T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Cándido stood there for two hours, trying to attract the attention of every pickup that pulled into the lumberyard, so desperate now he didn't care if La _Migra__ picked him up or not, but no one gave him even so much as a glance. His feet hurt and his stomach rumbled. He was cold. It must have been about half-past four when he finally gave it up and started back along the road, looking for cans to redeem and thinking he would watch for his chance to stick his head in the dumpster out back of the _paisano's__ market-he had to bring something back with him, anything. Every once in a while they would throw out a bag of onions with nothing worse than a few black spots on them or potatoes that had sprouted eyes-you never knew. He was keeping his head down and watching his feet, thinking maybe there'd be some meat that wouldn't be so bad if you boiled it long enough or some bones and fat from the beef they'd trimmed out, when a car swerved in across the shoulder just ahead of him.

He froze, thinking of the accident all over again, wet roads, _norteamericanos__ in a hurry, always in a hurry, and the next car blared its horn in a shrill mechanical curse because the rear end of the first car, the one right there on the shoulder, was sticking out into the roadway and all the endless line of cars coming up the hill with their wipers clapping and headlights glaring had to break the flow to swerve around it. But now the door was swinging open and another horn blared and Cándido was poisoned with déjà vu: this inescapable white, the fiery red brake lights and the yellow blinker, it was all so familiar. Before he had a chance to react, there he was, the _pelirrojo__ who'd run him down all those months ago and then sent his gangling ugly _pelirrojo__ of a son down into the canyon to harass and torment him, and the look on his face was pure malice. “You!” he shouted. “You stay right there!”

“You!” DELANEY SHOUTED. “YOU STAY RIGHT THERE!” He'd been coming up the road from the nursery on the Coast Highway, the trunk crammed with bags of ammonium sulfate and fescue seed, his view out the back partially obscured by a pair of areca palms for the front hallway, when he spotted the hunched shoulders, the weather-bleached khaki shirt and the pale soles of the Mexican's dark feet working against the straps of his sandals. He slowed automatically, without thinking-could this be the man, was this him? — and then he jerked the wheel and felt the rear tires yaw away from him even as the driver behind him hit the horn, and he was up on the shoulder spewing gravel, his rear end sticking out in the road. Delaney didn't care. He didn't care about the hazard, didn't care about the other drivers or the wet road or his insurance rates-all he cared about was this Mexican, the man who'd invaded his life like some unshakable parasite, like a disease. It was here, almost at the very spot, that he'd flung himself under the wheels of the car, everything come full circle, and this time Delaney wasn't going to let him off, this time he had proof, photographic proof. “You stay right there!” Delaney roared, and he punched 911 into the car phone Kyra had given him as an early Christmas present.

The Mexican stood there dumbfounded, leaner and harder-looking than Delaney remembered him, the eyes black and startled, the thick brush of the mustache making a wound of his mouth. “Hello?” Delaney bawled into the receiver, “my name is Delaney Mossbacher and I want to report a crime in progress-or no, an apprehension of a suspect-on Topanga Canyon Road near Topanga Village, just south of-” but before he could finish, the suspect had begun to move. The Mexican looked at Delaney, looked at the telephone in his hand, and then he just stepped right out into the traffic like a sleepwalker.

Delaney watched in shock as the high blue surging apparition of a pickup cab with a woman's face frozen behind the windshield framed the Mexican's spindly legs and humped-over torso in a portrait of unquenchable momentum, and then, at the last possible moment, veered away in a screeching, rattling, fishtailing blur that hit the guardrail and ricocheted into the back end of his Acura Vigor GS, his new milk-white Acura Vigor GS with the tan leather upholstery and only thirty-eight hundred and sixteen miles on the odometer, where it finally came to rest in all its trembling wide-bodied authority. And the Mexican? He was unscathed, jogging up the opposite side of the road while horns blared and bumpers kissed all up and down the frantically braking string of cars. It was the commuter's nightmare. It was Delaney's nightmare. “Hello, hello-are you there?” cried a voice through the speaker of the phone.

Delaney didn't call Kyra. He didn't call Jack. He didn't bother with Kenny Grissom or the body shop or even his insurer. As the rain started up again, a blanketing drizzle that seeped into his every pore, he stood at the side of the road and exchanged information with the woman in the pickup. She was in a rage, trembling all over, showing her teeth like a cornered rodent and stamping her feet in the mud. “What's wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you out of your mind stopping like that with your back end sticking halfway out across the road? And what's with your friend-is he drunk or something, just strolling right out in front of me without even turning his head? You're both drunk, you've got to be, and believe me you're in trouble, mister, and I'm going to demand the cops give you a breath test, right here and now-”

The policeman who showed up twenty minutes later was grim and harried. He questioned Delaney and the woman separately about the details of the accident, and Delaney tried to tell him about the Mexican, but the cop wasn't interested.

“I'm trying to tell you, it was this Mexican-he's crazy, he throws himself in front of cars to try and collect on the insurance, he's the one, and I've got a photograph, I caught him out front of Arroyo Blanco, that's where I live, where we've had all that trouble with graffiti lately?”

They were seated in the patrol car, Delaney in the passenger seat, the cop bent over his pad, laboriously writing out his report in a jagged left-handed script. The radio sputtered and crackled. Rain spilled across the windshield in sheets, drummed on the roof, really coming down now. There were accidents on the Coast Highway, Malibu Canyon Road, 101, the dispatcher's voice numb with the monotony of disaster. “Your vehicle was obstructing the road,” the cop said finally, and that was all.

Delaney sat in his car till the tow truck arrived; he showed the driver his Triple A card and then refused a ride home. “I'm going to walk,” he said, “it's only a mile and a half.”

The driver studied him a moment, then handed him a receipt and pulled the door closed. The rain had slackened, but Delaney was already wet through to the skin, the Gore-Tex jacket clinging to his shoulders like a sodden pelt, the hair stamped to his forehead and dancing round his ears in a lank red fringe. “Suit yourself,” the man said through the crack of the window, and then Delaney was walking up the shoulder of the road as the pale shell of his car faded away into the mist ahead of him. He was walking, but this time he wasn't merely walking to get somewhere, as on the torrid high-ceilinged summer morning when his first car was stolen-this time he had a purpose. This time-as he waited for a break in the traffic and dashed across the road-this time he was following a set of footprints up the muddy shoulder, very distinctive prints, unmistakable, cut in the rippled pattern of a tire tread.

Kyra could barely see the road. The rain had come up suddenly, closing off her view like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, and she had no choice but to hit her emergency flasher and pull off onto the shoulder to wait it out. She took advantage of the delay to thumb through her _Thomas Guide__ and compare the map with the directions Delaney had scrawled on the notepad by the telephone. It was just past four and she'd taken the afternoon off to do some Christmas shopping-business was slow, dead in the water, actually, and for as long as she could remember she'd been meaning to start making a little more time for her family and for herself too-and she'd volunteered to pick up Jordan at his friend's house. She didn't know the boy-he was a friend from school-and since Delaney had dropped Jordan off, she didn't know the house either. Or the street, which she was having trouble finding.