by T. C. Boyle
Then he skipped a night—a clear cold smog-free night that came at the tail end of the second storm—to take Kyra to dinner and a movie. They got back at midnight and the wall was blank still, but when Delaney went to the closet to change into his thermals, jeans and windbreaker, Kyra stepped out of the bathroom in her teddy and Delaney let his vigilance lapse. In the morning, the wall was still unmarked, but Delaney discovered that both cameras had been tripped. Probably coyotes, he was thinking as he took the film over to the Cherrystones, but there was always the possibility that the Mexicans had come back and been scared off by the flash—in which case he’d never catch them now. They wouldn’t be back. He’d blown it. His one chance, and he’d blown it. But then, it was probably only a coyote. Or a raccoon.
Jack was at a sound studio in Burbank, but Selda let Delaney in. She’d just had her hair done—it was the most amazing winter-ermine color, right down to the blue highlights—and she was drinking coffee from a mug and pouring words into the portable telephone in a low confidential voice. “Did you get anything?” she asked, putting a hand over the mouthpiece.
Delaney felt awkward. Only the Cherrystones, and Kyra knew what he was doing, but in a sense the whole community was depending on him—there might be ten thousand Mexicans camped out there in the chaparral waiting to set the canyon afire, but at least these two were going to get a one-way ticket to Tijuana. If he hadn’t blown it, that is. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Jack’s darkroom was a converted half-bath just off the den and it was cramped and poorly ventilated. Delaney oriented himself, switched on the fan, located what he needed, then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked on the safelight. He got so absorbed in what he was doing he’d almost forgotten what he was looking for by the time he was pinching the water off of the curling wet strip of film and holding it up to the light.
The face that stared back at him, as startled and harshly fixed in the light as any opossum’s face, was human, was Mexican, but it wasn’t the face he’d expected. He’d expected the cold hard eyes and swollen jaw of the graffiti artist with the bad dentures, the trespasser, the firebug, caught at last, proof positive, but this was a face come back to haunt him from his dreams, and how could he ever forget that silver-flecked mustache, the crushed cheekbone and the blood on a twenty-dollar bill?
6
AMÉRICA NURSED HER BABY, AND CÁNDIDO BUILT his house. It was a temporary house, a shelter, a place where they could keep out of the rain and lie low till he got work and they could live like human beings. The money—the apartment fund, the hoard in the peanut butter jar—wasn’t going to help them. It amounted to just four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in a hard shapeless knot of plastic. Cándido had waited three days, and then, under cover of night, he’d slipped down through the chaparral and across the road into the devastation of the canyon. There was a half-moon to guide him, a pale thin coating of light that showed his feet where to step, but everything was utterly transformed; he had a hard time even finding the trailhead. The world was ash, ash two or three inches deep, and the only landmarks left to guide him were the worn humps of the rocks. Once he got to the streambed he was on familiar ground, stumbling through the rock-strewn puddles to the dying murmur of the stream in the sterilized night. There was no chirrup of frog or cricket, no hoot of owl or even the parasitic whine of a single mosquito: the world was ash and the ash was dead. He found the pool, the wreck of the car, the sandspit and the stone, the very stone. But even before he lifted it and felt in the recess beneath it for his hoard, the money that would at least get them back to Tepoztlán, if nothing else, he knew what he would find: melted plastic, fused coins, U.S. Federal Reserve Notes converted to dust through the alchemy of the fire. And oh, what stinking luck he had.
It was beyond irony, beyond questions of sin and culpability, beyond superstition: he couldn’t live in his own country and he couldn’t live in this one either. He was a failure, a fool, a hick who put his trust in a coyote or a cholo with a tattoo on his neck, a man who couldn’t even roast a turkey without burning down half the county in the process. His life had been cursed ever since his mother died and his father brought that bitch Consuelo into the house and she gave the old man nine children he loved more than he’d ever loved his own firstborn son. Cándido sat there in the ashes, rocking back and forth and pressing his hands to his temples, thinking how worthless he was, how unworthy of America, whose life he’d ruined too, and of his daughter, his beautiful dark-eyed little daughter, and what she could hope to expect. The idea that came into his head in the dark of that obliterated canyon was to run, run and leave America and Socorro in the ramshackle hut with the half pot of cat stew that America thought was rabbit (The cat? She’s gone home to the rich people, sure she has ... ), run and never come back again. They’d be better off without him. The authorities would be looking for him, the agent of all this destruction, but they wouldn’t be looking for America, the mother of a U.S. citizen, and Cándido had heard over and over how they had clinics and housing and food slips for poor Americans, and why couldn’t his daughter get that sort of help? Why not?
He sat there for half an hour, awash in self-pity, as big a fool as any man alive, and then he knew what he had to do and he picked himself up, took the lump of plastic, the bent and blackened remnant of a grill from their old cookfire and the sixteen dollars he had in his pockets and climbed up the hill to the Chinese market, where they wouldn’t be so sure to recognize him, and went in to buy cheese, milk, eggs, tortillas and half a dozen disposable diapers. There were only two people in the store, a gringo customer who ignored him, and the Chinaman behind the counter, who took his money in silence.
