The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  It took him half an hour to find what he was looking for. Zigzagging back and forth across the face of the hill, sharp fragments of stone kicking out from beneath his feet and everywhere rats and lizards and all the other displaced creatures scrabbling away from him with a dry hiss of fur and scales, he came finally to a rock ledge that might have been a fragment of the bank of some ancient stream. It was about five hundred yards up the dry wash that opened out on the development and it afforded him a view of everything that lay below. This was the place. It would have to do. From here he could see anyone approaching from a long way off, and it was close enough to the burn area to discourage casual hikers or joggers—or even the police come to root out Mexican nrebugs—and the scrub all round it was thick and tangled, interwoven in a continuous mat of spikes and thorns. They would never find him here.

  As he worked his way back down to the shed he ran over in his mind what he would need. He was starting from scratch, like a shipwrecked sailor, everything they had—clothes, blankets, food, a pair of dented pots and a wooden spoon—consumed in the blaze. He thought of the money then, the replenished apartment fund, and what a joke that was—he was no closer to realizing his dream now than he was at the Tijuana dump. At least then he’d had a board to duck his head under in case it rained. But the money would have survived intact, wouldn’t it, safe beneath its rock? Rocks didn’t burn, did they? The first thing he would do when things settled down was slip into the canyon and retrieve it, but that might be days yet and they needed shelter now, shelter and food. They couldn’t risk staying in the shed for more than an hour or two beyond this. The maintenance man would almost certainly be called in to sweep up the ash and clean out the community pool—Cándido could see the big dark brooding mirror of it in the middle of the development, like a water hole on the African plains where all the horned animals came down to drink and the fanged ones lay in wait—but there was still time, because nothing was moving yet on the canyon road. It was cordoned off. They were afraid of the fire still. Afraid of looters.

  He didn’t wake América, not yet. He made four trips up to the ledge and back, with the tools, the sacks of vegetables—they could use the empty sacks as blankets, he’d already thought of that—and as many wooden pallets as he could carry. He’d found the pallets stacked up on the far side of the shed, and though he knew the maintenance man would be sure to miss them, it could be weeks before he noticed and then what could he do? As soon as Cándido had laid eyes on those pallets an architecture had invaded his brain and he knew he had to have them. If the fates were going to deny him his apartment, well, then, he would have a house, a house with a view.

  He worked furiously, racing against time, glancing up every few seconds to scan the deserted development for the first cars. The pallets were easy to work with—perfect squares, two and a half feet to the side—and they fit together like children’s blocks. Fifteen of them, connected with nails, gave him the frame of his house. The sides and back wall were two pallets long and two pallets high, and in the front he simply left a one-pallet gap for a crawl-in entrance. Then he laid four more side by side on the ground to provide a floor and keep them up out of the dirt in the event of rain, and he saw that he could stuff newspaper and rags into the three-inch gap between the surfaces for insulation. It was a good design, especially for something he’d thrown together on the spur of the moment, his fingers trembling and his heart slamming and one eye on the road, but it lacked the most essential thing: a roof.

  No problema. Cándido already had a solution, if he had time, and he had to make time, had to drive himself past the hunger and the exhaustion and get everything he could before the people came back and started looking over their shoulders, looking for thieves, for fire-bugs, for Mexicans. But the first thing was America. The morning was wearing on—it must have been nine or maybe ten—and he couldn’t risk leaving her in the shed any longer. He scuttled down the slope, trying to keep his balance and dodge away from the helicopters at the same time, and twice he fell, careening headlong into bushes that scraped his face and showered him with twigs and fibers that stuck to his skin and made him itch all over like the victim of a schoolboy prank. The sky was low and gray, saturated with smoke. There was no wind and the sun was barely strong enough to cast a shadow. “América,” Cándido called softly from the door of the shed. In answer, the cat mewled and then there was the gagging rasp of the baby’s cry, a new sound in a whole new world. “América,” he repeated, and when she answered him in that soft adhesive voice he said, “we’ve got to go now, mi vida, we can’t stay here.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, please don’t. They’re looking for me, you know that.”

