by T. C. Boyle
“We better shut off the turkey,” Delaney said, and that seemed to lift the spell. “Just in case.”
2
SO SHE SAT THERE, AS MISERABLE AS SHE’D EVER been in her life, and closed her mind down till the world went from a movie screen to a peephole, and still she wanted to close the peephole too. She was going mad, dancing round the edges of the abyss, and she didn’t care. The baby grew and it pressed on her organs and made her skin flush with a stipple of red like a rash. Cándido gave her food and she ate it. But she wouldn’t sleep with him. Wouldn’t talk to him. It was all his fault, everything, from the stale air in the bus on the ride from Cuernavaca to Tijuana and the smell of the dump to this place, this vacancy of leaves and insects and hot naked air where men did dirty things to her and made her pee burn like fire. She looked through her peephole at the gray leaves of the gray trees and thought of Soledad Ordóñez, the stooped old shapeless woman from the San Miguel barrio who didn’t speak to her husband for twenty-two years because he sold their pig in San Andrés and was drunk for a week on the proceeds. He was dying, stretched out on his deathbed with the priest and their three sons and four daughters there and all their seventeen grandchildren and his brother too, and he could barely croak out the words, “Soledad, talk to me,” and her face was stone and the priest and the brother and all the grandchildren held their breath, and she said one word, “Drunkard,” and he died.
America missed her mother with a pain of longing so intense it was as if some part of her body had been removed. She missed her sisters and her bed in the comer of the back room with the posters of rock stars and las reinas del cine above it and Gloria Iglesias and Remedios Esparza and the other girls she used to go around with. She missed human voices, laughter, the smells of the street and marketplace, the radio, TV, dances and shops and restaurants. And who had deprived her of all this? Cándido. And she hated him for it. She couldn’t help herself.
But then one day, lying there by the desolate stream like some dead thing, America heard a bird calling, three high-pitched notes and then a quavering sustained low-throated whistle that broke her heart with the sadness of it, over and over, that sad beautiful bird calling for her mate, her love, her husband, and América felt the sun touch her face like the hand of God, and the peephole snapped open like the shutter of a camera. It wasn’t much, just a fraction, the tiniest opening, but from that day on she began to recover. Her baby was coming. Cándido loved her. She made coffee the next morning, cooked him a meal. When he was gone she dug out the peanut butter jar and counted the limp gray bills there, the silver hoard of change, and she thought: Soon, soon. She wouldn’t talk to him yet. She wouldn’t smile at him. She hurt with a disappointment so yawning and wide she couldn’t help spilling him into it, holding his head down in the black bitter waters, and that was true and unchanging and ongoing, but each day now the gulf inside her began to close even as the peephole widened.
And now, today, when he came back with the turkey that had dropped down out of heaven, the Tenksgeevee turkey, she couldn’t make him suffer anymore. She was no Señora Ordóñez, she couldn’t live a life of accusation and hatred, serving the coffee in a funereal dress, throwing down the plate of eggs and beans as if it were a weapon, always biting her lip and cursing in her head. She laughed to see him there, wet to the waist, the clink of the beer bottles, the big naked bird and gobble, gobble, gobble. He clowned for her, danced round the sandspit with the bird atop his head, doing a silly jogging brinco step like a man strapped to a jackhammer. The leaves were green again, the sky blue. She got up and held him.
And the fire, when it leapt to the trees like the coming of the Apocalypse, didn’t affect her, not at first, not for a minute anyway. She was so intent on driving the sharp green stake of oak through the frozen carcass of the bird, so fixated on the image of crackling brown skin and rice with drippings, so happy to be alive again, that the roar didn’t register. Not until she looked, up and saw Cándido’s face and every living leaf and branch and bole wrapped in a vesture of flame. That was half a second before the panic set in, half a second before the numbing crazy bone-bruising flight up the hill, but half a second in which she wished with all her heart that she’d been strong enough to let the peephole close down forever.
