The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  The wind had shifted yet again and that meant the flames were climbing back toward them, relentless, implacable, eating up the canyon despite all that the gringos and their airplanes could do. It was hard to breathe and he could smell nothing but smoke and cinders and the burning stench of destruction—worse, far worse, than anything the Tijuana dump could offer. Even the smell of the dead burning flesh of the dogs was preferable to this, because this was his smell, his creation, and it was out of control. He kept going, faster now, patting furiously at the wall, the copper taste of panic rising in his throat. And what was behind the wall? Houses, he guessed. The houses of the rich. Or maybe a ranch—one of those big squared-off places with a single house set squarely in the middle of it. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was—the flight up the canyon and across the road had disoriented him—but they wouldn’t have built a wall around nothing. He had to get inside, had to find out.

  And then the shed was there, announced by a sharp pain in his knee and the dull booming reverberation of aluminum. He felt his way around it to the back and the door that opened on the black hole of the interior. It was hot inside, baked by the sun all day till it was like one of the sweat lodges the reservation Indians used in their rituals, and the aluminum ceiling was low. There was a sharp smell of chlorine and of grass clippings, gasoline and manure—even before he let his hands interpret the place for him, Cándido knew what it was. He felt around the walls like a blind man—he was a blind man, but a blind man in a hurry, a rush, life and death—and the tools were all there, the shovels and the shears and the weed whippers. His hands darted over the lawn mower, one of those ones you sit in, like a little tractor, the plastic buckets of chlorine and muriatic acid and all the rest of it. And then he found the shelves and felt over the boxes of seed and gopher pellets until, milagro de milagros, his fingers closed round the throat of a kerosene lantern. Half a minute and it was lit, and the shed was a place of depth and color. He stepped outside with the lantern and there, tucked in against the wall right at his feet, was a faucet and a green hose coiled up against the plastic pipe of the irrigation system.

  He found a cup in the shed and drank off three cups of water before filling it for America, and then he went off to get her, the lantern puddling light at his feet and throwing a dim halo into the bushes before him. He followed the wall back to where he’d jammed a stick in the ground to guide him and went off at a right angle from that, calling out to her as he went. The dirt was pale, the bushes paler. Smoke rolled over the hill like a deadly fog. “Here,” she called. “Over here!”

  It was hot. It smelled bad. She was scared. She couldn’t believe she was having her baby in a place like this, with the whole world on fire and nobody to help her, no midwife, no doctor, not even a curandera. And the pain. Everything was so tight down there, squeezing in, always in, when it should be pushing out. She was in a shed, floating in a sea of rustling plastic sacks of grass seed, the sweat shining all over her like cooking oil and Cándido fussing around with his knife—sharpening it now on a whetstone—as if he could be of any use at all. The pains came regularly now, every minute or so, and they took away her breath. She wanted to cry out, wanted to cry out for her mother, for Tepoztlán, for everything she’d left behind, but she held it all in, everything in, always in and why not out, and then again and again.

  She was dreaming, awake and dreaming, but the dreams were full of teeth and claws and the howls of animals. Outside, beyond the thin skin of the shed, the inferno rushed toward them and the winds rattled the walls with a pulse like a drumbeat and Cándido’s face was a glowing ball of sweat and worry. She knew what he was thinking: should they run and how could they run with the baby coming now and why did it have to come now of all times and who had elected him the sole target of all the world’s calamities? But she couldn’t help him. She could barely move and the pains were gripping her and then releasing again till she felt like a hard rubber ball slammed against a wall over and over. And then, in the middle of it all, with the terrible clenching pains coming one after the other, the animals suddenly stopped howling and the wind ceased its incessant drumming at the walls. America heard the fire then, a crackling hiss like the TV turned up full volume in the middle of the night and nothing on, and then a thin mewling whine that was no howl or screech but the tentative interrogatory meow of a cat, a pretty little Siamese with transparent ears that stepped through the open door and came right up to her as if it knew her. She held out her hand, and then clenched her fist with the pain of a contraction, and the cat stayed with her. “Gatita,” she whispered to the arching back and the blue luminous eyes, “you’re the one. You’re the saint. You. You will be my midwife.”

