The Tortilla Curtain (38 page)

That was all Kyra needed to hear. “Load up the cars!” she cried, and though she was still standing in place her movements were frantic, as if she were a conductor urging the full orchestra to a crescendo. “I want the photo albums, if nothing else—and Jordan, you pack clothes, hear me, clothes first, and then you can take video games.”

“All right,” Delaney heard himself say, and his voice was a desperate gulp for air, “and what should I take? The electronics, I guess. The computer. My books.”

Kit sank heavily into the armchair, her gaze fixed on the TV and the glorious billowing orange-red seduction of the flames. She glanced up at Delaney, at Kyra, at the grim uncomprehending face of the maid. She was dressed in a champagne suit with a frilly mauve blouse and matching heels, her hair perfectly coiffed, makeup flawless. “Is it really that serious?”

No one had moved. Not yet, not yet. They all turned back to the TV, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that they’d been watching old footage, color-enhanced pictures of the Dresden bombing, anything but the real and actual. But there it was, the fire, in living color, and there the familiar studio set and the anchorpersons so familiar they might have been family. The anchorpersons were clucking and grieving and admonishing, straining their prototypic features to hear the dramatic eyewitness testimony of a reporter standing on the canyon road with his windblown hair and handheld mike: oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, this was the real thing, oh, yes, indeed.

Kyra looked as if she were about to lift off and shoot through the ceiling. Orbalina, whose English was limited to a response to the six or seven most common scullery commands, stared at the screen in disbelief, no doubt thinking about her apartment in Pacoima and how she was going to get there if the buses weren’t running—and this meant the buses wouldn’t be running, didn’t it? Jordan clung to his mother’s leg. He was staring fascinated at the televised flames, his mother’s admonition to pack already forgotten. And Kit, though she sank ever more deeply into the folds of the chair, still didn’t seem to understand. “But they haven’t told us to evacuate,” she protested weakly. “I mean, no one said a word about the upper canyon. Did they?”

“We better shut off the turkey,” Delaney said, and that seemed to lift the spell. “Just in case.”

2

SO SHE SAT THERE, AS MISERABLE AS SHE’D EVER been in her life, and closed her mind down till the world went from a movie screen to a peephole, and still she wanted to close the peephole too. She was going mad, dancing round the edges of the abyss, and she didn’t care. The baby grew and it pressed on her organs and made her skin flush with a stipple of red like a rash. Cándido gave her food and she ate it. But she wouldn’t sleep with him. Wouldn’t talk to him. It was all his fault, everything, from the stale air in the bus on the ride from Cuernavaca to Tijuana and the smell of the dump to this place, this vacancy of leaves and insects and hot naked air where men did dirty things to her and made her pee burn like fire. She looked through her peephole at the gray leaves of the gray trees and thought of Soledad Ordóñez, the stooped old shapeless woman from the San Miguel barrio who didn’t speak to her husband for twenty-two years because he sold their pig in San Andrés and was drunk for a week on the proceeds. He was dying, stretched out on his deathbed with the priest and their three sons and four daughters there and all their seventeen grandchildren and his brother too, and he could barely croak out the words, “Soledad, talk to me,” and her face was stone and the priest and the brother and all the grandchildren held their breath, and she said one word, “Drunkard,” and he died.

America missed her mother with a pain of longing so intense it was as if some part of her body had been removed. She missed her sisters and her bed in the comer of the back room with the posters of rock stars and las reinas del cine above it and Gloria Iglesias and Remedios Esparza and the other girls she used to go around with. She missed human voices, laughter, the smells of the street and marketplace, the radio, TV, dances and shops and restaurants. And who had deprived her of all this? Cándido. And she hated him for it. She couldn’t help herself.

But then one day, lying there by the desolate stream like some dead thing, America heard a bird calling, three high-pitched notes and then a quavering sustained low-throated whistle that broke her heart with the sadness of it, over and over, that sad beautiful bird calling for her mate, her love, her husband, and América felt the sun touch her face like the hand of God, and the peephole snapped open like the shutter of a camera. It wasn’t much, just a fraction, the tiniest opening, but from that day on she began to recover. Her baby was coming. Cándido loved her. She made coffee the next morning, cooked him a meal. When he was gone she dug out the peanut butter jar and counted the limp gray bills there, the silver hoard of change, and she thought: Soon, soon. She wouldn’t talk to him yet. She wouldn’t smile at him. She hurt with a disappointment so yawning and wide she couldn’t help spilling him into it, holding his head down in the black bitter waters, and that was true and unchanging and ongoing, but each day now the gulf inside her began to close even as the peephole widened.

