The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  And all the while he was thinking: I’ve got him now, the son of a bitch, the jack-in-the-box, the firebug, and the exhilaration that took hold of him was like a drug and the drug shut out all reason. He never gave a thought as to what he was going to do with the Mexican once he caught him—that didn’t matter. None of it mattered. All that mattered was this, was finding him, rooting him out of his burrow and counting his teeth and his toes and the hairs on his head and noting it all down for the record. Delaney had been here before, been here a hundred times stalking a hundred different creatures—he was a pilgrim, after all. His senses were keen. There was no escaping him.

  And then, just as he knew he would, he caught the first faint reductive whiff of it: woodsmoke. Delaney touched the gun then, touched it there where it lay tight against his groin, and let his nose guide him.

  8

  “YOU LOOK LIKE YOU JUST SAW A GHOST.”

  Cándido was feeding sticks into the fire, trying to warm himself, and he didn’t answer. A moment ago he’d called out to her in the dark and the streaming rain so as not to startle her—“It’s me, mi vida”—and then he’d crawled through the dripping flap of rug they’d hung across the entrance, bringing the wet with him. He’d kicked the huaraches off outside, but his feet were balls of mud all the way up to his ankles, and his shirt and pants were dark with rain and pressed to his skin. He didn’t have a jacket. Or a hat.

  America was about to say, Cándido, mi amor, you need to rinse your feet out the door, this place is bad enough as it is, it’s leaking in the corner and that smell of mold or rot or whatever it is is driving me crazy, but she took another look at his face and changed her mind. He didn’t have anything with him, either, and that was strange—he always brought something back, a scrap of cloth she could make into a dress for the baby, a package of tortillas or rice or sometimes a candy bar. Tonight there was nothing, only that face. “Is there something wrong?” she said.

  He pulled his muddy feet up beneath him in that little space that was like a packing crate, the whole place hardly bigger than the king-size beds the gringos slept in, and she saw how thin and worn he’d become and she felt she was going to cry, she couldn’t hold it back, and it sounded like the whimper of a dog in her own ears. She was crying, sucking the sounds in before they could escape her, the rain drilling the green plastic roof and trickling down the clear plastic sheeting Cándido had dug up somewhere to protect the walls, and still he didn’t answer her. She watched a shiver pass through him, and then another.

  “I wish it was only a ghost,” he said after a while, and he reached for the aluminum dish of cocido where it sat on the shelf he’d built in the corner to hold their poor stock of groceries.

  She watched him put the dish on the grill, poke up the fire and lay a few sticks of the bigger wood in under it. Camping, how she hated camping.

  “It was that gabacho,” he said, “the one with the red hair who hit me with his car. He scares me. He’s like a madman. If we were back at home, back in the village, they’d take him to the city in a straitjacket and lock him up in the asylum.”

  Her voice was hushed. The rain pounded at the door. “What happened?”

  “What do you think?” He curled his lip and the sheen of the fire made his face come back to life. “I was walking along the road, minding my own business—and this was the worst day yet, nothing, not a chance of work—and suddenly there’s this car coming up behind me and I swear to Christ on his cross the lunatic tried to hit me again. It was inches. He missed me by inches.”

  She could smell the cocido now—there was meat in it, something he’d trapped—and potatoes and chiles and a good strong broth. She couldn’t tell him now, couldn’t tell him yet, though she’d been working up her nerve all day—Socorro had to have a doctor, right away, she had to—but when he’d finished eating and warmed himself, then, it would have to be then.

  Cándido’s voice was low with wonder. “Then he got out of the car and came after me—and with one of those telephones in his hand, the wireless ones—and I think he was calling the police, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out, you can bet your life on that. But what is it? What did I ever do to him? He can’t know about the fire, can he? And that was an accident, God knows—”

  “Maybe he tried to hit you the first time too. Maybe he’s a racist. Maybe he’s a pig. Maybe he hates us because we’re Mexican.”

  “I can’t believe it. How could anybody be that vicious? He gave me twenty dollars, remember?”

  “Twenty dollars,” she spat, and she jerked her hand so violently she woke the baby. “And he sent his son down into the canyon to abuse us, didn’t he?”

  Later, after Cándido had cleaned up the last of the cocido with three hot tortillas and his shirt had dried and the mud that had caked on his feet crumbled and fell through the slats of the floor, she steeled herself and came back to the question of Socorro and the doctor. “There’s something wrong with her,” America said, and a volley of wind-driven rain played off the plastic sheeting like spent ammunition. “It’s her eyes. I’m afraid, I’m afraid—” but she couldn’t go on.

