T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

The work was hard, no doubt about it. The man haown'. The mand hundreds of straw cases lining the walls of the room and stacked up to the ceiling in the back, and in each case was a stone figurine of the Buddha, gone black with mold and age. They were all the same: two feet high, heavier than lead, the bald head and pregnant gut and the stupid grin that was meant to be a look of wisdom but could as easily have been senility or constipation. And each Buddha had to be scrubbed with the corrosive to take the discoloration off the brow, under the eyelids and lips, in the crevices beneath the arms and the tiny blackened indentation of the navel. When it was cleaned, when the corrosive had devoured the mold and the wire brushes had dug their deepest, the Buddha took on a rosy sheen, and then it was time to affix the glossy gold strip of paper with the glue already on it that read JIM SHIRLEY IMPORTS.

America didn't care about the fumes or the tired nasal rant of the _gringa__ or the stiffening in her fingers and the ache in her back from lifting statue after statue out of its cradle and setting it on the table before her-all she cared about was pleasing this healthy big bearded fat man who'd given her the chance to earn the money she needed to stay alive till things got better. She worked hard. Worked like two women. And she never stopped, not even to stretch her aching back or massage her cramping fingers, not even for a minute.

Finally, at quarter past seven by the bronze sunburst clock on the wall, the fat man slammed through the door, running sweat, and gave them a wild-eyed look. He was panting, and the big T-shirt he wore-Mickey Mouse poised on the steps of the Magic Kingdom-was wet under the arms. He barked out something in a roaring deep voice and Mary sprang to her feet, roaring something back at him. America had her head down, raking the wire brush across the belly of the nearest Buddha as if she were trying to saw it in two. She was tired and hungry and she had to pee, but at the same time she wanted to stay here forever in the big clean open room earning four dollars and sixteen cents for every hour the blood flowed through her veins and the air swelled her lungs. She scrubbed at the statue. Scrubbed furiously.

The _patrón__ didn't seem to notice. His words were truncated, clipped off as if he couldn't spare the breath for them-“Okay, that's it, let's go”-and he clapped his hands twice, two short impatient bursts as abrupt as a cannonade. America didn't dare look up. Her fingers flew, the brush rasped. He was standing right over her now-“Come on, let's go, I'm in a hurry here”-and she felt a quick surge of panic. It was time to go, yes? Eight hours and more-of course it was. And yet she couldn't escape the feeling that he was criticizing her, urging her to work faster, harder, to ply the brush and pour the corrosive and make every Buddha in the room shine as if it had just emerged from the mold.

“Jesus,” he said, letting the air hiss over his teeth, and she understood him now. She wanted to apologize-the words were on her lips-but she didn't have the chance. The next thing she knew he had her by the elbow and he was pulling her roughly from the seat-“Finish now, finish,” he was saying-while Mary, a cigarette clamped between her lips, called out _“Vamos”__ in a drunken slur and they were moving, all three of them, out the door, down the steps and into the rich new car with the airtight doors.

Mary sat up front with the _patrón;__ America had the broad plane of the rear seat to herself, like a queen or a movie star. She sank back in the seat and let her eyes play over the blue-green lawns with their bursts of flowers-flowers everywhere, the very trees on the streets in bloom-and the tall angular houses that rose out of the hills behind them, every one striped and striped again with windows, as if they were expecting an invasion from the seage 'from the. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of those houses, gazing out the kitchen window at the sunstruck crags of the canyon while the machine for the dishes did your work for you and the radio played the soft sad music of violins and cellos. She studied the back of the fat man's neck for clues. It was unrevealing. Thick, pinkish, with little puckered mouths of flesh at the nape and a riot of hacked stiff hairs, it could have been anybody's neck. And then she wondered about his wife-what was she like? Was she fat too? Or was she one of those women you saw in the ads with a leotard clinging to her puffed-up breasts and her eyes staring out from the page like an animal's?

They went through a gate-two broad pastel-colored steel grids that swung back automatically as the car approached. The gate hadn't been there in the morning-América was sure of that. It had been ten-thirty or so when they came through and she was alive to everything, to every nuance, to the houses, the cars, the people in them, and she remembered seeing half a dozen of her own people there, with picks and shovels and a cement mixer-she thought she recognized one of the men from the labor exchange but the car went by too quickly to be sure. Two stone pillars had framed the road under a wrought-iron bonnet with a Spanish inscription-ARROYO BLANCO-and then a word in English she couldn't decipher, and there was a little booth there, like the ticket booth in the movies, but no one was inside and the fat man didn't stop. Now the gate was up. America looked over her shoulder and saw that the steel bars extended on the outside of the two main pillars to a series of smaller stone columns that were only half-built. She saw a wheelbarrow, three shovels lined up neatly, a pick, and then they were out on the canyon road and heading back down the hill to the labor exchange.

Mary was saying something to the _patrón,__ waving her hands, pointing-directions, that was it-and he turned off onto a side street that wound through a stand of dusty oaks to a cluster of little cottages tucked under the arches of the trees. The cottages were in need of paint, but they were fine, charming even, with their wooden shingles, sturdy porches and beams gone gray with age. Pickup trucks and foreign sports cars sat out front of them. There were flowers in pots, cats all over the place, the smell of barbecue. This was where Mary lived, the _gringa__ maid.

The fat man pulled to a stop in front of a redwood bungalow at the end of the lane, Mary said something, and he shifted in the seat to reach for his wallet. America couldn't see what he was paying her but from the way the big worthless cow of a drunken _gringa__ was acting she was sure it was for the full eight hours and not just the twenty-five dollars she'd been promised-or had Mary been promised more? The thought stabbed at America as she sat there in the car and watched a boy of twelve or so burst into view on a dirt bike and vanish round the side of the bungalow in a mirage of exhaust. Candelario Pérez had said twenty-five dollars, but maybe Mary was getting thirty or thirty-five, plus the extra two hours, because she was white, because she spoke English and wore a ring through her nose. America was sure of it. She watched the two big heads, complicitous, watched the shoulders dip as the money changed hands, and then Mary was out of the car and the _patrón__ was leaning over the seat saying something in his breathless cut-up incomprehensible garble of a language.

He wanted her to sit in front, that was it. The contortions of his face, the gestures of his swollen hands told her as much. All right. America got out and slid into the cupped seat beside him. The fat man backed around and shot up the road in an explosion of dust.

He turned on the radio. No violins, no cellos: guitars. She knewet.'rs. She k the song vaguely-_Hotel California__ or something like that, _Welcome, welcome-__and she thought about the strangeness of it all, sitting here in this rich man's car, earning money, living in the North. She never dreamed it would actually happen. If someone had told her when she was a girl at school she wouldn't have believed them-it would have been a fairy tale like the one about the charmaid and the glass slipper. And when the fat man laid his hand casually across her thigh, even before he cheated her of the extra two hours and pushed her rudely from the car, she wanted to fling it away from her, hack it off with a machete and bury it in some _bruja's__ yard, but she didn't. She just let it lie there like a dead thing, though it moved and insinuated itself and she wanted to scream for the car to stop, for the door to open and for the hard dry brush of the ravine to hide her.