The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  They had to show the address on their licenses to get back through the police cordon—the road was open to residents only, as a means of discouraging looters—and Delaney, with Jordan beside him, followed Kyra and her mother down the road, through the as-yet-unmanned gate and into the development. Delaney rolled down his window and the lingering odor of charred brush and timber filled the car with a smell that reminded him of the incinerator at his grandmother’s apartment all those years ago, or the dump, the Croton dump, smoldering under an umbrella of seagulls, but the development was untouched, pristine in the morning light. His neighbors were pulling into their driveways, unloading their cars, striding across deep-watered lawns to check the gates, the pool, the toolshed, all of them wearing the faint vacant half-smiles of the reprieved. Disaster had been averted. It was the morning after.

  As they swung into Piñon, Jordan began to lean forward in his seat, dangling like a gymnast from his shoulder strap. He was dirty, dressed in the grass-stained shorts, T-shirt and Dodgers cap he’d been wearing when the alarm sounded, and he was wide-eyed from lack of sleep (it had been past midnight when they’d finally decided to get a room at the Holiday Inn in Woodland Hills, the last room available). All he’d been able to talk about was Dame Edith, the cat, who’d managed to vanish just as they were loading the cars yesterday afternoon. “You think she’ll be all right, Delaney?” he said now for what must have been the hundredth time.

  “Of course she will,” he responded automatically, and it had become a kind of mantra, “—she can take care of herself.” But even as he said it, he caught sight of the place where yesterday a grove of lemon-scented gum had stood arching and white against the flank of the hill and saw nothing there but a vacancy of ash.

  Jordan bounded out of the car before it came to a stop, shouting, “Here, kitty, here, Dame Edith, here, kitty,” while Delaney sat there a moment to get his bearings. He’d been prepared for the worst, for blackened beams, melted plastic and twisted metal, for bathtubs hanging in the air and filing cabinets scorched like cookpans. These fires burned as hot as eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and they would sometimes suck up all the available oxygen in an area, superheating it far beyond the point of combustion until a breeze came up and the whole thing exploded as if a bomb had been dropped. Houses would burn from the inside out, even before the flames reached them, so intense were the temperatures. He’d expected annihilation, and here were the house, the yard, the neighborhood, and not a blade of grass disturbed.

  Kyra had pulled in just ahead of him, and now her mother climbed out of the passenger’s-side door, looking dazed. She’d spent the night on a cot at the foot of their bed in the Holiday Inn, and since they’d been up early to return to the roadblock and wait for the all-clear she hadn’t had time to do her hair and make herself up with her usual attention to detail. She was showing her age, the tragedy of the night etched under her eyes and dug in deep round the corners of her mouth. Kyra, in contrast, had tied her hair back and forgone makeup, and even in her party dress she looked streamlined, girded for battle. Before Delaney could get out of the car she was in the house, striding from room to room like a field marshal, calling out the cat’s name while punching numbers into the portable phone. Delaney, cradling a brown paper bag full of indispensable notebooks and essential nature guides, joined her a moment later.

  He set the books down on the kitchen table and went to the oven, which still gave off a faint if unappetizing whiff of turkey. And there, inside, was the turkey itself, as tough and desiccated as a piece of camel hide. It had been a hell of a Thanksgiving, Delaney was thinking, the worst he’d ever had, when Kyra strode into the room, gave him a sour look, and reached into the refrigerator for the carton of orange juice. She pinched the phone between chin and shoulder while pouring herself a glass. “Uh, huh,” she said, speaking into the mouthpiece. “Uh, huh, yes. Uh, huh.”

  She was concerned about her properties. As far as anybody knew to this point, the only homes lost had been eight redwood cabins just to the south of Arroyo Blanco in a little enclave of people living alternative lifestyles—hippies, bikers, palm readers, New Age enthusiasts and the like—but she was worried about a couple of far-flung listings, the Da Ros place in particular. She’d been on the verge of hysteria the previous afternoon when they’d had to leave the cat behind to what seemed a horrible and inescapable fate, but now that the fire had passed them by, Delaney could see that she’d automatically shifted her focus to her listings. The cat would be all right, she knew that. It was probably hiding under a bed somewhere, terrorized by the sirens. Or it was out back stalking all those dislocated mice. It would turn up.

