The Tortilla Curtain (24 page)

He’d been working up in Idaho, in the potatoes, sending all his money home to Resurrección, and when the potatoes ran out he made his way south to Los Angeles because his friend Hilario had a cousin in Canoga Park and there was plenty of work there. It was October and he’d wanted to go home to his wife and his aunt Lupe, who’d practically raised him after his mother died and his father remarried, and the timing was right too because most of the men in the village were just then leaving to work in the citrus and he’d be cock of the walk till spring. But Hilario convinced him: You’re here already, he’d argued, so why run the risk of another crossing, and besides, you’ll make more in two months in Los Angeles than you did in the past four in Idaho, believe me. And Cándido had asked: What kind of work? Gardening, Hilario told him. Gardening? He was dubious. You know, Hilario said, for the rich people with their big lawns and their flowerbeds and the trees full of fruit they never eat.

And so they pooled their money with four other men and bought a rusted-out 1971 Buick Electra with a balky transmission and four bald-as-an-egg tires for three hundred and seventy-five dollars, and started south in the middle of the season’s first snowstorm. None of them except Cándido had ever seen snow before, let alone experienced or even contemplated the peculiar problems of driving in it. With its bald tires on the slick surface, the Buick fishtailed all over the road while huge howling semitrailers roared past them like Death flapping its wings over the deepest pit. Cándido had driven before—but not much, having learned on an old Peugeot in a citrus grove outside of Bakersfield on his first trip North—and he was elected to do the bulk of the driving, especially in an emergency, like this one. For sixteen hours he gripped the wheel with paralyzed hands, helpless to keep the car from skittering like a hockey puck every time he turned the wheel or hit the brakes. Finally the snow gave out, but so did the transmission, and they’d only made it as far as Wagontire, Oregon, where six
indocumentados
piling out of the smoking wreck of a rust-eaten 1971 Buick Electra were something less than inconspicuous.

They hadn’t had the hood up ten minutes, with Hilario leaning into the engine compartment in a vain attempt to fathom what had gone wrong with a machine that had already drunk up half a case of transmission oil, when the state police cruiser nosed in behind them on the shoulder of the road. The effect was to send everybody scrambling up the bank and into the woods in full flight, except for Hilario, who was still bent over the motor the last time Cándido laid eyes on him. The police officers—pale, big-shouldered men in sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats—shouted incomprehensible threats and fired off a warning shot, but Cándido and two of the other men kept on running. Cándido ran till his lungs were on fire, a mile at least, and then he collapsed in a gully outside of a farmhouse. His friends were nowhere in sight. He was terrified and he was lost. It began to rain.

He couldn’t have been more at a loss if he’d been dropped down on another planet. He had money—nearly four hundred dollars sewed into the cuff of his trousers—and the first thing he thought of was the bus. But where was the bus? Where was the station and how could he hope to find it? There was no one in the entire state of Oregon who spoke Spanish. And worse: he wasn’t even sure, in terms of geography, where exactly Oregon was and what relation it bore to California, Baja and the rest of Mexico. He crouched down in the ditch, looking wistfully across the field to the farmhouse, as the day closed into night and the rain turned to sleet. He had a strip of jerky in his pocket to chew on, and as he tore into the leathery flavorless meat with quivering jaws and aching teeth, he remembered a bit of advice his father had once given him. In times of extremity, his father said, when you’re lost or hungry or in danger,
ponte pared,
make like a wall. That is, you present a solid unbreachable surface, you show nothing, neither fear nor despair, and you protect the inner fortress of yourself from all comers. That night, cold, wet, hungry and afraid, Cándido followed his father’s advice and made himself like a wall.

It did no good. He froze just the same, and his stomach shrank regardless. At daybreak, he heard dogs barking somewhere off in the distance, and at seven or so he saw the farmer’s wife emerge from the back door of the house with three pale little children, climb into one of the four cars that stood beside the barn, and make her way down a long winding drive toward the main road. The ground was covered with a pebbly gray snow, an inch deep. He watched the car—it was red, a Ford—crawl through that Arctic vista like the pointer on the bland white field of a game of chance at a village
fiesta.
Awhile later he watched a girl of twenty or so emerge from the house, climb into one of the other cars and wind her way down the drive to the distant road. Finally, and it was only minutes later, the farmer himself appeared, a
güero
in his forties, preternaturally tall, with the loping, patient, overworked gait of farmers everywhere. He slammed the kitchen door with an audible crack, crossed the yard and vanished through the door to the barn.