  “What do you mean, her eyes?” Cándido didn’t need this, he didn’t need another worry. “There’s nothing wrong with her eyes,” he said, and as if to prove it he took the baby from her and Socorro kicked out her arms in reflex and gave a harsh rasping cry: He looked into her face a moment—not too hard, he was afraid to look too hard—and then he glanced at America and said, “You’re crazy. She’s beautiful, she’s perfect—what more do you want?” Socorro passed between them again, soft and fragile and wrapped up in her towel, but for all that, Cándido handled her as if she were a bundle of sticks, a loaf of bread, just another object.

  “She, she can’t see me, Cándido—she can’t see anything, and I’m afraid.”

  Thunder struck his face. The rain screamed. “You’re crazy.”

  “No,” and she could barely get the words out, “no, I’m not. We need the doctor—maybe he can do something, maybe—you don’t know, Cándido, you don’t know anything, and you don’t want to.” She was angry now, all of it pouring out of her, all the pain and worry and fear of the past few days, weeks, months: “It was my pee, my pee burned, that’s what did it, because of ”—she couldn’t look him in the eye, the fire flickering, the lamp making a death mask of his face—“because of those men.”

  It was the worst wound she could have given him, but he had to understand, and there was no recrimination in it, what’s done is done, but she never heard his response. Because at that moment something fell against the side of the shack, something considerable, something animate, and then the flap was wrenched from the doorway and flung away into the night and there was a face there, peering in. A gabacho face, as startling and unexpected and horrible as any face leaping out of a dark corner on the Day of the Dead. And the shock of that was nothing, because there was a hand attached to that face and the hand held a gun.

  Delaney found the shack, and his fingers told him it was made of stolen pallets and slats stripped from the chaparral and the roof that had turned up missing from Bill Vogel’s greenhouse. There was light inside—from the fire and maybe a lantern—and it guided him, though the mud was like oil on glass and he lost his balance and gave himself away. He thought he heard voices. More than one. He was outraged—how many of them were there, how many? This couldn’t go on anymore, this destruction of the environment, this trashing of the hills and the creeks and the marshes and everyplace else; this was the end, the end of it. He blundered into the stolen flap of rug that concealed the entrance and he tore it aside with one hand because the other hand, his right hand, somehow held the gun now, and it was as if the gun were sentient and animate and had sprung out of the holster and into the grip of his fingers all on its own—

  And that was when things got hazy. He’d been hearing the roar for a minute or two now, a sound like the wildest surf pounding against the ruggedest shore, but there was no shore he
re, there was nothing but—

  And then he felt himself lifted up from behind by some monstrous uncontainable force and he dropped the gun and clutched at the frame of the stooped-over door of that pathetic little shack, staring in amazement into the lamplit faces there—his Mexican, that was him, at last, and a girl he’d never seen before, and was that an infant?—and the shack was spilling over on its side and floating up on the heavy liquid swell behind him until it fell to pieces and the light was snuffed out and the faces were gone and Delaney was drawn so much closer to that cold black working heart of the world than he’d ever dreamed possible.

  And so, in the end, it all came tumbling down on Cándido: his daughter’s affliction, the pelirrojo with the gun, the very mountain itself. The light was flickering, the rain hissing like a box of serpents prodded with a stick. She can’t see, Cándido, she can’t see anything, America said, and in that moment he had a vision of his perfect plump little daughter transmogrified into an old hag with a cane and a Seeing Eye dog, and before he could assimilate the meaning of that in all its fearful permutations and banish it from his consciousness, there was this maniac with the gun, threatening his life, and before he could even begin to deal with that, the mountain turned to pudding, to mush, the light failed and the shack fell to pieces. At first he didn’t know what was happening—who would?—but there was no resisting that force. He could have built his shack of tungsten steel with footings a hundred feet deep and the result would have been the same. The mountain was going somewhere, and he was going with it.

  He didn’t even have time to curse or flinch or wonder about his fate-all he could do was snatch America and his poor blind baby to him and hold on. America had Socorro pinned under her arm like a football and she clawed at him with her free hand as the roof shot away from them and they were thrown in a tangle on the pallets that just half a second ago were the inside wall and were now the floor. The moving floor. The floor that shot like a surfboard out on the crest of the liquid mountain that was scouring the earth and blasting trees out of the ground as if they’d never been rooted, and there was the pelirrojo, the white face and flailing white arms, caught up in the mad black swirl of it like a man drowning in shit.

