T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

“No,” and she could barely get the words out, “no, I'm not. We need the doctor-maybe he can do something, maybe-you don't know, Cándido, you don't know anything, and you don't want to.” She was angry now, all of it pouring out of her, all the pain and worry and fear of the past few days, weeks, months: “It was my pee, my pee burned, that's what did it, because of ”-she couldn't look him in the eye, the fire flickering, the lamp making a death mask of his face-“because of those men.”

It was the worst wound she could have given him, but he had to understand, and there was no recrimination in it, what's done is done, but she never heard his response. Because at that moment something fell against the side of the shack, something considerable, something animate, and then the flap was wrenched from the doorway and flung away into the night and there was a face there, peering in. A gabacho face, as startling and unexpected and horrible as any face leaping out of a dark corner on the Day of the Dead. And the shock of that was nothing, because there was a hand attached to that face and the hand held a gun.

Delaney found the shack, and his fingers told him it was made of stolen pallets and slats stripped from the chaparral and the roof that had turned up missing from Bill Vogel's greenhouse. There was light inside-from the fire and maybe a lantern-and it guided him, though the mud was like oil on glass and he lost his balance and gave himself away. He thought he heard voices. More than one. He was outraged-how many of them were there, how many? This couldn't go on anymore, this destruction of the environment, this trashing of the hills and the creeks and the marshes and everyplace else; this was the end, the end of it. He blundered into the stolen flap of rug that concealed the entrance and he tore it aside with one hand because the other hand, his right hand, somehow held the gun now, and it was as if the gun were sentient and animate and had sprung out of the holster and into the grip of his fingers all on its own- And that was when things got hazy. He'd been hearing the roar for a minute or two now, a sound like the wildest surf pounding against the ruggedest shore, but there was no shore here, there was nothing but- And then he felt himself lifted up from behind by some monstrous uncontainable force and he dropped the gun and clutched at the frame of the stooped-over door of that pathetic little shack, staring in amazement into the lamplit faces there-his Mexican, that was him, at last, and a girl he'd never seen before, and was that an infant? — and the shack was spilling over on its side and floating up on the heavy liquid swell behind him until it fell to pieces and the light was snuffed out and the faces were gone and Delaney was drawn so much closer to that cold black working heart of the world than he'd ever dreamed possible.

And so, in the end, it all came tumbling down on Cándido: his daughter's affliction, the _pelirrojo__ with the gun, the very mountain itself. The light was flickering, the rain hissing like a box of serpents prodded with a stick. _She can't see, Cándido, she can't see anything,__ America said, and in that moment he had a vision of his perfect plump little daughter transmogrified into an old hag with a cane and a Seeing Eye dog, and before he could assimilate the meaning of that in all its fearful permutations and banish it from his consciousness, there was this maniac with the gun, threatening his life, and before he could even begin to deal with _that,__ the mountain turned to pudding, to mush, the light failed and the shack fell to pieces. At first he didn't know what was happening-who would? — but there was no resisting that force. He could have built his shack of tungsten steel with footings a hundred feet deep and the result would have been the same. The mountain was going somewhere, and he was going with it.

He didn't even have time to curse or flinch or wonder about his fate-all he could do was snatch America and his poor blind baby to him and hold on. America had Socorro pinned under her arm like a football and she clawed at him with her free hand as the roof shot away from them and they were thrown in a tangle on the pallets that just half a second ago were the inside wall and were now the floor. The moving floor. The floor that shot like a surfboard out on the crest of the liquid mountain that was scouring the earth and blasting trees out of the ground as if they'd never been rooted, and there was the _pelirrojo,__ the white face and flailing white arms, caught up in the mad black swirl of it like a man drowning in shit.

The mountain roared, the boulders clamored, and yet they somehow stayed atop the molten flow, hurtling through the night with all the other debris. Cándido heard the rush of water ahead and saw the lights of the development below them, riding high on the wave of mud that hammered the walls flat and twisted the roofs from the houses and sent him and America and little Socorro thundering into the void. Then the lights went out in unison, the far wall of the development was breached and the two conjoined pallets were a raft in the river that the dry white wash had become, spinning out of control in the current.

América was screaming and the baby was screaming and he could hear his own voice raised in a thin mournful drone, and that was nothing compared to the shrieks of the uprooted trees and the night-marish roar of the boulders rolling along beneath them. He wasn't thinking-there was no time to think, only to react-but even as he pitched into the blackness of this new river that was rushing toward completion in the old river below, he managed finally to curse the engine of all this misery in a burst of profanity that would have condemned him for all time if he hadn't been condemned already. What was it? What was it about him? All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking _pinche__ luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn't enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.

There was no controlling this thing, no hope of it. There was only the mad ride and the battering of the rocks. Cándido held on to the pallet and America held on to him. His knuckles were smashed and smashed again but he held on because there was nothing else he could do. And then they were in the bed of the big creek, Topanga Creek, and the mountain was behind them. But this wasn't the creek Cándido had drunk from and bathed in and slept behind through all those punishing months of drought-it wasn't even the creek he'd seen raging under the bridge earlier that day. It was a river, a torrent that rode right up over the bridges and the streets and everything else. There was no escaping it. The pallet bucked and spun, and finally it threw him.

They hit something, something so big it was immovable, and Cándido lost his grip on America and the raft at the same time; he was in the water suddenly with nothing to hold on to and the water was as cold as death. He went under, and it felt as if an enormous fist were pinning him down, crushing him, but he kicked out against it, slammed into a submerged log and then the jagged tearing edge of a rock, and somehow the surface was there. “América!” he cried. “América!” In the next instant it had him again, the furious roiling water forced up his nostrils and rammed down his throat, the current raking him over a stony washboard, hump after hump of unyielding rock, and he saw his mother pounding the clothes back and forth in a froth of suds, he must have been three years old, and he knew he was going to die, Go to the devil, mijo, and he cried out again.

Then a voice spoke beside him, right in his ear-“Candido!”-and there was his wife, there was America, holding out a hand to him. The water churned and sucked at him, throwing him forward only to jerk him away again, and where was she? There, clinging to the slick hard surface of the washboard where it rose dizzily out of the current. He fought with all he had and suddenly the water spat him up in his wife's arms.