The Tortilla Curtain (25 page)

And after that? After that the trauma drove him from yard to yard, from green strip to green strip, and finally up over the dry Valley-side swell of Topanga Canyon and into the cleft of the creekbed. He bought food and two pints of brandy with the money in his pockets and he lay by the trickling creek for seven days, turning the horror over in his mind. He watched the trees move in the wind. He watched the ground squirrels, the birds, watched light shine through the thin transparent wings of the butterflies, and he thought: Why can’t the world be like this? Then he picked himself up and went home to Resurrección.

That was the first time he’d seen the canyon, and now he was here again, feeling good, working, protecting América from all that was out there. His accident had been bad, nearly fatal, but si
Dios quiere
he would be whole again, or nearly whole, and he understood that a man who had crossed eight lanes of freeway was like the Lord who walked on the waters, and that no man could expect that kind of grace to descend on him more than once in a lifetime. And so he worked for Al Lopez and painted till nearly ten at night and then Al Lopez dropped him off at the darkened labor exchange, fifty dollars richer.

America would have missed him, he knew that, and the stores were closed at this hour, everything shut down. At seven, Al Lopez had bought Pepsis and
burritos
in silver foil for him and the Indian, and so he didn’t need to eat, but still he felt a flare of hunger after all those days of enforced fasting. As he limped down the dark road, flinching at the headlights of the cars, he wondered if America had kept the fire going under the stew.

It was late, very late, by the time he bundled up his clothes and waded the pool to their camp. He was glad to see the fire, coals glowing red through the dark scrim of leaves, and he caught a keen exciting whiff of the stew as he shrugged into his clothes and called out softly to America so as not to startle her. “América,” he whispered. “It’s me, Cándido—I’m back.” She didn’t answer. And that was strange, because as he came round the black hump of the ruined car, he saw her there, crouched by the fire in her underthings, her back to him, the dress in her lap. She was sewing, that was it, working with needle and thread on the material she kept lifting to her face and then canting toward the unsteady light of the fire, the wings of her poor thin shoulder blades swelling and receding with the busy movement of her wrists and hands. The sight of her overwhelmed him with sadness and guilt: he had to give her more, he had to. He’d buy her a new dress tomorrow, he told himself, thinking of the thrift shop near the labor exchange. There were no bargains in that shop, he knew that without looking—it was for
gringos,
commuters and property owners and people on their way to the beach—but without transportation, what choice did he have? He fingered the bills in his pocket and promised himself he’d surprise her tomorrow.

Then he came up and put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hey,
mi vida,
I’m back,” and he was going to tell her about the job and Al Lopez and the fifty dollars in his pocket, but she jerked away from him as if he’d struck her, and turned the face of a stranger to him. There was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, something worse, far worse, than what he’d glimpsed the night before when she left the rich man in his car. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Her face went blank. Her eyes dropped away from his and her hands curled rigid in her lap till they were like the hands of a cripple.

He knelt beside her then and talked in an urgent apologetic whisper: “I made money, good money, and I’m going to buy you a dress, a new dress, first thing tomorrow, as soon as—once I’m done with work—and I know I’m going to get work, I know it, every day. You won’t have to wear that thing anymore, or mend it either. Just give me a week or two, that’s all I ask, and we’ll be out of here, we’ll have that apartment, and you’ll have ten dresses, twenty, a whole closetful ...”

But she wasn’t responding—she just sat there, hanging her head, her face hidden behind the curtain of her hair. It was then that he noticed the welts at the base of her neck, where the hair parted to fall forward across her shoulders. Three raised red welts that glared at him like angry eyes, unmistakable, irrefutable. “What happened?” he demanded, masking the damage with a trembling hand. “Was it that
rico?
Did he try anything with you, the son of a bitch—I swear I’ll kill him, I will—”

Her voice was tiny, choked, the faintest intrusion on the sphere of the audible: “They took my money.”

