The Tortilla Curtain, page 9
_I am excited. Bursting. Thrilling like a plucked string. For while I know these hills in the broad light of midday, and I know them in early morning and evening (and I've tasted them, as you might taste an exotic fruit) between the curtains of the night, this will be my first sojourn here under the stars. From the moment my wife drops me off at the Trippet Ranch trailhead with a kiss and a promise to come for me at nine the next morning, I feel a primeval sense of liberation, of release, and as I wend my way upward through the stands of undiscouraged shrubs, I can't help singing out their names in a sort of mantra--bush poppy, sumac, manzanita, ceanothus, chamise, redshanks__--_over and over again.__
_The mustard is an interloper here, by the way, an annual introduced by the Franciscan padres, who, so it is said, broadcast handfuls of seed along the Camino Real to mark the trail, but of course they had an ulterior motive too: this is the same mustard that winds up in a jar on our table. It blooms after the rains and transforms the hills, yellow flowers stretching to the horizon in pointillistic display, but by this time of the year it has already begun to fade. In a month there will be nothing left but shriveled leaves and dried-out stalks.__
_By contrast, the manzanita and toyon, with their lode of palatable berries, are on for the long haul, as are our two hardy members of the rose family, chamise__ (Adenostoma fasciculatum) _and redshanks__ (Adenostoma sparsifolium). _Tough customers, these. They deposit toxins in the soil to inhibit germination of competing plants and carry resins in their woody stems to feed the periodic brushfires that allow them to regenerate. They will see no rain__--_indeed, no moisture at all save for what little may drift in on the sea mist__--_till November or December. But there they are, holding the ground like an army keeping the sun at bay.__
_I will spend the night not at the prescribed campground (Musch Ranch), but in a more solitary place off the Santa Ynez Canyon Trail, with nothing more elaborate between me and terra firma than an old army blanket and a foam pad. Of course, unwelcome bed-fellows are always a concern up here, with rattlesnakes heading the list, but certain oversized members of the Arachnida class--tarantulas and scorpions, specifically__--_can be equally disconcerting.__
_A friend once joked that the scorpion has evolved his pincers in order to seize the big toe of the unsuspecting Homo sapiens and gain purchase for the fine penetrating over-the-back sting. Look at a scorpion lying there in the aperture of his burrow or scuttling about in the beam of a flashlight, and you might almost think it true. But like everything else in this Creation, the scorpion is beautiful in his way and beautifully adapted to seizing, paralyzing and absorbing his insect prey. (I once kept two of them in a__ jar--a _mustard jar, for that matter__--_and fed them on spiders. Though one was half again as large as the other, they seemed to coexist peacefully enough until I went away for a week and returned to see the larger drinking up the vital juices of the smaller, which at that point resembled nothing so much as a tiny scorpion-shaped balloon that someone had let the air out of.)__
_But that is why I am here instead of home in my armchair with a book in my lap: to savor not only the fixed joys and certitudes of Nature but the contingencies too. It's a heady feeling, the sort of feeling that makes you know you're alive and breathing and part of the whole grand scheme of things, drinking from the same fount as the red-tailed hawk, the mule deer, the centipede and the scorpion too.__
_Darkness is coming on as I spread my blanket on the earth at the head of a canyon near a trickling waterfall and settle in to watch the night deepen round me. My fare is humble: an apple, a handful of trail mix, a Swiss cheese sandwich and a long thirsty swallow of aqua pura from the bota bag. From somewhere deep in the hollow space below me comes the soft, almost delicate, hoot of the great horned owl--more a coo really--and it is answered a moment later by an equally diffident hoot off to the east. By now the night has taken over and the stars have begun to extricate themselves one by one from the haze. An hour passes. Two. I am waiting for something, I don't know what, but if I can filter out the glowing evidence of our omnipresent civilization (passenger jets, streaking high overhead on their incessant journeys, the light pollution that makes the eastern sky glow as if with the first trembling light of dawn), I feel that all this is mine to have and hold, for this night at least.__
_And then I hear it, a high tenuous glissade of sound that I might almost have mistaken for a siren if I didn't know better, and I realize that this is what I've been waiting for all along: the coyote chorus. The song of the survivor, the Trickster, the four-legged wonder who can find water where there is none and eat hearty among the rocks and the waste places. He is out there now, ringing-in the night, gathering in his powers and dominions, hunting, gamboling, stealing like a shadow through the scrub around me, and singing, singing for my benefit alone on this balmy seamless night. And I? I lie back and listen, as on another night I might listen to Mozart or Mendelssohn, lulled by the impassioned beauty of it. The waterfall trickles. The coyotes sing. I have a handful of raisins and a blanket: what more could I want? All the world knows I am content.__
6
THE BEANS WERE GONE, THE _TORTILLAS,__ THE LARD, the last few grains of rice. And what were they going to eat--grass? Like the cows? That was the question she put to Cándido when he tried to prevent her from going up the hill to the labor exchange for the fifth weary day in a row, and so what if it had a sting in it? What right did he have to tell her where she could go and what she could do? He wasn't helping any. He could barely get up and take a pee on his own--and what of the _gabacho__ boys who'd ripped up her dress and flung their blanket into the creek, where was he then? She threw it all at him, angry, hurt, terrified; and then he rose up off the blanket and slapped her. Hard. Slapped her in the pale rocky dawn of the ravine till her head snapped back on her neck like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle. “Don't you tell me,” he growled through his teeth. “It's an insult. A kick in the ass when I'm down.” He spat at her feet. “You're no better than your sister, no better than a whore.”
