The Tortilla Curtain (9 page)

The headman’s name was Candelario Pérez. He looked to be in his forties and he was squat and work-hardened. He’d been informally elected by the others to keep order (making sure the men waited their turn instead of mobbing every pickup that pulled into the lot), clean up the trash and mediate between the workers and the
gringos
of the community who’d donated the land and the lumber for the, sake of the hungry and homeless. “There’s not much work for women here, daughter,” he said, and she could see the tug of sympathy in his eyes. He didn’t know her from anybody, and yet he cared, she could see that.

“Doesn’t anyone in these big houses need a stove cleaned or a floor mopped? Doesn’t that ever happen?”

All the men were watching her. Traffic—amazing traffic—whined past on the canyon road, forty, fifty miles an hour, bumper-to-bumper, with barely room to breathe in between. Candelario Pérez gave her a long look. “We’ll see, daughter, we’ll see,” he said, and then he showed her where to sit, pointing to the corner she’d occupied now for three hours and more.

She was bored. She was frightened. What if she didn’t get work—not today, not ever? What would they eat? What would her baby do for clothes, shelter, nourishment? And this place—wasn’t it the perfect spot for
La Migra
to come in their puke-green trucks and tan shirts and demand documents,
la tarjeta verde,
a birth certificate, driver’s license, social security card? What was stopping them? It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. As each car pulled into the lot and two or three men gathered round it, she held her breath in hope and fear, wanting work, desperately wanting it, yet mortally afraid of the bland white faces of the men staring out from behind the windshield. What, exactly, did they want? What were the rules? Were they from Immigration? Were they perverts, rapists, murderers? Or were they good people, decent rich people who needed help with a baby, with laundry, with the pots and pans and the ironing?

As it turned out, it didn’t matter. She sat there from dawn till noon and she didn’t get work. At eleven or so—she had no way of telling the time exactly—a big
gringa
with wild dead-metal hair and eyes the color of a Coke bottle came up the canyon road with a strange jerking gait, passed through the open-air building like a zombie and threw herself down in the dirt beside América. It was hot already—ninety, at least—and yet the woman was dressed in the heavy brocade you might find on a sofa in a house of easy virtue, and she wore a shawl of the same material around her shoulders. When she got close, América could see the thin wire loop that punctured her right nostril.

“How you doing?” the woman said. “I’m Mary. Llama Mary.”

“Me
llamo América,”
América returned.
“¿Habla usted espanol?”

Mary grinned. Her teeth were enormous, like cow’s teeth, more yellow than white.
“Poco,”
she said. Little. “No work today, huh? You know, work,
trabaja.”

Work. Was this woman offering her work? America’s heart began to race, but then she caught herself. She didn’t look like a housewife, this woman, not the kind América knew from the North American films and TV. She looked dirty, and she had the sad smell of poverty about her.

“I’m looking too,” the woman said, and she punched a thumb into her own chest for emphasis. “Me. I work-
trabaja
.
Clean house, paint, odd jobs—
comprendo
? Sometimes get, sometimes no. You
sabe?”

America didn’t
sabe.
Nor did she understand. Was this woman trying to tell her that she, a
gringa
in her own country, was looking for the same work as América? It couldn’t be. It was a fantasy. Crazy.

But Mary persisted. She made wiping motions with her hands, cleaned an imaginary window, even making little squeaking sounds to imitate the pressure of the rag and the release of the ammonia, and she dipped her imaginary rag into an imaginary bucket until America got the idea: she was a
criada,
a maid, a cleaning lady, here in her own country, and as fantastic as it seemed, she was competing for the same nonexistent jobs America was.

Well, it was a shock—like seeing that gabacho with the long hair in Venice, begging on the streets. America felt all the hope crumple in her. And then the
gringa
—Mary—was digging around inside her clothes as if she were scratching fleas or something, actually squirming in the dirt. But it wasn’t a flea she came up with, it was a bottle. Pint-size. She took a long swallow and laughed, then offered it to America. No, America gestured, shaking her head, and she was thinking:
Have I sunk to this, a good student and a good girl who always respected her parents and did as she was told, sitting here penniless in the dirt with a common drunk?
“Escuse, pleese,” she said, and got up to seek out Candelario Pérez again to see if there was anything for her.

