The Tortilla Curtain, page 35
She dreaded the idea after her last experience, but just the mention of the name--Canoga Park--made her see the shops again, the girls on the street, the little restaurant that was like a café back at home. Somebody there would know what to do, somebody would help. “It's awfully far,” she said.
He said nothing. He was staring into the fire, his lips pursed, hands clasped in his lap.
“What did you do with the cord?” she said after a moment.
“Cord? What cord?”
“You know, the baby's cord. The umbilical.”
“I buried it. Along with the rest. What do you think?”
“I wanted that cord. For Chalma. I wanted to make a pilgrimage and hang it in the tree and pray to the Virgin to give Socorro a long and happy life.” And she saw the tree in her mind, the great ancient ahuehuete tree beside the road, with the crowds of pilgrims around it and the vendors and the hundreds upon hundreds of dried birth cords hanging from the branches like confetti. Socorro would never know that tree; she'd never be blessed. América had to catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it. “I hate it here,” she whispered. “God, how I hate it.”
Cándido didn't answer. He made coffee with sugar and condensed milk and they drank it out of _frijole__ cans, and then he cut up an onion, some _chiles__ and a tomato and cooked the rice, and she wouldn't get up, wouldn't help him, even if he'd tried to force her.
It rained the next day too, all day, and when she went out to relieve herself and bury the baby's diaper, the earth was like glue. For all this time it had been powder and now it was glue. She stood there in the rain, looking out over the misted canyon, the roofs of the houses, the barren scar of Cándido's fire, and the rain smelled good, smelled of release and reprieve--smelled, ever so faintly, of home. She had to get away, even if it meant bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border, and if she starved along the way, then that was God's will.
It was dark inside, dark as a hole in the ground, and when the rain slackened to a drizzle, she brought the baby outside for a breath of air. Sitting there high on the hillside, watching the clouds roll out over the canyon all the way to the sea and the cars creep like toys up the slick canyon road, she felt better. This was America and it was a beautiful place, drier and hotter than Tepoztlán in the dry season and colder in the wet, but she felt that there was peace here if only she could find it. Peace and prosperity too.
She looked down then into her daughter's face and the baby was staring past her, staring up and away into a distance she couldn't possibly contain, and it was in that moment that America felt the naked sharp claws of apprehension take hold bf her. She passed a hand over her daughter's face and her daughter didn't blink. She bent her own face to Socorro's and tugged at those dull black irises with her own and they only stared, as if there were a wall between them. And then the baby blinked and sneezed and the eyes stared at nothing.
Cándido told her they were eating rabbit, but rabbit was hard to come by up here. Those other little four-legged beasts, the ones with the bells on their collars to warn away the birds, they were easier to catch. All you had to do was wait till midnight, slip over the wall and whisper, “Kitty, here, kitty.” So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable. He'd stared so long and so hard at that strip of road out front of the post office, waiting for the apparition of Señor Willis's Corvair, that it wasn't a real place anymore, but a scene he'd devised in his brain--if he blinked, it wouldn't exist. There were no braceros there, not a one, and the word must have been out. Cándido didn't dare show himself and if he didn't show himself how could he get work? And if he couldn't get work, no matter how many things he borrowed from the houses beyond the wall or how many cans he collected in the bushes, sooner or later they would starve. If only he could call Señor Willis, but Señor Willis didn't have a phone. He could go back to Canoga Park, but there was no work there, he knew that already, and a hundred men ready to kill for whatever work might turn up. A little money, that was all he needed--with a little money he might think about going back to Tepoztlán, at least for the winter. His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América-he'd boasted to her, he'd promised her things--America would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father's house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some _chingado__ her old man owed money to.
