The Tortilla Curtain (3 page)

 

 

 

“So what’d you hit—a deer? Coyote?”

Delaney was in the showroom of the Acura dealership, a great ugly crenellated box of a building he’d always hated—it didn’t blend with the surrounding hills, didn’t begin to, not at all—but somehow, today, he felt strangely comforted by it. Driving up with his cracked lens and disarranged signal housing, he’d seen it as a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets. There were desks, telephones, the air was cool, the floors buffed to brilliance. And the cars themselves, hard and unassailable, so new they smelled of wax, rubber and plastic only, were healing presences arranged like heavy furniture throughout the cavern of the room. He was sitting on the edge of Kenny Grissom’s desk, and Kenny Grissom, the enthusiastic moon-faced thirty-five-year-old boy who’d sold him the car, was trying to look concerned.

Delaney shrugged, already reaching for the phone. “A dog, I think it was. Might have been a coyote, but kind of big for a coyote. Must have been a dog. Sure it was. Yeah. A dog.”

Why was he lying? Why did he keep thinking of shadowy black-and-white movies, men in creased hats leaning forward to light cigarettes, the hit-and-run driver tracked down over a few chips of paint—or a cracked headlight? Because he was covering himself, that’s why. Because he’d just left the poor son of a bitch there alongside the road, abandoned him, and because he’d been glad of it, relieved to buy him off with his twenty dollars’ blood money. And how did that square with his liberal-humanist ideals?

“I hit a dog once,” Kenny Grissom offered, “when I was living out in Arizona? It was this big gray shaggy thing, a sheepdog, I guess it was. I was driving a pickup at the time, Ford half-ton with a four-sixty in it, and my girlfriend was with me. I never even seen the thing—one minute I’m cruising, and the next minute my girlfriend’s all in tears and there’s this thing that looks like an old rug in the middle of the road in back of me. I don’t know. So I back up and the dog like lurches to his feet, but he’s only got three legs and I thought like holy shit I blew his leg right off, but then Kim gets out and we kind of look and there’s no blood or anything, just a stump.”

Kenny’s face was working, as if there were something trapped under the skin trying to get out. “Friggin’ thing only
had
three legs to begin with,” he suddenly shouted, “no wonder he couldn’t get out of the way!” His laugh reverberated through, the vast hollow spaces of the room, a salesman’s laugh, too sharp-edged and pleased with itself. And then his face came back to the moment, sober suddenly, composed round the pale tawny bristle of his mustache. “But it’s a bitch, I know it is,” he observed in a sort of yodel. “And don’t you worry, we’ll have your car for you any minute now, good as new. Feel free to use the phone.”

Delaney just nodded. He’d dialed Kyra at work and was listening to the number ring through.

“Hello?” Her voice was bright, amplified, right there with him.

“It’s me, honey.”

“What’s wrong? Is it Jordan? Something’s happened to Jordan?”

Delaney took a deep breath. Suddenly he felt hurt, put-upon, ready to let it all spill out of him. “I had an accident.”

Now it was her turn—the sharp insuck of breath, the voice gone dead in her throat. “Jordan’s hurt, isn’t he? Tell me, tell me the worst. Quick! I can’t stand it!”

“Nobody’s hurt, honey, everybody’s okay. I haven’t even gone to pick Jordan up yet.”

A numb silence, counters clicking, synapses flashing. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

“The Acura dealer. I’m getting the headlight fixed.” He glanced up, lowered his voice, Kenny Grissom nowhere in sight: “I hit a man.”

“Hit
a
man?”
There was a flare of anger in her voice. “What are you talking about?”

“A Mexican. At least I think he was a Mexican. Out on the canyon road. I was on my way to the recycler.”

“My god. Did you call Jack?”

Jack was Jack Jardine, their friend, neighbor, adviser and lawyer, who also happened to be the president of the Arroyo Blanco Estates Property Owners’ Association. “No”—Delaney sighed—“I just got here and I wanted to tell you, to let you know—”

“What are you thinking? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what one of these shyster personal-injury lawyers would do to get hold of something like this? You
hit
a man? Was he hurt? Did you take him to the hospital? Did you call the insurance?”

