The Tortilla Curtain (39 page)

But he didn’t want to think about it. He was in trouble, deep trouble, and he needed to take stock of the situation. He was lost, hungry, with sixteen dollars and thirty-seven cents and a rusted switchblade in his pocket and all their hoard of money, their apartment fund, buried somewhere in the midst of the conflagration, and for the past two hours America had been complaining of pains deep in her gut, pains down there where the baby was, and wouldn’t it be just his luck if the baby came now, at the worst possible time? It was the story of his life, pinched like a bug between two granite rocks, and how long before he was squashed?

They were lying in a clump of bushes somewhere halfway up the western rim of the canyon, and he knew now what a worthless plan it had been to try for the top. The fire would have caught them in the chaparral and they wouldn’t have had a chance. But he was afraid of the road, of all those
gringo
police and firemen, and he was guilty and scared and ashamed and all he could think of was making it to that peak where they’d be safe. He’d been stupid. Panicky and stupid. But now the fire was back in its lair, at least till morning, and they were in the middle of nowhere and America lay beside him like a shadow, crying out with pain every few seconds. What now? What next? They didn’t even have water.

“I’m afraid,” América said for the second time that day, her voice pinched and low, coming at him out of the void. All around them the brush crepitated with the tiny feet of rodents and lizards and the shuffling slink of snakes and insects fleeing the fire. There was a crash of bigger things too—deer, he supposed—and a persistent stirring and scratching of dead leaves that could have been anything from a skunk to a bobcat. He didn’t answer her, not right away, not until he confirmed what he’d been dreading: “Cándido,” she whispered, “I think my water broke. The baby’s coming, I can’t help it.” She paused to draw in a sharp breath. “It’s coming.”

“It’s going to be all right,” he told her, and he knelt beside her in the dark and ran his fingers over her face and stroked her brow, but all the while he could feel the little wheels racing inside him. There was no doctor here, no midwife, no apartment, no hospital, electricity, water, no roof even. He’d never delivered a baby. He’d never seen one delivered, except in the movies, and then it always happened off-camera, the honey-skinned actress in a sweat and crying out, a jerk of the camera, and there it was, the baby, clean and healthy and beautiful and wrapped in a snowy towel. America moaned, a deep quavering gasp of a moan that made his legs go weak with fear. She was so small. Too small. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. “Cándido,” she whispered, “I’m thirsty. So thirsty.”

He got to his feet. The night clung to him like a stocking. Off in the distance, to the north, there was a string of lights, cars turning back at the top of the canyon, a police cordon maybe, and just to the west of that was the staging area for the helicopters. But that was at least three or four miles as the crow flies, and how could he get her there, and if he did, then what? They’d seize him in a minute, a Mexican coming out of the bushes and the whole canyon ablaze—they’d see it in his eyes, see it in the color of his skin and the way he slouched up to them like a whipped dog, and what kind of mercy could he expect then?

“You stay here,” he told her, his own voice as strange in his ears as a disembodied voice talking out of the radio. “I’m going to see if I can’t find a house or, or—” He didn’t finish the thought. “Don’t worry,
mi vida,
I’ll be just a minute. I’ll find help, I will.”

And then he was weaving his way through the scrub, drawn like an insect to the promise of the distant lights. A helicopter clattered off down the valley, its running lights blinking green and red. Something plunged into the bushes ahead of him. He went a hundred feet and called out. America answered him. He couldn’t go too far or he’d lose her, he knew that, and he was afraid of losing her, lightheaded with the thought of it, but what else could he do? He decided he would only go two hundred feet, counting out the steps aloud, then double back and go out in the opposite direction. The hills were studded with houses, houses climbing the hills like some sort of blight—there were hundreds of houses out here, hundreds. And roads. Electric poles, water mains, sewers. There were trash cans and automobiles and pavement. There had to be something here, there had to be.