  The mountain roared, the boulders clamored, and yet they somehow stayed atop the molten flow, hurtling through the night with all the other debris. Cándido heard the rush of water ahead and saw the lights of the development below them, riding high on the wave of mud that hammered the walls flat and twisted the roofs from the houses and sent him and America and little Socorro thundering into the void. Then the lights went out in unison, the far wall of the development was breached and the two conjoined pallets were a raft in the river that the dry white wash had become, spinning out of control in the current.

  América was screaming and the baby was screaming and he could hear his own voice raised in a thin mournful drone, and that was nothing compared to the shrieks of the uprooted trees and the night-marish roar of the boulders rolling along beneath them. He wasn’t thinking—there was no time to think, only to react—but even as he pitched into the blackness of this new river that was rushing toward completion in the old river below, he managed finally to curse the engine of all this misery in a burst of profanity that would have condemned him for all time if he hadn’t been condemned already. What was it? What was it about him? All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking pinche luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.

  There was no controlling this thing, no hope of it. There was only the mad ride and the battering of the rocks. Cándido held on to the pallet and America held on to him. His knuckles were smashed and smashed again but he held on because there was nothing else he could do. And then they were in the bed of the big creek, Topanga Creek, and the mountain was behind them. But this wasn’t the creek Cándido had drunk from and bathed in and slept behind through all those punishing months of drought—it wasn’t even the creek he’d seen raging under the bridge earlier that day. It was a river, a torrent that rode right up over the bridges and the streets and everything else. There was no escaping it. The pallet bucked and spun, and finally it threw him.

  They hit something, something so big it was immovable, and Cándido lost his grip on America and the raft at the same time; he was in the water suddenly with nothing to hold on to and the water was as cold as death. He went under, and it felt as if an enormous fist were pinning him down, crushing him, but he kicked out against it, slammed into a submerged log and then the jagged tearing edge of a rock, and somehow the surface was there. “América!” he cried. “América!” In the next instant it had him again, the furious roiling water forced up his nostrils and rammed down his throat, the current raking him over a stony washboard, hump after hump of unyielding rock, and he saw his mother pounding the clothes back and forth in a froth of suds, he must have been three years old, and he knew he was going to die, Go to the devil, mijo, and he cried out again.

  Then a voice spoke beside him, right in his ear—“Candido!”—and there was his wife, there was America, holding out a hand to him. The water churned and sucked at him, throwing him forward only to jerk him away again, and where was she? There, clinging to the slick hard surface of the washboard where it rose dizzily out of the current. He fought with all he had and suddenly the water spat him up in his wife’s arms.

  He was saved. He was alive. There was no sky, there was no earth and the wind drove at them with pellets of rain and the water crashed at his feet, but he was alive and breathing and huddled in the arms of his wife, his thin beautiful shivering girl of a wife. It took him a moment, interpreting the humped rock beneath him with his numbed and bleeding fingers, before he understood where they were—they’d been saved by the United States Post Office and this was the tile roof and the building beneath them was the cut bank of the river as it swirled round the bend to the swamped bridge and the gorge beyond. “América” was all he could say, gasping it, moaning it, over and over. He fell into a spasm of coughing and brought up the cocido, sour and thin, and he felt as if he were being slowly strangled. “Are you okay?” he choked. “Are you hurt?”

  She was sobbing. Her body and his were one and the sobs shook him till he was sobbing himself, or almost sobbing. But men didn’t sob, men endured; they worked for three dollars a day tanning hides till their fingernails fell out; they swallowed kerosene and spat out fire for tourists on streetcorners; they worked till there was no more work left in them. “The baby,” he gasped, and he wasn’t sobbing, he wasn’t. “Where’s the baby?”

  She didn’t answer, and he felt the cold seep into his veins, a coldness and a weariness like nothing he’d ever known. The dark water was all around him, water as far as he could see, and he wondered if he would ever get warm again. He was beyond cursing, beyond grieving, numbed right through to the core of him. All that, yes. But when he saw the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles, he reached down and took hold of it.

  FOR MORE FROM T. C. BOYLE, LOOK FOR THE

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  A
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  East Is East

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  A Friend of the Earth

  It is 2025. Ty Tierwater, a failed eco-terrorist and ex-con, ekes out a bleak living managing a rock star’s private menagerie of scruffy hyenas, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions, some of the only species remaining after the collapse of the earth’s biosphere. ISBN 978-0-14-100205-7

  Greasy Lake and Other Stories

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