The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  The car rumbled and farted through its crippled exhaust. The wind blew. The mouths of the old man’s eyes beckoned. What the hell, Cándido said to himself, what have I got to lose? and he made his way round the car to the driver’s-side window and leaned in. “What work?” he asked in Spanish.

  There was a bottle on the seat next to the old man—two bottles, one of vodka, with a red label and clear liquid, the other with the same label but filled with a yellowish fluid, which Cándido later learned was urine. The old man didn’t smell good. When he opened his mouth to smile there were only three teeth visible, two on the bottom and one on the top. “Building,” the old man said, “construction. You got a strong back, you work for me, no pissing around, eight bucks an hour.”

  Eight bucks? Was he kidding? It was a joke. It had to be.

  “Get in the car,” the old man said, and Cándido went back round to the passenger’s side, nothing to lose, jerked open the door—it was battered shut—and slid into the seat beside the two capped bottles, the clear and the tinted.

  That was Señor Willis, and Señor Willis proved to be a surprise, a big surprise, the best surprise Cándido had had since he left Tepoztlán with his seventeen-year-old bride. The Corvair took the canyon road at about thirty miles an hour, the front end ratcheting and swaying, the tires gasping, black smoke pouring so thickly from the exhaust that Cándido was afraid the thing was on fire, but it made the crest and wound down into Woodland Hills, where Señor Willis pulled up in front of a house that was the size of three houses, and the bald nervous-looking gringo who owned it came out and shook his hand. That was Señor Willis.

  Cándido worked past dark, doing what Señor Willis told him, lifting this, pulling that, fetching a wrench, a hammer, the screw gun and two boxes of tile from the trunk of the car. Señor Willis was remodeling one of the six bathrooms in this grand hushed house that was like a hotel with its potted plants and rich Persian carpets and leather chairs, and Señor Willis was a genius. An old genius. A drunken genius. A worn-out, battered and decrepit genius. But a genius all the same. He’d built hundreds of houses in his day, built whole developments, and not only in California, but in Panama too, where he’d picked up his Spanish that was so bad it made Cándido feel the way he had as a kid when the teacher would scratch her nails on the blackboard to get the attention of the class.

  Cándido worked a full week with Señor Willis and then the job was done and the old man disappeared, drunk for a week more. But Cándido had money now, and he bought America things to try to cheer her, little delicacies from the grocery, white bread and sardines in oil, and the apartment fund began to grow again in the little plastic peanut butter jar. Two weeks went by. There was no work. La Migra, rumor had it, had snatched six men from in front of the post office, and the agents were in an unmarked car, black, plain black, and not the puke-green you could see a mile away. Cándido stayed away for a while. He dipped into the money he’d made. America was like a stranger and she was getting bigger by the day, so big he was afraid she’d burst, and she ate everything he could bring her and kept wanting more.

  He climbed the hill. Stood out front of the post office and sweated the police. And where was Señor Willis? He’d died, that must have been it. Sleeping in his car because his wife hounded him so much he couldn’t take it, drinking out of the one bottle and pissing in the other, seventy-six years old with bad hips and an irregular heart and who could survive that? He was dead. Sure he was. But then, one hopeless hot wind-tortured afternoon, there came the Corvair, drifting down the road like a mirage, and there was Señor Willis with one eye bruised purple and swollen shut like some artificial thing grafted to his face, a rubber joke you’d find in a novelty shop. “Hey, muchacho,” he said, “we got work. Get in.”

  Three days this time. Installing new gates with gravity feed on an old iron fence around a swimming pool, then replacing the coping. And then Señor Willis was drunk, and then there was more work, and now, now that they had nearly five hundred dollars in the jar, there was a month’s worth of work coming up, a whole big job of work, putting an addition on a young couple’s living room in Tarzana, and what was wrong with that? America should jump for joy. They’d be out of here any day now, out of here and into an apartment where Señor Willis could come by and knock at the door and Cándido could come out and just get into the Corvair and not have to worry about La Migra snatching him off the street. But América wasn’t jumping for joy. She wasn’t jumping at all. She wasn’t even moving. She was just sitting there by the moribund stream and the dwindling pool, bloated and fat and inanimate.