Cándido took the risk. He waited till the rain began to crackle on the pavement and the hair hung wet in his eyes, and then he stepped out of the bushes, crossed the road and stood beneath the overhang out front of the post office, stamping his feet and hugging his shoulders to keep the circulation going. Surely somebody would take pity on him and bring him home to work in a warm basement, putting up drywall or painting or cleaning out the trash. He waited, wet through and shivering, and every _gringo__ who got out of his car and ducked into the post office gave him a look of unremitting hate. If they didn't know he'd started the fire personally, they all suspected it, and where there was once tolerance and human respect, where there was the idea of community and a labor exchange and people to support it, now there was only fear and resentment. They didn't want to hire him, they didn't want to see him warm, they didn't want to see him fed and clothed and with a place to sleep at night that was better than a ditch or a shack hidden in the weeds--they wanted to see him dead. Or no: they didn't want to see him at all. He waited there through the afternoon, and when he couldn't take the cold anymore he went into the lobby of the post office, a public place, and a man in a blue uniform stepped from behind the counter and told him in Spanish that he had to leave.
America was strange that night. He huddled next to her, trying to stop shivering, and she didn't mention going home, not once, though she'd driven him half-mad with it for the past two weeks. Now it was the baby--that was all she could talk about. The baby needed to go to a clinic, the baby needed a doctor--a _gringo__ doctor--to look at her. But was the baby sick? he wanted to know. She looked all right to him. No, América gasped, no, she's not sick, but we need to have a doctor check her--just in case. And how will we get to this doctor, how will we pay? He was irritated, feeling harassed, squeezed dry. She didn't know. She didn't care. But the baby had to have a doctor.
In the morning, Cándido put a pot of rainwater on the grill to boit--he'd run a length of PVC pipe off the development's sprinkler system, easiest thing in the world, what with the saw and the cement and all the elbows and connectors right there in the shed for the taking, but he didn't use it if he didn't have to--and he skidded down the muddy slope, keeping low to the cover, and went back to the post office. It was overcast, with a cold breeze coming down out of the mountains, but the rain had tapered off at dawn and that was a relief. Cándido leaned against the brick front of the building, watching the earthworms crawl up out of the saturated earth to die on the pavement and trying his best to look eager and nonthreatening to the _gringos__ and _gringas__ who hurried in and out the door with Christmas packages in their arms. He could hear the creek where it cut into the bank out back of the post office before whipping round to pass under the bridge and plunge into the cut of the gorge. It was a sinister sound, a hiss that rose to a roar and fell back again as a crippled tree or boulder slammed along the bed of the stream and hung up on some hidden obstruction. They would have been flooded out if they were still camped below, flushed down the canyon like waste in a toilet, battered against the rocks and washed out to sea for the crabs to feed on. He thought about that, watching the earthworms wriggling on the pavement and the postal patrons stepping delicately through the puddles as if dirtying their shoes was the worst tragedy that could befall them, and he wondered if the fire hadn't been a blessing in disguise. Maybe there was a Providence looking out for him after all.
The thought cheered him. He began to smile at the people going in and out, combing his mustache down with his fingers and showing his teeth. “Work?” he said to one woman riding up off her heels like a gymnast, but she turned away as if he were invisible, as if it were the wind talking to her. But he kept on, his smile growing increasingly desperate, until the man in the blue uniform--the same one as yesterday, a _gabacho__ with a ponytail and turquoise eyes--came out and told him in textbook Spanish that he was going to have to leave if he didn't have business at the post office. Cándido shrugged his shoulders, grinning still--he couldn't help it, it was like a reflex. “I'm sorry if I'm bothering anybody,” he said, relieved to be explaining himself, relieved to be talking in his own language and thinking that maybe this was the break he was looking for, that maybe this man would be another Señor Willis, “but I need work to feed my wife and baby and I was wondering if you knew of anything around here?”
The man looked at him then, really looked at him, but all he said was “This isn't a good place for you to be.”
