The Tortilla Curtain (20 page)

She worked hard, worked without stint for the rest of the day, fighting back tears and lightheadedness to prove her worth, to show the
patrón
that all by herself she could transform as many Buddhas as both she and Mary had been able to the day before. He would notice and he would thank her and ask her back the next day and the next, and he would know that she was worth more than the kind of girl who would have lifted his hand from her lap and pressed it to her breasts. But when he finally reappeared—at six by the sunburst clock on the wall—he didn’t seem to notice. He just nodded his head impatiently and turned to trundle heavily to the car while the garage door rose beyond him as if by levitation.

He didn’t put his hand in her lap. He didn’t turn on the radio. When they swung into the lot at the market, he pulled out his wallet, shifting his weight with a grunt, extracted a twenty and a five and turned his blue-eyed gaze to the horizon as she fumbled with the door handle and let herself out. The door slammed, the engine gave a growl, and he was gone.

She didn’t see Cándido anywhere. The parking lot was full of white people hurrying in and out of the market with brown plastic bags tucked under their arms, and the labor exchange across the street was deserted. She felt a sharp letdown—this was where they’d agreed to meet—and for a long moment she just stood there in the middle of the lot, looking round her numbly. And then it occurred to her that Cándido must have gotten work. Of course. Where else would he be? A feeling like joy took hold of her, but it wasn’t joy exactly or joy without limit—she wouldn’t feel that until she had a roof over her head. But if Cándido had work they’d have enough money to eat for a week, two weeks maybe, and if they could both find a job—even every second day—they could start saving for an apartment.

For now, though, there was nothing to do but wait. She crossed the lot, clutching the bills in her hand, and found an inconspicuous perch on a tree stump at the corner of the building. From here she could watch the lot for Cándido and stay out of the way—all those
gringos
made her nervous. Every time a car swung into the lot she felt her heart seize. She couldn’t help thinking of
La Migra
and those tense silent men in the tan uniforms who’d ministered over the worst night of her life, the night she’d been stripped naked in front of all those people, though Cándido assured her they wouldn’t find her here. The chances were small. Minuscule. But she didn’t like chances, any chances, and she shrank into the vegetation and waited.

An hour went by. She was bored, scared, beginning to imagine all sorts of calamities: Cándido had been picked up by the police, he’d gone back to the canyon and stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes, another car had hit him and he lay bleeding in the bushes. From there her mind took her to their camp—maybe he was down there now, starting the fire, warming the stew—and then to the stew itself, and her stomach turned inside out and gnawed at her. She was hungry. Ravenous. And though the store intimidated her, the hunger drove her through the doors with her money and she bought another tin of sardines and a loaf of the sweet white bread that was puffed up like edible clouds and a Twix bar for Cándido. She was afraid someone would speak to her, ask a question, challenge her, but the girl at the checkout stand stared right through her and the price—$2.73—showed in red above the cash register; sparing her the complication of having to interpret the unfathomable numbers as they dropped from the girl’s lips. Outside, back on her stump, she folded the sardines into slices of bread and before she knew it she’d eaten the whole tin. Her poor bleached fingers were stained yellow with the evidence.

And then the sun fell behind the ridge and the shadows deepened. Where was Cándido? She didn’t know. But she couldn’t stay here all night. She began to think about their camp again, the lean-to, the stewpot, the blanket stretched out in the sand, the way the night seemed to settle in by degrees down there, wrapping itself round her till she felt safe, hidden, protected from all the prying eyes and sharp edges of the world. That was where she wanted to be. She was tired, enervated, giddy from breathing fumes all day. She rose to her feet, took a final glance around and started off down the road with her bread, the Twix bar and her twenty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents all wrapped up in the brown plastic bag dangling from her wrist.

