T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

But then one day, lying there by the desolate stream like some dead thing, America heard a bird calling, three high-pitched notes and then a quavering sustained low-throated whistle that broke her heart with the sadness of it, over and over, that sad beautiful bird calling for her mate, her love, her husband, and América felt the sun touch her face like the hand of God, and the peephole snapped open like the shutter of a camera. It wasn't much, just a fraction, the tiniest opening, but from that day on she began to recover. Her baby was coming. Cándido loved her. She made coffee the next morning, cooked him a meal. When he was gone she dug out the peanut butter jar and counted the limp gray bills there, the silver hoard of change, and she thought: Soon, soon. She wouldn't talk to him yet. She wouldn't smile at him. She hurt with a disappointment so yawning and wide she couldn't help spilling him into it, holding his head down in the black bitter waters, and that was true and unchanging and ongoing, but each day now the gulf inside her began to close even as the peephole widened.

And now, today, when he came back with the turkey that had dropped down out of heaven, the _Tenksgeevee__ turkey, she couldn't make him suffer anymore. She was no Señora Ordóñez, she couldn't live a life of accusation and hatred, serving the coffee in a funereal dress, throwing down sir matoutthe plate of eggs and beans as if it were a weapon, always biting her lip and cursing in her head. She laughed to see him there, wet to the waist, the clink of the beer bottles, the big naked bird and gobble, gobble, gobble. He clowned for her, danced round the sandspit with the bird atop his head, doing a silly jogging _brinco__ step like a man strapped to a jackhammer. The leaves were green again, the sky blue. She got up and held him.

And the fire, when it leapt to the trees like the coming of the Apocalypse, didn't affect her, not at first, not for a minute anyway. She was so intent on driving the sharp green stake of oak through the frozen carcass of the bird, so fixated on the image of crackling brown skin and rice with drippings, so happy to be alive again, that the roar didn't register. Not until she looked, up and saw Cándido's face and every living leaf and branch and bole wrapped in a vesture of flame. That was half a second before the panic set in, half a second before the numbing crazy bone-bruising flight up the hill, but half a second in which she wished with all her heart that she'd been strong enough to let the peephole close down forever.

For Cándido, it was a moment of pure gut-clenching terror, the moment of the fatal mistake and the reaping of the consequences. What would he liken it to? Nothing, nothing he'd ever seen, except maybe the time in Arizona when the man they called Sleepy burned to death under the tractor when his cigarette ignited a spill of gasoline from the tank. Cándido had been up his ladder in a lemon tree, picking, and he heard the muted cry, saw the flames leap up and then the bright exploding ball of them. But now he was on the ground and the flames were in the trees, swooping through the canyon with a mechanical roar that stopped his heart.

There was no heat like this, no furnace, no bomb, no reactor. Every visible thing danced in the flames. America was going to die. He was going to die. Not in a rocking chair on the porch of his little house surrounded by his grandchildren, but here and now, in the pit of this unforgiving canyon. Ahead of them, down the only trail he knew, the flames rose up in a forty-foot curtain; behind them was the sheer rock wall of their cul-de-sac. He was no mountain goat and America was so big around she could barely waddle, but what did it matter? He sprang at her, jerked her up from the sand and the white frozen carcass of the bird-and it would cook now, all right-and pulled her across the spit to the rock wall and the trickle of mist that fell intermittently from above. “Climb!” he screamed, shoving her up ahead of him, pushing at her bottom and the big swollen ball of her belly, fighting for finger- and toeholds, and they were climbing, both of them, scaling the sheer face of the rock as if it were a jungle gym.

The heat seared his skin through the fabric of his shirt, stung the exposed flesh of his hands and face. There was no air, not a breath, all the oxygen sucked up to feed the inferno, and with each step the rock went rotten beneath their feet. He didn't think they were going to make it, but then he gave America a final frantic shove and they were over the top and sitting in a puddle of water in a place that was as new to him as the back side of the moon, though he'd lived within spitting distance of it all these months. There were no pools here, no rills or falls-there was hardly any water at all. A staggered run of puddles retreated to the next tumble of rock, and beyond that it was more of the same, the canyon a trap, its walls a hundred feet high, unbroken, impregnable. The wind screamed. It screamed for blood, for sacrifice, for _Tenksgeevee,__ and the flames answered it, leaping behind them to the height of the ledge with a roar like a thousand jets taking off at once. And then Cándido and América were running up the streambed, stumbling over rocks, splashing through the muck and tearing the flesh of their arms and hands and feet on the talons of the scrub till they reached the next obstruction and went up and over it, and still they kept going.

“Don't stop! No!” Cándido cried, slapping furiously at América every time she faltered. “Keep going! Run, _mujer,__ run!” The wind could change direction at any moment, at whim, and if it did they were dead, though he knew they should have been dead already, cremated along with the turkey. He urged her on. Shoved and shouted and half-carried her. The canyon was a funnel, a conduit, the throat of an inconceivable flamethrower, and they had to get up and out of it, up to the road and across the blacktop and on up through the chaparral to the high barren rock of the highest peak. That was all he could think of, up, up and up, that naked rock, high above it all, and there was nothing to burn up there, was there?

They fumbled round a turning in the streambed, the wall falling back and away from them as the gorge widened, and there it was, the answer to Cándido's half-formed prayers: a way out. A second mountain lay at their feet, a mountain of junk hurled over the precipice above by generations of heedless _gabachos.__ “Climb!” Cándido shouted, and America, sweating, bleeding, tears of rage arid fear and frustration in her eyes, began to climb up over the hood of an accordioned car, her belly swinging out and away from her like an untethered balloon. Cándido scrambled up behind her, knocking aside toasters, water heaters, bedsprings, the refuse of a thousand kitchens and garages. The mass gave gently but held, locked in place by the heavy settled chassis of the automobiles, and as the smell of smoke came to them, as the wind shifted and the flames sent up a demonic howl, they reached a beaten hardpan promontory and struggled through the brush to the road.

The road was chaos. Firefighters ran shouting up and down the length of it, sirens wailed, lights flashed, the police were there, everywhere, the road closed going down, the last straggling automobiles coming up. Cándido took his wife by the hand and hurried up the road to the Chinese store-closed and shuttered and without a car in the lot-and ducked around back, searching along the foundation for a hose bib. They collapsed there, behind the store, gulping water from a hose, precious water, wetting their faces, soaking their clothes. A little water-the Chinamen wouldn't mind, and who gave a damn if they did? Cándido's throat was raw. A big airplane, hunkering low, brushed the treetops overhead. “I'm scared,” America whispered.