The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  The style was French Eclectic, simple, understated, with a tony elegance that made the late Da Ros place seem fussy, even garish, by comparison. From the hipped roof with its flared eaves to the stone quoins accenting windows and doors and the thick sturdy plaster walls painted in the exact pale-cinnamon shade of the eucalyptus trunks and festooned with grapevines gone blood-red with the season, the place was a revelation. The grounds too—the plantings were rustic, but well cared for and well thought out. There was a circular drive out front that swept round a pond with a pair of swans streaming across it, and the pond was set off by casual groupings of birch and Japanese maple. FOR SALE BY OWNER: she’d have to play this one carefully, very carefully. Kyra let the car roll forward as if it had a mind of its own; then she leaned into the arc of the drive, swung round front and parked. She spent half a minute with her compact, ran both hands through her hair, and went up the steps.

  A man about fifty in a plaid flannel shirt and tan slacks answered the door; behind him, already trying on a smile, was the wife, stationed beside a mahogany parlor table in a long white entrance hall. “You must be here to see the house?” the man said.

  Kyra never hesitated. She was thinking two mil, easy, maybe more, depending on the acreage, and even as she was totting up her commission on that—sixty thousand—and wondering why she should have to share it with Mike Bender, she was thinking about the adjoining properties and who owned them and whether this place couldn’t be the anchor for a very select private community of high-end houses, and that’s where the money was, in developing—not selling—developing. “Yes,” she said, giving them the full benefit of her face and figure and her nonpareil-closer’s smile, “yes, I am.”

  There were places where the spoor was interrupted, the footprints erased by the force of the downpour that had swept over the hills while Delaney was sitting in the police cruiser wasting his breath. That was all right. He knew which direction his quarry had taken and all he had to do was keep moving up the shoulder till the prints became discernible again—and he didn’t need much, the scuff of a toe in the gravel or the cup of a heel slowly filling with dirty yellow water. If he could track a fox that had slipped its radio collar and doubled back through a running stream for three hundred yards before climbing up into the lower branches of a sycamore, then he was more than capable of tracking this clumsy Mexican all the way to Hell and back—and that was exactly what he was going to do, track him down if it took all night.

  It was getting dark, black dark, by the time he reached Arroyo Blanco Drive, and when he saw by the lights of a passing car that the prints turned left into the road he wasn’t surprised, not really. It explained a lot of things—the graffiti, the photo, all the little incidentals that had turned up missing throughout the community, the plastic sheeting, the dog dishes, the kibble. The fire had flushed him out and now the drunken moron was camped out up here, spraying his graffiti, stealing kibble, shitting in a ditch. And then it came to him: What if he was the one who’d started the fire? What if the wetback with the hat was innocent all along and that’s why the police couldn’t hold him? This one had been camped down there somewhere, hadn’t he? Delaney saw the glint of the shopping cart all over again and the trail plunging down into the canyon and the Mexican there in the weeds, broken and bleeding, and he couldn’t help thinking it would have been better for everyone concerned if he’d just crawled off into the bushes and died.

  But now it was dark and he was going to have to get a flashlight if he was going to go on with this—and he was, he was determined to go on with it, no matter what, right to the end. He was almost at the gate when a car pulled over and the rain-bleared image of Jim Shirley’s face appeared in the window on the driver’s side. It was raining again, white pinpricks that jumped off the blacktop in the wash of the car’s headlights. The window cranked halfway down and Jim Shirley’s skin glowed green and red under the blinking Christmas lights. “What in hell you doing out in the rain, Delaney? Looking for horned toads? Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

  Delaney crossed to the car and stood hunched by the window, but he didn’t say Hi, Jim, hell of a night and how are you doing or thanks or no thanks. “You wouldn’t have a flashlight I could borrow, would you?” he asked, the rain terracing his cheeks and dripping steadily from the tip of his nose.

  Green and red. The colors settled into the big bloated face above the black band of the beard. “Afraid hot,” Jim Shirley said. “Used to keep one in the car but the batteries went dead and then my wife was going to replace them and that’s the last I saw of it. Why? You lose something?”