At this hour, the traffic had slowed considerably. The frenetic stream of cars had been reduced to the odd vehicle here and there, a rush of air, a hiss of tires, and then the silence of the canyon taking hold of the night, birds singing, the fragment of a moon glowing white in a cobalt sky. She looked carefully before crossing, thinking of Cándido, and kept to the edge of the shoulder, her head down, walking as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself. By the time she reached the entrance of the path she was breathing hard, anxious to get off the road and hide herself, but she continued past it, slowing her pace to a nonchalant stroll: a car was coming. She kept her head down, her footsteps dragging, and let it pass. As soon as it had disappeared round the bend by the lumberyard, she retraced her steps, but then another car swung round the curve coming toward her and she had to walk past the trailhead again. Finally there was a respite—no one coming either way—and she ducked into the bushes.

The first thing she did was relieve herself, just like last night. She lifted her dress, squatted over her heels and listened to the fierce impatient hiss of the urine as the light settled toward dusk and the smell of the earth rose to her nostrils. A moment ago she’d been out there on the road, exposed and vulnerable—frightened, always frightened—and now she was safe. But the thought of that frightened her too: what kind of life was it when you felt safe in the bushes, crouching to piss in the dirt like a dog? Was that what she’d left Tepoztlan for?

But that was no way to think. She was tired, that was all. Her shoulders ached and her fingers burned where the skin was peeling back from her nails. And she was hungry, always hungry. If she’d stayed in Tepoztlán through all the gray days of her life she would have had enough to eat, as long as her father was alive and she jumped like a slave every time he snapped his fingers, but she would never have had anything more, not even a husband, because all the men in the village, all the decent ones, went North nine months a year. Or ten months. Or permanently. To succeed, to make the leap, you had to suffer. And her suffering was nothing compared to the tribulations of the saints or the people living in the streets of Mexico City and Tijuana, crippled and abandoned by God and man alike. So what if she had to live in a hut in the woods? It wouldn’t be for long. She had Cándido and she’d earned her first money and now Cándido was able to work again and the nightmare of the past weeks was over. They’d have a place by the time the rains came in the fall, he’d promised her, and then they’d look back on all this as an adventure, a funny story, something to tell their grandchildren.
Cándido
, she would say,
do you remember the time the car hit you, the time we camped out like Indians and cooked over the open fire, remember?
Maybe they’d have a picnic here someday, with their son and maybe a daughter too.

She was holding that picture in her head, the picnic basket, one of those portable radios playing, a little boy in short pants and a girl with ribbons in her hair, as she worked her way down the trail with her brown plastic bag. Pebbles jumped away from her feet and trickled down the path ahead of her like water down a streambed. There was a clean sharp smell of sage and mesquite and some pale indefinable essence that might have been agave. There were certainly enough agave plants scattered across the slopes, their huge flowering stalks like spears thrown from the sky. Did they have a scent? she wondered. They had to, didn’t they, to attract the bees and hummingbirds? She’d have to get up close and smell one sometime.

She had almost reached the place where the big rounded spike of rock stuck out of the ground when a sudden noise in the undergrowth startled her. Her eyes darted to the path in front of her and she caught her breath. She had a fear of snakes, especially when the light began to fail and they came out to prowl, their coarse thick evil-eyed bodies laid alongside the trail like sticks of wood, like shadows. But this was no snake, and she had to laugh at herself even as the first of the quail, slate heads bobbing, scuttered across the path with a rasp of dead leaves. Cándido was forever trying to snare the little birds but they were too quick, folding themselves into the brush or crying out like scared children as they spread their wings and shot up over the bushes and down the canyon to safety. She stopped a moment to let them pass, the chicks at their heels, and then she stepped into the deep purple shadow cast by the rock.

He was waiting there for her, with his hoarse high voice and his skin that was like too much milk in a pan of coffee, with his hat turned backwards on his head like a
gringo
and the raw meat of his eyes. There was another man with him, an Indian, burnt like a piece of toast. They were sitting there, perched on blunt stools of sandstone, long silver cans of beer dangling from their fingertips. “Well, well,” he said, and his face was expressionless in the smothered light,
“buenas noches
,
señorita?
—or should I say
señora?
Yes? Right?” And he threw it back at her: “Married woman.”

