T. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain

By lunchtime, she could taste the panic in the back of her throat. For the first time in four months, for the first time since they'd left the South and her village and everything she knew in the world, she was separated from Cándido. She walked in circles. and everything looked strange, even when she'd seen it twice, three times over. She didn't speak the language. Black people sauntered up the street with plastic grocery bags dangling from their wrists. She stepped in dog excrement. A _gabacho__ sat on the sidewalk with his long hair and begged for change and the sight of him struck her with unholy terror: if he had to beg in his own country, what chance was there for her? But she held on to her six little silvery coins and finally a woman with the _chilango__ accent of Mexico City helped her find the bus.

She had to walk back up the canyon in the bleak light of the declining day while the cars swished by her in a lethal hissing chain, and in every one a pair of eyes that screamed, _Get out, get out of here and go back where you belong!__-and how long before one of them tore up the dirt in front of her and the police were standing there demanding her papers? She hurried along, head down, shoulders thrust forward, and when the strip of pavement at the side of the road narrowed to six inches she had to climb over the guardrail and plow through the brush.

Sweat stung her eyes. Burrs and thorns and the smooth hard daggers of the foxtails bit into every step. She couldn't see where she was going. She worried about snakes, spiders, turning her ankle in a ditch. And then the cars began to switch on their lights and she was alone on a terrible howling stage, caught there for everyone to see. Her clothes were soaked through by the time the entrance to the path came into sight, and she ran the last hundred yards, ran for the cover of the brush while the cold beams of light hunted her down, and she had to crouch there in the bushes till her breath came back to her.

The shadows deepened. Birds called to one another. Swish, swish, swish, the cars shot by, no more than ten feet away. Any one of them could stop, any one. She listened to the cars and to the air rasping through her lips, to the hiss of the tires and the metallic whine of the engines straining against the grade. It went on for a long time, forever, and the sky grew darker. Finally, when she was sure no one was following her, she started down the path, letting the trees and the shrubs and the warm breath of the night calm her, hungry now-ravenous-and so thirsty she could drink up the whole streambed, whether Cándido thought the water was safe or not.

At first, the thing in the path wasn't anything to concern her-a shape, a concert of shades, light and dark-and then it was a rock, a pile of laundry, and finally, a man, her man, sleeping there in the dirt. Her first thought was that he was drunk-he'd got work and he'd been drinking, drinking cold beer and wine while she struggled through the nine circles of Hell-and she felt the rage come up in her. No lunch-she hadn't had a bite since dawn, and then it was only a burned tortilla and an egg-and nothing to drink even, not so much as a sip of water. What did he think she was? But then she bent and touched him and she knew that she was in the worst trouble of her life.

The fire was a little thing, twigs mostly, a few knots the size of a fist, nothing to attract attention. Candido lay on a blanket in the sand beside it, and the flames were like a magic shoe g Qa magic w, snapping and leaping and throwing the tiniest red rockets into the air round a coil of smoke. He was dreaming still, dreaming with his eyes open, images shuffled like cards in a deck till he didn't know what was real and what wasn't. At the moment he was replaying the past, when he was a boy in Tepoztlán, in the south of Mexico, and his father caught an opossum in among the chickens and he hit it with a stick-_zas!__-just above the eyes. The opossum collapsed like a sack of cloth and it lay there, white in the face and with the naked feet and tail of a giant rat, stunned and twitching. That was how he felt now, just like that opossum. The pressure in his head had spread to his chest, his groin, his limbs-to every last flayed fiber of his body-and he had to close his eyes against the agonizing snap and roar of the fire. They skinned the opossum and they ate it in a stew with hominy and onions. He could taste it even now, even here in the North with his body crushed and bleeding and the fire roaring in his ears-rat, that's what it tasted like, wet rat.

América was cooking something over the fire. Broth. Meat broth. She'd laid him here on the blanket and he'd given her the crumpled bill he'd earned in the hardest way any man could imagine, in the way that would kill him, and she'd gone up the hill to the near store, the one run by the suspicious Chinamen or Koreans or whatever they were, and she'd bought a stew bone with a ragged collar of beef on it, a big plastic bottle of aspirin, rubbing alcohol, a can of _gabacho-__colored Band-Aids and, best of all, a pint of brandy, E & J, to deaden the pain and keep the dreams at bay.

It wasn't working.

The pain was like the central core of that fire, radiating out in every direction, and the dreams-well, now he saw his mother, dead of something, dead of whatever. He was six years old and he thought he'd killed her himself-because he wasn't good enough, because he didn't say his “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” and because he fell asleep in church and didn't help with the housework. There was no refrigeration in Tepoztlán, no draining of the blood and pumping in of chemicals, just meat, dead meat. They sealed the coffin in glass because of the smell. He remembered it, huge and awful, like some ship from an ancient sea, set up on two chairs in the middle of the room. And he remembered how he sat up with her long after his father and his sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and their _compadres__ had fallen asleep, and how he'd talked to her through the glass. Her face was like something chipped out of stone. She was in her best dress and her crucifix hung limp at her throat. _Mamá,__ he whispered, _I want you to take me with you, I don't want to stay here without you, I want to die and go to the angels too,__ and then her dead eyes flashed open on him and her dead lips said, _Go to the devil,__ mijo.

“Can you drink this?”

America was kneeling beside him and she held an old styrofoam coffee cup to his lips. The smell of meat was strong in his nostrils. It nauseated him and he pushed her hand away.

“You need a doctor. Your face… and here”-she pointed to his hip, then his arm, a gentle touch, the rag soaked in alcohol-“and here.”

He didn't need a doctor. He didn't need to put himself in their hands-his bones would knit, his flesh would heal. What would he say to them? How would he pay? And then when they were done with him, the man from _La Migra__-the Immigration-would be standing there with his twenty questions and his clipboard. No, he didn't need a doctor.

The firelight took hold of America's face and she looked old suddenly, older than the girl she was, the girl who'd come to the North wout Qthe Nortith him though she'd never in her life been farther than the next village over, older than his grandmother and her grandmother and any woman that had ever lived in this country or any other. “You have to go to the doctor,” she whispered, and the fire snapped and the stars howled over the roof of the canyon. “I'm afraid.”

“Afraid?” he echoed, and he reached out to stroke her hand. “Of what? I'm not going to die,” he said, but even as he said it, he wasn't so sure.

In the morning, he felt worse-if that was possible. He woke to fog and the inquisition of the birds, and he didn't know where he was. He had no recollection of what had happened to him-nothing, not a glimmer-but he knew that he hurt, hurt all over. He staggered up from the damp blanket and pissed weakly against a rock, and that hurt too. His face was crusted. His urine was red. He stood there a long while, shaking his prick and watching the leaves of the tree above him emerge incrementally from the mist. Then he felt dizzy and went back to lay himself down on the blanket in the sand.