  “No, that’s all right,” Delaney murmured, backing away now. “Thanks.”

  He watched Jim Shirley drive through the gate and on up into the development and then he turned and in the haunted light of the red and green blinking bulbs discovered the fresh outrage of the wall, the mocking black hieroglyphs staring back at him, right there, as raw as the paint that was already smearing in the rain, right there under the nose of the guard and the blinking lights and everything else. His car was wrecked, his dogs were gone. He went right up to the wall and pressed a finger to the paint and the finger came back wet. And black. Stained black.

  This was the signal, this was it, the declaration of war, the knife thrown in the dirt. First the car, now this. Delaney thought of the cameras then, of the evidence, and he tugged the cord at his feet so the flash would locate him. Only one camera flashed—the near one. The other had been smashed. He couldn’t see if any of the pictures had been exposed—the light was too dim—and so he tucked the functional camera under his jacket and worked his way along the wall to the gate.

  When he rapped on the glass of the guard’s cubicle, the guard—a lugubrious long-nosed kid with a croaking voice and the faintest blond beginnings of a mustache—jumped as if he’d been goosed with a cattle prod, and then Delaney was in the booth with him and the kid was saying, “Jesus, Mr. Mossbacher, you really scared me—what’s the matter, is anything wrong?”

  It was close. Steaming. Room for one and now there were two. A red-and-white-striped box of fried chicken sat beside a paperback on the control panel, the cover of the paperback decorated with the over- muscled figure of a sword-wielding barbarian and his two bare-breasted female companions. “Your car break down?” the kid croaked.

  Delaney pulled out the camera and saw that six pictures had been exposed, six indisputable pieces of incriminating evidence, and he felt as if he’d just hit a home run to win the game. The kid was watching him, his eyes like little glittering rivets supporting the weight of that nose, something sallow and liverish in his skin. They were six inches apart, their shoulders filling the booth. “No,” Delaney said, giving him a grin that in retrospect must have seemed about three-quarters deranged, “everything’s okay, just fine, perfect,” and then he was ducking back out into the rain and jogging up the street toward his house, thinking of the photos, yes, thinking of the wrecked car and the slap in the face of the wall, but thinking above all of the gun in the garage, the Smith & Wesson stainless-steel .38 Special Jack had talked him into buying for “home protection.”

  He’d never wanted the thing. He hated guns. He’d never hunted, never killed anything in his life; nor did he ever want to. Rednecks had guns, criminals, vigilantes, the cretinous trigger-happy minions of the NRA who needed assault rifles to hunt deer and thought the natural world existed only as a vast and ever-shifting target. But he’d bought it. With Jack. They’d had a drink after tennis one afternoon at a sushi bar in Tarzana, it must have been six months ago now. Jack had just introduced Delaney to Onigaroshi on the rocks and the conversation had turned to the sad and parlous state of the world as represented in the newspaper, when Jack swung round in his seat and said, “Knowing you, I’ll bet you’re completely naked.”

  “Naked? What do you mean?”

  “Home protection.” Delaney watched Jack lift a sliver of maguro to his lips. “I’ll bet the best you can do is maybe a Louisvi
lle Slugger, am I right?”

  “You mean a gun?”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said, chewing, and then he reached for the glass of sake to wash it down. “It’s an angry, fragmented society out there, Delaney, and I’m not only talking about your native haves and have- nots, but the torrents of humanity surging in from China and Bangladesh and Colombia with no shoes, no skills and nothing to eat. They want what you’ve got, my friend, and do you really think they’re going to come knocking at the door and ask politely for it? Look, it boils down to this: no matter what you think about guns, would you rather be the killer or the killee?”

