The Tortilla Curtain, page 28
Something was happening. They were asking him something, pointing at the turkey and asking him--what? What did they want from him? Cándido glanced round in a growing panic: everyone in the line was watching him. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.
The one nearest him, the one with the hoops in his ear, burst out laughing, and then the other one, the first one, joined in. “Oh, man,” the first one said, “oh, man,” and the laughter twisted in Cándido like a knife. Why did they always have to do this? he thought, and his face went dark.
Now the checkout girl chimed in: “I don't think we can do that, sir,” she said. “It's for the customer who made the purchase. If he”--and she indicated Cándido with a flick of her enameled fingers--“rings up fifty dollars he gets his turkey, just like you. But if you don't want one--”
“God, a turkey,” the first one said, and he was giggling so hard he could barely get the words out, “what a concept.”
“Hey, come on, move it, will you?” a tall black man with a knitted brow crowed from the back of the line.
The man with the rings shook out his long hair, looked back at the black man and gave him the richest smile in the world. “Yeah,” he said finally, turning back to the checker, “yeah, I want my turkey,” and Cándido looked away from his eyes and his leering smile and the turkey found its way into a plastic bag. But the men didn't leave, not yet. They stood just off to the side of the checker and watched her ring up Cándido's purchases with two frozen grins on their faces, and then, as Cándido tried to ease past them--he didn't want any trouble, he didn't, not now, not ever--the first man hefted the big frozen twelve-pound turkey and dropped it into Cándido's arms and Cándido had no choice but to grab the dead weight of it, rock-hard and cold through to the bone, and he almost dropped his bottles of beer, his precious beer, and still he didn't understand.
“Happy Thanksgiving, dude,” the one with the rings said, and then the two of them were out the door, their long gringo legs scissoring the light, and the hot wind rushed in.
Cándido was dazed, and he just stood there looking at all those white faces looking at him, trying to work out the permutations of what had just happened. Then he knew and accepted it in the way he would have swallowed a piece of meat without cutting it up, gulping it down because it was there on the tines of the fork. He cradled the lump of the frozen bird under one arm and hurried out the door and across the lot before someone came and took it away from him. But what luck, he thought, skittering down the road, what joy, what a coup! This would put a smile on América's face, this would do it, the skin crusted and basted in its own juices, and he would build up the coals first, make an inferno and let it settle into a bed of coals, and then he would roast the _pavo__ on a spit, slow-roast it, sitting right there and turning the spit till it was brown all over and not a blackened spot on it.
He hurried down the trail, and nothing bothered him now, not his hip or his cheekbone or the wind in his face, thinking of the beer and the turkey and América. “Gobble, gobble,” he called, sloshing across the pool to where she sat like a statue in the sand, “gobble, gobble, gobble, and guess what _papacito's__ got for you!”
And she smiled. She actually smiled at the sight of the thing, stripped of its head and its feet and its feathers, rolled up into one big ball of meat, turkey meat, a feast for two. She took a sip of beer when he offered it to her and she pressed his bicep with her hand as he told her the insuperable tale of the turkey, and already the flames were rising, the wind sucking them higher as it tore through the canyon, and should he get up from the sand and the beer and America and all the birds in the trees and the frogs croaking at the side of the pool and feed it some more?
He got to his feet. The wind snatched at the fire and the fire roared. He went up and down the streambed in search of wood, rapping the bigger branches against the trunks of the trees to break them down, and every time he came back to feed the fire America was sitting there cradling the pale white bird as if she'd given birth to it, kneading the cold flesh and fighting to work the thick green spit through the back end of it. Yes, he told her, yes, that's the way, and he was happy, as happy as he'd ever been, right up to the moment when the wind plucked the fire out of its bed of coals and with a roar as loud as all the furnaces of hell set it dancing in the treetops.