Dispirited, Cándido crossed the road and shambled over the bridge in the direction of the Chinese market and the lumberyard beyond it. He'd hardly even noticed the bridge before--it was just a section of the road suspended over the dead brush of the streambed--but now its function was revealed to him as the churning yellow water pounded at its concrete abutments and the boulders slammed into it with a rumble that was like the grinding of the earth's molars--all through the summer and fall there had been no water, and now suddenly there was too much. Cándido stood for a while outside the Chinese store, though he was nervous about that, and sure enough, the old Chinaman, the one with the goggle glasses and the suspenders to hold the pants up over his skinny hips, came out to shoo him away in his weird up-and-down language. But Cándido wouldn't give up and so he stood just down the street from the lumberyard, hoping some contractor picking up materials might see him there and give him work. It wasn't a propitious place, even in the best of times, and Cándido had never seen a single _bracero__ hunkered over his heels here. Rumor had it that the lumberyard boss would call the cops the minute he saw a Mexican in the lot.
Cándido stood there for two hours, trying to attract the attention of every pickup that pulled into the lumberyard, so desperate now he didn't care if La _Migra__ picked him up or not, but no one gave him even so much as a glance. His feet hurt and his stomach rumbled. He was cold. It must have been about half-past four when he finally gave it up and started back along the road, looking for cans to redeem and thinking he would watch for his chance to stick his head in the dumpster out back of the _paisano's__ market--he had to bring something back with him, anything. Every once in a while they would throw out a bag of onions with nothing worse than a few black spots on them or potatoes that had sprouted eyes--you never knew. He was keeping his head down and watching his feet, thinking maybe there'd be some meat that wouldn't be so bad if you boiled it long enough or some bones and fat from the beef they'd trimmed out, when a car swerved in across the shoulder just ahead of him.
He froze, thinking of the accident all over again, wet roads, _norteamericanos__ in a hurry, always in a hurry, and the next car blared its horn in a shrill mechanical curse because the rear end of the first car, the one right there on the shoulder, was sticking out into the roadway and all the endless line of cars coming up the hill with their wipers clapping and headlights glaring had to break the flow to swerve around it. But now the door was swinging open and another horn blared and Cándido was poisoned with déjà vu: this inescapable white, the fiery red brake lights and the yellow blinker, it was all so familiar. Before he had a chance to react, there he was, the _pelirrojo__ who'd run him down all those months ago and then sent his gangling ugly _pelirrojo__ of a son down into the canyon to harass and torment him, and the look on his face was pure malice. “You!” he shouted. “You stay right there!”
7
“You!” DELANEY SHOUTED. “YOU STAY RIGHT THERE!” He'd been coming up the road from the nursery on the Coast Highway, the trunk crammed with bags of ammonium sulfate and fescue seed, his view out the back partially obscured by a pair of areca palms for the front hallway, when he spotted the hunched shoulders, the weather-bleached khaki shirt and the pale soles of the Mexican's dark feet working against the straps of his sandals. He slowed automatically, without thinking--could this be the man, was this him?--and then he jerked the wheel and felt the rear tires yaw away from him even as the driver behind him hit the horn, and he was up on the shoulder spewing gravel, his rear end sticking out in the road. Delaney didn't care. He didn't care about the hazard, didn't care about the other drivers or the wet road or his insurance rates--all he cared about was this Mexican, the man who'd invaded his life like some unshakable parasite, like a disease. It was here, almost at the very spot, that he'd flung himself under the wheels of the car, everything come full circle, and this time Delaney wasn't going to let him off, this time he had proof, photographic proof. “You stay right there!” Delaney roared, and he punched 911 into the car phone Kyra had given him as an early Christmas present.
The Mexican stood there dumbfounded, leaner and harder-looking than Delaney remembered him, the eyes black and startled, the thick brush of the mustache making a wound of his mouth. “Hello?” Delaney bawled into the receiver, “my name is Delaney Mossbacher and I want to report a crime in progress--or no, an apprehension of a suspect--on Topanga Canyon Road near Topanga Village, just south of--” but before he could finish, the suspect had begun to move. The Mexican looked at Delaney, looked at the telephone in his hand, and then he just stepped right out into the traffic like a sleepwalker.