And now he was rough, though he didn’t mean to be. He jerked at her shoulders and forced her to look him in the face. “Who took your money—what are you talking about?” And then he knew, knew it all, knew as certainly as if he’d been there: “Those
vagos?
It was the one with the hat, wasn’t it? The half-a-
gringo?
”

She nodded. He forgot his hunger, forgot the pot on the coals, the night, the woodsmoke, the soil beneath his knees, oblivious to everything but her face and her eyes. She began to cry, a soft kittenish mewling that only infuriated him more. He clutched at her shoulders, shook her again. “Who else?”

“I don’t know. An Indian.”

“Where?” he shouted. “Where?”

“On the trail.”

On the trail. His heart froze around those three words. If they’d robbed her in the parking lot, on the road, at the labor exchange, it was one thing, but
on the trail
... “What else? What else did they take? Quick, tell me. They didn’t, they didn’t try to—?”

“No,” she said. “No.”

“You’re lying. Don’t lie to me. Don’t you dare lie to me.”

She broke his grip and stared into the fire, rubbed a wrist across her eyes. “They took my money.”

Cándido was ready to kill, ready to hack through every bush in the mountains till he found their camp and crushed their skulls while they lay sleeping. The image infested his brain: the tan dog’s eyes, the stirring limbs and the rock coming down, again and again. “Is that all?” he hissed, fighting against the knowledge. “Is that all they took?” He gripped her arm again. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she whispered, turning to level her gaze on him, “I’m sure.”

 

 

 

It hurt, that’s all she knew. Burned. Burned like acid in an open wound, like the corrosive at the fat man’s house when it got down into the split skin at the quick of her nails. Every time she peed it was like fire passing through her. She didn’t know what it was—some lingering effect of what they’d done to her that night, her insides scored and dirty, rubbed raw like a skinned knee ... or was it just a new and unexpected phase of her pregnancy? Was this normal? Was this the way it was supposed to be in the beginning of the fifth month, flaming pee? Her mother would know. Her aunts, her older sisters, the village midwives. If she were home she could even have asked Señora Serrano, the neighbor lady who’d given birth to sixteen children, the oldest grown up and with children of their own, the youngest in diapers still. But here? Here there was no one, and that frightened her—frightened her now and for when her time came.

America waited there in the hut behind the wrecked car for Cándido, day after day, bored and aching—he wouldn’t let her go to the labor exchange, never again—her breasts tender, her stomach queasy, needing her mother, needing to ask the questions a daughter never asks, not till she’s married. But then, she and Cándido never were married, not officially, not in the church. In the eyes of the Church, Cándido was already married, forever married, to Resurrección. And America and Cándido had gone off in the night, silent as thieves, and only a note left for her mother, not a word to her face, and even then America was pregnant, though she didn’t know it. She wanted to call her mother now, on the telephone, one of those outdoor phones with the little plastic bonnets lined up in a row by the Chinese store and hear her voice and tell her she was all right and ask her why it burned so when she peed. Was that the way it was supposed to be? Did all women go through that? But then, even if she had the money, all lined up on the plastic shelf in all the silver denominations, she’d have to call the village pharmacy because her parents had no phone, and how was she to do that? She didn’t know the number. Didn’t know how to dial Mexico even.

And so she waited there in her little nook in the woods like some princess in a fairy story, protected by a moat and the sharp twisted talons of a wrecked car, only this princess had been violated and her pee burned and she jumped at every sound. Cándido had got her some old magazines in English—he’d found them in the trash at the supermarket—and six greasy dog-eared
novelas
, picture romances about El Norte and how poor village girls and boys made their fortunes and kissed each other passionately in the gleaming kitchens of their gleaming
gringo
houses. She read them over and over again and she tried not to think of the man with the cap and the Indian and their filthy writhing bodies and the stinking breath in her face, tried not to think of her nausea and lightheadedness, of her mother, of the future, tried not to think of anything. She explored the creekbed out of boredom. She bathed in the pool. Collected firewood. Repaired her old dress and saved the new one, the one Cándido had brought home one afternoon, for when they had an apartment and she needed something nice to get work. A week passed. Then another. It got hot. Her pee burned. And then, gradually, the pain faded and she began to forget what had happened to her here in the paradise of the North, began to forget for whole minutes at a time.