She couldn’t find him. It was too late. By arrangement with the local citizens, the labor exchange closed down at noon—they might have been liberal and motivated by a spirit of common humanity and charity, but they didn’t want a perpetual encampment of the unemployed, out of luck and foreign in their midst. Twelve o’clock came and you went home, unless you were lucky enough to have found a job for the day, and then you went home when the boss told you to go. They were very strict about camping in the ravine or in the brush along the road—not only the
gringos,
but men like Candelario Pérez, who knew that one encampment could ruin it for them all. There was nothing to stop the
gringos
from tearing down this building and calling in the cops and the hard-faced men from the INS. America knew nothing of this, and that was a small mercy. She did know that it was noon, and that the gathering was breaking up voluntarily.

She walked aimlessly round the lot. Cars went by on the canyon road, but fewer of them now, and at greater intervals. There was a gas station, a secondhand-clothing store; across the street, the post office, and then the little shopping center where the
paisano
from Italy had his store. The men were staring at her openly now, and their stares were harder, hungrier. Most of them were here alone, separated from their families—and their wives—for months at a time, sometimes years. They were starving, and she was fresh meat.

The image spooked her, and she started off down the road, conscious of their eyes drilling into her. All the warmth she’d felt earlier, the familiarity, the brother- and sisterhood, was gone suddenly, and all she could think of, looming nightmarishly, was the faces of those animals at the border—
Mexican
animals—the ones who’d come out of the night to attack her and Cándido as they crossed over. Mexicans. Her own people. And when the light hit them their faces showed nothing—no respect, no mercy, nothing.

America had been terrified to begin with—what she and Cándido were doing was illegal, and she’d never done anything illegal in her life. Crouching there beside the corrugated iron fence, her mouth dry and heart racing, she waited through the long night till the
coyote
gave the word, and then she and Cándido and half a dozen others were running for their lives on the hard-baked earth of another country. Two-thirds of their savings had gone to this man, this
coyote,
this emissary between the two worlds, and he was either incompetent or he betrayed them. One minute he was there, hustling them through a gap in the fence, and the next minute he was gone, leaving them in a clump of bushes at the bottom of a ravine in a darkness so absolute it was like being thrust into the bottom of a well.

And then the animals jumped them. Just like that. A gang of them, armed with knives, baseball bats, a pistol. And how did they know that she and Cándido would be there beneath that particular bush—and at the ungodly hour of four a.m.? There were six or seven of them. They pinned Cándido down and cut the pockets from his trousers, and then, in that hot subterranean darkness, they went for her. A knife was in her face, their hands were all over her, and they jerked the clothes from her as if they were skinning a rabbit. Cándido cried out and they clubbed him; she screamed, and they laughed. But then, just as the first one loosened his belt, taking his time, enjoying it, the helicopter came with its lights and suddenly it was bright day and the vermin were scattering and Cándido had her and the wash of the propellers threw the dirt against her bare skin like a thousand hot needles. “Run!” Cándido screamed. “Run!” And she ran, naked, her feet sliced by the rocks and the stabbing talons of the desert plants, but she couldn’t outrun a helicopter.

That was the most humiliating night of her life. She was herded along with a hundred other people toward a line of Border Patrol jeeps and she stood there naked and bleeding, every eye on her, until someone gave her a blanket to cover herself. Twenty minutes later she was back on the other side of the fence.

Bitter reflections. She continued down the road, thinking to duck off onto one of the hilly side streets to her right, as she’d done yesterday. There were backyard gardens there, fruit trees, tomatoes and peppers and squash. She didn’t mean to steal. She knew it was wrong. And she’d never stolen a thing in her life.

Until yesterday.

 

 

 

The voices echoed through the confined space of the ravine as if it were a public bath, high-pitched with excitement, almost squealing: “Hey, took—didn’t I tell you?” “What—you find something?” “What the fuck you think that is—a fucking fireplace—and look, a fucking blanket!”

