T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

There was no time for revision, no time for remonstrance or plea. She turned and ran, uphill, toward the road she'd just escaped-they wouldn't touch her there, they couldn't. She was young and in good shape from climbing up and down out of the canyon twice a day for the last six weeks and she was fast too, the blood singing in her ears, but they were right there, right behind her, and they were grown healthy men with long leaping houndlike strides and the sinews gone tight in their throats with the pulse of the chase. They caught up with her before she'd gone a hundred feet, the tall one, the one from the South, slamming into her like some irresistible force, like the car that had slammed into Cándido.

A bush raked her face, something jerked the bag from her wrist, and they fell together in the dust that was exactly like flour spread over the trail by some mad baker. He was on top of her, sitting on her buttocks, his iron hand forcing her face into the floury dust. She cried out, tried to lift her head, but he slammed his fist into the back of her neck once, twice, three times, cursing to underscore each blow. “Shut up,” he snarled. “Shut the fuck up.”

The other one stood behind him, waiting. She could hear the rasp of their breathing, anything possible now, and she recoiled from the stinking graveyard breath of the one atop her. He hit her again, suddenly, once at the base of the skull and then in the small of the back. Then he eased up from her, leaning all his weight on the hand that pinned her face to the ground, and with the other hand he took hold of the collar of her dress, her only dress, and tore it down the length of her till the cool evening air pricked at her naked skin. In a frenzy, in a rage, the curses foaming on his lips, he shredded her panties and rammed his fingers into her.

It was as if a tree had fallen on her, as if she were the victim of some random accident, powerless, unable to move. She breathed the dust. Her neck hurt. His fingers moved inside her, in her private places, and it was like he was squirting acid into her. She squirmed in the dirt and he shoved back at her, hard and unrelenting. Then he lifted his hand from the back of her neck, breathing spasmodically, and she could hear him fumbling in his pocket for something and her heart froze-he was going to murder her, rape and murder her, and what had she done? But it wasn't that, it wasn't that at all-it was something in a wrapper, silver foil, the rustle of silver foil. Was it one of those things, one of those-no, a stick of gum. There, in the quickening night, with his dirty fingers inside her as if they belonged there and the Indian waiting his turn, he stopped to put a stick of gum in his mouth and casually drop the wrapper on the exposed skin of her back, no more concerned than if he were sitting on a stool in a bar.

She clenched her eyes shut, gritted her teeth. His hand went away and she could feel him shift his weight as he balanced himself to work down his pants. She stiffened against the pounding of her blood and the moment hung there forever, like the eternal torment of the damned. And then, finally, his voice came at her, probing like a knife. “Married woman,” he whispered, leaning close. “You better call your husband.”

“HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” KENNY CRISSOM ASSURED him, and from the undisguised joy in his voice you would have thought he'd stolen the car himself to drum up business. This was the moment he lived for, his moment of grace and illumination: Delaney was without a car and he had a lot full of them. “You'd be surprised,” he added. “But look what it says about your car and its desirability-it's a class car all the way; people want it. No offense, but probably some judge or police chief down in Baja is driving it right now. They contract out. They do. Señor So-and-So says get me a Mercedes or a jag or an Acura Vigor GS, white with tan interior, all the options, and the dude down there calls his buddies in Canoga Park and they cruise the streets till they find one. Three hours later it's in Mexico.” He paused to shift his shoulders, tug at his tie. “Happens all the time.”

Small comfort to Delaney. It happened all the time, but why did it have to happen to. him? “I still can't understand it,” he muttered, signing the papers as Kenny Grissom handed them across the desk. “It was broad daylight, hundreds of people going by-and what about the alarm?”

The salesman blew a quick sharp puff of air between his teeth. “That's for amateurs, joyriders, kids. The people that got your car are pros. You know that tool the cops have for when somebody locks their keys in the car, flat piece of metal about this long? They call it a Slim Jim?” He held his index fingers apart to demonstrate. “Well, they slip that down inside the glass and flip the lock, then they ease open the door so it doesn't trip the alarm, pop the hood, flip the cable off the battery to disarm the thing, hot-wire the ignition, and bye-bye. A pro can do it in sixty seconds.”

Delaney was clutching the pen like a weapon. He felt violated, taken, ripped off-and nobody batted an eyelash, happens all the time. His stomach clamped down on nothing and the sense of futility and powerlessness he'd felt when he came up the road and saw that empty space on the shoulder flooded over him again. It was going to cost him four and a half thousand on top of the insurance to replace the car with the current year's model, and that was bad enough, not to mention the dead certainty that his insurance premiums would go up, but the way people seemed to just accept the whole thing as if they were talking about the weather was what really got him. Own a car, it will be stolen. Simple as that. It was like a tax, like winter floods and mudslides.

The police had taken the report with all the enthusiasm of the walking dead-he might as well have been reporting a missing paper clip for all the interest they mustered-and Jack had used the occasion to deliver a sermon. “What do you expect,” he'd said, “when all you bleeding hearts want to invite the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who's going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with his loaves and fishes. You've seen them lined up on the streets scrambling all over one another every time a car slows at the corner, ready to kill for the chance to make three bucks an hour. Well, did you ever stop to think what happens when they don't get that half-day job spreading manure or stripping shingles off a roof? Where do you think they sleep? What do you think they eat? What would you do in their place?” Jack, ever calm, ever prepared, ever cynical, drew himself up and pointed an admonishing finger. “Don't act surprised, because this is only the beginning. We're under siege here-and there's going to be a backlash. People are fed up with it. Even you. You're fed up with it too, admit it.”

And now Kenny Grissom. Business as usual. A shoulder shrug, a wink of commiseration, the naked joy of moving product. From the minute Kyra had dropped Delaney off at the lot-he was determined to replace his car, exact model, color, everything-Kenny Grissom had regaled him with stories of carjackings, chop shops, criminality as pervasive as death. “Don't get me wrong-I'm not blaming it all on the Mexicans,” Kenny said, handing him yet another page of the sales agreement, “it's everybody-Salvadorians, I-ranians, Russians, Vietnamese. There was this one woman came in here, she's from Guatemala I think it was, wrapped up in a shawl, bad teeth, her hair in a braid, couldn't have been more than four and a half feet tall. She'd heard about credit-'we don't refuse credit' and that sort of thing, you know? — and even though she didn't have any money or collateral or any credit history whatever, she just wondered if she could sign up for a new car and maybe drive it down to Guatemala-”