Delaney tried to gather it all in. She was excitable, Kyra, explosive, her circuits so high-wired she was always on the verge of overload, even when she was asleep. There were no minor issues in her life. “No, listen, Kyra: the guy’s okay. I mean, he was just ... bruised, that was all. He’s gone, he went away. I gave him twenty bucks.”

“Twenty—?”

And then, before the words could turn to ash in his mouth, it was out: “I told you—he was
Mexican.”

HE’D HAD HEADACHES BEFORE-HIS WHOLE LIFE was a headache, his whole stinking worthless
pinche vida-but
never like this. It felt as if a bomb had gone off inside his head, one of those big atomic ones like they dropped on the Japanese, the black roiling clouds pushing and pressing at his skull, no place to go, no release, on and on and on. But that wasn’t all—the throb was in his stomach too, and he had to go down on his hands and knees and vomit in the bushes before he’d even got halfway to the camp in the ravine. He felt his breakfast come up—two hard-cooked eggs, half a cup of that weak reheated piss that passed for coffee and a tortilla he’d involuntarily blackened on a stick held over the fire-all of it, every lump and fleck, and then he vomited again. His stomach heaved till he could taste the bile in the back of his throat, and yet he couldn’t move, that uncontainable pressure fighting to punch through his ears, and he crouched there for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by a single strand of saliva that dangled endlessly from his lips.

When he got to his feet again, everything had shifted. The shadows had leapt the ravine, the sun was caught in the trees and the indefatigable vulture had been joined by two others. “Yes, sure, come and get me,” he muttered, spitting and wincing at the same time, “that’s all I am—a worn-out carcass, a walking slab of meat.” But Christ in Heaven, how it hurt! He raised a hand to the side of his face and the flesh was stiff and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head. What had happened to him? He was crossing the road, coming back from the grocery after the labor exchange closed—the far grocery, the cheaper one, and what did it matter if it was on the other side of the road? The old man there at the checkout—a
paisano,
he called himself, from Italy—he didn’t look at you like you were dirt, like you were going to steal, like you couldn’t keep your hands off all the shiny bright packages of this and that, beef jerky and
nachos
and shampoo, little gray-and-black batteries in a plastic sleeve. He’d bought an orange soda, Nehi, and a package of
tortillas
to go with the pinto beans burned into the bottom of the pot ... and then what? Then he crossed the road.

Yes. And then that pink-faced
gabacho
ran him down with his flaming
gabacho
nose and the little lawyer glasses clenched over the bridge of it. All that steel, that glass, that chrome, that big hot iron engine—it was like a tank coming at him, and his only armor was a cotton shirt and pants and a pair of worn-out
huaraches.
He stared stupidly round him—at the fine tracery of the brush, at the birds lighting in the branches and the treetops below him, at the vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky. America would help him when she got back, she’d brew some tea from manzanita berries to combat the pain, bathe his wounds, cluck her tongue and fuss over him. But he needed to go down the path now, and his hip was bothering him all of a sudden, and the left knee, there, where the trousers were torn.

It hurt. Every step of the way. But he thought of the penitents at Chalma, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh, and he went on. Twice he fell. The first time he caught himself with his good arm, but the second time he tasted dust and his eyes refused to focus, the whole hot blazing world gone cool and dark all of a sudden, as if he’d been transposed to the bottom of the ocean. He heard a mockingbird then, a whistle and trill in the void, and it was as if it had drowned in sunlight too, and then he was dreaming.

His dreams were real. He wasn’t flying through the air or talking with the ghost of his mother or vanquishing his enemies—he was stalled in the garbage dump in Tijuana, stalled at the wire, and America was sick with the
gastro
and he didn’t have a cent in the world after the
cholos
and the
coyotes
had got done with him. Sticks and cardboard over his head. The stink of burning dogs in the air. Low man in the pecking order, even at the
dompe. Life is poor here,
an old man—a garbage picker—had told him. Yes, he’d said, and he was saying it now, the words on his lips somewhere between the two worlds,
but at least you have garbage.

