The Tortilla Curtain, page 7
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 hatuit qhes and e 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
5
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.
Though the walk had calmed him, he couldn't suppress a sudden pounding in his chest as he passed the Dagolian place--heedless people, slobs--and turned up Piñon Drive, conscious once again of the burden in the pocket of his windbreaker. His house sat at the end of Piñon, in a cul-de-sac that marked the last frontier of urban development, and the chirring of the crickets seemed louder here, the darkness more complete. As if to prove the point, a great horned owl began to hoot softly from the trees behind him. Someone's sprinklers went on with a hiss. High overhead, a jet climbing out of LAX cut a tear in the sky. Delaney had just begun to relax again when a car suddenly turned into the street from Robles Drive, high beams obliterating the night. He glanced over his shoulder, squinted into the light and kept on walking.
The car was moving, but barely. Its exhaust rumbled menacingly, all that horsepower held in check, and from behind the rolled-up windows came the bottom-heavy thump of rap music--no words, no instrument, no melody discernible, just a thump. Delaney kept walking, annoyed all over again. Why couldn't they pass by already and let the night close back over him? Why couldn't he have a minute's peace even in his own neighborhood?
The car pulled slowly alongside him, and he could see that it was some sort of American car, older, a big boat of a thing with mag wheels and an elaborate metal-flake paint job. The windows were smoked and he couldn't see inside. What did they want--directions? No face was visible. No one asked. He cursed under his breath, then picked up his pace, but the car seemed to hover there beside him, the speakers sucking up all available sound and then pumping it back out again, _ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.__ The car stayed even with him for what seemed an eternity, then it gradually accelerated, made the end of the street, wheeled round and rolled slowly back down the block again--_ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump--__and this time the lights, still on bright, glared directly into Delaney's eyes. He kept going and the car crept past him again and finally faded to a pair of taillights swinging back onto Robles. It wasn't till Delaney was inside, and the door locked behind him, that he thought to be afraid.
Who would be up here at this hour in a car like that? He thought of the solemn fat man at the meeting and his litany of woes, the bringer of bad tidings, the Cassandra of Arroyo Blanco. Was it burglars, then? Muggers? Gangbangers? Is that what they were? As he crossed the kitchen and surreptitiously slipped Sacheverell's foreleg into the freezer beneath a bag of frozen peas--he'd bury it tomorrow, after Kyra went off to work--he couldn't help thinking about the gate. If there was a gate that car wouldn't have been there, and who knew what he'd just escaped--a beating, robbery, murder? He poured himself a glass of orange juice, took a bite of the macaroni and cheese Jordan had left on his plate at dinner. And then he saw the light in the bedroom: Kyra was waiting up for him.
He felt a stirring in his groin. It was nearly eleven, and normally she was in bed by nine-thirty. That meant one thing: she was propped up against the pillows in one of the sheer silk teddies he'd bought her at Christmas for just such an occasion as this, reading Anaïs Nin's erotica or paging through one of the illustrated sex manuals she kept in a box under the bed--waiting, and eager. There was something about the little tragedies of life, the opening of the floodgates of emotion, that seemed to unleash her libido. For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs--and who was Delaney to argue? She'd been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gallbladder operation, and he could remember never wanting to leave the motel room they'd rented across the street from the hospital--it was the next best thing to a second honeymoon. Smaller sorrows aroused her too--having a neighbor list her house with a rival company, discovering a dent in the door of her Lexus, seeing Jordan laid low with the flu or swollen up with the stigmata of poison oak. Delaney could only imagine what the death of a dog would do to her.
He came into the room with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, ready for anything. She was there, just as he'd pictured her, the pillows fluffed, the silk clinging to her breasts, her eyes moist with desire as she lifted them from the page. “How was the meeting?” she whispered.
He watched, transfixed, as she swung her smooth tanned legs over the side of the bed, set her book down on the night table and snapped off the reading light, leaving only the sensual flicker of a scented candle to guide them. “The meeting?” he echoed, and he was whispering too, he couldn't help himself. “It was nothing. The usual.”
And now she was on her feet, her arms encircling his shoulders, her body straining against his. “I thought”--her voice cracked and tiny--“I thought they were... debating the... gate and all?”
Her mouth was warm. He pressed himself to her like a teenager at a dance, oblivious of gates, coyotes, dogs and Mexicans. She moved against him, and then she pulled away to perch again at the edge of the bed, her fingers busy at his zipper. After a long pause, he whispered, “That's right... and you know how I feel about it, but--” And though his pants were down around his ankles and they were kissing again and he was caressing her through the black liquid silk, he couldn't help thinking about that car and the low rumbling menace of it and how that modified his views vis-à-vis gated communities, public spaces and democratic access... He lifted the silk from her thighs. “I guess I'm not sure anymore--”
She was wet. He sank into her. The candle sent distorted shadows floating up and down the walls. “Poor Sacheverell,” she breathed, and then suddenly she froze. Her eyes, inches from his, flashed open. “He's dead, isn't he?”
There'd been movement, warmth, a slow delicious friction, but now all movement ceased. What could he say? He tried to kiss her, but she fought his mouth away. He let out a sigh. “Yes.”
“For sure?”
“For sure.”
“You found him, didn't you? Tell me. Quick.”
She was clutching him still, but there was no passion in it--at least not the sort of passion he'd anticipated. Another sigh. “A piece of him. His foreleg, actually. The left.”
She drew in a sudden sharp breath--it was as if she'd burned herself or been pricked with a pin--and then she pushed him aside and rolled out from under him. Before he knew what was happening she was on her feet, rigid with anger. “I knew it! You lied to me!”
“I didn't lie, I just--”
“Where is it?”
The question took him by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“The”--her voice broke--“what's left of him.”
He'd done all he could. He would have had to tell her in the morning anyway. “In the freezer,” he said.
And then he was standing naked in the kitchen, watching his wife peer into the palely glowing depths of the freezer, her negligee derealized in the light of a single frigid bulb. He tried to nuzzle up against her but she pushed him impatiently away. “Where?” she demanded. “I don't see anything.”
Miserable, his voice pitched low: “Third shelf down, behind the peas. It's wrapped up in a Baggie.”
He watched her poke tentatively through the bright plastic sacks of vegetables until she found it, a nondescript lump of hair, bone, gristle and meat wrapped like a chicken leg in its transparent shroud. She held it in the palm of her hand, her eyes swollen with emotion, the heavy breath of the freezer swirling ghostlike round her bare legs. Delaney didn't know what to say. He felt guilty somehow, culpable, as if he'd killed the dog himself, as if the whole thing were bound up in venality, lust, the shirking of responsibility and duty, and yet at the same time the scene was irresistibly erotic. Despite himself, he began to stiffen. But then, as Kyra stood there in a daze and the freezer breathed in and out and the pale wedge of light from the open door pressed their trembling shadows to the wall, there came a clacking of canine nails on the polished floorboards, and Osbert, the survivor, poked his head in the door, looking hopeful.
