T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

The first night he watched from ten till past one, saw nothing-not even an opossum or a cat-and dragged through the following morning's routine as if he were comatose, burning Kyra's toast and getting Jordan to school twelve minutes late. He napped when he should have been writing and he curtailed his afternoon hike, unable to focus on the natural world when the unnatural one was encroaching on everything he held sacred. The second night he went out just after nine, prowled around a bit, came home to watch a news show with Kyra, and then went back out at eleven and sat there hidden, within sight of the gate, till two. He slept through the alarm the next morning and Kyra had to take Jordan to school.

During the ensuing week he averaged three hours a night in the blind he'd created in the lee of a ceanothus bush, but he didn't see a thing. He watched his neighbors drive in and out of the gate, knew who was going to the liquor store and who to the movies and when they got back, but the vandals never showed. A second storm rolled in during the middle of the week and it got cold, down into the low forties, and though he knew it was unlikely that any Hispanics, Mexican or otherwise, would be out tagging in the rain, he stayed put anyway, hunched under his parka, experiencing the night and letting his thoughts wander. The rain playing off the slick blacktop at the gate made him think of Florida and the way the roads would disappear under a glistening field of flesh when the Siamese walking catfish were on the move in all their ambulatory millions. He remembered being awed by the sheer seething protoplasmic power of them, their jaws gaping and eyes aglitter as they waddled from one canal to the next, an army on the march. No one, least of all the exotic aquaria importer who brought them into the country, suspected that they could actually walk, despite the powerful intimation of their common name, and they'd slithered right out of their holding tanks and into the empty niche awaiting them in the soft moist subtropical night. Now they were unstoppable, endlessly breeding, straining the resources of the environment and gobbling up the native fishes like popcorn. And all because of some shortsighted enthusiast who thought they might look amusing in an aquarium.

But there were no catfish here, walking or otherwise. The rain fell. Water ran off into the ditches in tight yellow braids. Delaney periodically scanned the shrubbery at the base of the wall through his night-vision binoculars. The graffiti had been painted over almost immediately by the maintenance man-that was the best way, everyone said, of frustrating the taggers-and Delaney sat there watching a blank wall, a clean slate that had to be a gall and an incitement to that shithead with the weird eyes and the hat turned backwards on his head, and he watched as the Christmas lights went on over the entranceway and the sign that announced ARROYO BLANCO ESTATES, red and green lights, blinking against the blank wall in the rain. He didn't mind. This was a crusade, a vendetta.

Then he skipped a night-a clear cold smog-free night that came at the tail end of the second storm-to take Kyra to dinner and a movie. They got back at midnight and the wall was blank still, but when Delaney went to the closet to change into his thermals, jeans and windbreaker, Kyra stepped out of the bathroom in her teddy and Delaney let his vigilance lapse. In the morning, the wall was still unmarked, but Delaney discovered that both cameras had been tripped. Probably coyotes, he was thinking as he took the film over to the Cherrystones, but there was always the possibility that the Mexicans had come back and been scared off by the flash-in which case he'd never catch them now. They wouldn't be back. He'd blown it. His one chance, and he'd blown it. But then, it was probably only a coyote. Or a raccoon.

Jack was at a sound studio in Burbank, but Selda let Delaney in. She'd just had her hair done-it was the most amazing winter-ermine color, right down to the blue highlights-and she was drinking coffee from a mug and pouring words into the portable telephone in a low confidential voice. “Did you get anything?” she asked, putting a hand over the mouthpiece.

Delaney felt awkward. Only the Cherrystones, and Kyra knew what he was doing, but in a sense the whole community was depending on him-there might be ten thousand Mexicans camped out there in the chaparral waiting to set the canyon afire, but at least these two were going to get a one-way ticket to Tijuana. If he hadn't blown it, that is. He shrugged. “I don't know.”

Jack's darkroom was a converted half-bath just off the den and it was cramped and poorly ventilated. Delaney oriented himself, switched on the fan, located what he needed, then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked on the safelight. He got so absorbed in what he was doing he'd almost forgotten what he was looking for by the time he was pinching the water off of the curling wet strip of film and holding it up to the light.

The face that stared back at him, as startled and harshly fixed in the light as any opossum's face, was human, was Mexican, but it wasn't the face he'd expected. He'd expected the cold hard eyes and swollen jaw of the graffiti artist with the bad dentures, the trespasser, the firebug, caught at last, proof positive, but this was a face come back to haunt him from his dreams, and how could he ever forget that silver-flecked mustache, the crushed cheekbone and the blood on a twenty-dollar bill?

AMéRICA NURSED HER BABY, AND CáNDIDO BUILT his house. It was a temporary house, a shelter, a place where they could keep out of the rain and lie low till he got work and they could live like human beings. The money-the apartment fund, the hoard in the peanut butter jar-wasn't going to help them. It amounted to just four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in a hard shapeless knot of plastic. Cándido had waited three days, and then, under cover of night, he'd slipped down through the chaparral and across the road into the devastation of the canyon. There was a half-moon to guide him, a pale thin coating of light that showed his feet where to step, but everything was utterly transformed; he had a hard time even finding the trailhead. The world was ash, ash two or three inches deep, and the only landmarks left to guide him were the worn humps of the rocks. Once he got to the streambed he was on familiar ground, stumbling through the rock-strewn puddles to the dying murmur of the stream in the sterilized night. There was no chirrup of frog or cricket, no hoot of owl or even the parasitic whine of a single mosquito: the world was ash and the ash was dead. He found the pool, the wreck of the car, the sandspit and the stone, the very stone. But even before he lifted it and felt in the recess beneath it for his hoard, the money that would at least get them back to Tepoztlán, if nothing else, he knew what he would find: melted plastic, fused coins, U. S. Federal Reserve Notes converted to dust through the alchemy of the fire. And oh, what stinking luck he had.

It was beyond irony, beyond questions of sin and culpability, beyond superstition: he couldn't live in his own country and he couldn't live in this one either. He was a failure, a fool, a hick who put his trust in a _coyote or a cholo__ with a tattoo on his neck, a man who couldn't even roast a turkey without burning down half the county in the process. His life had been cursed ever since his mother died and his father brought that bitch Consuelo into the house and she gave the old man nine children he loved more than he'd ever loved his own firstborn son. Cándido sat there in the ashes, rocking back and forth and pressing his hands to his temples, thinking how worthless he was, how unworthy of America, whose life he'd ruined too, and of his daughter, his beautiful dark-eyed little daughter, and what she could hope to expect. The idea that came into his head in the dark of that obliterated canyon was to run, run and leave America and Socorro in the ramshackle hut with the half pot of cat stew that America thought was rabbit (The cat? She's gone home to the rich people, sure she has…), run and never come back again. They'd be better off without him. The authorities would be looking for him, the agent of all this destruction, but they wouldn't be looking for America, the mother of a U. S. citizen, and Cándido had heard over and over how they had clinics and housing and food slips for poor Americans, and why couldn't his daughter get that sort of help? Why not?