  “They didn‘t,” Kyra said into the mouthpiece. The juice went untasted from her hand to the counter, a clear orange tube of light. “Are you sure it was the Da Roses’?” And then, to Delaney: “Quick, flick on the TV, will you?” and they were heading in lockstep for the living room. “Channel Seven,” she breathed, and spoke into the phone again: “Thanks, Sally. Yes, yes, I’m watching it now.”

  Full-color scenes of destruction blew by on the screen. The flattened remains of the redwood cabins held center stage a moment, burned-out cars and vans and toppling chimneys raising their skeletal fragments to the treeless horizon, and then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing people outside Gitello’s Market.

  “That was Sally Lieberman,” Kyra said. “She says they showed the Da Ros place.” Her voice caught. “It’s gone. She said it’s gone.”

  If this was the case, the reporters on Channel 7 failed to confirm it—at least in this segment—and their counterparts on Channels 2, 4, 5, 11 and 13 didn’t report it either. They all showed the blackened rocks, the white ash, the corrugated air rising from the remaining hot spots and the sweaty exhausted firefighters plying their hoses, but already the fire was old news—there had been no deaths and precious little destruction of real property—and they turned to other matters, to the drive-by shootings, the fatal knifings, the traffic gore.

  “Maybe not,” Delaney said. “Maybe she got it wrong.”

  Kyra was wearing her frantic look. “I’ve got to go check.”

  “What, now?” Delaney was incredulous. “It’s dangerous. The thing isn’t out yet, you know—it could flare up again. Besides, they’ve probably got the road blocked.”

  He was right, and she knew it. She sank into the chair, volitionless, the phone clutched desperately in her hand. She was thinking of who to call next, how to get around the roadblocks, how to make things happen. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said, “and we’ve got to get all this crap out of the cars before we do anything. You don’t want people stealing it, do you?”

  Kit appeared at that moment, still looking a bit disoriented but more herself now—she’d wrapped a turban round her head to conceal her frayed hair and reapplied her lipstick. Delaney saw that she was holding something awkwardly in her right hand, out away from her body, as if she’d found a bit of offal or a dead rat under the bed. But what was it—a belt? A Walkman? Or no, it was a black plastic box dangling from a neatly severed strap. The thing was wrong somehow in his mother-in-law’s hand, anomalous, out of place, but powerfully evocative for all that.

  “I found this in my purse,” Kit said, and her voice rose in surprise and puzzlement. “I can’t imagine how it got there.”

  But Delaney could. It came to him all at once, and he glanced at Kyra and saw that she understood too. “Dominick Flood” was all he could say.

  “But why—?” Kyra began.

  Epiphany came to Kit with a force all its own and her eyes sank back into her head in shame and hurt—Dominick Flood had been playing a very nasty game with her, stringing her along, waiting his chance. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

  Delaney pictured him, suave and unctuous, Kit clinging to his arm as they watched the spectacle of the fire from the safety of the police line, and the dawning realization coming over him that this was his opportunity. The monitoring device woul
d still be sending out its signal from Arroyo Blanco, even if it wasn’t from his own house, and the people at the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service would have known that he’d been evacuated overnight, that there’d been an emergency—it would probably take them days to sort it out. And Flood? A bank account in the Bahamas? A chalet in Switzerland, a beach house in the Seychelles? He would have had all the eventualities worked out.

  Kit drew in a heavy wet gulp of air. She looked as if she was about to break down and Kyra had just crossed the room to sit beside her on the sofa and offer some daughterly comfort when Jordan came tearing into the room, his clothes even dirtier and more disarranged than they’d been twenty minutes ago. “Mom,” he panted, and you could see his ribs heaving against the thin skin of his T-shirt, “I looked all over the place and I just can’t find Dame Edith anywhere.”