He shouted out twice more and heard América’s weak bleat of response, all the while counting higher—
ciento ochenta
y
uno, ciento ochenta
y
dos
—as he eased through the brush like a man tiptoeing across a minefield. He was worried about his feet, all the snakes on the move, the son and brother and uncle of that one he’d killed, but he went on, feeling his way, and what choice did he have? He’d rather be attacked by all the snakes in the world than have to deliver that baby out here in the desert of the night, or anywhere, for that matter. He was no doctor—he was a fool, a fool stumbling through an ever-expanding obstacle course, the cards stacked against him, the fates howling, and everything that was good or precious or even possible depended on him and him alone. He’d reached a hundred and ninety-five, the wheels racing, despair in his gut, when he saw a faint glow ahead, and then, all of a sudden, it was there and he was pressed against it: a wall, a white stucco wall.

 

 

 

Cándido worked his way along the wall, feeling for an opening. There was no light but for the unsteady glow of the fire in the distance, and the sky was black, as black as the night sky in Tepoztlán during the rains. Gone was the yellow reflection of the city, every last watt of light driven down and conquered by the smoke of his little campfire that had gone berserk. The thought frightened him all over again. All this—the magnitude of it. If they caught him—oh, his
pinche
life would be worth nothing then. But what was he thinking? What did his life matter? America was the one. She’d followed him into this mess and she was out there now, the underbrush rustling with rats and crawling things, out there in the utter absence of light, and her baby was coming and she was thirsty and tired and scared.

The wind had shifted yet again and that meant the flames were climbing back toward them, relentless, implacable, eating up the canyon despite all that the
gringos
and their airplanes could do. It was hard to breathe and he could smell nothing but smoke and cinders and the burning stench of destruction—worse, far worse, than anything the Tijuana dump could offer. Even the smell of the dead burning flesh of the dogs was preferable to this, because this was his smell, his creation, and it was out of control. He kept going, faster now, patting furiously at the wall, the copper taste of panic rising in his throat. And what was behind the wall? Houses, he guessed. The houses of the rich. Or maybe a ranch—one of those big squared-off places with a single house set squarely in the middle of it. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was—the flight up the canyon and across the road had disoriented him—but they wouldn’t have built a wall around nothing. He had to get inside, had to find out.

And then the shed was there, announced by a sharp pain in his knee and the dull booming reverberation of aluminum. He felt his way around it to the back and the door that opened on the black hole of the interior. It was hot inside, baked by the sun all day till it was like one of the sweat lodges the reservation Indians used in their rituals, and the aluminum ceiling was low. There was a sharp smell of chlorine and of grass clippings, gasoline and manure—even before he let his hands interpret the place for him, Cándido knew what it was. He felt around the walls like a blind man—he
was
a blind man, but a blind man in a hurry, a rush, life and death—and the tools were all there, the shovels and the shears and the weed whippers. His hands darted over the lawn mower, one of those ones you sit in, like a little tractor, the plastic buckets of chlorine and muriatic acid and all the rest of it. And then he found the shelves and felt over the boxes of seed and gopher pellets until,
milagro de milagros,
his fingers closed round the throat of a kerosene lantern. Half a minute and it was lit, and the shed was a place of depth and color. He stepped outside with the lantern and there, tucked in against the wall right at his feet, was a faucet and a green hose coiled up against the plastic pipe of the irrigation system.

He found a cup in the shed and drank off three cups of water before filling it for America, and then he went off to get her, the lantern puddling light at his feet and throwing a dim halo into the bushes before him. He followed the wall back to where he’d jammed a stick in the ground to guide him and went off at a right angle from that, calling out to her as he went. The dirt was pale, the bushes paler. Smoke rolled over the hill like a deadly fog. “Here,” she called. “Over here!”

 

 

 

It was hot. It smelled bad. She was scared. She couldn’t believe she was having her baby in a place like this, with the whole world on fire and nobody to help her, no midwife, no doctor, not even a
curandera.
And the pain. Everything was so tight down there, squeezing in, always in, when it should be pushing out. She was in a shed, floating in a sea of rustling plastic sacks of grass seed, the sweat shining all over her like cooking oil and Cándido fussing around with his knife—sharpening it now on a whetstone—as if he could be of any use at all. The pains came regularly now, every minute or so, and they took away her breath. She wanted to cry out, wanted to cry out for her mother, for Tepoztlán, for everything she’d left behind, but she held it all in, everything in, always in and why not out, and then again and again.