  Cándido went up the hill. He was worried, always worried, but then life had its ups and downs and this time they were on the upswing, no doubt about it. He was making plans in his head and when he passed the big stubbed-toe rock where he’d encountered that son of a bitch of a half-a-gringo with the hat turned backwards on his head, he refused even to think about him. There was no work today or tomorrow either. It was a holiday, Señor Willis had told him, a four-day weekend, and they would start in on the new project, the big job, on Monday. But what holiday was it? Thanksgiving, Señor Willis had said, El Día de las Gracias, El Tenksgeevee.

  Well that was all right. Cándido would rather be working, he’d rather be putting his first and last months’ rent down on an apartment, any apartment, anywhere, and bringing his wife up out of the hole she was in, but it could wait another week at sixty-four dollars a day—or at least he hoped and prayed it could. América was due soon—she looked like an unpoked sausage swelling on the grill. But he had no control over that—sure, he’d stood out there by the post office this morning, but nobody came by, nobody, it was like the whole canyon was suddenly deserted—and now he was coming back up the hill, three o’clock in the afternoon, to buy rice, stewed tomatoes in the can, a two-quart cardboard container of milk for his wife and maybe a beer or two, Budweiser or Pabst Blue Ribbon, in the tall brown one-liter bottle, for El Tenksgeevee.

  He kept his head up on the road. La Migra wouldn’t be working today, not on El Tenksgeevee, the lazy overfed fat-assed bastards, but you could never tell: it would be just like them to pick you up when you least expected it. There wasn’t a lot of traffic—more than in the morning, but still it was nothing compared to a working day. Cándido crossed the road—careful, careful—made his way through the maze of shopping carts and haphazardly parked vehicles in the lot, and entered the paisano’s market, stooping to pick up a red plastic handbasket just inside the door.

  The place was the same as always, changeless, as familiar to him now as the market in his own village, and still there wasn’t a scent of food, not even a stray odor, as if the smell of a beefsteak or a cheese or even good fresh sawdust was somehow obscene. The light was dead. The shoppers were the same as always, the same changeless bleached-out faces, and they gave him the same naked stares of contempt and disgust. Or no, they weren’t the same, not exactly: today they were all dressed up in their finery for El Tenksgeevee. Cándido made his way down the canned-vegetable aisle, thinking to save the beer cooler for last, so as to keep the beer cold to the last possible moment—and he would reach way in back too, to get the maximally chilled ones. He smelled plastic wrap, Pine-Sol, deodorant.

  He lingered over the beer, standing in front of the fogged-over door, comparing prices, the amber bottles backlit so that they glowed invitingly, and he was thinking: One? Or two? America wouldn’t drink any, it was bad for the baby, and if she drank beer she might forget how implacably and eternally angry she was and maybe even let a stray smile fall on him. No, she wouldn’t drink any, and one would make him feel loose at the edges, little fingers crepitating in his brain and massaging the bad side of his face, but two would be glorious, two would be thanksgiving. He opened the case and let the cool air play over his face a moment, then reached into the back and selected two big one-liter bottles of Budweiser, the King of Beers.

  He was thinking nothing at the checkout, his face a mask, his mind back
in Tepoztlán, the rocky cerros rising above the village in a glistening curtain of rain, the plants lush with it, fields high with corn and the winter dry season just setting in, the best time in all the year, and he didn’t pay any attention to the gringos in line ahead of him, the loud ones, two men already celebrating the holiday, their garish shirts open at the neck, jackets tight in the shoulders. “Turkey?” one of them shouted in his own language, and his voice was rich with amusement, with mockery, and now Cándido looked up, wondering what it was all about. “What the hell do we want with a turkey?”

  The man who’d been speaking was in his twenties, cocky, long-haired, rings leaping out of his knuckles. The other one, his companion, had six little hoops punched through his earlobe. “Take it, man,” the second one said. “Come on, Jules, it’s a goof. Take it, man. It’s a turkey. A fucking turkey.”

  They were holding up the line. Heads had begun to turn. Cándido, who was right behind them, studied his feet.

  “You gonna cook it?” the first man said.

  “Cook it? You think it’ll fit in a microwave?”

  “That’s what I’m saying: what the fuck do we want with a fucking turkey?”