  4

  CÁNDIDO SAW THE CAT THERE AND AMERICA CRADLING it in her arms like a doll even as her body went rigid with the pain and then relaxed and tensed all over again for the next contraction. His first impulse was to shoo it away, but he stopped himself. If it helped take her mind off the pains, then why not?—and it seemed lost and hungry just like they were, content in the face of all this smoldering disaster to curl up and comfort his wife. All right. But the fire was creeping closer, charged one minute by the winds and then knocked back again when they ran out of breath. It wasn’t safe here—they were taking a gamble, a big gamble—but he didn’t know what else to do but watch and wait. And pray. Maybe pray too.

  He already knew what was on the other side of the wall, and the prospect wasn’t very comforting. In fact, if he let himself think about it his heart raced so much he was afraid it was going to burst. A development of big rich houses lay just a stone’s throw away—he’d seen that much from the roof of the shed—and it was as dark as dark and totally deserted. He knew the place now. He’d worked in there one day with Al Lopez on a fence, but he didn’t remember the wall—that was new, he was sure of it. What chilled him, though, was the thought that if all these people had been evacuated, abandoning all their things, their fine rich houses and their lawns and gardens and all the rest, then it looked grim for him and America. The fire was coming this way, no doubt about it, and they would be trapped, burned alive, the fat under their skin sizzling like backmeat in a frying pan, their bones charred and broken. He watched her. He sat with her. And he prayed.

  Sometime in the small hours of that insufferable night America called out so sharply it was like a bark, like a dog’s bark, and the cat was startled and jumped away from her and she tried to get up from the bed he’d made for her from the bags of seed. “Cándido,” she croaked, “I have to go, I have to move my bowels, I ... I can’t ... hold it in any longer,” and as he tried to lift her up, to help her, he saw it between her legs, against her naked thighs and the red paste of the blood: her baby, his baby, his son. The crown of the baby’s head was there between her legs, black wet wisps of hair, and he held her down and lifted her legs and told her to push, it was coming, and to push, push, push. Then there was a sound like gas released from a balloon—Pffffffft!—and there he was, his son, lying there all wrinkled in a bag of skin, slick with blood and mucus and what looked like curdled cheese. The noise of one of the big bombers came low overhead and there was the whoosh of its load driving back the flames below them, and Cándido smelled the strong human smell of the birth and the placenta coming out too, rich and warm in that shed full of seed and chlorine and manure. América’s face was transported. She took the baby in her arms, the blue cord attached to it still, and cleared its mouth and started it breathing, started it crying, a thin mewl like the cat’s, and she cradled it, the real thing, alive and healthy.

  It was the moment Cándido had been waiting for. He leaned forward with the knife and cut the blue cord that was like a length of sausage and with a rag dipped in water wiped the mess from the tiny limbs and torso. He felt exultant, infused with a strength and joy that made a mockery of his poverty, his hurts and wants and even the holocaust that had leapt out of his poor cookfire in the depths of the canyon. He had a son, the first of his line, the new generation born on American soil, a son who would have all the gabachos had and more. And then, moving the rag over the baby’s abdomen as América put it to her breast—and there, between the legs, swabbing it clean—he discovered something in the unsteady wash of light that made him pause, hesitate, stop cold with the rag in his hand. This was no son. This was—

  But America already knew. “You know what I’m going to call her?” she said in a drowsy voice, the voice of someone in a dream so beautiful they don’t want to let it go.

  Cándido didn’t answer. He was trying to absorb the fact that he was a father, finally a father—the father of a daughter—and his mind was already leaping ahead to the fire and the deserted houses and where they would stay the night tomorrow and the night after that and what would happen to him if the gringos got hold of him.

  The voice came back to him, sticky with contentment. “I’m going to call her Socorro,” she said, “—isn’t that a pretty name? Socorro,” she repeated, and she nuzzled the baby’s tiny red ear with the bridge of her nose and cooed it for her, “Socorro, Socorro, Socorro...”