And now, today, when he came back with the turkey that had dropped down out of heaven, the
Tenksgeevee
turkey, she couldn’t make him suffer anymore. She was no Señora Ordóñez, she couldn’t live a life of accusation and hatred, serving the coffee in a funereal dress, throwing down the plate of eggs and beans as if it were a weapon, always biting her lip and cursing in her head. She laughed to see him there, wet to the waist, the clink of the beer bottles, the big naked bird and gobble, gobble, gobble. He clowned for her, danced round the sandspit with the bird atop his head, doing a silly jogging
brinco
step like a man strapped to a jackhammer. The leaves were green again, the sky blue. She got up and held him.

And the fire, when it leapt to the trees like the coming of the Apocalypse, didn’t affect her, not at first, not for a minute anyway. She was so intent on driving the sharp green stake of oak through the frozen carcass of the bird, so fixated on the image of crackling brown skin and rice with drippings, so happy to be alive again, that the roar didn’t register. Not until she looked, up and saw Cándido’s face and every living leaf and branch and bole wrapped in a vesture of flame. That was half a second before the panic set in, half a second before the numbing crazy bone-bruising flight up the hill, but half a second in which she wished with all her heart that she’d been strong enough to let the peephole close down forever.

 

 

 

For Cándido, it was a moment of pure gut-clenching terror, the moment of the fatal mistake and the reaping of the consequences. What would he liken it to? Nothing, nothing he’d ever seen, except maybe the time in Arizona when the man they called Sleepy burned to death under the tractor when his cigarette ignited a spill of gasoline from the tank. Cándido had been up his ladder in a lemon tree, picking, and he heard the muted cry, saw the flames leap up and then the bright exploding ball of them. But now he was on the ground and the flames were in the trees, swooping through the canyon with a mechanical roar that stopped his heart.

There was no heat like this, no furnace, no bomb, no reactor. Every visible thing danced in the flames. America was going to die. He was going to die. Not in a rocking chair on the porch of his little house surrounded by his grandchildren, but here and now, in the pit of this unforgiving canyon. Ahead of them, down the only trail he knew, the flames rose up in a forty-foot curtain; behind them was the sheer rock wall of their cul-de-sac. He was no mountain goat and America was so big around she could barely waddle, but what did it matter? He sprang at her, jerked her up from the sand and the white frozen carcass of the bird—and it would cook now, all right—and pulled her across the spit to the rock wall and the trickle of mist that fell intermittently from above. “Climb!” he screamed, shoving her up ahead of him, pushing at her bottom and the big swollen ball of her belly, fighting for finger- and toeholds, and they were climbing, both of them, scaling the sheer face of the rock as if it were a jungle gym.

The heat seared his skin through the fabric of his shirt, stung the exposed flesh of his hands and face. There was no air, not a breath, all the oxygen sucked up to feed the inferno, and with each step the rock went rotten beneath their feet. He didn’t think they were going to make it, but then he gave America a final frantic shove and they were over the top and sitting in a puddle of water in a place that was as new to him as the back side of the moon, though he’d lived within spitting distance of it all these months. There were no pools here, no rills or falls—there was hardly any water at all. A staggered run of puddles retreated to the next tumble of rock, and beyond that it was more of the same, the canyon a trap, its walls a hundred feet high, unbroken, impregnable. The wind screamed. It screamed for blood, for sacrifice, for
Tenksgeevee,
and the flames answered it, leaping behind them to the height of the ledge with a roar like a thousand jets taking off at once. And then Cándido and América were running up the streambed, stumbling over rocks, splashing through the muck and tearing the flesh of their arms and hands and feet on the talons of the scrub till they reached the next obstruction and went up and over it, and still they kept going.