Cándido was a wall, but the wall was crumbling. He wasn’t used to the North, had seen snow only twice before in his life, both times with the potatoes in Idaho, and he hated it. His jacket was thin. He was freezing to death. And so, he became a moving wall, lurching up out of the ditch, crossing under a barbed-wire fence and making his way in
huaraches
and wet socks across the field to the barn, where he stopped, his heart turning over in his chest, and knocked at the broad plane of painted wood that formed one-half of the door through which the farmer had disappeared. He was shivering, his arms wrapped round his shoulders. He didn’t care whether they deported him or not, didn’t care whether they put him in prison or stretched him on the rack, just so long as he got warm.

And then the farmer was standing there, towering over him, a man of huge hocks and beefy arms with a head the size of a prize calabash and great sinewy thick-fingered hands, a man who could easily have earned his living touring Mexico as the thyroid giant in a traveling circus. The man—the giant—looked stunned, shocked, as surprised as if this actually were another planet and Cándido a strange new species of being. “Pleese,” Cándido said through jackhammering teeth, and realizing that he’d already used up the full range of his English, he merely repeated himself: “Pleese.”

The next thing he knew he was wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a big gleaming American kitchen, appliances humming, a steaming cup of coffee clutched in his hands. The farmer moved about the kitchen on feet the size of snowshoes. All the broad geometry of his back was in motion as he fussed over his appliances, six slices of toast in the shining silver toaster, eggs and a slab of ham in the little black oven that congealed the yolks and set the meat sizzling in two minutes flat, and then he was standing there, offering the plate and trying to work his face into a smile. Cándido took the plate from the huge callused hands with a dip of his head and a murmur of
“Muchísimas gracias
,” and the big man lumbered across the kitchen to a white telephone hanging on the wall and began to dial. The eggs went cold in Cándido’s mouth: this was it, this was the end. The farmer was turning him in. Cándido crouched over the plate and made like a wall.

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness. The farmer motioned him to the phone, and on the other end of the line there was an angelic voice, the sweet lilting gently lisping voice of Graciela Herrera, a
chicana
from a town five miles away, talking to him in the language of their ancestors. Graciela picked him up in her bright yellow Volkswagen and dropped him off at the bus station, where she translated for the ticket agent so he could purchase his ticket. Cándido wanted to raise a shrine to her. He kissed her fingertips and gave her the only thing he had to give: the laminated picture card of the Virgin of Guadalupe he carried for luck.

In Canoga Park, Cándido was able to find Hilario’s cousin with no problem—the town was like a Mexican village writ large—and he got work right away, with an English-speaking boss who managed half a dozen gardening crews of three men each. The cousin’s name was Arturo and he showed Cándido what to do—it was nothing: pull the cord on the mower, walk behind the airblast of the blower, cultivate the flowerbeds and trim the shrubs—while they both awaited news of Hilario. Weeks went by. Cándido shared a place off Shoup in Woodland Hills with six other men and the close quarters and the dirt and the foul smells reminded him of his first stay in Los Angeles, in the filth of Echo Park. He sent money home and wired Resurrecci6n that he’d be home by Christmas. News came finally that Hilario was back in Guerrero, deported from Oregon and stripped of everything he owned by the Federal Judicial Police the minute he reentered Mexico.

Things were good for a while. Cándido was making a hundred and sixty dollars a week, spending two hundred a month on rent, another hundred on food, beer, the occasional movie, and sending the rest home. Arturo became a good friend. The work was like play compared to struggling through the mud of the potato fields like a human burro or picking lemons in hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. He began to relax. Began to feel at home. Wagontire, Oregon, was a distant memory.