  It was dawn. The fire had spared them. It had rushed up over the hill in the night with a flap of beating wings and now the helicopters and the big swollen bombers were diving down out of sight behind the ridge. Cándido hadn’t slept, not even for a second. He’d turned the wick down low on the lantern and set it beside America and then he’d gone out to sit on the roof of the shed and watch the war of fire and water. He saw men in the distance, stick figures silhouetted against the blaze, saw the arc of their hoses, watched the planes zero in. Twice he thought the flames would overtake them and he was poised to wake America and the baby and make a run for the road, but then the winds turned on a whim and blew at his back, chasing the fire up and over the hill, and they were saved.

  Nothing moved out there in the soupy light of dawn, not even the birds. Smoke hung heavy over the canyon and in the distance the blackened hills steamed and the sirens cried out in exhaustion. Cándido eased himself down from the roof of the shed and stood for a moment looking in on América and the baby. América lay asleep on her side, the baby drawn in under the cover of her arm, as oblivious as if she were in a private room in the hospital with a hundred nurses on call. The cat was there too, nestled in the crook of her leg. It looked up at him and yawned when he reached down to turn off the lamp.

  He didn’t have much time—two, three, four hours at the most—and he knew what he had to do and how much of him it would take. The first thing was food. He was no looter, no thief, no pandillero or ladrón, but this was a question of survival, of necessity—he had a wife and a daughter now and they had to eat—and he swore to the Virgin of Guadalupe that he would pay back everything he appropriated. There was a garden in the house directly behind the wall and he climbed silently atop the shed and slipped down over the wall without thinking how he was going to get back up again.

  The yard was still, silent, the whole canyon holding its breath in the wake of the fire. No one was home. But they would be back, back soon, and he had to work fast. He wouldn’t enter the house—he would never do that, not even if he was dying of hunger in the street—but there was a garden shed here too (a little one, nothing like the big maintenance shed in which America and his daughter lay sleeping as if they didn’t have a care in the world), and in the shed some of the things he would need: a hammer, a box of three-and-a-half-inch nails, four burlap sacks hanging from a hook. He stuffed the hammer into his back pocket, filled his front pockets with nails. Then he waded into the garden and weighed down the sacks with cucumbers, tomatoes and squash, topping them off with oranges and grapefruits from the trees that stood in neat rows in the far corner of the yard. What else would he need? He borrowed a bow saw and a hatchet and told himself he would sneak them back in the night and no one would be the w
iser.

  And how to get back over the wall? A plastic bucket, ten gallons, with a snug green plastic lid, by the doorstep. But it was heavy. Filled with something. He removed the lid and saw the kibbled dog food inside, reddish-brown pellets shaped like stars. His stomach rumbled—he hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning—and he put a handful of the pellets in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. They tasted like paper, like cardboard, but if the dogs could eat them so could he, and he decided to bring the whole bucketful along—the people in the house would probably think the raccoons or skunks had gotten to it. He set the bucket at the base of the wall as a stepping stool, tossed hammer, saw and hatchet over the top, heaved the groaning sacks of vegetables up beside him one by one and gently lowered them down on the far side. Then he leaned over as far as he could and just managed to hook the wire handle on the bucket of dog food and drag it up the side of the wall.

  He left everything where it lay, his stomach roaring, and dodged away through the brush and on up the hill, just outside the scorched zone the fire had left on the slope. The smell of the burn, rank with sodden ash, dominated everything, even the strong sweet fragrance of the sage that broke off and crumbled beneath his fingers as he hoisted himself up, hand over hand. And there was heat too, the baking heat of midafternoon in the cool of the morning, as if there were a thousand ovens turned up high, and places where persistent wreaths of smoke wound their way up into the sky. Cándido was careful to hide himself. There was movement below him now—the firefighters combing back over the area to douse the hot spots—and helicopters beating overhead every few minutes. He couldn’t let them catch him out here—that would be fatal. That would involve explanations, interrogation, handcuffs and billy clubs, and if not the gas chamber, then prison, with its iron bars, gabacho guards and high stone walls topped with razor wire. And how would he provide for America then? And for his daughter?