For Cándido, it was a moment of pure gut-clenching terror, the moment of the fatal mistake and the reaping of the consequences. What would he liken it to? Nothing, nothing he’d ever seen, except maybe the time in Arizona when the man they called Sleepy burned to death under the tractor when his cigarette ignited a spill of gasoline from the tank. Cándido had been up his ladder in a lemon tree, picking, and he heard the muted cry, saw the flames leap up and then the bright exploding ball of them. But now he was on the ground and the flames were in the trees, swooping through the canyon with a mechanical roar that stopped his heart.
There was no heat like this, no furnace, no bomb, no reactor. Every visible thing danced in the flames. America was going to die. He was going to die. Not in a rocking chair on the porch of his little house surrounded by his grandchildren, but here and now, in the pit of this unforgiving canyon. Ahead of them, down the only trail he knew, the flames rose up in a forty-foot curtain; behind them was the sheer rock wall of their cul-de-sac. He was no mountain goat and America was so big around she could barely waddle, but what did it matter? He sprang at her, jerked her up from the sand and the white frozen carcass of the bird—and it would cook now, all right—and pulled her across the spit to the rock wall and the trickle of mist that fell intermittently from above. “Climb!” he screamed, shoving her up ahead of him, pushing at her bottom and the big swollen ball of her belly, fighting for finger- and toeholds, and they were climbing, both of them, scaling the sheer face of the rock as if it were a jungle gym.
The heat seared his skin through the fabric of his shirt, stung the exposed flesh of his hands and face. There was no air, not a breath, all the oxygen sucked up to feed the inferno, and with each step the rock went rotten beneath their feet. He didn’t think they were going to make it, but then he gave America a final frantic shove and they were over the top and sitting in a puddle of water in a place that was as new to him as the back side of the moon, though he’d lived within spitting distance of it all these months. There were no pools here, no rills or falls—there was hardly any water at all. A staggered run of puddles retreated to the next tumble of rock, and beyond that it was more of the same, the canyon a trap, its walls a hundred feet high, unbroken, impregnable. The wind screamed. It screamed for blood, for sacrifice, for Tenksgeevee, and the flames answered it, leaping behind them to the height of the ledge with a roar like a thousand jets taking off at once. And then Cándido and América were running up the streambed, stumbling over rocks, splashing through the muck and tearing the flesh of their arms and hands and feet on the talons of the scrub till they reached the next obstruction and went up and over it, and still they kept going.
“Don’t stop! No!” Cándido cried, slapping furiously at América every time she faltered. “Keep going! Run, mujer, run!” The wind could change direction at any moment, at whim, and if it did they were dead, though he knew they should have been dead already, cremated along with the turkey. He urged her on. Shoved and shouted and half-carried her. The canyon was a funnel, a conduit, the throat of an inconceivable flamethrower, and they had to get up and out of it, up to the road and across the blacktop and on up through the chaparral to the high barren rock of the highest peak. That was all he could think of, up, up and up, that naked rock, high above it all, and there was nothing to burn up there, was there?
They fumbled round a turning in the streambed, the wall falling back and away from them as the gorge widened, and there it was, the answer to Cándido’s half-formed prayers: a way out. A second mountain lay at their feet, a mountain of junk hurled over the precipice above by generations of heedless gabachos. “Climb!” Cándido shouted, and America, sweating, bleeding, tears of rage arid fear and frustration in her eyes, beg
an to climb up over the hood of an accordioned car, her belly swinging out and away from her like an untethered balloon. Cándido scrambled up behind her, knocking aside toasters, water heaters, bedsprings, the refuse of a thousand kitchens and garages. The mass gave gently but held, locked in place by the heavy settled chassis of the automobiles, and as the smell of smoke came to them, as the wind shifted and the flames sent up a demonic howl, they reached a beaten hardpan promontory and struggled through the brush to the road.