She was dreaming, awake and dreaming, but the dreams were full of teeth and claws and the howls of animals. Outside, beyond the thin skin of the shed, the inferno rushed toward them and the winds rattled the walls with a pulse like a drumbeat and Cándido’s face was a glowing ball of sweat and worry. She knew what he was thinking: should they run and how could they run with the baby coming now and why did it have to come now of all times and who had elected him the sole target of all the world’s calamities? But she couldn’t help him. She could barely move and the pains were gripping her and then releasing again till she felt like a hard rubber ball slammed against a wall over and over. And then, in the middle of it all, with the terrible clenching pains coming one after the other, the animals suddenly stopped howling and the wind ceased its incessant drumming at the walls. America heard the fire then, a crackling hiss like the TV turned up full volume in the middle of the night and nothing on, and then a thin mewling whine that was no howl or screech but the tentative interrogatory meow of a cat, a pretty little Siamese with transparent ears that stepped through the open door and came right up to her as if it knew her. She held out her hand, and then clenched her fist with the pain of a contraction, and the cat stayed with her. “
Gatita
,” she whispered to the arching back and the blue luminous eyes, “you’re the one. You’re the saint. You. You will be my midwife.”

THE NIGHT CAME DOWN LIKE A HAMMER: NO GENTLY fading light, no play of colors on the horizon, no flights of swallows or choruses of crickets. Delaney watched it from behind the police barrier at the top of Topanga Canyon, his wife, stepson and mother-in-law at his side. Their friends and neighbors were gathered there with them, refugees in Land-Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes and Jeep Cherokees that were packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry. Bombers pounded overhead while fire trucks, sirens whining, shot down the road. Emergency lights flashed, strobing endlessly across the panorama of massed and anxious faces, and police stood tall against the strips of yellow plastic that held back the crowd. It was war, and no mistaking it.

Kyra leaned into Delaney, gripping his arm with both hands, her head on his shoulder. She was still dressed for the party. They gazed out on the distant flames and smelled the smoke and felt the wind in their faces while dogs yapped and hastily trailered horses whinnied and the radios from a hundred cars blared out the catastrophic news. “I guess this means we can forget the turkey,” Delaney said. “It’ll be like jerky by now.”

“Turkey?” Kyra lifted her face to fix him with an acid look. “What about the oven, the kitchen, the roof? What about all our furniture, our clothes? Where are we going to live?”

Delaney felt a stab of irritation. “I was just being, I don’t know, ironic.”

She turned away from him, her eyes on the creeping molten fingers of the fire. “It’s no joke, Delaney. Two of my listings went up in the Malibu fire last year, and believe me, there was nothing left, nothing but smoldering ash and metal twisted up out of the ground where the plumbing used to be, and if you think that’s funny you must have a pretty sick sense of humor. That’s our house down there. That’s everything we own.”

“What in christ’s name are you talking about? You think I think this is funny? It’s not—it’s terrifying. It scares the shit out of me. We never had anything like this in New York, maybe a hurricane or something every ten years or so, a couple of trees knocked down, but this—”

She detached herself from him then and shouted out to Jordan, who’d been darting in and out of the knots of people with one of his friends, to stay close. Then she turned back to Delaney. “Maybe you should have stayed there, then,” she said, her voice harsh with anger, and she went off in the direction of her mother and Dom Flood.

Delaney watched her go. She was throwing it all on his shoulders, making him the scapegoat, and he felt put-upon and misunderstood, felt angry, pissed off, rubbed raw. He’d done his best. He’d managed to get his word processor and discs into the car in the ten minutes the police had given them between the first and final warnings—a pair of cruisers crawling up and down the street with their loudspeakers blaring—but that was about all. Ten minutes. What could you do in ten minutes? He was frozen with grief and anxiety—how could she doubt that? He hadn’t meant anything about the turkey—it was gallows humor, that was all, an attempt to break the tension. What did a turkey matter? A thousand turkeys? He was standing there in the garish light, the wind in his face and his entire cranial cavity filled with smoke, angry at the world—What next? he was thinking, what more could they do to him?—when Jack Cherrystone appeared at his side with a bottle of liquor in his hand.