  “I want to go home to my mother,” she said, and her face was puffy and red, the eyes sunk deep in their sockets. “I want to show her my baby. I can’t live like this. You promised me—you promised.”

  He went to her, crouched beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. His heart was breaking. He couldn’t stand to see her like this, to see his daughter deprived and his wife denied. “It’s not far,” he whispered, and even as the words passed his lips he was startled by the sound of a car’s horn—three sharp blasts—in the distance. “Come on, it’s just up the hill.”

  Cándido grabbed what he could—a few sacks of grass seed for bedding and he’d come back for more later—and helped her up the sharp incline. She was weak still and her hair was like a madwoman’s, knotted and filthy and flecked with bits of vegetation. She didn’t want to duck when a helicopter suddenly appeared over the ridge and then fell away from them, but he forced her head down. The baby didn’t make a sound. She was the smallest living human in the world, a face out of the immemorial past, her eyes clenched against the light, and she rode up against her mother’s breast as if she were attached to it, as if she were part of her still. Cándido had to marvel at that—his daughter, and look how well-behaved she was, and not eight hours old yet.

  “What is this place?” America demanded when he settled her in the roofless box, and her voice had lost its contentment.

  “Just for now,” he said, “just till I get this straightened out.”

  She didn’t argue, though he could see she wanted to. She was too tired, too scared, and she sank into the corner and accepted the orange he handed her.

  He didn’t want to risk going over the wall again—he could see the glint of the first cars on the canyon road as he made his way back down the slope—but he had to, just one more time. There was something he’d seen in the next yard over from the one where he’d got the tools, something he needed to borrow before it was too late. He hit the shed at a bound, then crouched to peer cautiously over the wall and into the yard below, watching the windows of the house for movement. There was no sign of life, though he’d been hearing the cars for a while now—minutes, that’s all he had—but this time he wasn’t going to leap down behind that wall without a way up, was he? He was. He couldn’t help himself. Down the wall he went, crouched low, and he saw the big doghouse in the corner of the yard and the two deep aluminum dishes—one with water, one with kibble—and he stuck his head inside the doghouse and saw the nice green wool-blend carpet they’d put in there for the dog to lie on. They would miss it, sure they would, and the aluminum dishes too, but Cándido was a human being, a man with a daughter, and this was only a dog. Was it wrong, was it a sin, was it morally indefensible to take from a dog? Where in the catechism did it say that?

  He threw the whole business over the wall and darted through the hedge into the next yard, and there it was, the thing he coveted, the thing he’d come for: a roof, his roof. It was a single sheet of green-tinted plastic, with corrugations for the rain, and it wasn’t even attached to the little greenhouse that sat in a clutch of fig trees just beyond the swimming pool—not even attached, just laid across the top. He stood there a moment in his exhaustion, contemplating it, and the figs seemed to drop into his hands, and then they we
re in his mouth, pulpy and sweet and with the thick bitter skin to chew on. All the frenzied stinking bad luck and terrible draining exhaustion of the previous day and night began to exact its toll on him then and he just stood there, locked in place, staring stupidly down into the pool. It was a little pool, no more than a puddle compared to the big lake of a thing in the middle of the development, but it was pretty, oval-shaped and blue, cool, clean blue, the water so pure it was transparent but for the film of ash on the surface. How nice it would be to dive in, he was thinking, just for a second, and clean himself of the filth and sweat and black slashes of charcoal that striped him from head to foot like a hyena ... But then he started at a sound behind him, away and across the street—the slam of a car door, voices—and he sprang for the greenhouse.

  The sheet of plastic was unwieldy, too big for the greenhouse, too big for his little shack, but there was no way to cut it to size and the voices were louder now, closing in on him. He gave it a frantic jerk and the next thing he knew he was on the ground, writhing out from under it. The plastic was looser than he’d thought, more flexible, and that made it all the harder to manipulate. Still, he managed to drag it across the lawn to the wall, and he was just working it up the side to tip it over the top when a window shot up in the house next door and he froze. There was a face in the window, a woman’s face, gazing out into the yard that now lacked several hand tools, four sacks of fruit and vegetables, a plastic bucket of kibble, two dog dishes and a scrap of carpet.

