The Tortilla Curtain (19 page)

At nine-thirty or so the fat man wheeled into the lot in his rich long car. América had been chattering away about Tepoztlán to take Cándido’s mind off the situation—she was remembering an incident from her childhood, a day when a September storm swept over the village and the hail fell like stones amid the standing corn and all the men rushed out into the streets firing their pistols and shotguns at the sky—but she stopped in midsentence when she heard the crunch of’ gravel and looked up into the lean shoulders and predatory snout of the
patrón’s
car. She felt the living weight of the big man’s hand in her lap all over again and something seized up inside her: nothing like that had ever happened to her before, not in her own country, not in Tepoztlán, not even in the dump in Tijuana. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of eight, and her parents had loved her and she’d gone to school all the way through and done everything that was expected of her. There were no strange men, no hands in her lap, there was no living in the woods like a wild animal. But here it was. She rose to her feet.

America crossed the lot in a kind of daze, picturing the bright expanse of that big room with the Buddhas and the windows that laid all the world at her feet, and the money too, twenty-five dollars, twenty-five more than nothing. The window of the car threw her reflection back at her for a moment, then it ceremonially descended to reveal the face of the
patrón.
He didn’t get out of the car, but there he was, expressionless, the beard clipped close round his mouth to frame his colorless lips. Candelario Pérez came up to him, managing to look officious and subservient at the same time—
A sus órdenes,
let me bow and scrape for you—but the big man ignored him. He motioned with his head for America to go round the car and get in the front seat beside him, and then he glanced up at Candelario Pérez and said something in English, a question. Did he want Mary too, was that it? Mary was nowhere in sight. Probably drunk in her little redwood house sitting in front of a refrigerator stocked with hams. America turned to look for Cándido, and he was right there, right in back of her, and they exchanged a look before she dropped her eyes, hurried round the car and got in. The
patrón
gave her the faintest nod of acknowledgment as she shut the door and settled herself as far away from him as possible, and then he turned back to Candelario Pérez, who was touting the virtues of Cándido and the next two men in line—anybody could scrape the crud from a stone Buddha—but the fat man shook his head. He wanted only women.

And then they were out of the lot and wheeling up the canyon road, the trees rushing past them, the car leaning gracefully into the turns, turn after turn after turn, all the way up to the gate and the men working there with their picks and shovels. The radio was silent. The
patrón
said nothing, didn’t even look at her. He seemed pensive—or tired maybe. His lips were pursed, his eyes fixed on the road. And his hands—fleshy and white, swollen up like sponges—stayed where they belonged, on the wheel.

She had the big room to herself. She lifted the Buddhas from the cartons, dipped them in the corrosive, scrubbed them with the brush, affixed the labels and packed them back up again. It wasn’t long before her eyes had begun to water and she found herself dabbing at them with the sleeves of her dress—which was awkward, because they were short sleeves and she had to keep lifting one shoulder or the other to her eyes. And her nose and throat felt strange too—the passages seemed raw and abraded, as if she had a cold. Was the solution stronger than what they’d been using yesterday? Mary, the big gringa, had complained all through the day without remit like some insect in the grass, but América didn’t remember its being as bad as this. Still, she kept at it, the Buddhas floating through a scrim of tears, until her fingers began to bother her. They weren’t stiffening as they had yesterday, not yet, but there was a sharp stinging sensation round the cuticles of her nails, as if she were squeezing lemon into a cut, and she realized with a jolt that the big man had neglected to give her the plastic gloves. She held her hands up to the light then and saw that the skin had begun to crack and peel and that all the color had gone out of the flesh. These weren’t her hands—they were the hands of a corpse.

She was alarmed. If she didn’t have those gloves there would be nothing left of her fingers by the end of the day—only bones, as if in some horrible costume for the Day of the Dead—but she was too timid to go look for them. The
patrón
might be watching even now, watching to see if she was scrubbing hard enough, ready to burst in and abuse her in his harsh superior language, to send her home, fire her, lay his big bloated paw in her lap. Her fingers were burning. Her throat was a cinder. She couldn’t see the Buddhas for the water in her eyes. Finally, she stole a look over her shoulder.