“Don’t stop! No!” Cándido cried, slapping furiously at América every time she faltered. “Keep going! Run,
mujer,
run!” The wind could change direction at any moment, at whim, and if it did they were dead, though he knew they should have been dead already, cremated along with the turkey. He urged her on. Shoved and shouted and half-carried her. The canyon was a funnel, a conduit, the throat of an inconceivable flamethrower, and they had to get up and out of it, up to the road and across the blacktop and on up through the chaparral to the high barren rock of the highest peak. That was all he could think of, up, up and up, that naked rock, high above it all, and there was nothing to burn up there, was there?

They fumbled round a turning in the streambed, the wall falling back and away from them as the gorge widened, and there it was, the answer to Cándido’s half-formed prayers: a way out. A second mountain lay at their feet, a mountain of junk hurled over the precipice above by generations of heedless
gabachos.
“Climb!” Cándido shouted, and America, sweating, bleeding, tears of rage arid fear and frustration in her eyes, began to climb up over the hood of an accordioned car, her belly swinging out and away from her like an untethered balloon. Cándido scrambled up behind her, knocking aside toasters, water heaters, bedsprings, the refuse of a thousand kitchens and garages. The mass gave gently but held, locked in place by the heavy settled chassis of the automobiles, and as the smell of smoke came to them, as the wind shifted and the flames sent up a demonic howl, they reached a beaten hardpan promontory and struggled through the brush to the road.

The road was chaos. Firefighters ran shouting up and down the length of it, sirens wailed, lights flashed, the police were there, everywhere, the road closed going down, the last straggling automobiles coming up. Cándido took his wife by the hand and hurried up the road to the Chinese store—closed and shuttered and without a car in the lot—and ducked around back, searching along the foundation for a hose bib. They collapsed there, behind the store, gulping water from a hose, precious water, wetting their faces, soaking their clothes. A little water—the Chinamen wouldn’t mind, and who gave a damn if they did? Cándido’s throat was raw. A big airplane, hunkering low, brushed the treetops overhead. “I’m scared,” America whispered.

“Don’t be scared,” he said, though he himself was terrified. What would they do to him now, what would they do. if they found out? They had the gas chamber here in California, didn’t they? Sure they did. They’d put him in a little room with cyanide pellets and his lungs would fill with the corrosive fumes, but he wouldn’t breathe, wouldn’t open his mouth, he wouldn’t... He took a long drink from the slack hose and thought he was going to vomit. The smoke was blacker now, pouring over them. The wind had changed and the fire was coming up the canyon. “Get up,” he said, and his voice was shot through with urgency, with panic, infested with it, a crazy man’s voice. “We’ve got to go. Now!”

She sat there in the mud from the hose, her big maternity shorts soaked through, the big wet folds of the maternity blouse clinging to the perfect ball of her belly, hair in her mouth, her face smudged and bleeding, her eyes wild. “No,” she said, “I won’t get up. I’m tired. I feel sick.”

He jerked her to her feet. “You want to burn?” he shouted, and his grip on her arm was punishing. “You want to die?”

The smoke thickened. There was no one around, no one, and it was eerie, spooky, like some horror movie with the aliens closing in. Sirens wailed in the distance. América snatched her arm away from him, curled her lip to show her teeth. “Yes,” she hissed. “Yes, I do.”

 

 

 

It was dark, darker than Cándido could ever have imagined it, all the homes in the canyon without electricity, the people evacuated, a pall of smoke closing over the sky against the distant flare of the fire. From here, high up the canyon, the fire sat low on the horizon, like a gas burner glowing under the great black pot of the sky. The winds had died down with nightfall, and the blaze was in remission, settling into its beds of coals to await the coming of day and the return of the winds. Or maybe they would put it out, maybe the
gringos
would keep attacking it with their planes and their chemicals till they’d snubbed it out like a cigarette ground under the heel of a boot. Cándido didn’t know what the next day would bring, but as he looked down into the darkened canyon he felt awed by the enormity of his bad luck, stunned by the chain of events that had led from the windfall of the turkey and the simple joy of the campfire to this nightmare of flames and smoke and airplanes that exploded across the sky. Had he really been the cause of all this? One man with a match? It was almost inconceivable, too much for his poor fevered brain to take in.