Cándido presented the groceries to América as if they were rare treasure and fixed her a meal in the aluminum dog dish on the grill that was the only thing left of their ill-starred camp in the canyon. It was late when they’d eaten and the air was damp and cold and Cándido was thinking of the cement blocks he’d seen out back of the Chinese market and how he could remove a pallet and make a wall of the blocks, with the fire on the inside to warm the place, when America took the baby from her breast and in the shadowy shifting light of the lantern fixed him with a look. “Well,” she said, “and what now?”
He shrugged. “I’ll find work, I guess.”
Her eyes had the look of pincers, that grasping and seizing look she got when she wanted something and had made up her mind to get it. “I want you to buy me a bus ticket with that money,” she said. “I want to go home and I don’t care whether you’re coming with me or not. I’ve had it. I’m finished. If you think I’m going to raise my daughter like a wild animal with no clothes, no family, no proper baptism even, you’re crazy. It’s you they want, not me. You’re the one.”
She was right, of course she was right, and he could already feel the loss of her like something cut right out of his own body, his heart or his brain, a loss no man could survive. He wouldn’t let her go. Not if he had to kill her and the baby too and then cut his own worthless throat in the bargain. “There is no money,” he said.
He watched her lips form around a scowl. “That’s a lie.”
Wordlessly, with a brutality that made him hate himself, he dug the nugget of plastic out of his pocket and dropped it on the scrap of wool carpet. Neither of them spoke. They lay there a long moment, stretched out beneath the green sheet of the roof, staring at the little bolus of plastic and the coins embedded in it. “There’s your bus fare,” he said finally.
She had her baby, and every living cell and hair of it was a miracle, the thing she’d done herself though her father said she was stupid and her mother called her clumsy and lazy and unreliable—her creation, beautiful and undeniable. But who could she show her off to? Who was going to admire her Socorro, the North American beauty, born with nothing in the land of plenty? For the first few days she was too full of joy and too tired to worry about it. She was in a shack, another shack, hidden away like a rabbit in
a burrow, and she was alive because of Cándido’s bravery and his quick thinking, and she had her daughter at her breast and Cándido had delivered her. That was all for then. That was all she needed to know. But as he went out to scavenge things—a blanket he found on a clothesline one night, a beach towel to wrap the baby in—or left her to crouch in the bushes across from the post office and wait for Señor Willis’s car that never came, she began to brood, and the more she brooded the more afraid she became.
This wasn’t just bad luck, this was an ongoing catastrophe, and how long could they survive that? Cándido was the best man in the world, loving and kind and he’d never known the meaning of the word “lazy” in his life, but everything he did turned out wrong. There was no life for her here, no little house, no bathroom with its gleaming faucets and bright white commode like the bathroom in the guatón’s big astonishing mansion. It was time to give it up, time to go back to Tepoztlán and beg her father to take her back. She had her daughter now and her daughter was a North American, a citizen of Los Estados Unidos, and she could come back when she was grown and claim her birthright. But then, how would anyone know? Didn’t they have to record the birth in the village or the church? But what village, what church?
“Cándido, what about the baby?” she said one night as they sat before the hearth he’d constructed of cement blocks, laying sticks on the fire while water boiled in the pot. It was raining, a soft discontinuous patter on the plastic roof, and she was lying snug atop the sacks of grass seed, wrapped in the blanket. Cándido had been gone all day, scouring the roadside for cans and bottles to redeem in the machine outside the Chinese store, and he’d come home with sugar, coffee and rice.
“What about her?” he said.
“We have to register her birth with the priest—she was born here, but who’s going to know that?”
He was silent, squatting over his haunches, breaking up sticks to feed the fire. He’d managed to make the place comfortable for her, she had to give him that. The slats between the pallets had been stuffed with rags and newspaper for insulation, and with a fire even on the coldest days she was warm. And he’d got water for them too, spending a whole night digging a trench up the hill and tapping into the development’s sprinkler system, cutting the pipe and running joined lengths of it all the way to their little invisible house, and then he’d buried it and hidden his traces so well no one would ever suspect. “What priest?” he said finally.
She shrugged. Socorro lay sleeping at her breast. “I don’t know—the village priest.”
“What village?”
“I want to go home. I hate this place. I hate it.”
Cándido was silent a moment, his face like a withered fruit. “We could walk into Canoga Park again, if you think you’re up to it,” he said finally. “They must have a priest there. He would know what to do. At least he could baptize her.”
She dreaded the idea after her last experience, but just the mention of the name—Canoga Park—made her see the shops again, the girls on the street, the little restaurant that was like a café back at home. Somebody there would know what to do, somebody would help. “It’s awfully far,” she said.
He said nothing. He was staring into the fire, his lips pursed, hands clasped in his lap.