  3

  THE NIGHT CAME DOWN LIKE A HAMMER: NO GENTLY fading light, no play of colors on the horizon, no flights of swallows or choruses of crickets. Delaney watched it from behind the police barrier at the top of Topanga Canyon, his wife, stepson and mother-in-law at his side. Their friends and neighbors were gathered there with them, refugees in Land-Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes and Jeep Cherokees that were packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry. Bombers pounded overhead while fire trucks, sirens whining, shot down the road. Emergency lights flashed, strobing endlessly across the panorama of massed and anxious faces, and police stood tall against the strips of yellow plastic that held back the crowd. It was war, and no mistaking it.

  Kyra leaned into Delaney, gripping his arm with both hands, her head on his shoulder. She was still dressed for the party. They gazed out on the distant flames and smelled the smoke and felt the wind in their faces while dogs yapped and hastily trailered horses whinnied and the radios from a hundred cars blared out the catastrophic news. “I guess this means we can forget the turkey,” Delaney said. “It’ll be like jerky by now.”

  “Turkey?” Kyra lifted her face to fix him with an acid look. “What about the oven, the kitchen, the roof? What about all our furniture, our clothes? Where are we going to live?”

  Delaney felt a stab of irritation. “I was just being, I don’t know, ironic.”

  She turned away from him, her eyes on the creeping molten fingers of the fire. “It’s no joke, Delaney. Two of my listings went up in the Malibu fire last year, and believe me, there was nothing left, nothing but smoldering ash and metal twisted up out of the ground where the plumbing used to be, and if you think that’s funny you must have a pretty sick sense of humor. That’s our house down there. That’s everything we own.”

  “What in christ’s name are you talking about? You think I think this is funny? It’s not—it’s terrifying. It scares the shit out of me. We never had anything like this in New York, maybe a hurricane or something every ten years or so, a couple of trees knocked down, but this—”

  She detached herself from him then and shouted out to Jordan, who’d been darting in and out of the knots of people with one of his friends, to stay close. Then she turned back to Delaney. “Maybe you should have stayed there, then,” she said, her voice harsh with anger, and she went off in the direction of her mother and Dom Flood.

  Delaney watched her go. She was throwing it all on his shoulders, making him the scapegoat, and he felt put-upon and misunderstood, felt angry, pissed off, rubbed raw. He’d done his best. He’d managed to get his word processor and discs into the car in the ten minutes the police had given them between the first and final warnings—a pair of cruisers crawling up and down the street with their loudspeakers blaring—but that was about all. Ten minutes. What could you do in ten minutes? He was frozen with grief and anxiety—how could she doubt that? He hadn’t meant anything about the turkey—it was gallows humor, that was all, an attempt to break the tension. What did a turkey matter? A thousand turkeys? He was standing there in the garish light, the wind in his face and his entire cranial cavity filled with smoke, angry at the world—What next? he was thinking, what more could they
do to him?—when Jack Cherrystone appeared at his side with a bottle of liquor in his hand.

  “It’s hell, isn’t it?” Jack rumbled, and he might have been doing a trailer for the next disaster movie.

  “Yeah,” Delaney said, his eyes focused on the advancing line of the fire and the furious roiling skeins of smoke. “And what worries me is they evacuated us—which they didn’t do last year—and that must mean they think this is worse. Or potentially worse.”

  Jack didn’t have anything to say to this, but Delaney felt the touch of his hand, the hard hot neck of the bottle. “Glenfiddich,” Jack said. “Couldn’t let that burn.”

  Delaney didn’t drink hard liquor, and the two beers he’d had at Dominick’s would have constituted his limit under normal circumstances, but he took the bottle, held it to his lips and let the manufactured fire burn its way down to the deepest part of him. It was then that he spotted the two men walking up the road out of the darkness, their faces obscured by the bills of their baseball caps. Something clicked in his head, even at this distance, something familiar in the spidery long stride of the one in front... and then he knew. This was the jerk with the “flies,” the wiseass, the camper. Amazing, he thought—and he didn’t try to correct himself, not now, not ever again—amazing how the scum comes to the surface.