It was during one of those forgetful periods, when she was lying on her back in the sand, staring up into the shifting patchwork of the leaves above her, so still and so empty she might have been comatose, that she became aware of the faintest stirring behind her. The day was high and hot, the birds silent, the distant traffic a drowsy hum. There was another sentient creature there with her in the hollow place at the base of the intermittent falls, another breathing, seeing, sensing thing. She wasn’t alarmed. Though she couldn’t see it, she could hear it, feel it, and it was no man, no snake, no thing that would do her harm. Very gradually, millimeter by millimeter, like a plant turning to the sun, she shifted her head in the sand until she could see behind her.

At first, she was disappointed, but she was patient, infinitely patient, rooted to the ground by the boredom of the days, and then she saw movement and the thing materialized all at once, as in one of those trick-of-the-eye drawings where you can look and look forever and see nothing until you turn your head the magic way. It was a coyote. Bristle fur, tanned the precise shade of the dried hill grasses, one paw lifted, ears high. It held there, sensing something amiss, and looked right through her with eyes of yellow glass, and she saw that it had dugs and whiskers and a black slotted nose and that it was small, small as the dog she’d had as a girl, and still it didn’t move. She looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out, to know that men were her enemies—men in uniform, men with their hats reversed, men with fat bloated hands and fat bloated necks, men with traps and guns and poisoned bait—and she saw the den full of pups and the hills shrunk to nothing under the hot quick quadrupedal gait. She never moved. Never blinked. But finally, no matter how hard she stared, she realized the animal was no longer there.

 

 

 

The fire snapped and fanned itself with a roar. Sparks and white flecks of ash shot straight up into the funnel of the ravine, trailing away into the night until the dark drank them up. The night was warm, the stars were cold. And Cándido, feeding the fire with one hand while skewering a sausage with the other and cradling a gallon jug of Cribari red between his thighs, was drunk. Not so drunk that he’d lost all caution—he’d observed the canyon from above, on the trail, with the fire going strong, and reassured himself that not even the faintest glimmer escaped the deep hidden nook where they’d made their camp. The smoke was visible, yes, but only in daylight, and in daylight he made sure the fire was out, or at least reduced to coals. But now it was dark and who could detect a few threads of smoke against the dark curtain of the sky?

Anyway, he was drunk. Drunk and feeding the fire, for the thin cheer of it, for the child’s game of watching the flames crawl up a stick, and for the good and practical purpose of cooking sausages. A whole package, eight hot Italian sausages, not as good as
chorizo
maybe, but good nonetheless. One after another, roasting them till they split, using a
tortilla
like a glove to squeeze them off the stick and feed them into his mouth, bite by sizzling bite. And the wine, of course. Lifting the jug, heavy at first but getting lighter now, the wine hot in his gut and leaking from the corners of his mouth, and then setting the jug down again, between his legs, in the sand. That was the process, the plan, the sum of his efforts. Stick, sausage, wine.

America, grown modest in proportion to the way the baby was changing her shape, stood off in the shadows, by the hut, trying on the clothes he’d brought back for her from the Goodwill in Canoga Park. They’d been working up the street, repairing stucco on an apartment building that was changing hands, and Rigoberto—the Indian who worked for Al Lopez—told him about the store. It was cheap. And he found maternity c!othes—big flower-print shorts with an expanding waistline, dresses like sacks, corduroy pants that could have fit a clown. He’d selected one shapeless dress with an elastic waistband—pink, with green flowers all over it—and a pair of shorts. She’d asked for blue jeans, something durable to wear around the camp and save her two dresses, but there was no sense in buying her jeans that wouldn’t fit for another three or four months, and so he’d settled on the shorts as a compromise. She could always take them in later.