T. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain

He was saved. He was alive. There was no sky, there was no earth and the wind drove at them with pellets of rain and the water crashed at his feet, but he was alive and breathing and huddled in the arms of his wife, his thin beautiful shivering girl of a wife. It took him a moment, interpreting the humped rock beneath him with his numbed and bleeding fingers, before he understood where they were-they'd been saved by the United States Post Office and this was the tile roof and the building beneath them was the cut bank of the river as it swirled round the bend to the swamped bridge and the gorge beyond. “América” was all he could say, gasping it, moaning it, over and over. He fell into a spasm of coughing and brought up the cocido, sour and thin, and he felt as if he were being slowly strangled. “Are you okay?” he choked. “Are you hurt?”

She was sobbing. Her body and his were one and the sobs shook him till he was sobbing himself, or almost sobbing. But men didn't sob, men endured; they worked for three dollars a day tanning hides till their fingernails fell out; they swallowed kerosene and spat out fire for tourists on streetcorners; they worked till there was no more work left in them. “The baby,” he gasped, and he wasn't sobbing, he wasn't. “Where's the baby?”

She didn't answer, and he felt the cold seep into his veins, a coldness and a weariness like nothing he'd ever known. The dark water was all around him, water as far as he could see, and he wondered if he would ever get warm again. He was beyond cursing, beyond grieving, numbed right through to the core of him. All that, yes. But when he saw the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles, he reached down and took hold of it.

The End

T. C. Boyle is the author of _The Inner Circle, Drop City__ (a finalist for The National Book Award), _A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East Is East, World's End__ (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), _Budding Prospects, Water Music,__ and seven collections of stories. In 1999, he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including _The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire,__ and _Playboy.__ He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T. C. Boyle's Web site is www.tcboyle.com.