The road was chaos. Firefighters ran shouting up and down the length of it, sirens wailed, lights flashed, the police were there, everywhere, the road closed going down, the last straggling automobiles coming up. Cándido took his wife by the hand and hurried up the road to the Chinese store—closed and shuttered and without a car in the lot—and ducked around back, searching along the foundation for a hose bib. They collapsed there, behind the store, gulping water from a hose, precious water, wetting their faces, soaking their clothes. A little water—the Chinamen wouldn’t mind, and who gave a damn if they did? Cándido’s throat was raw. A big airplane, hunkering low, brushed the treetops overhead. “I’m scared,” America whispered.
“Don’t be scared,” he said, though he himself was terrified. What would they do to him now, what would they do. if they found out? They had the gas chamber here in California, didn’t they? Sure they did. They’d put him in a little room with cyanide pellets and his lungs would fill with the corrosive fumes, but he wouldn’t breathe, wouldn’t open his mouth, he wouldn’t... He took a long drink from the slack hose and thought he was going to vomit. The smoke was blacker now, pouring over them. The wind had changed and the fire was coming up the canyon. “Get up,” he said, and his voice was shot through with urgency, with panic, infested with it, a crazy man’s voice. “We’ve got to go. Now!”
She sat there in the mud from the hose, her big maternity shorts soaked through, the big wet folds of the maternity blouse clinging to the perfect ball of her belly, hair in her mouth, her face smudged and bleeding, her eyes wild. “No,” she said, “I won’t get up. I’m tired. I feel sick.”
He jerked her to her feet. “You want to burn?” he shouted, and his grip on her arm was punishing. “You want to die?”
The smoke thickened. There was no one around, no one, and it was eerie, spooky, like some horror movie with the aliens closing in. Sirens wailed in the distance. América snatched her arm away from him, curled her lip to show her teeth. “Yes,” she hissed. “Yes, I do.”
It was dark, darker than Cándido could ever have imagined it, all the homes in the canyon without electricity, the people evacuated, a pall of smoke closing over the sky against the distant flare of the fire. From here, high up the canyon, the fire sat low on the horizon, like a gas burner glowing under the great black pot of the sky. The winds had died down with nightfall, and the blaze was in remission, settling into its beds of coals to await the coming of day and the return of the winds. Or maybe they would put it out, maybe the gringos would keep attacking it with their planes and their chemicals till they’d snubbed it out like a cigarette ground under the heel of a boot. Cándido didn’t know what the next day would bring, but as he looked down into the darkened canyon he felt awed by the enormity of his bad luck, stunned by the chain of events that had led from the windfall of the turkey and the simple joy of the campfire to this nightmare of flames and smoke and airplanes that exploded across the sky. Had he really been the cause of all this? One man with a match? It was almost inconceivable, too much for his poor fevered brain to take in.
But he didn’t want to think about it. He was in trouble, deep trouble, and he needed to take stock of the situation. He was lost, hungry, with sixteen dollars and thirty-seven cents and a rusted switchblade in his pocket and all their hoard of money, their apartment fund, buried somewhere in the midst of the conflagration, and for the past two hours America had been complaining of pains deep in her gut, pains down there where the baby was, and wouldn’t it be just his luck if the baby came now, at the worst possible time? It was the story of his life, pinched like a bug between two granite rocks, and how long before he was squashed?
They were lying in a clump of bushes somewhere halfway up the western rim of the canyon, and he knew now what a worthless plan it had been to try for the top. The fire would have caught them in the chaparral and they wouldn’t have had a chance. But he was afraid of the road, of all those gringo police and firemen, and he was guilty and scared and ashamed and all he could think of was making it to that peak where they’d be safe. He’d been stupid. Panicky and stupid. But now the fire was back in its lair, at least till morning, and they were in the middle of nowhere and America lay beside him like a shadow, crying out with pain every few seconds. What now? What next? They didn’t even have water.
