The Tortilla Curtain (13 page)

There’d been no breakfast, nothing, not a twig to suck, and he was as hungry as he’d ever been in his life, but the hunger spurred him on and as the pile of water-bleached sticks began to grow an idea took hold of him: he would surprise her, that’s what he would do. With a real camp. Something solid and substantial, a place they could call home—at least till he got back on his feet and found work and they could have their own apartment in a nice neighborhood with trees and sidewalks and a space for the car he was going to buy her, and he could see the outline of that space already, fresh blacktop, all neatly laid out and marked with crisp yellow paint...

He found some twine—or was it fishing line?—in a pile of water-run brush, and two black plastic bags that he was able to work into the thatch of the roof. His hip hurt him still, and his knee, and his ribs when he stretched, but he was a slave to the idea, and by the time the sun had passed over the lip of the canyon and left him in an artificial twilight, a sturdy lean-to of interlaced branches stood on the spit behind the rusted hulk of the car, work he could be proud of.

He dozed, exhausted from his efforts, and when he woke a weak patina of sunlight painted the eastern rim of the ledge above him. He looked up drowsily, full of a false sense of well-being, and then it hit him:
América. Where was she?
She wasn’t here... but then, how could she be? This wasn’t their old camp, this wasn’t a place she knew. He got to his feet, the pain digging claws into his hip, and cursed himself. It must have been four, five o’clock. She’d be back there, downstream, looking for him, and how could she doubt that he’d run out on her for good?

Cursing still, cursing nonstop, he plunged into the pool and slashed through the murky water, heart hammering, and never mind his clothes. He hurried along the streambed as fast as his hip would allow, frantic now, in a panic—and then he rounded the bend that gave onto their old camp and she wasn’t there. The leaves hung limp, the stream stood still. There was no trace of her, no note, no pile of stones or scribble in the sand. This was
muy gacho,
bad news. And fuck his stinking
pinche
life. Fuck it.

Then it was up the hill, each step a crucifixion, and what choice did he have?—up the hill for the first time since the accident. He hadn’t gone a hundred feet before he had to stop and catch his breath. The clothes hung sodden from his frame—and he’d lost weight, he had, lying there in the stinking sand with nothing but scraps and vegetables to eat for the last nine days like some wasted old sack of bones in a nursing home. He spat in the dirt, gritted his teeth, and went on.

The sun was hot still, though it must have been six o’clock at least, higher and hotter than down below. Despite his wet clothes he began to sweat, and he had to use his hands—or his one good hand—to help him over the rough places. When he was halfway up, at a spot where the trail jogged to the right and dodged round a big reddish chipped tooth of a boulder, he had a surprise. A nasty surprise. Turning the corner and throwing a quick glance up the trail ahead, he saw that he wasn’t alone. A man was coming down from above, a stranger, long strides caught up in the mechanics of a walk that threw his hips out as if they belonged to somebody else. Cándido’s first reaction was to duck into the bushes, but it was too late: the man was on top of him already, leaning back against the pitch of the slope like an insect climbing down a blade of grass.

“Hey, ’mano,”
the man said, his voice as high and harsh as a hawk’s call.
“¿Qué onda?
What’s happening?” He’d stopped there in the middle of the trail that was no more than two feet wide, a tall pale man made taller by the slope, speaking the border Spanish of the back alleys and
cantinas
of Tijuana. He was wearing a baseball cap turned backwards on his head and his eyes were a color Cándido couldn’t identify, somewhere between yellow and red, like twin bruises set in his skull. He was one of the
vagos
from the labor exchange, that’s what he was. And he’d have a knife in his pocket or tucked into the back of his belt.

“Buenas,”
Cándido murmured, keeping an eye on him, though God knew he had nothing worth stealing but the clothes on his back—and they’d been washed and mended so many times they wouldn’t fetch more than a few
centavos
at a rag shop. But you could never tell: sometimes they’d steal your shirt just for pure meanness.

“What’s it like down there, brother?” the man asked, indicating the ravine with a flick of his eyes. The sun glanced off his face. His skin was the color of a dirty bar of soap—not white, but not brown either. “Comfortable? Quiet? There’s water, right?”