  “Fucking wetbacks,” Jack growled. “I lay you odds they started this thing, smoking pot down there, cooking their fucking beans out in the woods.”

  And now Delaney recognized the second man too, the one with the coiled hair and the serape. He was dirty, covered in white dust from his sandaled feet to the dangling ends of his hair, and there were seedpods and burrs and slices of needlegrass clinging to his clothes. They were both dirty, Delaney saw now, as if they’d been rolling through the brush, and he imagined them trying to get up and around the roadblock in the chaparral and then finally having to give it up. He watched the two of them working their slow way up the road toward the flashing lights—no hurry, no worry, everything’s cool—and he felt as much pure hatred as he’d ever felt in his life. What the hell did they think they were doing here anyway, starting fires in a tinderbox? Didn’t they know what was at stake here, didn’t they know they weren’t in Mexico anymore?

  “Come on, we can’t let these jokers get through,” Jack said, and he had his hand on Delaney’s arm, and then they were moving off in the direction of the roadblock to intercept them. “I mean, we’ve got to alert the cops at least.”

  But the cops were alert already. When Delaney got there with Jack, one of the patrolmen—he looked Hispanic, dark-skinned, with a mustache—was questioning the two men in Spanish, his flashlight stabbing first at one face, then the other. Normally, Delaney would have stood off at a respectful distance, but he was anxious and irate and ready to lay the blame where it belonged, and he could feel the liquor burning in his veins.

  “Officer,” he said, coming right up to them, joining the group, “I want to report that I’ve seen this man”—pointing now at the glowering twisted face—“in the lower canyon, camping, camping right down there where the fire started.” He was excited now, beyond caring—somebody had to pay for this—and so what if he hadn’t actually seen the man lying there drunk in his filthy sleeping bag, it was close enough, wasn’t it?

  The policeman turned to him, lights flashing, the scream of a siren, bombs away, and he had the same face as the shorter man, the one in the blanket: black Aztecan eyes, iron cheekbones, the heavy mustache and white gleaming teeth. “I can handle this,” he said, and his voice went cold and he said something vicious and accusatory in rapid-fire Spanish to the two men.

  It didn’t seem to have much effect. The tall one reached up lazily to twist his hat around so that the bill faced backwards and gave first the cop, and then Delaney, an impassive look. He said something extenuating—or at least that was what it sounded like. That was when Jack spoke up, his voice a magnificent trumpeting instrument that jerked the whole group to attention—the Mexicans, the cop, even Delaney. “Officer,” he boomed, “I’ve seen these men too, I’m sure of it, and I’d like to know what they were doing down there at the scene of a very suspicious fire. Those are our homes down there—that’s everything we have—and if arson was involved I damn well want to know about it.”

  A crowd had begun to gather—Delaney and Jack hadn’t been the only ones to spot the Mexicans coming up the road. “That’s right,” a shrill voice called out at Delaney’s back, a female voice, and he turned round on a heavyset woman with muddy eyes and a silver hoop in her right nostril. She wore a shawl over a heavy brocade dress that trailed in the dirt and hid her shape. “And I want to know too,” she cried, stumbling over the last two syllables, and Delaney saw that she was drunk.

  By this point a second patrolman had joined the first, a ramrod CHP officer with a pale-blond crew cut bristling against the brim of his hat. He gave a quick glance round him to size up the situation, stared down the big woman with the nose ring, and then, ignoring the other cop, said something in Spanish to the two Mexicans, and now they jumped, all right. The next second they were both lying prone in the dirt, legs spread, arms scissored at the back of their heads, and the new cop was patting them down. Delaney felt a thrill of triumph and hate—he couldn’t suppress it—and then both cops were bending over the suspects to clamp the handcuffs round their wrists, and the tall Mexican, Delaney’s special friend, was protesting his innocence in two languages. The son of a bitch. The jerk. The arsonist. It was all Delaney could do to keep from wading in and kicking him in the ribs.