“What did you do with the cord?” she said after a moment.
“Cord? What cord?”
“You know, the baby’s cord. The umbilical.”
“I buried it. Along with the rest. What do you think?”
“I wanted that cord. For Chalma. I wanted to make a pilgrimage and hang it in the tree and pray to the Virgin to give Socorro a long and happy life.” And she saw the tree in her mind, the great ancient ahuehuete tree beside the road, with the crowds of pilgrims around it and the vendors and the hundreds upon hundreds of dried birth cords hanging from the branches like confetti. Socorro would never know that tree; she’d never be blessed. América had to catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it. “I hate it here,” she whispered. “God, how I hate it.”
Cándido didn’t answer. He made coffee with sugar and condensed milk and they drank it out of frijole cans, and then he cut up an onion, some chiles and a tomato and cooked the rice, and she wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t help him, even if he’d tried to force her.
It rained the next day too, all day, and when she went out to relieve herself and bury the baby’s diaper, the earth was like glue. For all this time it had been powder and now it was glue. She stood there in the rain, looking out over the misted canyon, the roofs of the houses, the barren scar of Cándido’s fire, and the rain smelled good, smelled of release and reprieve—smelled, ever so faintly, of home. She had to get away, even if it meant bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border, and if she starved along the way, then that was God’s will.
It was dark inside, dark as a hole in the ground, and when the rain slackened to a drizzle, she brought the baby outside for a breath of air. Sitting there high on the hillside, watching the clouds roll out over the canyon all the way to the sea and the cars creep like toys up the slick canyon road, she felt better. This was America and it was a beautiful place, drier and hotter than Tepoztlán in the dry season and colder in the wet, but she felt that there was peace here if only she could find it. Peace and prosperity too.
She looked down then into her daughter’s face and the baby was staring past her, staring up and away into a distance she couldn’t possibly contain, and it was in that moment that America felt the naked sharp claws of apprehension take hold bf her. She passed a hand over her daughter’s face and her daughter didn’t blink. She bent her own face to Socorro’s and tugged at those dull black irises with her own and they only stared, as if there were a wall between them. And then the baby blinked and sneezed and the eyes stared at nothing.
Cándido told her they were eating rabbit, but rabbit was hard to come by up here. Those other little four-legged beasts, the ones with the bells on their collars to warn away the birds, they were easier to catch. All you had to do was wait till midnight, slip over the wall and whisper, “Kitty, here, kitty.” So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable. He’d stared so long and so hard at that strip of road out front of the post office, waiting for the apparition of Señor Willis’s Corvair, that it wasn’t a real place anymore, but a scene he’d devised in his brain—if he blinked, it wouldn’t exist. There were no braceros there, not a one, and the word must have been out. Cándido didn’t dare show himself and if he didn’t show himself how could he get work? And if he couldn’t get work, no matter how many things he borrowed from the houses beyond the wall or how many cans he collected in the bushes, sooner or later they would starve. If only he could call Señor Willis, but Señor Willis didn’t have a phone. He could go back to Canoga Park, but there was no work there, he knew that already, and a hundred men ready to kill for whatever work might turn up. A little money, that was all he needed—with a little money he might think about going back to Tepoztlán, at least for the winter. His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América-he’d boasted to her, he’d promised her things—America would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father’s house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some chingado her old man owed money to.
Cándido took the risk. He waited till the rain began to crackle on the pavement and the hair hung wet in his eyes, and then he stepped out of the bushes, crossed the road and stood beneath the overhang out front of the post office, stamping his feet and hugging his shoulders to keep the circulation going. Surely somebody would take pity on him and bring him home to work in a warm basement, putting up drywall or painting or cleaning out the trash. He waited, wet through and shivering, and every gringo who got ou
t of his car and ducked into the post office gave him a look of unremitting hate. If they didn’t know he’d started the fire personally, they all suspected it, and where there was once tolerance and human respect, where there was the idea of community and a labor exchange and people to support it, now there was only fear and resentment. They didn’t want to hire him, they didn’t want to see him warm, they didn’t want to see him fed and clothed and with a place to sleep at night that was better than a ditch or a shack hidden in the weeds—they wanted to see him dead. Or no: they didn’t want to see him at all. He waited there through the afternoon, and when he couldn’t take the cold anymore he went into the lobby of the post office, a public place, and a man in a blue uniform stepped from behind the counter and told him in Spanish that he had to leave.
America was strange that night. He huddled next to her, trying to stop shivering, and she didn’t mention going home, not once, though she’d driven him half-mad with it for the past two weeks. Now it was the baby—that was all she could talk about. The baby needed to go to a clinic, the baby needed a doctor—a gringo doctor—to look at her. But was the baby sick? he wanted to know. She looked all right to him. No, América gasped, no, she’s not sick, but we need to have a doctor check her—just in case. And how will we get to this doctor, how will we pay? He was irritated, feeling harassed, squeezed dry. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. But the baby had to have a doctor.