  And then time seemed to slow down, crystallize, hold everything suspended in that long three o’clock Thanksgiving moment under the dead light of the store and the sharp cat-eyed glances of the gringos. “What about this dude here? He looks like he could use a turkey. Hey, man”—and now Cándido felt a finger poke at his shoulder and he looked up and saw it all, the two sharp dressers, the plastic sack of groceries, the exasperated checkout girl with the pouf of sprayed-up hair and the big frozen bird, the pavo in its sheet of white skin, lying there frozen like a brick on the black conveyor belt—“you want a turkey?”

  Something was happening. They were asking him something, pointing at the turkey and asking him—what? What did they want from him? Cándido glanced round in a growing panic: everyone in the line was watching him. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.

  The one nearest him, the one with the hoops in his ear, burst out laughing, and then the other one, the first one, joined in. “Oh, man,” the first one said, “oh, man,” and the laughter twisted in Cándido like a knife. Why did they always have to do this? he thought, and his face went dark.

  Now the checkout girl chimed in: “I don’t think we can do that, sir,” she said. “It’s for the customer who made the purchase. If he”—and she indicated Cándido with a flick of her enameled fingers—“rings up fifty dollars he gets his turkey, just like you. But if you don’t want one—”

  “God, a turkey,” the first one said, and he was giggling so hard he could barely get the words out, “what a concept.”

  “Hey, come on, move it, will you?” a tall black man with a knitted brow crowed from the back of the line.

  The man with the rings shook out his long hair, looked back at the black man and gave him the richest smile in the world. “Yeah,” he said finally, turning back to the checker, “yeah, I want my turkey,” and Cándido looked away from his eyes and his leering smile and the turkey found its way into a plastic bag. But the men didn’t leave, not yet. They stood just off to the side of the checker and watched her ring up Cándido’s purchases with two frozen grins on their faces, and then, as Cándido tried to ease past them—he didn’t want any trouble, he didn’t, not now, not ever—the first man hefted the big frozen twelve-pound turkey and dropped it into Cándido’s arms and Cándido had no choice but to grab the dead weight of it, rock-hard and cold through to the bone, and he almost dropped his bottles of beer, his precious beer, and still he didn’t understand.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, dude,” the one with the rings said, and then the two of them were out the door, their long gringo legs scissoring the light, and the hot wind rushed in.

  Cándido was dazed, and he just stood there looking at all those white faces looking at him, trying to work out the permutations of what had just happened. Then he knew and accepted it in the way he would have swallowed a piece of meat without cutting it up, gulping it down because it was there on the tines of the fork. He cradled the lump of the frozen bird under one arm and hurried out the door and across the lot before someone came and took it away from him. But what luck, he thought, skittering down the road, what joy, what a coup! This would put a smile on América’s face, this would do it, the skin crusted and basted in its own juices, and he would build up the coals first, make an inferno and let it settle into a bed of coals, and then he would roast the pavo on a spit, slow-roast it, sitting right there and turning the spit till it was brown all over and not a blackened spot on it.

  He hurried down the trail, and nothing bothered him now, not his hip or his cheekbone or the wind in his face, thinking of the beer and the turkey and América. “Gobble, gobble,” he called, sloshing across the pool to where she sat like a statue in the sand, “gobble, gobble, gobble, and guess what papacito’s got for you!”

  And she smiled. She actually smiled at the sight of the thing, stripped of its head and its feet and its feathers, rolled up into one big ball of meat, turkey meat, a feast for two. She took a sip of beer when he offered it to her and she pressed his bicep with her hand as he told her the insuperable tale of the turkey, and already the flames were rising, the wind sucking them higher as it tore through the canyon, and should he get up from the sand and the beer and America and all the birds in the trees and the frogs croaking at the side of the pool and feed it some more?

  He got to his feet. The wind snatched at the fire and the fire roared. He went up and down the streambed in search of wood, rapping the bigger branches against the trunks of the trees to break them down, and every time he came back to feed the fire America was sitting there cradling the pale white bird as if she’d given birth to it, kneading the cold flesh and fighting to work the thick green spit through the back end of it. Yes, he told her, yes, that’s the way, and he was happy, as happy as he’d ever been, right up to the moment when the wind plucked the fire out of its bed of coals and with a roar as loud as all the furnaces of hell set it dancing in the treetops.