PART THREE
Socorro
1
“BUT IT'S ONLY A COUPLE OF BLOCKS,” DELANEY WAS saying to the steamed-over bathroom mirror while Kyra moved behind him in the bedroom, trying on clothes. He'd towel-dried his hair and now he was shaving. Even with the hallway door closed he could smell the turkey, the entire house alive with the aroma of roasting bird, an aroma that took him back to his childhood and his grandparents' sprawling apartment in Yonkers, the medley of smells that would hit him in the stairwell and grow increasingly potent with each step of the three flights up until it exploded when the door swung open to reveal his grandmother standing there in her apron. Nothing had ever smelled so good--no French bakery in the first hour of light, no restaurant, no barbecue or clambake. “It seems ridiculous to take the car.”
Kyra appeared in the bathroom doorway. She was in a black slip and she'd put her hair up. “Hurry, can't you,” she said, “I need the mirror. And yes, we're taking the car, of course we're taking the car--with this wind? My hair would be all over the place.”
Jordan was in the living room, occupied with the tape-delayed version of the Macy's parade, Orbalina was scrambling to set the table and clean up the culinary detritus in the kitchen, and Kyra's mother--Kit--was in the guest room, freshening up. Delaney cracked the blinds. The day was clear, hot, wind-driven. “You've got a point,” he conceded.
Back then, he'd always worn a suit, tie and overcoat, even when he was five or six, as the yellowed black-and-white photos testified. But those were more formal times. Plus it was cold. There'd be ice on the lakes now and the wind off the Hudson would have a real bite to it. But what to wear today--to Dominick Flood's cocktail party? Delaney sank his face into the towel, padded into the bedroom on bare feet and pushed through the things in his closet. This was California, after all--you could wear hip boots and a top hat and nobody would blink twice. He settled finally on a pair of baggy white cotton trousers and a short-sleeve sport shirt Kyra had bought him. The shirt carved alternate patches of white and burgundy across his chest and over his shoulders, and in each burgundy patch the multiplied figures of tiny white jockeys leapt, genuflected and gamboled their way through a series of obscure warm-up exercises. It was California all the way.
There must have been a hundred people at Dominick Flood's, two o'clock in the afternoon, umbrellas flapping over the tables set up in the backyard. A string quartet was stationed under the awning that shaded the den, and the awning was flapping too. Most of the guests were packed in near the bar, where two men in tuxedos and red ties were manipulating bottles with professional ease. To the left of the bar, along the interior wall and running the length of the room, was a table laden with enough food for six Thanksgiving feasts, including a whole roast suckling pig with a mango in its mouth and fresh-steamed lobsters surrounded by multicolored platters of sashimi and sushi. Dominick himself, resplendent in a white linen suit that flared at the ankle to hide the little black box on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service, stood just inside the door, greeting guests, a long-stemmed glass in his hand. Delaney maneuvered Kyra and her mother through the crowd to introduce them.
“Ahh, Delaney,” Dominick cried, taking his hand theatrically even as he shifted his attention to Kyra and her mother. “And this must be Mrs. Mossbacher? And--?”
“Kit,” Kyra's mother put in, taking Flood's hand, “Kit Menaker. I'm visiting from San Francisco.”
The string quartet started up then, sawing harshly into something jangling and modern, their faces strained against the rush of wind and the indifferent clamor of the party, and Delaney tuned out the conversation. Kyra's mother, fifty-five, blond and divorced, with Kyra's nose and legs and an exaggerated self-presence, was the single most coquettish woman Delaney had ever known. She would tangle herself like a vine round Dominick Flood, whose incipient bachelorhood she could smell out in some uncanny extrasensory way, and she would almost certainly invite him to their little dinner party, only to be disappointed and maybe even a bit shocked by the black manacle on his ankle. And that, of course, would only whet her appetite. “Yes,” he heard Kyra say, “but I was just a little girl then,” and Kit chimed in with a high breathless giggle that was like a warcry.