When the stranger swiveled his shoulders to scan the ravine, Cándido saw that he had a bedroll wound up tight and slung across his back with a length of twine. Cándido didn’t want to give him any encouragement—if word got out, the whole labor exchange would be down there. “Not much,” he said.

This was funny. The man let out a little bark of a laugh and grinned to show off a cheap set of fake teeth. “Judging from the look of you,
carnal,
there’s enough to go swimming in, eh?”

Cándido held the man’s eyes. He shrugged. “It’s an unlucky place. I had a camp down there but they raided it three days ago.
Gabachos.
They painted things on the rocks with their spray cans. You won’t catch me down there again.”

Birds flitted from bush to bush. The sun stood still. The man was taking his time. “That what happened to your face? And that arm?”

“Yeah. Or no—not then.” Cándido shrugged again, conscious of the tattered sling that cradled his left arm. The arm was better, a whole lot better, but that still gave him an arm and a half to the stranger’s two—if it came to that. “It’s a long story,” he said.

The stranger seemed to be weighing the matter, arms folded across his chest, studying Cándido’s ravaged face as if it were the key to a puzzle. He made no move to step aside and let Cándido pass—he was in control, and he knew it. “So where’s your things?” he demanded, his voice riding up out of range. “I mean, if what you say is true. You got no bedroll, no cooking things, no money stashed away in a jar someplace maybe? Nothing in your pocket?”

“They took it all,” Cándido lied.
“Pinche gabachos.
I hid in the bushes.”

A long slow moment ticked by. Cándido eased his hand into his pocket and felt the weight of his own poor rusted switchblade there, the one he’d got after those punks had gone after América at the border. “Listen,” he said, trying to take hold of the situation without provoking anything he would regret—;he was no match for this guy, not in the shape he was in now—“it’s been good talking to you, always good to talk to a
compañero,
but I’ve got to be moving along. I need to find a place to sleep tonight... you don’t know of anything, do you? Someplace safe?”

No response. The stranger stared out over Cándido’s head into the gaping nullity of the ravine, patting mechanically at his breast pocket before reaching into it and producing a single stick of gum in a dull aluminum wrapper. Slowly, casually, as if he had all the time in the world, he inserted the flat wedge of gum between the thin flaps of his lips and began chewing, crumpling the wrapper as if he were strangling something. Cándido watched it drop from his fingers into the fine white dust of the trail.

“I could really use something to eat too,” Cándido prodded, giving him a pathetic look, the look of a dog, a beggar on the street. “You wouldn’t have a little bite of something on you, would you?”

The man came back to him then, pinning him with those strange tan eyes: Cándido had turned the tables on him—he was the one asking the questions now. The stranger looked uncomfortable suddenly, his jaws working gingerly round the stick of gum, and Cándido thought of his grandfather, reduced to eating mush in his fifties, his dentures so cracked and ill-fitting they might have been designed by a Nazi torturer. The moment had passed. The menace was gone.

“Sorry,
’mano,”
the man said, and then he brushed by Cándido and headed down the path. The last Cándido saw of him was the peak of his reversed cap vanishing round the bend, and he couldn’t be sure whether the stranger was looking backwards or forwards.

Shaken, Cándido turned and started back up the trail. Now he had to worry about this stinking crack-toothed
pendejo
nosing around down in the canyon, as if he didn’t have enough problems already. And what if he found their camp? What then? Cándido felt jealous suddenly, possessive: the son of a bitch. There was a whole range of mountains here, canyons all over the place—too many to count—and why did he have to pick this one? Anger spurred him on—and worry. He was breathing hard and his hip hurt, his knee, the throbbing crust of scab that masked the left side of his face. He kept going, forcing himself on, until a sudden screech of tires let him know that the road was just above him, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.

And then he emerged from the bushes and he was out on the road, the traffic hurtling past him in a crazy
gringo
taillight-chasing rush—and what was the hurry, the constant hurry? Making a buck, that’s what. Building their glass office towers and adding up the figures on their dark little TV screens, getting richer—that’s what the hurry was. And that was why the
gabachos
had cars and clothes and money and the Mexicans didn’t. He walked along the highway, feeling strange—this was just where he’d been hit, just here—and he felt the cold steel rush of a passing car at his back and someone leaned on the horn and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He watched the taillights and cursed under his breath.

