everything. She looked into his eyes in the dim subterranean glow of the streetlamp and let the words sink in. There would be no bed, no shower, no dinner even. And in the future: no apartment, no shops, no restaurants, no toys and blankets and diapers for her baby. Her mind raced ahead and back again, and then she thought of the woods, of the canyon, of that shitpile of sticks, and she wanted to die.

  His head ached, but that was nothing new. For a while there, his eyes had been playing tricks on him, everything doubled and doubled again, two walls, two windows, two streetlamps, then four and eight and sixteen, till he had to clamp his lids shut and start all over again. The world was back to a single image at least, and that was all right, but his shoulder throbbed where he must have fallen on it, and what next? It was like getting hit by that car all over again, except that this time he had no one to blame but himself. How could he have been so stupid? That chingón had no aunt. He was as bad as any vago at the labor exchange, worse. “This way,” he kept saying, “it’s just up here, my aunt’s house, you’ll like it, man, you’ll like it.” He didn’t have any aunt. But there were two more just like him waiting in the alley, and how many mojados had they clipped in their time? They knew just where to look—every dumb hick must have sewed his bankroll into his cuffs. Where else would it be? At the Bank of America? Under his pillow at the Ritz? It was his stinking bad luck, that was all, and now his head ached and he had nothing left in the world, not even a decent pair of pants, and America was looking at him as if he were the lowest form of life on the earth, no sympathy in her eyes, not a trace.

  The first thing to do was find a gas station and have America ask to use the rest room so he could slip in and wash the blood off his face. It wasn’t bad, a little headache, that was all—a headache and a whole lot of blood. He didn’t give a damn for the blood, but if the police spotted him looking like this it would be the end of him. First the rest room, then something to eat. He hated to do this to her, to America, because this was just what he’d tried to protect her from, but they were going to have to go out back of one of the fast-food places—Kentucky Fried or Taco Bell or McDonald’s—and go through the trash. After that they’d need a place to sleep, some business with shrubs around it and a little patch of lawn, someplace quiet where nobody would notice them, least of all the sons of bitches roaming the streets for blood, and now he had two of them to kill, hijo de la chingada and fuck the whole world.

  “Okay,” he said, and America wouldn’t look at him, “okay now, listen to me...”

  And she listened. Scared, angry, defeated, full of pity and hate, her heart in her mouth, no bed, no shower, no nothing. The nearest service station was five blocks up the street, up Sherman Way, and nobody said a word to her with Cándido at her side, his face a flag of blood, his pantlegs flapping like ragged banners. The attendant was Nicaraguan and he looked at her like she was dirt when she asked for the key to the rest room without buying anything, but she smiled and used her smallest voice and he relented. She took advantage of the opportunity to use the commode and cushion the back strap of her sandals with toilet paper, while Cándido washed the blood from his face and patted the mouth of the wound dry with paper towels. His face was pale and bristling with a vagrant’s short stiff whiskers, but his hair hid the black slash of the contusion and when
he’d finished he looked almost presentable, but for his torn shirt and the frayed ends of his trousers and the pit under his left eye that was part of him forever now.

  He walked two steps ahead of her and he had nothing to say, his shoulders squared up like a fighting cock’s, his eyes eating up the street. The few people out at this hour—drunks, mainly—gave him a wide berth. Though she was tired and shot through with despair, though her feet hurt and her stomach clenched on nothing, America didn’t dare ask him where they were going or what the plan was or where they would sleep, eat, wash, live. She just followed along, numbed and vacant, and all the acid odors of the street assaulted her as if they’d been distilled just for her, for her and her alone. They walked for blocks and blocks, heading west, then turned onto a bright big boulevard to the south and followed it eternally, past shuttered restaurants, record shops and great hulking dimly lit malls floating like factory ships in black seas of macadam. It was very late. The leaves of the trees hung limp. There were hardly any cars at all on the streets.

  Finally, just as she thought she was going to collapse, they came to another broad boulevard that looked familiar somehow, painfully familiar, though it was different now in the muted light, the sidewalks deserted, traffic dormant, every decent person home in bed. She’d never been very good with directions—Cándido joked that she could get lost just going from the kitchen to the bathroom—but she knew this place, didn’t she? They were crossing against the light, no cars coming in either direction, when it came to her: they were back on the canyon road, right back where they’d started, where the shade trees overhung all those pretty little unattainable houses and the yards that were thick with swing sets and tricycles. She felt her heart sink. What were they doing here? He wasn’t going to make her walk all the way back up the road and down into that miserable hole tonight, was he? He couldn’t. He was crazy. Insane. She’d throw herself down right here on the sidewalk and die first.

  She was about to say something, when he stopped suddenly just outside a restaurant she remembered from the morning, a little place set apart on its own paved lot, with plate-glass windows, a candy-striped roof and a big illuminated red-and-white bucket revolving round a pole atop it. The place was closed, dark inside, but the lot on either side of it was lit up like brightest day. “You hungry?” Cándido whispered, and they hadn’t spoken in so long her voice sounded strange in her own ears when she said yes, yes she was. “Okay,” he said, shooting a nervous glance up and down the street, “follow me and be quick about it—and keep your voice down.”

  She wasn’t thinking. She was too tired to think, too depressed. There must have been some vague wonder in the back of her brain, some sort of puzzlement—did he know someone who worked here or was he going to lift something, supplies they delivered late at night?—but it never came to the surface and she just followed him stupidly into the harsh flood of the lights. They were in the back lot now, hidden from the street, fenced in on three sides. A big gray metal bin stood there, just outside the rear door, and it gave off an odor that told her immediately what it was.