  Somebody’s dog was barking, raging in primal fury, and the sirens tore at the air. There must have been thirty or forty people gathered now and more coming. They took a step back when the cops hauled the suspects to their feet, but Delaney was right there, right in the thick of it, Jack at his side. He saw the dirt and bits of weed on the front of the Mexicans’ shirts, saw the individual bristles of their unshaven throats and jowls. The tall one’s hat had been knocked askew so that the brim jutted out at a crazy angle. The handcuffs sparked in the repetitive light. No one moved. And then the big woman shouted a racial slur and the Hispanic cop’s head jerked around.

  That was when Delaney felt the tall Mexican’s eyes on him. It was like that day out on the Cherrystones’ lawn, the same look of contempt and corrosive hate, but this time Delaney didn’t flinch, didn’t feel guilt or pity or even the slightest tug of common humanity. He threw the look back at the son of a bitch and put everything he had into it, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Then, just as the blond cop pulled at the man’s arm to swing him round and march him off toward the squad car, the Mexican spat and Delaney felt the wet on his face, saw it there spotting the lenses of his glasses, and he lost all control.

  The next thing he knew he was on the guy, flailing with his fists even as the crowd surged forward and the Mexican kicked out at him and the cop wedged his way between them. “Motherfucker!” the Mexican screamed over his shoulder as the cop wrestled him away. “I kill you, I kill you, motherfucker!”

  “Fuck you!” Delaney roared, and Jack Cherrystone had to hold him back.

  “Arsonist!” somebody shouted. “Spic!” And the crowd erupted in a cacophony of threats and name-calling. “Go back to Mexico!” shouted a man in a sport shirt like Delaney’s, while the woman beside him cried “Wetbacks!” over and over till her face was swollen with it.

  The cops thrust their prisoners behind them and the blond one stepped forward, his hand on his holster. “You people back off or I’ll run you in, all of you,” he shouted, the cords standing out in his throat. “We’ve got a situation here, don’t you understand that, and you’re just making it worse. Now back off! I mean it!”

  No one moved. The smoke lay on the air like poison, like doom. Delaney looked round at his neighbors, their faces drained and white, fists clenched, ready to go anywhere, do anything, seething with it, spoiling for it, a mob. They were out here in the night, outside the walls, forced
out of their shells, and there was nothing to restrain them. He stood there a long moment, the gears turning inside him, and when Jack offered the bottle again, he took it.

  Ultimately, it was the winds that decided the issue. The fire burned to within five hundred yards of Arroyo Blanco, swerving west and on up the wash in back of the development and over the ridge, where it was finally contained. Night choked down the Santa Ana winds and in the morning an onshore flow pumped moisture into the air, and by ten a.m., after sleeping in their cars, in motels, on the couches of friends, relatives, employees and casual acquaintances, the people of Arroyo Blanco were allowed to return to their homes.

  Delaney was hungover and contrite. He’d all but started a riot, and the thought frightened him. He remembered the time he’d participated in an antinuke demonstration with his first wife, Louise, and how it seemed as if the whole world was against them—or worse, when they went up the steps of the abortion clinic in White Plains and the hard-line crazies had yabbered at them like dogs, faces twisted with rage and hate till they were barely human. Delaney had thrown it right back at them, defiant and outraged—the issue was personal, deeply personal, and he and Louise had agonized over their decision, they weren’t ready yet, that was all, and why bring a child into a world already teeming with its starving billions?—but the protesters wouldn’t let them be, didn’t even see them as individuals. Well, he was one of them now. He was the hater, he was the redneck, the racist, the abuser. There was no evidence that those men had a thing to do with the fire—they could have been fleeing on foot, thumbing a ride, walking up the road to take in the sights, hiking. As sober as he was, as ashamed and repentant, he couldn’t suppress a flare of outrage at the thought—hiking, the son of a bitch—but then, he asked himself, would he have felt the same way if the men walking up the road had been white?