He looked first in the parking lot at the Chinese store, but America wasn’t there. There were no Mexicans around at this hour, not a one—you’d think they’d all vanished into the earth, like those toad-stools that spring up after a rainfall and disappear by sunset. The place was swarming with
norteamericanos
though, hordes of them, jumping in and out of their cars, hustling into the store and hustling back out again with their brown paper bags full of beer and wine and little sweet things to put in the mouth. They looked at Cándido like he was a leper.

On up the street, careful, careful, look both ways and cross. Nobody was coming down the canyon, but they were all going up, endlessly, relentlessly, enough cars to fill twenty big boats going back to Japan where they’d all come from in the first place. There was a little shopping plaza here, the one with the larger market and the
paisano
from Italy. This was where America would be if she’d missed him down below, or if—and the idea hit him with the sudden force of inspiration—if she was working. Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d been worrying for nothing. Maybe she would have money and they could buy food.

Food. His stomach clenched at the thought of it and he felt faint for just a moment—a moment, that was all, but it was enough to make him lurch into a big beefy
gabacho
with sideburns that ate up half his face and hair all piled up slick on his head like Elvis in one of those black velvet tapestries. The man shoved him away, a violent thrust of the arms, and said something harsh, something hateful, his face exploding with it. “Escuse, escuse,” Cándido blurted, throwing up his hands and backing away, but they were all watching now, all the
gabachos
in the parking lot, and he would have run but his legs wouldn’t carry him.

 

 

 

At six p.m., with the sun starting to slant down in the west and the shadows of the trees swelling against the windows like images out of a dream, America was working. Still working. Though the six hours were up and the fat man was nowhere to be found. Candelario Pérez had said six hours’ work, twenty-five dollars, and this was eight hours now and she was wondering, did this mean the fat man would pay her more? Six divided into twenty-five was four dollars and sixteen cents an hour, and so, for two extra hours she should get, what—eight dollars and thirty-two cents more. She glowed with the thought of it. She was earning money, money for food, for Cándido and her baby—she, who’d never earned a
centavo
in her life. She’d worked in her father’s house, of course, cooking and cleaning and running errands for her mother, and he gave her an allowance each week, but it was nothing like this, nothing like earning a wage from a stranger—and a
gringo,
no less. Cándido would be surprised. Of course he would have guessed by now that she was working, but wait till he saw her tonight, coming down that trail into the canyon with all the groceries she could carry, with meat and eggs and rice and a can of those big sardines, the ones in oil so rich you lick it from the tips of your fingers...

She thought of that, held the image in her brain till it was imprinted there, and her hands were quick and nimble even after eight hours, and the fumes hardly bothered her. They bothered Mary, though. Bothered her plenty. The big
gringa
with the ring through her nose hadn’t shut up about it since the fat man had led them into this great long beautiful room of his house lined with windows and given them each a pair of yellow latex gloves and the plastic bottles of the corrosive. America didn’t understand what the woman was saying, of course, and she tried to block her out too, but the drift of it was inescapable. Mary didn’t like the work. Mary didn’t need the work. Mary had a house with a roof and four walls and a refrigerator with food in it. She didn’t like the fumes or the fat man or his beautiful house or life on this planet. She tipped back a pint of that liquor she had with her and as the day went on she got slower and slower till practically all she did at the end was sit there and complain.

The work was hard, no doubt about it. The man had hundreds of straw cases lining the walls of the room and stacked up to the ceiling in the back, and in each case was a stone figurine of the Buddha, gone black with mold and age. They were all the same: two feet high, heavier than lead, the bald head and pregnant gut and the stupid grin that was meant to be a look of wisdom but could as easily have been senility or constipation. And each Buddha had to be scrubbed with the corrosive to take the discoloration off the brow, under the eyelids and lips, in the crevices beneath the arms and the tiny blackened indentation of the navel. When it was cleaned, when the corrosive had devoured the mold and the wire brushes had dug their deepest, the Buddha took on a rosy sheen, and then it was time to affix the glossy gold strip of paper with the glue already on it that read JIM SHIRLEY IMPORTS.