The Tortilla Curtain (12 page)

THE BEANS WERE GONE, THE
TORTILLAS,
THE LARD, the last few grains of rice. And what were they going to eat—grass? Like the cows? That was the question she put to Cándido when he tried to prevent her from going up the hill to the labor exchange for the fifth weary day in a row, and so what if it had a sting in it? What right did he have to tell her where she could go and what she could do? He wasn’t helping any. He could barely get up and take a pee on his own—and what of the
gabacho
boys who’d ripped up her dress and flung their blanket into the creek, where was he then? She threw it all at him, angry, hurt, terrified; and then he rose up off the blanket and slapped her. Hard. Slapped her in the pale rocky dawn of the ravine till her head snapped back on her neck like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle. “Don’t you tell me,” he growled through his teeth. “It’s an insult. A kick in the ass when I’m down.” He spat at her feet. “You’re no better than your sister, no better than a whore.”

But you couldn’t eat grass, and for all his bluster, he must have realized that. He was healing, but he was still in no shape to climb up out of the canyon and throw himself back into
la lucha,
the struggle to find a job, to be the one man picked out of a crowd, and then to work like ten men to show the
patrón
you wanted to come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. She understood his frustration, his fear, and she loved him, she did, to the bottom of her heart. But it hurt to be the target of those hard and filthy words, hurt more than the blow itself. And when it was all over, when the birds had started in again and the stream made its noise against the rocks and the cars clawed at the road above, what had been accomplished? Bitterness, that was all. She turned her back on him and made her way up that crucible of a hill for the fifth useless time in as many useless days.

Somebody handed her a cup of coffee. A man she’d seen the last two mornings, a newcomer—he said he was from the South, that was all. He was tall—nearly six feet, she guessed—and he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head like one of the
gringos
in the supermarket. His skin was light, so light he could almost have passed for one of them, but it was his eyes that gave him away, hard burnished unblinking eyes the color of calf’s liver. He’d been damaged somehow, she could see that, damaged in the way of a man who has to scrape and grovel and kiss the hind end of some irrecusable yankee boss, and his eyes showed it, jabbing out at the world like two weapons. He was Mexican, all right.

She had to turn away from those eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t have accepted the coffee—steaming, with milk and so much sugar it was like a confection, in a styrofoam cup with a little plastic lid to keep the heat in—but she couldn’t help herself. There was nothing in her stomach, nothing at all, and she was faint with the need of it. She was in her fourth month now, and the sickness was gone, but she was ravenous, mad with hunger, eating for two when there wasn’t enough for one. She dreamed of food, of the
romeritos
stew her mother made on Holy Thursday,
tortillas
baked with chopped tomatoes,
chiles
and grated cheese, chicken heads fried in oil, shrimp and oysters and a
mole
sauce so rich and piquant with
serranos
it made the juices come to her mouth just to think about it. She stood there in the warm flowing flower-scented dawn and sipped the coffee, and it only made her hungrier.

By seven, three pickup trucks had already swung into the lot, Candelario Pérez had separated out three, four and three men again, and they were gone. The stranger from the South was not chosen, and there were still ten men who’d arrived before him. Out of the corner of her eye, America watched him contend with Candelario Pérez—she couldn’t hear the words, but the man’s violent gestures and the contortions of his scowling pale half-a-
gringo’
s face were enough to let her know that he wasn’t happy waiting his turn, that he was a grumbler, a complainer, a sorehead. “Son of a bitch,” she heard him say, and she averted her eyes.
Please,
she was praying,
don’t let him come over to me.

But he did come over. He’d given her a cup of coffee—she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop—and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some
gringo
or
gringa
pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he’d been poked in the throat, “—enjoy the coffee?”

She wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t speak.

“I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, ‘There’s a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,’ and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh,
linda?”
And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.

Miserable, guilty—she’d taken the coffee, hadn’t she?—she didn’t resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again—there was something rotting inside of him.
“Me llamo José,”
he said, holding out a hand to shake,
“José Navidad. ¿Y tú
? ¿
Cómo te llamas, pretty?”

This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.

“Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don’t bite. I’m a friendly guy—don’t you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don’t you?”

“All right,” she said, and she felt the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I’m a married woman and it’s not right to talk to me like that—”

He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy,
loco,
demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle—just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”

Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man—a giant of a fat man, a real
guatón—
stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then—miracle of miracles!—Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even—she had a job and they didn’t. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded
guatón
of a white man with no consciousness of how she’d gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.

“Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman’s voice, in English.

America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.

The fat man, the
gringo,
called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn’t understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the
gringa
had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn’t speak any English—what do you want with her?”

“Quiero trabajar,”
América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”

Candelario Pérez said something to the man—América was there before the
gringa,
first come, first served—and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment—too long—and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something—she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared—and Candelario Pérez told her, “It’s all right, six hours’ work and he’ll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary—big Mary, the drunk, the
gringa
maid who’d tried to cut her out—got in too.

 

 

 

Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the
Laboratorio Medico
in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm’s way. Those boys—those teenage
gabachos—
had terrified him. They weren’t
La Migra,
no, and they weren’t the police, but the way they’d attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who’d raised them must have been even worse—and what would have happened if they’d come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?

He’d fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he’d lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América’s dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren’t his wife at all, just somebody he’d met in the street.

All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He’d gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end—a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter’s floods crammed into every crevice.

Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand—if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his
huaraches
—they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut—and feel his way barefoot. It wasn’t a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there—snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.

When he waded back in, clinging to the Tough canyon wall for support, the
huaraches
were strung around his neck and the rucksack propped up on the crown of his head. The water reached his knees, his crotch, his waist, and finally it came right up to his armpits, which meant that America would have to swim. He thought of that as his toes felt their way through the muck, of America swimming, the hair spread wet on her shoulders, her dress balled up in one slim pretty hand and held high above her, and he began to feel horny, a sure sign that he was healing.

He found what he was looking for at the rear of the pool, just behind the wreckage of the car. There was a spit of sand there, a private beach just wide enough for a blanket and some sort of shelter—a lean-to, maybe—and then the canyon closed up like a fist. A sheer wall of stone, thirty feet or more in height, rose up out of a shallow pool to a cleft from which the stream splayed out into the air in a perpetual shower. The light was soft, filtered through the vegetation above, and what Cándido saw wasn’t stone and leaf and grain of sand, but a sitting room with a big shaded lamp dangling from the ceiling, with sofas and chairs and a polished wooden floor that gleamed beneath a burden of wax. It was a revelation. A vision. The sort of thing that might have inspired a pilgrim to build a shrine.

Cándido set down his rucksack and rested in the warm sand till his clothes dried to a uniform dampness. Then he got up and began constructing a rude hearth, one rock at a time, one beside the other, and in his excitement, in the heat of the moment, he forgot his pain. When it was done, when the circle was complete and the battered refrigerator grill laid neatly atop it, he found he still had the strength to gather firewood—anything to keep moving—and he began to think about what America might bring home with her. If she’d found work, that is. And of course he’d have to wait at the old spot for her and they’d have to wade across with the groceries ... but maybe she’d have some
tortillas
or a piece of meat and something to cook down into a stew, some vegetables and rice or a couple of potatoes...