  Cándido astonished her. He strode right up to the thing and threw back the lid and he never noticed the dark quick shadow that shot out from beneath the bin and disappeared between the slats of the fence. All at once she understood: garbage, they were going to eat garbage. Sift through it like the basureros at the dump, take somebody else’s filthy leavings, full of spit and maggots and ants. Was he crazy? Had he gone mad with the knock on his head? Even at their lowest, even in Tijuana in the’ dump they’d been able to scrape together a few centavos to buy steamed corn and caldo from the street vendors. She stood there frozen at the edge of the lot, watched in shock and disbelief as Cándido leaned into the bin till his legs came up off the ground and he began to kick for balance. She could feel the outrage burning in her, fueled by all the cruel disappointments of the day, a rising white-hot blaze of it that pushed her forward to sink her nails into his leg. “What are you doing?” she demanded in a whisper she could barely contain. “What in the name of Jesus do you think you’re doing?”

  His legs kicked. She heard him grunt from deep inside the bin. Somewhere out on the street an engine roared to life and she flinched and let go of him. What if someone caught them? She’d die of shame. “I’m not touching that, that shit,” she hissed at the flailing legs, at his fat floundering rear. “I’d rather starve.” She moved a step closer, outraged, and the smell hit her again, mold, rot, decay, filth. She wanted to shove him into the bin and slam the lid down on him, she wanted to break things, pound her fists against the walls. “Maybe you can live like this, but not me,” she said, fighting to keep her voice down. “My family’s respectable, miles above the likes of you and your aunt, and my father, my father—” She couldn’t go on. She was breathless and weak and she thought she was going to cry.

  There was a prolonged grunt from the depths of the bin, and then Cándido resurfaced, feeling his way with his feet, backing out of the mouth of the dumpster like a hermit crab emerging from its shell. He turned to her with his face ironed gray under the blast of the floodlights and she saw that his arms were spilling over with red-and-white-striped cardboard boxes, little things, like candy or cigar boxes. Grease, she smelled grease. Cooking grease. Cooking grease gone cold. “Your father,” he said, holding out one of the boxes to her, “is a thousand miles away.”

  He looked round him quickly, that worried look on his face, tensed a moment, then relaxed. His voice softened. “Eat, mi vida,” he said. “You’re going to need it to keep up your strength.”

  8

  IN THE EAST, FALL CAME IN ON A GUST OF CANADIAN air, invigorating and decisive. The leaves changed. The rain fell in cold gray splinters and the puddles developed a second skin overnight. The world was closing down, getting snug in dens and burrows, and the equinox was no casual thing. But here, in the bleached hills above Los Angeles, fall was just another aspect of the eternal summer, hotter, drier, hurled through the canyons on the breath of winds that leached all the moisture from the chaparral and brought combustible oils to the surface of every branch and twig. This was the season Delaney had the most trouble with. What was there to recommend in hundred-degree temperatures, zero-percent humidity and winds that forced fine grains of degraded sandstone up your nostrils every time you stepped out the door? Where was the charm in that? Other writers could celebrate the autumnal rituals of New England or the Great Smoky Mountains—watching the birds flock overhead, cutting wood for the stove, cranking up the cider press or stalking somnolent bears through the leafless woods with the first wet scent of snow in the air—but what could Delaney do to color the dismal reality of the season here? Sure, he educated his audience about fire-dependent germination, solvent extractives in manzanita and chamise, the release of nutrients in wood ash, but what could you do with a season that anticipated not the first soft magical transforming blanket of snow but the hellish raging infernos that vaporized everything in their path and shot roiling columns of atramental smoke twenty thousand feet into the air?

  The winds blew, and Delaney sat at his desk and tried to make sense of them. He was still collecting material for a column on introduced species and population conflict, but the seasonal phenomena had to take precedence. How did the ground squirrels react to the drop in humidity? he wondered. Or the lizards? Maybe he could do something with the lizards, and not just the homed lizard, but all of them—the fence lizard, the western skink, the side-splotched lizard, the banded gecko. Did the winds change their behavior? Did the moisture content of their prey go down? Did they spend more time in their burrows during the heat of the day? He should have been out observing them, but the weather was getting him down. A high-pressure system had been stalled over the Great Basin for weeks now and every day was a replica of the day before: hot, cloudless, wind like a rope burn. He’d been out on the trails yesterday and spent most of his time applying Chap Stick and chasing his hat. Dust blew in his eyes. The scrub was whipped flat a
s if by the force of some great invisible hand. He cut his hike short and went home to sit in the air-conditioned living room, shades drawn, watching a joyless football contest between panting fat men who looked as if they’d rather be elsewhere.

  Still, the lizard idea was a good one, definitely worth exploring, and he got up from his desk to sift through his nature library, picking up tidbits about the six-lined racer (eats the eggs of small ground-nesting birds by crushing them with its jaws and lapping up the contents), the chuckwalla (strictly vegetarian) and the gila monster (stores fat in its tail). But then, unaccountably, he thought of vultures—they must do pretty well under these conditions. No one had written much about the turkey vulture—too pedestrian—and that might make for an unusual column. And this was their season, no doubt about it. Water sources were drying up. Things were dying.

  He was sitting there, lost in lizard lore and statistical analyses of disgorgement rates in nesting vultures, when the doorbell rang, a dull metallic passing of gas that hissed through the nether regions of the house like air leaking out of a balloon. He debated whether or not to answer it. This was his private time, his writing time, and he guarded it jealously. But who could it be at this hour? The mailman? Fed Ex? Curiosity got the better of him and he went to the door.

  A man in a dirty T-shirt was standing there on the doormat, a cement mixer and two flatbed trucks piled high with cinder blocks looming behind him at the curb. He was wearing a hard hat and his arms were bruised with tattoos. Behind him, milling around the trucks, was a crew of Mexicans. “I just wanted to tell you we’ll be coming through here today,” he said, “and it would be a help if you could leave the side gate open.”