  Cándido didn’t dare breathe, praying that the line of bushes separating the yards would screen him from view. He studied that face as he might have studied a portrait in a gallery, memorizing every crease and wrinkle, waiting for the change to come over it, the look of astonishment, fear and hate, but the change never came. After a moment the woman took her face back into the house. Instantly, with a quick snap of his shoulders, Cándido flipped the sheet of plastic up and over the wall, and then fell to his knees in the shrubbery.

  “Okay, Butch, okay, puppy,” a voice called from next door, and there was the woman at the back door and a huge black Alsatian romping out onto the porch and scuttering down the steps to the lawn. When it started barking—a deep-chested thundering roar of a bark—Cándido thought it was all up and he curled himself instinctively into the fetal position, protecting his head and genitals, but the dog was barking at the woman, who held a yellow tennis ball cocked behind her ear in the act of throwing it. She released the ball and the dog loped after it and brought it back. And then again. And again.

  Cándido, buried in the shrubbery next door, flattened himself to the ground. There were shouts in the distance, the sound of engines revving and dying, children’s voices, more dogs: they were coming back, all of them, and it was only a matter of time—minutes maybe—till someone returned to this house and saw the roof gone from the greenhouse and came out to investigate. He had to do something and fast, and he was thinking about that, his mind racing, when a further complication occurred to him: he had no way over the wall.

  Next door the dog began barking again, a whole frenzied slobbering symphony of barking, and the woman threw the ball a final time and went back into the house. That was a break. Cándido waited till the dog had flipped the ball up in the air a few times, poked its head into the carpetless doghouse and settled down on the lawn to work the ball over as if it were a bone. Then he crawled across the greenhouse yard like a commando, pelvis to the dirt, and wriggled through a gap in an oleander hedge and into the next yard.

  This yard was quiet, nobody home, the pool as still as a bathtub, the lawn wet with dew. But he knew this place, didn’t he? Wasn’t this where he’d worked with Al Lopez on the fence? He remembered that oak tree, sure he did, a real grandfather of a tree, but where was the fence? He got cautiously to his feet and that was when he saw the bare spots in the lawn where they’d set the posts—gabachos, they’re never satisfied with anything—and then something a whole lot more interesting: a stepladder. An aluminum one. Right there against the wall. In a heartbeat he was up over the top and scrambling along the outside of the wall, hunched low over his feet, angry suddenly, raging, darting on past the plastic sheeting until he found the dog’s dishes and the scrap of carpet and tucked them under his arm—and fuck the dog, he hated that dog, and fuck the fat lady who owned him too; they could buy another dish, another carpet, and who cared if a poor unlucky man and his wife and daughter died of want right under their noses? He wasn’t going to worry about it anymore, he wasn’t going to ask—he was just going to take.

  He secreted the rug and the dishes—cookpots, they were his cookpots now—in the underbrush till he could come back for them later, then made his way back along the wall to where the green plastic sheet had fallen in the dirt. His roof. Plastic to keep the rain out, and the rain was coming, he could smell it, even over the stink of ash and smoldering brush. A crow winged past, mocking him. The sun faded away into the gloom. And Cándido, despite his exhaustion, despite everything, began dragging the big balky sheet of plastic up through the unyielding brush, and as the branches tore at him and his fingers stiffened and the helicopters swooped overhead, he. thought of Christ with his cross and his crown of thorns and wondered who had it worse.