And then the roof fell in. Someone tipped off La Migra and they made a sweep of the entire area, six o’clock in the morning, snatching people off the street, from in front of the 7-Eleven and the bus stop. A hundred men and women were lined up on the sidewalk, even a few children, staring at their feet while the puke-green buses from the Immigration pulled up to the curb to take them one-way to Tijuana, the doors locked, the windows barred, all their poor possessions—the eternally rolling TVs, the mattresses on the floor, their clothes and cooking things—ieft behind in their apartments for the scavengers and the garbagemen.

Six a.m. Cándido was among the throng, dressed for work, a hundred and ten dollars in his string bag under the sink in the apartment behind him, the darkness broken only by the ugly yellow light of the streetlamps and the harsh glowing eyes of the buses. It was cold. A woman was crying softly beside him; a man argued with one of the Spanish-speaking Immigration agents, a hard high nagging whine: “My things,” he said, over and over, “what about my things?” Cándido had just left his apartment to wait out front for Arturo to swing by for him in the boss’s pickup when
La Migra
nailed him, and now he stood in line with all the hopeless others. Eight Immigration agents, two of them female, worked their way down the line of Mexicans, one by one, and the Mexicans, as if they were shackled together, joined at the elbow, rooted to the pavement, never thought to run or flex a muscle or even move. It was the Mexican way: acquiesce, accept. Things would change, sure they would, but only if God willed it.

Cándido was listening to the woman cry softly beside him and thinking about that fatalism, that acquiescence, the inability of his people to act in the face of authority, right or wrong, good or bad, when a voice cried out in his head:
Run! Run now, while the fat-faced overfed
pendejo
from the Immigration is still five people up the line with his flashlight and his pen and his clipboard and the green-eyed bitch behind him. Run!

He broke for the line of pepper trees across the street, and seeing him run, two other men broke from the line and fled with him, the whole
macho
corps of the Immigration crying out in unison and flowing toward them in a wave. “Stop!” they shouted. “You’re under arrest!”—things like that, the words of English every Mexican knew—but Cándido and the two men who had broken with him didn’t stop. They went across the road and into the trees, struggling up the refuse-choked bank to the freeway fence, and then, with
La Migra
right behind them, they went up and over the fence and onto the shoulder of the freeway.

The cars streamed by in a rush, even at this hour. Four lanes in each direction, the torrent of headlights, sixty-five and seventy miles an hour: suicide. Cándido shot a glance at the two men beside him—both young and scared—and then he began to jog up the shoulder, against the traffic, looking to make it to the next exit and disappear in the bushes, no thought but that. The two men—they were boys really, teenagers—followed his lead and the three of them ran half a mile or more, two hard-nosed men from the Immigration flinging themselves up the shoulder behind them, the traffic raging, thundering in their ears, and when they came in sight of the exit they saw that
La Migra
had anticipated them and stationed a green van on the shoulder ahead. The boys were frantic, their breathing as harsh as the ragged roaring whine of the engines as the headlights picked them out and the first of the police sirens tore at the air. Was it worth dying for this? Half the people on those buses would be back in a day, back in forty-eight hours, a week. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t.

Cándido would never forgive himself for what happened next. He was the one, he should have known, and they were only boys, scared and directionless. It wasn’t worth it, but when the agents came panting up to them, their faces contorted and ugly with their shouts and threats, something uncoiled inside of him and he sprang out into the traffic like a cornered rabbit leaping from a cliff to avoid the dogs. The boys followed him, both of them, and they gave up their lives. All he could remember was the shrieking of the brakes and the blare of the horns and then the sound of all the glass in the world shattering. Pulp, that’s what those boys were—they were nothing forever—and they could have been back in forty-eight hours. The first boy went down like a piston, torn off his legs at the hip, down and gone, and the second made it nearly to Cándido in the third lane over when he was flung into the air in one whole pounded piece. The fourth lane was free and Cándido was across it while the apocalypse of twisted metal and skating cars blasted the world around him till even the traffic across the divider was stopped dead in horror. He climbed the divider, walked to the far side on melting legs, vaulted the fence and became one with the shadows.