Delaney excused himself and drifted off toward the food, picking at a few things here and there--he never could resist a bite of _ahi__ tuna or a spicy scallop roll if it was good, and this was very good, the best--but pacing himself for the feast to come. He smiled at a stranger or two, murmured an apology when he jostled a woman over the carcass of the pig, exchanged sound bites about the weather and watched the bartender pour him a beer, but all the while he was fretting. He kept envisioning the turkey going up in flames, the potatoes congealing into something like wet concrete, Jordan sinking into boredom and distracting Orbalina with incessant demands for chocolate milk, pudding, Cup O' Noodles, a drink of juice. And their guests. He hadn't yet seen the Jardines or the Cherrystones (though he could hear Jack Cherrystone's booming basso profundo from somewhere out on the back lawn), but he was sure they'd fill up here and push their plates away at dinner. Delaney wasn't very good at enjoying himself, not in a situation like this, and he stood there in the middle of the crush for a moment, took a deep breath, let his shoulders go slack and swung his head from side to side to clear it.
He was feeling lost and edgy and maybe even a bit guilty to be imbibing so early in the afternoon, even on a day dedicated to self-indulgence like this one, when he felt a pressure at his elbow and turned to see Jack, Erna and Jack Jr. arrayed in smiling wonder behind him. “Delaney,” Jack sang out, holding on to the last syllable as if he couldn't let it go, “you look lost.”
Jack was dressed. Three-piece suit, crisp white button-down shirt, knotted tie. His wife, a catlike bosomy woman who always insisted on the two-cheek, continental style of greeting and would clutch your shoulders with tiny fists until she'd been accommodated, as she did now, was dressed. Delaney saw that she was wearing a shroudlike evening gown, black satin, and at least sixty percent of her jewelry collection. Even Jack Jr., with his hi-tops, earrings and ridiculous haircut, was dressed, in a sport coat that accented the new spread of his shoulders and a tie he must have inherited _from__ his father.
“I _am__ lost,” Delaney admitted. He hefted the beer and grinned. “It's too early in the afternoon for me to be drinking--you know me and alcohol, Jack--and I've got a six-course dinner to worry about. Which you're going to love, by the way. Old New England right here in California. Or old New York, anyway.”
“Relax, Delaney,” Erna purred, “it's Thanksgiving. Enjoy the party.”
Jack Jr. gave him a sick grin. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room. His voice cracked when he excused himself and drifted toward the suckling pig like some incubus of the food chain.
“I see from the letters this month you've been taking some heat on that coyote column,” Jack said, and a glass of wine seemed to materialize magically in his hand. Erna grinned at Delaney, waved at someone over his shoulder.
Leave it to Jack to bore right in. Delaney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. There've been something like thirty letters, most of them critical, but not all. But that's something. I must have pushed some buttons.”
Actually, the response had surprised him. He'd never generated--provoked?--more than half a dozen letters before, all from literal-minded biologists taking issue with his characterization of the dusky-footed wood rat or his use of the common name of some plant in preference to the scientific. The readers, die-hard preservationists to the last man, woman and child, had seemed to feel he was advocating some sort of control on coyote populations, and though he'd been upset over Osbert when he wrote the piece, he didn't see the column as being at all environmentally incorrect. After the tenth letter had come in, he'd sat down and reread the column. Twice. And there was nothing there. They just weren't getting it--they weren't reading it in the spirit it was intended. He wasn't pushing for population controls--controls were futile and the historical record proved it. As he'd indicated. He was just elucidating the problem, opening up the issue to debate. Certainly it wasn't the coyotes that were to blame, it was us--hadn't he made that clear?
Jack was grinning, his lips ever so slightly drawn back to reveal a strategic flash of enamel. Delaney recognized the expression. It was skeptical, faintly ironic, meant to convey to judges, jurors and district attorneys alike that the issue had yet to be decided. “So what is it, Delaney--should we bring back the traps and quotas or not? You've lost two dogs, and how many others here have lost pets too?” He made a sweeping gesture to take in the room, the house, the community at large.
“That's right,” Kyra said, slipping up behind Delaney and taking hold of his arm, “and that's where we had our falling-out over the wall--or actually, it was war, full-on, no-holds-barred.”