  Jack had picked up the check and from there they’d gone to Grantham’s GunMart in Van Nuys, and it wasn’t at all what Delaney had expected. There were no escaped convicts or Hell’s Angels sifting through bins of hollow-point bullets, no swaggering bear hunters or palpitating accountants running up and down the aisles with their tails between their legs. The place was wide open, brightly lit, the wares laid out on display as if Grantham’s was dealing in fine jewelry or perfume or Rolex watches. Nothing was furtive, nobody was embarrassed, and the clientele, so far as Delaney could see, consisted of average ordinary citizens in shorts and college sweatshirts, business suits and dresses, shopping for the tools of murder as casually as they might have shopped for rat traps or gopher pellets at the hardware store. The woman behind the counter—Samantha Grantham herself —looked like a retired first-grade teacher, gray hair in a bun, silver-framed glasses, her fingers fat and elegant atop the display case. She sold Delaney the same model handgun she carried in her purse, the one she’d used to scare off the would-be muggers in the parking lot at the Fallbrook Mall after the late movie, and she sold him a lightweight Bianchi clip-on holster made of nylon with a Velcro strap that fit right down inside the waistband of his pants as comfortably as a second pocket. When he got home, he felt ashamed of himself, felt as if he’d lost all hope, and he’d locked the thing away in a chest in the garage and forgotten all about it. Till now.

  Now he came in the front door, water puddling on the carpet, fished the key out of the desk drawer in his office and went directly out to the garage. The chest was made of steel, fireproof, the size of two reams of paper, stacked. There was dust on it. He fit the key in the lock, flipped back the lid, and there it was, the gun he’d forgotten all about. It glowed in his hand, flashing light under the naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling, and the rain crashed at the roof. His mouth was dry. He was breathing hard. He inserted the bullets in the slots so ingeniously designed to receive them, each one sliding in with a precise and lethal click, and he knew he would never use the thing, never fire it, never—but he was going to draw it out of the holster in all its deadly flashing beauty and hold it there over that vandalizing alien black-eyed jack-in-the-box till the police came and put him away where he belonged.

  Delaney tucked the gun into his holster and tucked the holster into his pants and then a spasm passed through him: he was freezing. Shivering so hard he could barely reach a hand to the light switch. He was going to have to change, that was the first thing—and where was Kyra, shouldn’t she be home by now? And then the film, and maybe something to eat. The lights had been out at Jack and Selda’s as he passed by on the street, but he knew where they kept the spare key, under the third flowerpot on the right, just outside the back door, and he was sure they wouldn’t mind if he just slipped in for a minute and used the darkroom—he had to have those photos; had to catch the jerk with the spray can in his hand, catch him in the act. The other picture, the first one, was something, but it wasn’t conclusive—they could always say in court that it didn’t prove a thing except that the suspect was out there on public property, where he had every right to be, and who was going to say he wasn’t, on his way to the gate to visit friends in Arroyo Blanco or that he wasn’t there looking for work or delivering fliers? But these new photos, these six—Delaney would have them printed and blown up and lying right there on the counter in the kitchen when the police came in ...

  But first, his clothes. His body was seized with an involuntary tremor, then another, and he sneezed twice as he set the gun down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. He would take a hot shower to warm up, that’s what he would do, then he’d check the message machine—Kyra must have taken Jordan out for a pizza—and then he’d sit down and have something himself, a can of soup, anything. There was no hurry. He knew now where to find the bastard—up there, up in the chaparral within sight of the wall—and he’d have to have a fire on a night like this, and the fire would give him away. It would be the last fire he’d ever start—around here, at least.

  While the soup was heating in the microwave, Delaney pulled a clean pair of jeans out of the closet, dug down in back for his High Sierra lightweight hiking boots with the half-inch tread, laid out a pair of insulated socks, a sweater and his raingear on the bed. The shower had warmed him, but he was still trembling, and he realized it wasn’t the cold affecting him, but adrenaline, pure adrenaline. He was too keyed up to do much more than blow on the soup—CampbeH’s Chunky Vegetable—and then he was in the hallway, standing before the full-length mirror and watching himself tuck the gun into his pants and pull it out again while listening to the messages on the machine. Kyra was going to be late, just as he’d thought—she’d got involved with some house in Agoura, of all places, and she was late picking up Jordan and thought she’d just maybe take him out for Chinese and then to the card shop; he was collecting X-Men cards now. Delaney looked up, dropped the film in his pocket and stepped back out into the rain.

