The Tortilla Curtain (17 page)

Delaney held his breath. The voices had stopped abruptly, replaced by a brooding silence that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity before they started up again, lazy now, contented, the buzz of a pair of flies settling down on the sidewalk. And then, through some auditory quirk of the canyon walls, the voices suddenly crystallized and every word came to him true and distinct. It took him a moment, and then he understood: Spanish, they were talking Spanish.

He was already angry with himself, angry even before he turned away and tried to slink out of the reeds like a voyeur, angry before the choice was made. The hike was over, the day ruined. There was no way he was just going to waltz out of the bushes and surprise these people, whoever they were, and the defile was too narrow to allow him to go round them undetected. He lifted one foot from the mud and then the other, parting the reeds with the delicacy of a man tucking a blanket under the chin of a sleeping child. The sound of the creek, which to this point had been a whisper, rose to a roar, and it seemed as if every bird in the canyon was suddenly screaming. He looked up into the face of a tall raw-boned Latino with eyes like sinkholes and a San Diego Padres cap reversed on his head.

The man was perched on a boulder just behind and above Delaney, no more than twenty feet away, and how he’d got there or whether he’d been there all along, Delaney had no idea. He wore a pair of tight new blue jeans tucked into the tops of his scuffed workboots, and he sat hunched against his knees, prying a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket with exaggerated care. He attempted a smile, spreading his lips in a show of bravado, but Delaney could see that the man was flustered, as confounded by Delaney’s sudden appearance as Delaney was by his. “Hey,
amigo,
how’s it going?” he said in a voice that didn’t seem to fit him, a voice that was almost feminine but for the rasp of it. His English was flat and graceless.

Delaney barely nodded. He didn’t return the smile and he didn’t reply. He would have moved on right then, marching back to his car without a word, but something tugged at his pack and he saw that one of the reeds had caught in his shoulder strap. He bent to release it, his heart pounding, and the man on the rock sprawled out his legs as if he were sinking into a sofa, folded the stick of gum into his mouth and casually flicked the wrapper into the stream. “Hiking, huh?” the man said, and he was smiling still, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Me,” he said, “I’m hiking too. Me and my friend.” He jerked his head to indicate the friend, who appeared behind Delaney now, just beyond the reeds.

The friend regarded Delaney out of an expressionless face. His hair hung in coils to his shoulders and a thin wisp of beard trailed away from the base of his chin. He was wearing some sort of poncho or
serape,
jagged diamonds of color that leapt out against the quiet greens of the streambed. He had nothing to add to the first man’s description. They were hiking, and that was it.

Delaney looked from the first man to his companion and back again. He wasn’t alarmed, not exactly—he was too angry for that. All he could think of was the sheriff and getting these people and their garbage heap out of here, of hustling them right back to wherever they’d come from, slums,
favelas, barrios,
whatever they called them. They didn’t belong here, that was for sure. He jerked the reed out of the ground and flung it away from him, adjusted his pack and began picking his way back down the streambed.

“Hey,
amigo”
—the man’s voice came at him in a wild high whinny—“you have a nice day, huh?”

 

 

 

The walk to the road was nothing—it barely stretched his muscles. The anticipation had gone sour in his throat, and it rankled him—it wasn’t even noon yet and the day was shot. He cursed as he passed by the sleeping bags again, and then he took the bank in five strides and he was out in the glare of the canyon road. He had a sudden impulse to continue on down the stream, under the bridge and around the bend, but dismissed it: this was where the creek fanned out into its floodplain before running into the ocean, and any idiot who could park a car and clamber down a three-foot embankment could roam it at will, as the successive layers of garbage spread out over the rocks gave testimony. There was no adventure here, no privacy, no experience of nature. It would be about as exciting as pulling into the McDonald’s lot and counting the starlings.