Jack laughed. Erna laughed. Delaney managed a rueful smile as greetings went round and the string quartet built to a frenzy in the _con fuoco.__ “But really,” Kyra said, unwilling to let it go, “don't you feel safer now, all of you--Jack, Erna, Delaney? Don't you?” she said, turning her face to him. “Admit it.”
Delaney reddened. Shrugged again. The beer glass in his hand was heavy as a cannonball. “I know when I'm licked,” he was saying, but Erna Jardine had already leapt in to answer for him. “Of course we do,” she said. “We all do. The wall's barely been completed and yet I'm breathing easier to know there'll never be another rattlesnake in my garage. Or another break-in.” She gave them a pious look. “Oh, I know that doesn't mean we can let our guard down, but still, it's one more barrier, isn't it?” she said, and then she leaned into Kyra and lowered her voice confidentially. “Did you hear about Shelly Schourek? It was a follow-home. Right down the hill in Calabasas.”
The party went on. Delaney fretted. Had a second beer. Jack Cherrystone joined them and gave a farcical synopsis of a movie he'd just done the trailer for, yet another apocalyptic futuro cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles in the twenty-first century. People gathered round when he shifted from the merely thunderous tones of his everyday voice to the mountain-toppling hysteria of the one he wielded professionally. “They brokered babies!” he roared, “ate their young, made love an irredeemable sin!” Jack's eyes bugged out. He shook his jowls and waved his hands as if he'd dipped them in oil. It was a real performance, all of that voice pouring out of so small a vessel, and Delaney found himself laughing, laughing till he felt something uncoil inside him, overcooked turkeys, mucilaginous potatoes and other culinary disasters notwithstanding. He finished the second beer and wondered if he should have a third.
That must have been about four in the afternoon--Delaney couldn't place the time exactly in the frantic sequence of events that followed, but he remembered looking at his watch about then and thinking he had to excuse himself soon if there was any hope of serving dinner by six. And then the sirens went off and the first of the helicopters sliced overhead and someone jumped up on one of the tables in the backyard and shouted, “Fire! Fire in the canyon!”
Kyra had been enjoying herself. Delaney might have looked constipated, wearing what she liked to think of as his night-before-the-exams face, sweating the little details of their dinner party--the firmness of the turkey, the condition of the silverware and god knew what else--but she was kicking back, not a care in the world. Everything's under control, she kept telling him, don't worry. She'd had everything organized for days, right down to the last detail--all it would take was to reheat a few things in the microwave and uncork the wines. She'd already finished her run for the day and swum forty laps too (in anticipation of taking on a few superfluous calories), the flowers were cut and arranged, the turkey was in the oven, and Orbalina was more than capable of handling any little emergency that might arise. And while she could have been out showing houses--holidays were always hot, even Thanksgiving, though among holidays it ranked next to last, just ahead of Christmas--she figured she deserved a break. When you worked ten and twelve hours a day, six days a week, and sat by the telephone on the seventh and hadn't taken a real vacation in five years, not even for your honeymoon, you had to give something back to your family--and yourself. Her mother was here, her sister was on the way. She was giving a dinner party. It was time to relax.
Besides, she'd always been curious about Dominick Flood. Erna was forever dropping his name, and there was always something hushed and secretive about the whole business--his conviction, the anklet he had to wear, his wife leaving him--and though he was known to entertain frequently (what else could he do?) Kyra had never met him till now or been inside the house either. She had to admit she was favorably impressed. The house was tasteful, nothing splashy or showy, quintessentially Southwestern, with a few really fine details like the Talavera tiles in the kitchen set off by a pair of ancient _retablos__ depicting a saint at prayer, and it was interesting to see what he'd done with a floor plan identical to theirs. And the man himself had proven to be no disappointment either. Oozing charm. And with something dangerous in his eyes, the way he glanced at you, the easy crackle of his voice. He'd made one convert, at least--her mother hadn't left his side since they got there. It was a pity he couldn't come to dinner.