No one was watching her. Both doors that gave onto the room were shut and the house was silent. The near door, the one she’d come in through, led to the garage and the stairway to the second floor, and the other must have been to the bathroom, judging from the amount of time Mary had spent behind it yesterday. For her part, America had been afraid to get up from her seat—who knew when the
patrón
would come to check on them?—and that was a trial, because she felt like she always had to pee lately and she’d had to hold it all day (it was the baby crowding her organs, she knew that, and she wished she could talk to her mother about it, even for a minute). But that was over. That was yesterday. The second she and Cándido got off the road and into the cover at the head of, the trail, she’d squatted in the bushes and the problem was solved. This was different. This was dangerous—and it wasn’t her fault. The
patrón
should have given her the gloves, he should have remembered.

It was eleven-fifteen by the sunburst clock. The mountains pressed at the windows. Her fingertips burned. The statue before her loomed and receded and her head felt light. Finally she got up from the chair and hurried across the room—she had to rinse her hands at least, to take the sting away, no one would deny her that ...

There was a bathroom behind, the door, as she’d surmised, pink and white tile, a little shower stall, fluffy pink mats and wallpaper decorated with dewy-eyed little rabbits, and she couldn’t help admiring it—this was just what she wanted, so pretty and efficient, so clean. She ran the cold water over her hands, and then, not wanting to risk dirtying the plush white towels, she dried them on her dress. That was when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her hair all ragged and wild—she looked like a madwoman, a gypsy, a beggar in the street—but she suppressed the image, eased back the lid of the toilet and sat down quickly, thinking to relieve herself now and get everything over with at once.

Sequestered there in that pink bathroom with the bunnies on the walls and the pristine towels and the lilac soap in a little ceramic dish, she felt at peace for the first time since she’d stepped away from Cándido and slipped into the big man’s car. She studied the architecture of the shower, marveling at all that pretty tile, and thought how nice it would be to have hot water whenever you wanted it, a dab of shampoo, soap, a bristle toothbrush instead of a stalk of dry grass. And then she thought about the fat man, all lathered up with soap, and his pink ridiculous flesh and fat white feet. Maybe he’d go away to China to buy more Buddhas for his store and she could stay here and sleep in the big room at night and use the bathroom ten times a day if she wanted ...

She was thinking about that, daydreaming—just for a second—when a sudden noise from above brought her back to herself. There was a dull thump, as if someone had just pushed a chair back from a table, followed by the sound of footsteps. América jumped up from the toilet, afraid to flush it for fear of giving herself away, and in her extremity forgot what she’d come for. The footsteps were directly overhead now, and for a moment she froze, unable to think, unable to move.
The gloves
, that was it. She tore open the cabinet under the sink, rifled the drawers beside it—one, two, three, four—but there were no gloves and the footsteps seemed to be coming closer, coming down the stairs. She hit the chair on the run and snatched up her brush in a panic.

The footsteps ceased. There was no one on the stairs, no one overhead. The Buddha on the table gave her his look of inscrutable wisdom.

Three Buddhas later, she had to give it up. She couldn’t take it a second longer—no one could. She rinsed her hands again and the relief flooded over her. Then, steeling herself, she went to the door, eased it open and peered up the stairs to where a larger, more formal-looking door gave onto the floor above. She hesitated a moment, gazing into the penumbral depths of the garage. The car was there, the car that cost more than her entire village could make in a year, and there was a refrigerator too, a washer and dryer, all sorts of things. Tennis rackets. Sticks for that game they play on the ice. Birdcages, bicycles, chairs, beds, tables, a pair of sawhorses, cardboard boxes of every shape and size, tools, old clothes and stacks of newspapers, all of it amassed on the garage floor like the treasure of some ancient potentate.