But you couldn't eat grass, and for all his bluster, he must have realized that. He was healing, but he was still in no shape to climb up out of the canyon and throw himself back into _la lucha,__ the struggle to find a job, to be the one man picked out of a crowd, and then to work like ten men to show the _patrón__ you wanted to come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. She understood his frustration, his fear, and she loved him, she did, to the bottom of her heart. But it hurt to be the target of those hard and filthy words, hurt more than the blow itself. And when it was all over, when the birds had started in again and the stream made its noise against the rocks and the cars clawed at the road above, what had been accomplished? Bitterness, that was all. She turned her back on him and made her way up that crucible of a hill for the fifth useless time in as many useless days.
Somebody handed her a cup of coffee. A man she'd seen the last two mornings, a newcomer--he said he was from the South, that was all. He was tall--nearly six feet, she guessed--and he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head like one of the _gringos__ in the supermarket. His skin was light, so light he could almost have passed for one of them, but it was his eyes that gave him away, hard burnished unblinking eyes the color of calf's liver. He'd been damaged somehow, she could see that, damaged in the way of a man who has to scrape and grovel and kiss the hind end of some irrecusable yankee boss, and his eyes showed it, jabbing out at the world like two we thnd grd bapons. He was Mexican, all right.
She had to turn away from those eyes, and she knew she shouldn't have accepted the coffee--steaming, with milk and so much sugar it was like a confection, in a styrofoam cup with a little plastic lid to keep the heat in--but she couldn't help herself. There was nothing in her stomach, nothing at all, and she was faint with the need of it. She was in her fourth month now, and the sickness was gone, but she was ravenous, mad with hunger, eating for two when there wasn't enough for one. She dreamed of food, of the _romeritos__ stew her mother made on Holy Thursday, _tortillas__ baked with chopped tomatoes, _chiles__ and grated cheese, chicken heads fried in oil, shrimp and oysters and a _mole__ sauce so rich and piquant with _serranos__ it made the juices come to her mouth just to think about it. She stood there in the warm flowing flower-scented dawn and sipped the coffee, and it only made her hungrier.
By seven, three pickup trucks had already swung into the lot, Candelario Pérez had separated out three, four and three men again, and they were gone. The stranger from the South was not chosen, and there were still ten men who'd arrived before him. Out of the corner of her eye, America watched him contend with Candelario Pérez--she couldn't hear the words, but the man's violent gestures and the contortions of his scowling pale half-a-_gringo'__s face were enough to let her know that he wasn't happy waiting his turn, that he was a grumbler, a complainer, a sorehead. “Son of a bitch,” she heard him say, and she averted her eyes. _Please,__ she was praying, _don't let him come over to me.__
But he did come over. He'd given her a cup of coffee--she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop--and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some _gringo__ or _gringa__ pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he'd been poked in the throat, “--enjoy the coffee?”
She wouldn't look at him. Wouldn't speak.
“I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, 'There's a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,' and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh, _linda?”__ And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.
Miserable, guilty--she'd taken the coffee, hadn't she?--she didn't resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again--there was something rotting inside of him. _“Me llamo José,”__ he said, holding out a hand to shake, _“José Navidad. ¿Y tú__? ¿_Cómo te llamas, pretty?”__
This was bad. This man was bad. She thought of Cándido and bit her tongue.
“Come on,” the man coaxed in his strange high choked tones, “come on, loosen up, baby. I don't bite. I'm a friendly guy--don't you like friendly guys?” And then his voice changed, dropping down suddenly to a growl. “You like coffee, though, don't you?”
“All right,” she said, and she fel pl' and she t the anger come up in her as she stood to brush the litter from her dress, “I like coffee and I thank you, I thank you again, but I want you to know that I'm a married woman and it's not right to talk to me like that--”
He was sitting there on the ground, lanky, the knots of his fists thrust over his knees, the long blue-jean-clad shanks of his legs, and he just laughed, laughed till his eyes filled and she knew he was crazy, _loco,__ demented, and she was already turning away to appeal to Candelario Pérez for protection when he grabbed her ankle--just grabbed it, and held on. “Married woman,” he mocked, his voice gone high and ragged again. “Maybe so.” He let go of her ankle. “But not for long, pretty, not for long.”
