The Tortilla Curtain (49 page)

And then he felt himself lifted up from behind by some monstrous uncontainable force and he dropped the gun and clutched at the frame of the stooped-over door of that pathetic little shack, staring in amazement into the lamplit faces there—his Mexican, that was him, at last, and a girl he’d never seen before, and was that an infant?—and the shack was spilling over on its side and floating up on the heavy liquid swell behind him until it fell to pieces and the light was snuffed out and the faces were gone and Delaney was drawn so much closer to that cold black working heart of the world than he’d ever dreamed possible.

 

 

 

And so, in the end, it all came tumbling down on Cándido: his daughter’s affliction, the
pelirrojo
with the gun, the very mountain itself. The light was flickering, the rain hissing like a box of serpents prodded with a stick.
She can’t see, Cándido, she can’t see anything,
America said, and in that moment he had a vision of his perfect plump little daughter transmogrified into an old hag with a cane and a Seeing Eye dog, and before he could assimilate the meaning of that in all its fearful permutations and banish it from his consciousness, there was this maniac with the gun, threatening his life, and before he could even begin to deal with
that,
the mountain turned to pudding, to mush, the light failed and the shack fell to pieces. At first he didn’t know what was happening—who would?—but there was no resisting that force. He could have built his shack of tungsten steel with footings a hundred feet deep and the result would have been the same. The mountain was going somewhere, and he was going with it.

He didn’t even have time to curse or flinch or wonder about his fate-all he could do was snatch America and his poor blind baby to him and hold on. America had Socorro pinned under her arm like a football and she clawed at him with her free hand as the roof shot away from them and they were thrown in a tangle on the pallets that just half a second ago were the inside wall and were now the floor. The moving floor. The floor that shot like a surfboard out on the crest of the liquid mountain that was scouring the earth and blasting trees out of the ground as if they’d never been rooted, and there was the
pelirrojo,
the white face and flailing white arms, caught up in the mad black swirl of it like a man drowning in shit.

The mountain roared, the boulders clamored, and yet they somehow stayed atop the molten flow, hurtling through the night with all the other debris. Cándido heard the rush of water ahead and saw the lights of the development below them, riding high on the wave of mud that hammered the walls flat and twisted the roofs from the houses and sent him and America and little Socorro thundering into the void. Then the lights went out in unison, the far wall of the development was breached and the two conjoined pallets were a raft in the river that the dry white wash had become, spinning out of control in the current.

América was screaming and the baby was screaming and he could hear his own voice raised in a thin mournful drone, and that was nothing compared to the shrieks of the uprooted trees and the night-marish roar of the boulders rolling along beneath them. He wasn’t thinking—there was no time to think, only to react—but even as he pitched into the blackness of this new river that was rushing toward completion in the old river below, he managed finally to curse the engine of all this misery in a burst of profanity that would have condemned him for all time if he hadn’t been condemned already. What was it? What was it about him? All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking
pinche
luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.

There was no controlling this thing, no hope of it. There was only the mad ride and the battering of the rocks. Cándido held on to the pallet and America held on to him. His knuckles were smashed and smashed again but he held on because there was nothing else he could do. And then they were in the bed of the big creek, Topanga Creek, and the mountain was behind them. But this wasn’t the creek Cándido had drunk from and bathed in and slept behind through all those punishing months of drought—it wasn’t even the creek he’d seen raging under the bridge earlier that day. It was a river, a torrent that rode right up over the bridges and the streets and everything else. There was no escaping it. The pallet bucked and spun, and finally it threw him.

They hit something, something so big it was immovable, and Cándido lost his grip on America and the raft at the same time; he was in the water suddenly with nothing to hold on to and the water was as cold as death. He went under, and it felt as if an enormous fist were pinning him down, crushing him, but he kicked out against it, slammed into a submerged log and then the jagged tearing edge of a rock, and somehow the surface was there. “América!” he cried. “América!” In the next instant it had him again, the furious roiling water forced up his nostrils and rammed down his throat, the current raking him over a stony washboard, hump after hump of unyielding rock, and he saw his mother pounding the clothes back and forth in a froth of suds, he must have been three years old, and he knew he was going to die, Go to the devil, mijo, and he cried out again.

Then a voice spoke beside him, right in his ear—“Candido!”—and there was his wife, there was America, holding out a hand to him. The water churned and sucked at him, throwing him forward only to jerk him away again, and where was she? There, clinging to the slick hard surface of the washboard where it rose dizzily out of the current. He fought with all he had and suddenly the water spat him up in his wife’s arms.

He was saved. He was alive. There was no sky, there was no earth and the wind drove at them with pellets of rain and the water crashed at his feet, but he was alive and breathing and huddled in the arms of his wife, his thin beautiful shivering girl of a wife. It took him a moment, interpreting the humped rock beneath him with his numbed and bleeding fingers, before he understood where they were—they’d been saved by the United States Post Office and this was the tile roof and the building beneath them was the cut bank of the river as it swirled round the bend to the swamped bridge and the gorge beyond. “América” was all he could say, gasping it, moaning it, over and over. He fell into a spasm of coughing and brought up the cocido, sour and thin, and he felt as if he were being slowly strangled. “Are you okay?” he choked. “Are you hurt?”

She was sobbing. Her body and his were one and the sobs shook him till he was sobbing himself, or almost sobbing. But men didn’t sob, men endured; they worked for three dollars a day tanning hides till their fingernails fell out; they swallowed kerosene and spat out fire for tourists on streetcorners; they worked till there was no more work left in them. “The baby,” he gasped, and he wasn’t sobbing, he wasn’t. “Where’s the baby?”

She didn’t answer, and he felt the cold seep into his veins, a coldness and a weariness like nothing he’d ever known. The dark water was all around him, water as far as he could see, and he wondered if he would ever get warm again. He was beyond cursing, beyond grieving, numbed right through to the core of him. All that, yes. But when he saw the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles, he reached down and took hold of it.

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