Cándido crouched there behind the rocks, afraid to breathe, trembling as uncontrollably as if he’d suddenly been plunged into an ice bath, and all he could think of was America. He’d been caught three times before—once in L.A., once in Arizona, and then with America just over the Tijuana fence—and the fear of that took his breath away and turned his stomach over yet again. It wasn’t himself he was afraid for, it was her. For him it was nothing. A pain in the ass, sure, a bus ride to the border, his meager possessions scattered to the winds—but how would he get back to his wife? A hundred and eighty miles and no money, not a cent. There might be a beating. The
gabachos
could be brutal—big men with little blond mustaches and hate in their eyes—but usually they were just bored, just going through the motions. A beating he could take—even now, even with his face and his arm and the shit pouring out of him—but it was América he trembled for.

What would happen to her? How would he find her? If they’d caught her already—at the labor exchange, walking along the road—she could be on a bus even now. And worse: if they hadn’t caught her and she came back here, back to nothing, what then? She’d think he’d deserted her, run off from his responsibilities like a cock on the loose, and what love could survive that? They should have made a contingency plan, figured out a place to meet in Tijuana, a signal of some kind ... but they hadn’t. He listened to the voices and gritted his teeth.

“Hey, dude, check this out—”

“What?”

“Look at this shit.”

But wait a minute—these weren’t the voices of INS agents, of the police, of grown men ... no, there was something in the timbre, something harsh and callow in the way the words seemed to claw for air as if they were choking on them, something adolescent ... Cándido stealthily pushed himself to a sitting position, pulled up his trousers and crept forward on hands and knees to a place where he could peer between the rocks without being detected. What he saw got him breathing again. Two figures, no uniforms. Baggy shorts, hi-top sneakers, big black billowing T-shirts, legs and arms pale in the slashing sun as they bent to his things, lifted them above their heads and flung them, one by one, into the creek. First the blanket, then the grill he’d salvaged from an abandoned refrigerator, then his rucksack with his comb and toothbrush and a change of clothes inside, and then América’s things.

“Shit, man, one of them’s a girl,” the bigger one said, holding up América’s everyday dress, blue cotton washed so many times it was almost white. In that moment Cándido confirmed what his ears had suspected: these weren’t men; they were boys, overgrown boys. The one holding the dress out before him was six feet at least, towering, all limbs and feet and with a head shaved to the ears and
gabacho-
colored hair gone long on top—
redheads,
did they all have to be redheads?

“Fucking Beaners. Rip it up, man. Destroy it.”

The other one was shorter, big in the shoulders and chest, and with the clear glassy cat’s eyes so many of the
gringos
inherited from their mothers, the
gringas
from Sweden and Holland and places like that. He had a mean pinched face, the face of an insect under the magnifying glass—bland at a distance, lethal up close. The bigger one tore the dress in two, balled the halves and flung them at the other one, and they hooted and capered up and down the streambed like apes that had dropped from the trees. Before they were done they even bent to the rocks of the fireplace Cándido had built and heaved them into the stream too.

Cándido waited a long while before emerging. They’d been gone half an hour at least, their shrieks and obscenities riding on up the walls of the canyon till finally they blended with the distant hum of the traffic and faded away. His stomach heaved on him again, and he had to crouch down with the pain of it, but the spasm passed. After a moment he got up and waded into the stream to try to recover his things, and it was then that he noticed their parting gift, a message emblazoned on the rocks in paint that dripped like blood. The letters were crude and the words in English, but there was no mistaking the meaning:

 

BEANERS DIE

DELANEY COULDN’T FEEL BAD FOR LONG, NOT UP here where the night hung close round him and the crickets thundered and the air off the Pacific crept up the hills to drive back the lingering heat of the day. There were even stars, a cluster here and there fighting through the wash of light pollution that turned the eastern and southern borders of the night yellow, as if a whole part of the world had gone rancid. To the north and east lay the San Fernando Valley, a single endless plane of parallel boulevards, houses, mini-malls and streetlights, and to the south lay the rest of Los Angeles, ad infinitum. There were no streetlights in Arroyo Blanco—that was one of the attractions, the rural feel, the sense that you were somehow separated from the city and wedded to the mountains—and Delaney never felt the lack of them. He didn’t carry a flashlight either. He enjoyed making his way through the dark streets, his eyes adjusting to the shapes and shadows of the world as it really was, reveling in the way the night defined itself in the absence of artificial light and the ubiquitous blast of urban noise.