Delaney watched in shock as the high blue surging apparition of a pickup cab with a woman's face frozen behind the windshield framed the Mexican's spindly legs and humped-over torso in a portrait of unquenchable momentum, and then, at the last possible moment, veered away in a screeching, rattling, fishtailing blur that hit the guardrail and ricocheted into the back end of his Acura Vigor GS, his new milk-white Acura Vigor GS with the tan leather upholstery and only thirty-eight hundred and sixteen miles on the odometer, where it finally came to rest in all its trembling wide-bodied authority. And the Mexican? He was unscathed, jogging up the opposite side of the road while horns blared and bumpers kissed all up and down the frantically braking string of cars. It was the commuter's nightmare. It was Delaney's nightmare. “Hello, hello--are you there?” cried a voice through the speaker of the phone.
Delaney didn't call Kyra. He didn't call Jack. He didn't bother with Kenny Grissom or the body shop or even his insurer. As the rain started up again, a blanketing drizzle that seeped into his every pore, he stood at the side of the road and exchanged information with the woman in the pickup. She was in a rage, trembling all over, showing her teeth like a cornered rodent and stamping her feet in the mud. “What's wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you out of your mind stopping like that with your back end sticking halfway out across the road? And what's with your friend--is he drunk or something, just strolling right out in front of me without even turning his head? You're both drunk, you've got to be, and believe me you're in trouble, mister, and I'm going to demand the cops give you a breath test, right here and now--”
The policeman who showed up twenty minutes later was grim and harried. He questioned Delaney and the woman separately about the details of the accident, and Delaney tried to tell him about the Mexican, but the cop wasn't interested.
“I'm trying to tell you, it was this Mexican--he's crazy, he throws himself in front of cars to try and collect on the insurance, he's the one, and I've got a photograph, I caught him out front of Arroyo Blanco, that's where I live, where we've had all that trouble with graffiti lately?”
They were seated in the patrol car, Delaney in the passenger seat, the cop bent over his pad, laboriously writing out his report in a jagged left-handed script. The radio sputtered and crackled. Rain spilled across the windshield in sheets, drummed on the roof, really coming down now. There were accidents on the Coast Highway, Malibu Canyon Road, 101, the dispatcher's voice numb with the monotony of disaster. “Your vehicle was obstructing the road,” the cop said finally, and that was all.
Delaney sat in his car till the tow truck arrived; he showed the driver his Triple A card and then refused a ride home. “I'm going to walk,” he said, “it's only a mile and a half.”
The driver studied him a moment, then handed him a receipt and pulled the door closed. The rain had slackened, but Delaney was already wet through to the skin, the Gore-Tex jacket clinging to his shoulders like a sodden pelt, the hair stamped to his forehead and dancing round his ears in a lank red fringe. “Suit yourself,” the man said through the crack of the window, and then Delaney was walking up the shoulder of the road as the pale shell of his car faded away into the mist ahead of him. He was walking, but this time he wasn't merely walking to get somewhere, as on the torrid high-ceilinged summer morning when his first car was stolen--this time he had a purpose. This time--as he waited for a break in the traffic and dashed across the road--this time he was following a set of footprints up the muddy shoulder, very distinctive prints, unmistakable, cut in the rippled pattern of a tire tread.
Kyra could barely see the road. The rain had come up suddenly, closing off her view like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, and she had no choice but to hit her emergency flasher and pull off onto the shoulder to wait it out. She took advantage of the delay to thumb through her _Thomas Guide__ and compare the map with the directions Delaney had scrawled on the notepad by the telephone. It was just past four and she'd taken the afternoon off to do some Christmas shopping--business was slow, dead in the water, actually, and for as long as she could remember she'd been meaning to start making a little more time for her family and for herself too--and she'd volunteered to pick up Jordan at his friend's house. She didn't know the boy--he was a friend from school--and since Delaney had dropped Jordan off, she didn't know the house either. Or the street, which she was having trouble finding.