He turned and walked back up the road, past the line of cars restrained by a man in a yellow hard hat with a portable sign that read STOP on one side and SLOW on the reverse. The trucks and bulldozers were quiet now—it was lunchtime, the workers sprawled in the shade of the big rippled tires with their sandwiches and
burritos,
the dust settling, birds bickering in the scrub, chamise and toyon blooming gracefully alongside the road with no help from anyone. Delaney felt the sun on his face, stepped over the ridges of detritus pushed into the shoulder by the blades of the earthmovers and let the long muscles of his legs work against the slope of the road. In one of his first “Pilgrim” columns he’d observed that the bulldozer served the same function here as the snowplow back East, though it was dirt rather than snow that had to be cleared from the streets. The canyon road had become a virtual streambed during the rainy season and Caltrans had been hard-pressed to keep it open, and now, in early summer, with no rain in sight for the next five months, they were just getting round to clearing out the residual rubble.

That was fine with Delaney, though he wished they’d chosen another day for it. Who wanted to hear the roar of engines and breathe diesel fuel down here—and on a day like this? He was actually muttering to himself as he passed the last of the big machines, his mood growing progressively blacker, and yet all the defeats and frustrations of the morning were nothing compared to what awaited him. For it was at that moment, just as he cleared the last of the Caltrans vehicles and cast a quick glance up the road, that he felt himself go numb: the car was gone.

Gone. Vanished.

But no, that wasn’t where he’d parked it, against the guardrail there, was it? It must be around the next bend, sure it was, and he was moving more quickly now, almost jogging, the line of cars across the road from him creeping down toward the bridge and a second man in hard hat and bright orange vest flagging his SLOW sign. Every eye was on Delaney. He was the amusement, the sideshow, stiff-legging it up the road with the sweat stinging his eyes and slicking the frames of his glasses. And then he made the bend and saw the tight shoulderless curve beyond it and all the naked space of the canyon spread out to the horizon, and knew he was in trouble.

Dumbstruck, he swung reluctantly round on his heels and waded back down the road like a zombie, tramping back and forth over the spot where he’d parked the car and finally even going down on one knee in the dirt to trace the tire tracks with his unbelieving fingertips. His car was gone, all right. It was incontrovertible. He’d parked here half an hour ago, right on this spot, and now there was nothing here, no steel, no chrome, no radial tires or personalized license plates. No registration. No
Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.

The first thing that came into his head was the police. They’d towed it. Of course. That was it. There was probably some obscure regulation about parking within two hundred feet of a road crew or something—or they’d posted a sign he’d missed. He rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the faces in the cars across from him, and approached a group of men lounging in the shade of the nearest bulldozer. “Did anybody see what happened to my car?” he asked, conscious of the barely restrained note of hysteria in his voice. “Did they tow it or what?”

They looked up at him blankly. Six Hispanic men, in khaki shirts and baseball caps, arrested in the act of eating, sandwiches poised at their lips, thermoses tipped, the cans of soft drink sweating between their fingers. No one said a word.

“I parked right there.” Delaney was pointing now and the six heads dutifully swiveled to regard the vacant shoulder and the scalloped rim of the guardrail set against the treetops and the greater vacancy of the canyon beyond it. “A half hour ago? It was an Acura—white, with aluminum wheels?”

The men seemed to stir. They looked uneasily from one to the other. Finally, the man on the end, who seemed by virtue of his white mustache to be the senior member of the group, set his sandwich carefully down on a scrap of waxed paper and rose to his feet. He regarded Delaney for a moment out of a pair of inexpressibly sad eyes. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later Delaney was having his hike after all, though it wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned. After questioning the boss of the road crew—
We haven’t towed nothin’ here, not to my knowledge
—he started back up the canyon road on foot. It was three miles or so to the near grocery and the telephones out front, but it was all uphill and the road wasn’t designed for pedestrians. Horns blared, tires screeched, some jerk threw a beer can at him. For fear of his life he had to hop the guardrail and plow through the brush, but it was slow going and the burrs and seedheads caught in his socks and tore at his naked legs, and all the while his head was pounding and his throat gone dry over the essential question of the day: what had happened to the car?