  It was coming down hard. Piñon was like a streambed, nothing moving but the water, and he could hear boulders slamming around in the culverts high up on the hill that were meant to deflect runoff and debris from the development. Delaney wondered about that, and he stood there in the rain a long moment, listening for the roar of the mountain giving way—what with erosion in the burn area and all this rain anything could happen. They were vulnerable—these were the classic mudslide conditions, nothing to hold the soil in thanks to the match-happy Mexican up there—but then there really wasn’t much he could do about it. If the culverts overflowed, the wall would repel whatever came down—it wasn’t as if he and his neighbors would have to be out there sandbagging or anything. He was concerned, of course he was concerned—he was concerned about everything—and if the weather gods would grant him a wish he’d cut this back to a nice safe gently soaking drizzle, but at least the way it was coming down now that bastard up there would be pinned down in whatever kind of hovel he’d been able to throw together, and that would make him all the easier to find.

  At the Cherrystones, Delaney found the key under the pot with no problem, and he hung his poncho on the inside of the doorknob in the kitchen so as not to dribble water all over the tile. He fumbled for the light switch, the gun pressing at his groin like a hard hot hand, like something that had come alive, and his heart slammed at his ribs and thudded in his ears. The light suddenly exploded in the room, and Selda’s cat—a huge manx that was all but indistinguishable from a bobcat—sprang from the chair and shot down the hallway. Delaney felt like a thief. But then he was in the darkroom, the film in the tank, and that calmed him, that was all right—Anytime, Jack had said, anytime you want. Delaney was so sure of what he was going to get this time he barely registered the reversed images on the negatives—there was something there, shadowy figures, a blur of criminal activity—and he cut the curling strip of film and let it drop to the floor, printing up the first six frames on a contact sheet. When it was ready, he slid the paper into the developer and received his second photographic jolt of the week: this was no Mexican blinking scared and open-faced into the lens on a pair of towering legs anchored by glistening leather hi-tops, no Mexican with the spray can plainly visible in his big white fist, no Mexican with hair that shade or cut ...

  It was Jack Jr.

  Jack Jr. and an accomplice Delaney didn’t recognize, and there they were, r
eplicated six times on a sheet of contact paper, brought to life, caught in the act. It was as complete a surprise as Delaney had ever had, and it almost stopped him. Almost. He pushed himself up from the counter and in a slow methodical way he cleaned up, draining the trays, rinsing them and setting them back on the shelf where Jack kept them. Then he dropped the negatives on the contact sheet and balled the whole thing up in a wad and buried it deep in the trash. That Mexican was guilty, sure he was, guilty of so much more than this. He was camping up there, wasn’t he? He’d wrecked Delaney’s car. Stolen kibble and plastic sheeting. And who knew but that he hadn’t set that fire himself?

  The night was black, utterly, impenetrably black, but Delaney didn’t want to use his flashlight—there was too much risk of giving himself away. As soon as he dropped down on the far side of the wall, the faint light of the development’s porch lights and Christmas displays was snuffed out and the night and the rain were all. The smell was raw and rich at the same time, an amalgam of smells, a whole mountainside risen from the dead. The boulders echoed in the steel-lined culverts, groaning like thunder, and everywhere the sound of running water. Every least crack in the soil was a fissure and every fissure a channel and every channel a stream. Delaney felt it washing round his ankles. His eyes, ever so gradually, began to adjust to the light.

  He started straight up, along the backbone of the slope the coyote had ascended with Sacheverell in its jaws, and there was nothing under his feet. Where the white dust and the red grains of the anthills had lain thick on the dehydrated earth, there was now an invisible, infinitely elastic net of mud. Delaney’s feet slipped out from under him despite the money-back guarantee of the boots, and he was down on his hands and knees before he’d gone twenty steps. Rain whipped his face, the chaparral disintegrated under the frantic grasp of his fingers. He kept going, foot by foot, seeking the level patches where he could rise to his feet and reconnoiter before he slipped again and went back to all fours. Time meant nothing. The universe was reduced to the square foot of broken sky over his head and the mud beneath his hands. He was out in it, right in the thick of it, as near to the cold black working heart of the world as he could get.