  PART THREE

  Socorro

  1

  “BUT IT’S ONLY A COUPLE OF BLOCKS,” DELANEY WAS saying to the steamed-over bathroom mirror while Kyra moved behind him in the bedroom, trying on clothes. He’d towel-dried his hair and now he was shaving. Even with the hallway door closed he could smell the turkey, the entire house alive with the aroma of roasting bird, an aroma that took him back to his childhood and his grandparents’ sprawling apartment in Yonkers, the medley of smells that would hit him in the stairwell and grow increasingly potent with each step of the three flights up until it exploded when the door swung open to reveal his grandmother standing there in her apron. Nothing had ever smelled so good—no French bakery in the first hour of light, no restaurant, no barbecue or clambake. “It seems ridiculous to take the car.”

  Kyra appeared in the bathroom doorway. She was in a black slip and she’d put her hair up. “Hurry, can’t you,” she said, “I need the mirror. And yes, we’re taking the car, of course we’re taking the car—with this wind? My hair would be all over the place.”

  Jordan was in the living room, occupied with the tape-delayed version of the Macy’s parade, Orbalina was scrambling to set the table and clean up the culinary detritus in the kitchen, and Kyra’s mother—Kit—was in the guest room, freshening up. Delaney cracked the blinds. The day was clear, hot, wind-driven. “You’ve got a point,” he conceded.

  Back then, he’d always worn a suit, tie and overcoat, even when he was five or six, as the yellowed black-and-white photos testified. But those were more formal times. Plus it was cold. There’d be ice on the lakes now and the wind off the Hudson would have a real bite to it. But what to wear today—to Dominick Flood’s cocktail party? Delaney sank his face into the towel, padded into the bedroom on bare feet and pushed through the things in his closet. This was California, after all—you could wear hip boots and a top hat and nobody wou
ld blink twice. He settled finally on a pair of baggy white cotton trousers and a short-sleeve sport shirt Kyra had bought him. The shirt carved alternate patches of white and burgundy across his chest and over his shoulders, and in each burgundy patch the multiplied figures of tiny white jockeys leapt, genuflected and gamboled their way through a series of obscure warm-up exercises. It was California all the way.

  There must have been a hundred people at Dominick Flood‘s, two o’clock in the afternoon, umbrellas flapping over the tables set up in the backyard. A string quartet was stationed under the awning that shaded the den, and the awning was flapping too. Most of the guests were packed in near the bar, where two men in tuxedos and red ties were manipulating bottles with professional ease. To the left of the bar, along the interior wall and running the length of the room, was a table laden with enough food for six Thanksgiving feasts, including a whole roast suckling pig with a mango in its mouth and fresh-steamed lobsters surrounded by multicolored platters of sashimi and sushi. Dominick himself, resplendent in a white linen suit that flared at the ankle to hide the little black box on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service, stood just inside the door, greeting guests, a long-stemmed glass in his hand. Delaney maneuvered Kyra and her mother through the crowd to introduce them.

  “Ahh, Delaney,” Dominick cried, taking his hand theatrically even as he shifted his attention to Kyra and her mother. “And this must be Mrs. Mossbacher? And—?”

  “Kit,” Kyra’s mother put in, taking Flood’s hand, “Kit Menaker. I’m visiting from San Francisco.”

  The string quartet started up then, sawing harshly into something jangling and modern, their faces strained against the rush of wind and the indifferent clamor of the party, and Delaney tuned out the conversation. Kyra’s mother, fifty-five, blond and divorced, with Kyra’s nose and legs and an exaggerated self-presence, was the single most coquettish woman Delaney had ever known. She would tangle herself like a vine round Dominick Flood, whose incipient bachelorhood she could smell out in some uncanny extrasensory way, and she would almost certainly invite him to their little dinner party, only to be disappointed and maybe even a bit shocked by the black manacle on his ankle. And that, of course, would only whet her appetite. “Yes,” he heard Kyra say, “but I was just a little girl then,” and Kit chimed in with a high breathless giggle that was like a warcry.