There was no time for revision, no time for remonstrance or plea. She turned and ran, uphill, toward the road she’d just escaped—they wouldn’t touch her there, they couldn’t. She was young and in good shape from climbing up and down out of the canyon twice a day for the last six weeks and she was fast too, the blood singing in her ears, but they were right there, right behind her, and they were grown healthy men with long leaping houndlike strides and the sinews gone tight in their throats with the pulse of the chase. They caught up with her before she’d gone a hundred feet, the tall one, the one from the South, slamming into her like some irresistible force, like the car that had slammed into Cándido.

A bush raked her face, something jerked the bag from her wrist, and they fell together in the dust that was exactly like flour spread over the trail by some mad baker. He was on top of her, sitting on her buttocks, his iron hand forcing her face into the floury dust. She cried out, tried to lift her head, but he slammed his fist into the back of her neck once, twice, three times, cursing to underscore each blow. “Shut up,” he snarled. “Shut the fuck up.”

The other one stood behind him, waiting. She could hear the rasp of their breathing, anything possible now, and she recoiled from the stinking graveyard breath of the one atop her. He hit her again, suddenly, once at the base of the skull and then in the small of the back. Then he eased up from her, leaning all his weight on the hand that pinned her face to the ground, and with the other hand he took hold of the collar of her dress, her only dress, and tore it down the length of her till the cool evening air pricked at her naked skin. In a frenzy, in a rage, the curses foaming on his lips, he shredded her panties and rammed his fingers into her.

It was as if a tree had fallen on her, as if she were the victim of some random accident, powerless, unable to move. She breathed the dust. Her neck hurt. His fingers moved inside her, in her private places, and it was like he was squirting acid into her. She squirmed in the dirt and he shoved back at her, hard and unrelenting. Then he lifted his hand from the back of her neck, breathing spasmodically, and she could hear him fumbling in his pocket for something and her heart froze—he was going to murder her, rape and murder her, and what had she done? But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all—it was something in a wrapper, silver foil, the rustle of silver foil. Was it one of those things, one of those—no, a stick of gum. There, in the quickening night, with his dirty fingers inside her as if they belonged there and the Indian waiting his turn, he stopped to put a stick of gum in his mouth and casually drop the wrapper on the exposed skin of her back, no more concerned than if he were sitting on a stool in a bar.

She clenched her eyes shut, gritted her teeth. His hand went away and she could feel him shift his weight as he balanced himself to work down his pants. She stiffened against the pounding of her blood and the moment hung there forever, like the eternal torment of the damned. And then, finally, his voice came at her, probing like a knife. “Married woman,” he whispered, leaning close. “You better call your husband.”

“HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” KENNY CRISSOM ASSURED him, and from the undisguised joy in his voice you would have thought he’d stolen the car himself to drum up business. This was the moment he lived for, his moment of grace and illumination: Delaney was without a car and he had a lot full of them. “You’d be surprised,” he added. “But look what it says about your car and its desirability—it’s a class car all the way; people want it. No offense, but probably some judge or police chief down in Baja is driving it right now. They contract out. They do. Señor So-and-So says get me a Mercedes or a jag or an Acura Vigor GS, white with tan interior, all the options, and the dude down there calls his buddies in Canoga Park and they cruise the streets till they find one. Three hours later it’s in Mexico.” He paused to shift his shoulders, tug at his tie. “Happens all the time.”

Small comfort to Delaney. It happened all the time, but why did it have to happen to. him? “I still can’t understand it,” he muttered, signing the papers as Kenny Grissom handed them across the desk. “It was broad daylight, hundreds of people going by—and what about the alarm?”

The salesman blew a quick sharp puff of air between his teeth. “That’s for amateurs, joyriders, kids. The people that got your car are pros. You know that tool the cops have for when somebody locks their keys in the car, flat piece of metal about this long? They call it a Slim Jim?” He held his index fingers apart to demonstrate. “Well, they slip that down inside the glass and flip the lock, then they ease open the door so it doesn’t trip the alarm, pop the hood, flip the cable off the battery to disarm the thing, hot-wire the ignition, and bye-bye. A pro can do it in sixty seconds.”