T. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain

They'd been living in the canyon three weeks now-there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L. A. or even Van Nuys-and though they didn't have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he'd felt happy for the first time since they'd left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was his, all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetcorner for work, the reek of the place, the roaches and the nits. Down here was different. Down here they were safe from all the filth and sickness of the streets, from _la chota__-the police-and the Immigration. Twice he'd gotten work, at three dollars an hour, no questions asked-once from a contractor who was putting up a fieldstone wall and then from a rico in a Jaguar who needed a couple of men to clear the brush from a ravine out back of his house. And each morning when he went out looking, not knowing whether he'd be back at noon or after dark, he'd warned America to douse the fire and keep out of sight.

He hadn't wanted to frighten her, but he knew what would happen if any of those _vagos__ from above discovered her down here while he was away. It would be just like that girl in the dump at Tijuana. He could see her now, skinny legs, eyes like pits. She was a child, twelve years old, and her parents poor people who were out working all day, sifting through the mountains of trash with broomsticks fitted with a bent nail at one end, and the drunks in the place had come after her. The girl's parents had a shack made out of wooden pallets nailed together, a surprisingly sturdy little thing set amid a clutter of tumble-down shanties and crude lean-tos, and when they went off in the morning, they padlocked the girl inside. But those aniand Qt those mals-they howled outside the door and pounded at the walls to get at her, and nobody did a thing. Nobody except Cándido. Three times he snatched up a length of pipe and drove them away from the shack-junkies, _cementeros,__ bottle suckers-and he could hear the girl sobbing inside. Twelve years old. One afternoon they managed to spring the lock, and by the time Cándido got there, it was all over. The sons of bitches. He knew what they were like, and he vowed he'd never let América out of his sight if he could help it, not till they had a real house in a real neighborhood with laws and respect and human dignity.

“No,” he said. “I can't let you do it. I was worried sick the whole day you were gone-and look at the bad luck it brought us.” He patted his arm in its sling by way of illustration. “Besides, there are no jobs for women there, only for men with strong backs. They want _braceros,__ not maids.”

“Listen,” she said, and her voice was quiet and determined, “we have maybe a cup of rice left, half a twelve-ounce sack of dry beans, six corn _tortillas__-no eggs, no milk. We have no matches to start the fire. No vegetables, no fruit. Do you know what I would do for a mango now-or even an orange?”

“All right,” he snarled, “all right,” and he pushed himself up from the blanket and stood shakily, all his weight on his good leg. The aspirin bottle was nearly empty, but he shook half a dozen tablets into his palm and ground them between his teeth. “I'll go myself. Nobody can tell me I can't feed my own wife-”

She wasn't having it. She sprang to her feet and took hold of his forearm in a grip so fierce and unyielding it surprised him. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe the next day. What happened to you would have killed an ordinary man. You rest. You'll feel better. Give it a day or two.”

He was woozy on his feet. His head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. The crow mocked him from an invisible perch. “And what do you plan to do for work?”

She grinned and made a muscle with her right arm. “I can do anything a man can do.”

He tried for a stern and forbidding look, but it tortured his face and he had to let it go. She was tiny, like a child-she _was__ a child. She couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds, and the baby hadn't begun to show yet, not at all. What could she hope to accomplish at a labor exchange?

“Pick lettuce,” she said. “Or fruit maybe.”

He had to laugh. He couldn't help himself. “Lettuce? Fruit? This isn't Bakersfield, this is L. A. There's no fruit here. No cotton, no nothing.” His face tightened on him and he winced. “There's nothing here but houses, houses by the millions, roof after roof as far as you can see…”

She scratched at a mosquito bite on her arm, but her eyes were alive, shining with the image, and her lips compressed round a private smile. “I want one of those houses,” she said. “A clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator, and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden and make a place for the chickens. That's what you promised me, didn't you?”

She wanted. Of course she wanted. Everybody who'd stayed behind to dry up and die in Tepoztlán wanted too-hell, all of Morelos, all of Mexico and the Indian countries to the south, they all wanted, and what else was new? A house, a yard, maybe a TV and a car too-nothing fancy, no palaces like the _gringos__ built-just four walls and a roof. Was that so much to ask?

He watched her lips-pouting, greedy lips, lips he wanted to 3“> Q wanted kiss and own. ”Well?“ she demanded, and she wasn't teasing now, wasn't bantering or joking. ”Didn't you?"

He'd promised. Sure he had. He'd held up the lure of all those things, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the glitter of the North like a second Eden; sure, a young girl like her and an old man like himself with gray in his mustache-what else was he going to tell her? That they would get robbed at the border and live under two boards at the dump till he could make enough on the streetcorner to get them across? That they'd hide out like rats in a hole and live on a blanket beside a stream that would run dry in a month? That he'd be hammered down on the road so he could barely stand or make water or even think straight? He didn't know what to say.

She let go of his arm and turned away from him. He watched the morning mist enclose her as she began to pick her way over the boulders that cluttered the ravine like broken teeth. When she got to the foot of the trail she swung round and stood there a moment, the mist boiling beneath her. “Maybe somebody will need a floor mopped or a stove cleaned,” she said, the words drifting down to him over the hum of the invisible cars above.

It took him a long moment, and when he spoke it was as if the air had been knocked out of him. “Yeah,” he said, sinking back down into the blanket. “Maybe.”

HIGH UP THE CANYON, NESTLED IN A FAN-SHAPED depression dug out of the side of the western ridge by the action of some long-forgotten stream, lay the subdivision known as Arroyo Blanco Estates. It was a private community, comprising a golf course, ten tennis courts, a community center and some two hundred and fifty homes, each set on one-point-five acres and strictly conforming to the covenants, conditions and restrictions set _forth__ in the 1973 articles of incorporation. The houses were all of the Spanish Mission style, painted in one of three prescribed shades of white, with orange tile roofs. If you wanted to paint your house sky-blue or Provencal-pink with lime-green shutters, you were perfectly welcome to move into the San Fernando Valley or to Santa Monica or anywhere else you chose, but if you bought into Arroyo Blanco Estates, your house would be white and your roof orange.

Delaney Mossbacher made his home in one of these Spanish Mission houses (floor plan #A227C, Rancho White with Navajo trim), along with his second wife, Kyra, her son, Jordan, her matching Dandie Dinmont terriers, Osbert and Sacheverell, and her Siamese cat, Dame Edith. On this particular morning, the morning that Cándido Rincón began to feel he'd lost control of his wife, Delaney was up at seven, as usual, to drip Kyra's coffee, feed Jordan his fruit, granola and hi-fiber bar and let Osbert and Sacheverell out into the yard to perform their matinal functions. He hadn't forgotten his unfortunate encounter with Cándido four days earlier-the thought of it still made his stomach clench-but the needs and wants and minor irritations of daily life had begun to push it into the background. At the moment, his attention was focused entirely on getting through the morning ritual with his customary speed and efficiency. He was nothing if not efficient.