Later, it must have been nine, nine-thirty, a new shiny expensive car pulled into the lot and a fat man--a giant of a fat man, a real _guatón--__stepped wheezing from its luxurious interior. Candelario Pérez said something to him in English and the man said something back, something long and complicated, and then--miracle of miracles!--Candelario Pérez looked to her and called out her name. Excited, timid, trembling, hungry, she started across the lot, feeling every eye on her, feeling the envy, the hate even--she had a job and they didn't. But then, at the moment she arrived there to stand in front of the big bearded _guatón__ of a white man with no consciousness of how she'd gotten there, how her legs had worked and her feet negotiated the way, she heard a cry behind her.
“Hey, take me!” a voice cried out, a woman's voice, in English.
America turned her head and there she was, Mary, the big hippie gringa with the wire driven through her nose like some barnyard animal, and she was coming across the lot in double time, hitching at the seat of a pair of spreading and filthy sweatpants.
The fat man, the _gringo,__ called out something to her, and in the next moment Mary was insinuating herself between America and the prospective employer, jabbering at him in English with her hands flailing and her big bloated eyes swelling out of her head. “Take me,” she said, ignoring America, and though America didn't understand the words, she felt the thrust of their meaning just as surely as if the _gringa__ had shoved a knife between her shoulder blades. “She doesn't speak any English--what do you want with her?”
_“Quiero trabajar,”__ América said, appealing to the fat man first and then, in response to the blank look on his face, to Candelario Pérez, “I want to work.”
Candelario Pérez said something to the man--América was there before the _gringa,__ first come, first served--and the man looked at her for a long lingering moment--too long--and she felt like squirming under that blue-eyed gaze, but she forced herself to return his stare. And then the man decided something--she could see it in the way his shoulders came forward and his jaw squared--and Candelario Pérez told her, “It's all right, six hours' work and he'll give you twenty-five dollars,” and then she was in the car, the luxury of it, leather seats and a sweet new machine smell, before the door opened on the other side and Mary--big Mary, the drunk, the _gringa__ maid who'd tried to cut her out--got in too.
Though he still felt like shit, like some experiment gone wrong in the subbasement of the _Laboratorio Medico__ in Mexico City, Cándido did manage to rouse himself sufficiently to move their poor camp upstream, out of harm's way. Those boys--those teenage _gabachos--__had terrified him. They weren't _La Migra,__ no, and they weren't the police, but the way they'd attacked his harmless little bundle of things had real teeth in e b'al teeth it, real venom. They were dangerous and crazy and the parents who'd raised them must have been even worse--and what would have happened if they'd come in the night, when he and América were rolled up asleep in their blanket?
He'd fished the blanket out of the stream and hung it on a limb to dry, and he was able to find the grill and their cookpot too, but he'd lost a shirt and his only change of underwear, and of course América's dress was nothing but rags. He knew they had to move, but he was still too weak. Three days crawled by and he just lay there, gathering his strength, jumping at every sound, and there was precious little to eat and at night they slept in terror. And then this morning America awoke hungry, with bitter words on her lips, stings and accusations, and he slapped her and she turned her back on him and went up the hill to the labor exchange as if she weren't his wife at all, just somebody he'd met in the street.
All right, he thought, all right. Sucking in his breath against the pain in his hip, his left arm, the flayed hemisphere of his face, he bundled their things together and moved upstream, into the current, where the canyon walls steepened till they were like the walls of a room. He'd gone maybe half a mile when he came to a dead end--a pool, murky and of uncertain depth, stretched from one wall to the other. Beyond it, the wreck of a car lay beached on its back, the refuse of last winter's floods crammed into every crevice.
Cándido tried the water, the torn rucksack and mildewed blanket and everything else he could carry thrust up above his head in the grip of his one good hand--if he could make it to the far side and set up camp there, then no one could get to them, unless they were part fish. The water was tepid, stained the color of tea brewed through a twice-used bag. A thin yellowish film clung to the surface. There was hardly any current. Still, the moment he lifted the second foot from the bank he lost his balance, and only the quickness of his reaction and a thin friable stalk of cane prevented him from pitching face forward into the pool. He understood then that he would have to remove his _huaraches__--they had no grip at all, slick as the discarded tires from which the soles had been cut--and feel his way barefoot. It wasn't a prospect he relished. Who knew what could be down there--snakes, broken bottles, those ugly pale water beetles that could kill a frog and suck it dry till there was nothing left but skin? He backed out of the pool, sat heavily, and removed his sandals.
When he waded back in, clinging to the Tough canyon wall for support, the _huaraches__ were strung around his neck and the rucksack propped up on the crown of his head. The water reached his knees, his crotch, his waist, and finally it came right up to his armpits, which meant that America would have to swim. He thought of that as his toes felt their way through the muck, of America swimming, the hair spread wet on her shoulders, her dress balled up in one slim pretty hand and held high above her, and he began to feel horny, a sure sign that he was healing.