 

 

 

America found him at the bottom of the path, bundled in the twilight like a heap of rags. She’d walked nearly eight miles already, down out of the canyon to the highway along the ocean where she could catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized, and then back again, and she was like death on two feet. Two dollars and twenty cents down the drain and nothing to show for it. In the morning, at first light, she’d walked along the Coast Highway, and that made her feel good, made her feel like a girl again—the salt smell, people jogging on the beach, the amazing narrow-shouldered houses of the millionaires growing up like mushrooms out of the sand—but the address the Guatemalan woman had given her was worth nothing. All the way there, all,the way out in the alien world, a bad neighborhood, drunks in the street, and the building was boarded up, deserted, no back entrance, no sewing machines, no hard-faced boss to stand over her and watch her sweat at three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, no nothing. She checked the address twice, three times, and then she turned round to retrace her steps and found that the streets had shuffled themselves in the interim, and she knew she was lost.

By lunchtime, she could taste the panic in the back of her throat. For the first time in four months, for the first time since they’d left the South and her village and everything she knew in the world, she was separated from Cándido. She walked in circles .and everything looked strange, even when she’d seen it twice, three times over. She didn’t speak the language. Black people sauntered up the street with plastic grocery bags dangling from their wrists. She stepped in dog excrement. A
gabacho
sat on the sidewalk with his long hair and begged for change and the sight of him struck her with unholy terror: if he had to beg in his own country, what chance was there for her? But she held on to her six little silvery coins and finally a woman with the
chilango
accent of Mexico City helped her find the bus.

She had to walk back up the canyon in the bleak light of the declining day while the cars swished by her in a lethal hissing chain, and in every one a pair of eyes that screamed,
Get out, get out of here and go back where you belong!
—and how long before one of them tore up the dirt in front of her and the police were standing there demanding her papers? She hurried along, head down, shoulders thrust forward, and when the strip of pavement at the side of the road narrowed to six inches she had to climb over the guardrail and plow through the brush.

Sweat stung her eyes. Burrs and thorns and the smooth hard daggers of the foxtails bit into every step. She couldn’t see where she was going. She worried about snakes, spiders, turning her ankle in a ditch. And then the cars began to switch on their lights and she was alone on a terrible howling stage, caught there for everyone to see. Her clothes were soaked through by the time the entrance to the path came into sight, and she ran the last hundred yards, ran for the cover of the brush while the cold beams of light hunted her down, and she had to crouch there in the bushes till her breath came back to her.

The shadows deepened. Birds called to one another. Swish, swish, swish, the cars shot by, no more than ten feet away. Any one of them could stop, any one. She listened to the cars and to the air rasping through her lips, to the hiss of the tires and the metallic whine of the engines straining against the grade. It went on for a long time, forever, and the sky grew darker. Finally, when she was sure no one was following her, she started down the path, letting the trees and the shrubs and the warm breath of the night calm her, hungry now—ravenous—and so thirsty she could drink up the whole streambed, whether Cándido thought the water was safe or not.

At first, the thing in the path wasn’t anything to concern her—a shape, a concert of shades, light and dark—and then it was a rock, a pile of laundry, and finally, a man, her man, sleeping there in the dirt. Her first thought was that he was drunk—he’d got work and he’d been drinking, drinking cold beer and wine while she struggled through the nine circles of Hell—and she felt the rage come up in her. No lunch—she hadn’t had a bite since dawn, and then it was only a burned tortilla and an egg—and nothing to drink even, not so much as a sip of water. What did he think she was? But then she bent and touched him and she knew that she was in the worst trouble of her life.

 

 

 

The fire was a little thing, twigs mostly, a few knots the size of a fist, nothing to attract attention. Candido lay on a blanket in the sand beside it, and the flames were like a magic show, snapping and leaping and throwing the tiniest red rockets into the air round a coil of smoke. He was dreaming still, dreaming with his eyes open, images shuffled like cards in a deck till he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. At the moment he was replaying the past, when he was a boy in Tepoztlán, in the south of Mexico, and his father caught an opossum in among the chickens and he hit it with a stick—
zas!
—just above the eyes. The opossum collapsed like a sack of cloth and it lay there, white in the face and with the naked feet and tail of a giant rat, stunned and twitching. That was how he felt now, just like that opossum. The pressure in his head had spread to his chest, his groin, his limbs—to every last flayed fiber of his body—and he had to close his eyes against the agonizing snap and roar of the fire. They skinned the opossum and they ate it in a stew with hominy and onions. He could taste it even now, even here in the North with his body crushed and bleeding and the fire roaring in his ears—rat, that’s what it tasted like, wet rat.