  Later, after he’d flung the roof over the frame and hacked down half a mountainside’s worth of brush to stack atop it and hide it from view, he slept. It was a deep sleep, the sleep of utter depletion, but it wasn’t without dreams. Especially toward the end of it, when night had fallen and he woke and drifted off again half a dozen times. Then his dreams were the dreams of the hunted—they chased him, faceless hordes with bright Irish hair and grasping hands, and he ran and ran till they cornered him in a little wooden box on the side of the mountain. Then he was awake, awake to the soft glow of the lantern and America and the baby sleeping at his side. He smelled fruit—the smell was so strong he thought for a minute he was fifteen again and working a juice presser in the stand at the mercado. With an effort, aching all over from his ordeal, he propped himself up on his elbows and surveyed the little shack, his new home, his refuge, his hideout. There was a pile of peels and rinds in the comer, seeds and pulp chewed for the moisture and spat out again, a huge pile, and then he looked at América, asleep, her lips chapped and her chin stained with the juice.

  This was no good. She’d wind up with diarrhea if she didn’t have it already. She was nursing, for Christ’s sake—she needed meat, milk, eggs, cheese. But how could he get it? He didn’t dare show his face at the store, and even if he did, all his money but for sixteen dollars was down there in the blackened canyon, cooling off beneath a blackened rock. Meat, they needed meat for a stew—and at the thought of it, of stew, he felt his salivary glands tighten.

  It was at that moment, as if it were preordained, that the cat reappeared, delicate, demanding, one gray foot arrested at the doorframe. “Meow,” the cat said.

  “Kitty, kitty,” Cándido said. “Here, kitty.”

  5

  IT DIDN’T LOOK GOOD. BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD were blackened, the chaparral gone, the trees scorched. Kyra drove out of the normal world and into the dead zone, where the underbrush had been so completely eradicated she would have thought it had been bulldozed if it weren’t for the crablike clumps of charred sticks here and there and the pale-gray ash that inundated everything and still, two days later, gave off heat. The trees that had survived—oaks, mostiy—were scarred all the way up to their denuded crowns and the ones out on the margins of the fire’s path were charred on one side and still green on the other. She held her breath as she came round the last turn and caught a glimpse of the skewed remains of the Da Ros gate.

  She was wearing jeans and sneakers and she’d thought to bring along a pair of work gloves, and she stopped the car now and got out to see if she could move the gate back manually. It wouldn’t budge, what was left of it. She could see that the fire had swept right up the drive, scouring the earth and leveling the trees, and that the gate, with its
ornamental grillwork and iron spikes, hadn’t been able to hold it back. The gate had been bent and flattened, the paint vaporized and the wheels seized in their track. There was no way to drive into the property: she would have to walk.

  More than anything—more than the acid stink of the air or the sight of all that mature landscaping reduced to ash—it was the silence that struck her. She was the only thing moving beneath the sun, each step leaving a print as if she were walking in snow, and she could hear the faint creak of her soles as they bent under her feet. No lizard or squirrel darted across the path, no bird broke the silence. She steeled herself for what was coming.

  It wasn’t her house, not really, she kept telling herself, and she wasn’t the one who was going to have to absorb the loss. She would call Patricia Da Ros late tonight, when it would be morning in Italy, and let her know what had happened. If the place had been miraculously spared—and these things happened, the wildfires as unpredictable as the winds that drove them, torching one house and leaving the place next door untouched—it was going to be a hard sell. She’d already had three buyers call up to wriggle out of done deals on houses in the hills, and she knew that nobody would want to even look up here till spring at least—they had short memories, yes, but for the next six months it would be like pulling teeth to move anything anywhere near here, even a horse trailer. But if the house wasn’t too bad, she’d have to get the Da Roses’ insurer to re-landscape ASAP, and maybe she could use the fire as a selling point—it wouldn’t burn here again in this lifetime, and that was a kind of insurance in itself ...

  And then she came over the hill and into the nook where the garage used to be and saw the tall chimneys of the house standing naked against the stark mountains and the crater of the sea: the rest was gone. The leather-bound books, the period furniture, the paintings, the rugs, the marble and the Jacuzzi and the eight and a half bathrooms—gone, all gone. Even the stone walls had crumbled under the weight of the cascading roof, the rubble scattered so far out you would have thought the place had been dynamited.