She mounted the stairs on silent feet, her heart pounding. How would she ask for gloves? In pantomime? What if the big man got dirty with her? Wasn’t she asking for it by coming into his house all alone? She hesitated again, on the landing at the top of the stairs, and then she forced herself to knock. Her knock was soft, apologetic, barely a whisper of the knuckles against the wood. No one answered it. She knocked again, a bit more forcefully. Still nothing. She didn’t know what to do—she couldn’t work without those gloves. She’d cripple herself, dissolve the skin from her bones ...

She tried the doorknob.

It was open. “Alo?” she called, her face pressed to the crack of the door.
“¿Alguien está aquí?”
But what was it they said in those old movies on television that used to crack up all the girls in the village?
Yoo-hoo
, wasn’t that it? She gave it a try. “Yoo-hoo!” she called; and it sounded as ridiculous on her lips as on any actress’s.

She waited a moment and tried it again. “Alo? Yoo-hoo?”

There was the sound of movement, heavy footsteps on the floor, and the fat man shuffled into view. He was wearing a pair of wire-rim spectacles that seemed to pinch his face, and house slippers on his feet. He looked puzzled—or irritated. The white lips glared out from the nest of his beard.

“Escuse, pleese,” America said, half-shielded by the door. She was on the landing still, not daring to enter the house. She held up her hands.
“Guantes.
Pleese.
Para las manos.”

The
patrón
had stopped ten paces from the door. He looked bewildered, as if he’d never seen her before. He said something in English, something with the lift of a question to it, but his tone wasn’t friendly, not at all.

She tried again, in dumb show this time, rubbing her hands together and making the motions of pulling on a pair of imaginary gloves.

Then he understood. Or seemed to. He came forward in two propulsive strides, took hold of her right wrist and examined her hand as if it were something he’d found stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Then he dropped it with a curse—flung it way from him—turned his back on her and stalked out of the room.

She stood there waiting, her eyes on the floor. Had he understood? Did he care? Had he gone to get her the gloves or was he ignoring her—after all, what should he care if the flesh rotted off her bones? He’d laid his big presumptuous paw in her lap and she’d shrunk from it—what use did he have for her? She wanted to turn and dash back down the stairs, wanted to hide herself among the Buddhas—or better yet, in the bathroom—but she stood her ground. When it came down to it, she’d rather starve than dip her hands in that solution for even one second more, she would.

But then she heard the heavy footfall again, the vase on the little table by the door trembling with the solidity of it, and the
patrón
came round the corner, moving quickly, top-heavy and tottering on his feet. The little glasses were gone. In his hand, a pair of yellow plastic gloves. He thrust them at her impatiently, said something in his cacophonous blast of a voice—thank you, goodbye, I’m sorry; she couldn’t tell what—and then he slammed the door shut on her.

 

 

 

The day sank into her veins like an elixir and she worked in a delirium of fumes, scrubbing statue after statue, her aching hands sealed away from the corrosive in the slim plastic envelope of the gloves. Her eyes watered, her throat was raw, but she concentrated on her work and the substantiality of the twenty-five dollars the
patrón
would give her, trying not to think about the ride back and what it would be like sitting next to him in the car. She pictured the
cocido
she and Cándido had made from yesterday’s profits, visualizing each chunk of meat, the
chiles,
the beans, the onions—and the
tortillas
and cheese and hard-cooked eggs that went with it—all of it carefully wrapped in the plastic bags from the store and secreted beneath a rock in a cool spot she’d dug out in the wet sand of the streambed. But what if an animal got to it? What did they have here in the North?
El mapache
, the short-nosed cousin of the coatimundi, a furtive, resourceful animal. Still, the stone was heavy and she’d wrapped the food as tightly as she could. No: it was more likely that the ants would discover it—they could get into anything, insidious, like so many moving grains of sand—and she saw a line of them as thick as her wrist pouring in and out of the pot as she scrubbed one of a thousand blackened Buddhas. The vision made her hungry and she removed the gloves a moment to devour the dry crackers and slivers of cheese she’d brought along, and then she dashed across the room to wet her mouth under the faucet and relieve herself, flushing quickly this time and darting back to the table before the roar of the rushing water had subsided.