He called the police from the pay phone and they gave him the number of the towing service and he called the towing service and they told him they didn’t have his car—and no, there was no mistake: they didn’t have it. Then he called Kyra. He got her secretary and had to sit on the curb in front of the pay phone in a litter of Doritos bags and candy wrappers for ten agonizing minutes till she rang him back. “Hello?” she demanded. “Delaney?”

He was bewildered, immobilized. People pulled into the lot and climbed casually out of their cars. Doors slammed. Engines revved. “Yes, it’s me.”

“What is it? What’s the matter? Where are you?” She was wound tight already.

“I’m at Li’s Market.”

He could hear her breathing into the receiver, and he counted the beats it took her to absorb this information, puzzle over its significance and throw it back at him. “Listen, Delaney, I’m in the middle of—”

“They stole my car.”

“What? What are you talking about? Who stole it?”

He tried to dredge up all he’d heard and read about car thieves, about chop shops, counterfeit serial numbers and theft to order, and he tried to picture the perpetrators out there in broad daylight with hundreds of people driving obliviously by, but all he could see was the bruised face and blunted eyes of his Mexican, the wheel clutched between his hands and the bumper gobbling up the fragments of the broken yellow line as if the whole thing were one of those pulse-thumping games in the arcade. “You better call Jack,” he said.

IT WAS LIKE BEING HAUNTED BY DEVILS, RED-HAIRED devils and
rubios
in eighty-dollar running shoes and sunglasses that cost more than a laboring man could make in a week. What had he done to deserve such a fate? Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball, first the big jerk with the Elvis hair and then the
pelirrojo
who’d run him down in the road, the very one, and his gangling tall awkward
pendejo
of a son who’d hiked all the way down into the canyon to violate a poor man’s few pitiful possessions. It was too much. He needed to go to confession, do penance, shrive himself somehow. Even Job would have broken down under an assault like this.

For the next hour he hid himself in a clump of shrubbery at the far end of the parking lot, watching the door of the
supermercado
for América. This was where she’d look for him—it was the only place she knew besides the Chinese store, and she must have known he wouldn’t hang around there any longer than he had to. So he waited in the bushes, out of sight, and though his concealment made him feel better—at least now no one was going to push him around—he was still in a fever of worry. What if he’d missed her and she was down below in the canyon, staring numbly at the bleak pile of rocks where their camp used to be? What if the
patrón
of the job he hoped she’d gotten forced her to do something with him? What if she was lost, hurt or worse?

The traffic was thinning on the road now and fewer cars were pulling in and out of the lot. His tormentors—the
gabachos
young and old—had shoved into their cars and driven off without so much as a backward glance for him. He was about to give it up and cross the road to the labor exchange and look hopelessly round the empty lot there and then maybe head back down the road to where the path cut into the brush and shout out her name for every living thing in the canyon to hear, when a Mercedes sedan pulled up in front of the grocery and America stepped out of it.

He watched her slim legs emerge first, then her bare arms and empty hands, the pale flowered dress, the screen of her hair, and he was elated and devastated at the same time: she’d got work, but he hadn’t. They would have money to eat, but he hadn’t earned it. No: a seventeen-year-old village girl had earned it, and at what price? And what did that make him? He crouched there in the bushes and tried to read her face, but it was locked up like a strongbox, and the man with her, the
rico,
was like some exotic animal dimly viewed through the dark integument of the windshield. She slammed the door, looked about her indecisively for a moment as the car wheeled away in a little blossom of exhaust, and then she squared her shoulders, crossed the lot and disappeared into the market.

Cándido brushed down his clothes, made good and certain that no one was looking his way, and ambled out of the bushes as if he’d just come back from a stroll around the block. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with the
gringos
he passed as he crossed the lot and ducked into the grocery. After a week and a half of living on so little that his stomach had shrunk and his pants were down around his hips, the effect of all that abundance was devastating. There was no smell of food here, no hint of the rich stew of odors you’d find in a Mexican market—these people sanitized their groceries just as they sanitized their kitchens and toilets and drove the life from everything, imprisoning their produce in jars and cans and plastic pouches, wrapping their meat and even their fish in cellophane—and yet still the sight and proximity of all those comestibles made his knees go weak again.