“I’m afraid,” América said for the second time that day, her voice pinched and low, coming at him out of the void. All around them the brush crepitated with the tiny feet of rodents and lizards and the shuffling slink of snakes and insects fleeing the fire. There was a crash of bigger things too—deer, he supposed—and a persistent stirring and scratching of dead leaves that could have been anything from a skunk to a bobcat. He didn’t answer her, not right away, not until he confirmed what he’d been dreading: “Cándido,” she whispered, “I think my water broke. The baby’s coming, I can’t help it.” She paused to draw in a sharp breath. “It’s coming.”
“It’s going to be all right,” he told her, and he knelt beside her in the dark and ran his fingers over her face and stroked her brow, but all the while he could feel the little wheels racing inside him. There was no doctor here, no midwife, no apartment, no hospital, electricity, water, no roof even. He’d never delivered a baby. He’d never seen one delivered, except in the movies, and then it always happened off-camera, the honey-skinned actress in a sweat and crying out, a jerk of the camera, and there it was, the baby, clean and healthy and beautiful and wrapped in a snowy towel. America moaned, a deep quavering gasp of a moan that made his legs go weak with fear. She was so small. Too small. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. “Cándido,” she whispered, “I’m thirsty. So thirsty.”
He got to his feet. The night clung to him like a stocking. Off in the distance, to the north, there was a string of lights, cars turning back at the top of the canyon, a police cordon maybe, and just to the west of that was the staging area for the helicopters. But that was at least three or four miles as the crow flies, and how could he get her there, and if he did, then what? They’d seize him in a minute, a Mexican coming out of the bushes and the whole canyon ablaze—they’d see it in his eyes, see it in the color of his skin and the way he slouched up to them like a whipped dog, and what kind of mercy could he expect then?
“You stay here,” he told her, his own voice as strange in his ears as a disembodied voice talking out of the radio. “I’m going to see if I can’t find a house or, or—” He didn’t finish the thought. “Don’t worry, mi vida, I’ll be just a minute. I’ll find help, I will.”
And then he was weaving his way through the scrub, drawn like an insect to the promise of the distant lights. A helicopter clattered off down the valley, its running lights blinking green and red. Something plunged into the bushes ahead of him. He went a hundred feet and called out. America answered him. He couldn’t go too far or he’d lose her, he knew that, and he was afraid of losing her, lightheaded with the thought of it, but what else could he do? He decided he would only go two hundred feet, counting out the steps aloud, then double back and go out in the opposite direction. The hills were studded with houses, houses climbing the hills like some sort of blight—there were hundreds of houses out here, hundreds. And roads. Electric poles, water mains, sewers. There were trash cans and automobiles and pavement. There had to be something here, there had to be.
He shouted out twice more and heard América’s weak bleat of response, all the while counting higher—ciento ochenta y uno, ciento ochenta y dos—as he eased throug
h the brush like a man tiptoeing across a minefield. He was worried about his feet, all the snakes on the move, the son and brother and uncle of that one he’d killed, but he went on, feeling his way, and what choice did he have? He’d rather be attacked by all the snakes in the world than have to deliver that baby out here in the desert of the night, or anywhere, for that matter. He was no doctor—he was a fool, a fool stumbling through an ever-expanding obstacle course, the cards stacked against him, the fates howling, and everything that was good or precious or even possible depended on him and him alone. He’d reached a hundred and ninety-five, the wheels racing, despair in his gut, when he saw a faint glow ahead, and then, all of a sudden, it was there and he was pressed against it: a wall, a white stucco wall.
Cándido worked his way along the wall, feeling for an opening. There was no light but for the unsteady glow of the fire in the distance, and the sky was black, as black as the night sky in Tepoztlán during the rains. Gone was the yellow reflection of the city, every last watt of light driven down and conquered by the smoke of his little campfire that had gone berserk. The thought frightened him all over again. All this—the magnitude of it. If they caught him—oh, his pinche life would be worth nothing then. But what was he thinking? What did his life matter? America was the one. She’d followed him into this mess and she was out there now, the underbrush rustling with rats and crawling things, out there in the utter absence of light, and her baby was coming and she was thirsty and tired and scared.