The Tortilla Curtain (48 page)

While the soup was heating in the microwave, Delaney pulled a clean pair of jeans out of the closet, dug down in back for his High Sierra lightweight hiking boots with the half-inch tread, laid out a pair of insulated socks, a sweater and his raingear on the bed. The shower had warmed him, but he was still trembling, and he realized it wasn’t the cold affecting him, but adrenaline, pure adrenaline. He was too keyed up to do much more than blow on the soup—CampbeH’s Chunky Vegetable—and then he was in the hallway, standing before the full-length mirror and watching himself tuck the gun into his pants and pull it out again while listening to the messages on the machine. Kyra was going to be late, just as he’d thought—she’d got involved with some house in Agoura, of all places, and she was late picking up Jordan and thought she’d just maybe take him out for Chinese and then to the card shop; he was collecting X-Men cards now. Delaney looked up, dropped the film in his pocket and stepped back out into the rain.

It was coming down hard. Piñon was like a streambed, nothing moving but the water, and he could hear boulders slamming around in the culverts high up on the hill that were meant to deflect runoff and debris from the development. Delaney wondered about that, and he stood there in the rain a long moment, listening for the roar of the mountain giving way—what with erosion in the burn area and all this rain anything could happen. They were vulnerable—these were the classic mudslide conditions, nothing to hold the soil in thanks to the match-happy Mexican up there—but then there really wasn’t much he could do about it. If the culverts overflowed, the wall would repel whatever came down—it wasn’t as if he and his neighbors would have to be out there sandbagging or anything. He was concerned, of course he was concerned—he was concerned about everything—and if the weather gods would grant him a wish he’d cut this back to a nice safe gently soaking drizzle, but at least the way it was coming down now that bastard up there would be pinned down in whatever kind of hovel he’d been able to throw together, and that would make him all the easier to find.

At the Cherrystones, Delaney found the key under the pot with no problem, and he hung his poncho on the inside of the doorknob in the kitchen so as not to dribble water all over the tile. He fumbled for the light switch, the gun pressing at his groin like a hard hot hand, like something that had come alive, and his heart slammed at his ribs and thudded in his ears. The light suddenly exploded in the room, and Selda’s cat—a huge manx that was all but indistinguishable from a bobcat—sprang from the chair and shot down the hallway. Delaney felt like a thief. But then he was in the darkroom, the film in the tank, and that calmed him, that was all right—Anytime, Jack had said, anytime you want. Delaney was so sure of what he was going to get this time he barely registered the reversed images on the negatives—there was something there, shadowy figures, a blur of criminal activity—and he cut the curling strip of film and let it drop to the floor, printing up the first six frames on a contact sheet. When it was ready, he slid the paper into the developer and received his second photographic jolt of the week: this was no Mexican blinking scared and open-faced into the lens on a pair of towering legs anchored by glistening leather hi-tops, no Mexican with the spray can plainly visible in his big white fist, no Mexican with hair that shade or cut ...

It was Jack Jr.

Jack Jr. and an accomplice Delaney didn’t recognize, and there they were, replicated six times on a sheet of contact paper, brought to life, caught in the act. It was as complete a surprise as Delaney had ever had, and it almost stopped him. Almost. He pushed himself up from the counter and in a slow methodical way he cleaned up, draining the trays, rinsing them and setting them back on the shelf where Jack kept them. Then he dropped the negatives on the contact sheet and balled the whole thing up in a wad and buried it deep in the trash. That Mexican was guilty, sure he was, guilty of so much more than this. He was camping up there, wasn’t he? He’d wrecked Delaney’s car. Stolen kibble and plastic sheeting. And who knew but that he hadn’t set that fire himself?

 

 

 

The night was black, utterly, impenetrably black, but Delaney didn’t want to use his flashlight—there was too much risk of giving himself away. As soon as he dropped down on the far side of the wall, the faint light of the development’s porch lights and Christmas displays was snuffed out and the night and the rain were all. The smell was raw and rich at the same time, an amalgam of smells, a whole mountainside risen from the dead. The boulders echoed in the steel-lined culverts, groaning like thunder, and everywhere the sound of running water. Every least crack in the soil was a fissure and every fissure a channel and every channel a stream. Delaney felt it washing round his ankles. His eyes, ever so gradually, began to adjust to the light.

He started straight up, along the backbone of the slope the coyote had ascended with Sacheverell in its jaws, and there was nothing under his feet. Where the white dust and the red grains of the anthills had lain thick on the dehydrated earth, there was now an invisible, infinitely elastic net of mud. Delaney’s feet slipped out from under him despite the money-back guarantee of the boots, and he was down on his hands and knees before he’d gone twenty steps. Rain whipped his face, the chaparral disintegrated under the frantic grasp of his fingers. He kept going, foot by foot, seeking the level patches where he could rise to his feet and reconnoiter before he slipped again and went back to all fours. Time meant nothing. The universe was reduced to the square foot of broken sky over his head and the mud beneath his hands. He was out in it, right in the thick of it, as near to the cold black working heart of the world as he could get.

And all the while he was thinking: I’ve got him now, the son of a bitch, the jack-in-the-box, the firebug, and the exhilaration that took hold of him was like a drug and the drug shut out all reason. He never gave a thought as to what he was going to do with the Mexican once he caught him—that didn’t matter. None of it mattered. All that mattered was this, was finding him, rooting him out of his burrow and counting his teeth and his toes and the hairs on his head and noting it all down for the record. Delaney had been here before, been here a hundred times stalking a hundred different creatures—he was a pilgrim, after all. His senses were keen. There was no escaping him.

And then, just as he knew he would, he caught the first faint reductive whiff of it: woodsmoke. Delaney touched the gun then, touched it there where it lay tight against his groin, and let his nose guide him.

8

“YOU LOOK LIKE YOU JUST SAW A GHOST.”

Cándido was feeding sticks into the fire, trying to warm himself, and he didn’t answer. A moment ago he’d called out to her in the dark and the streaming rain so as not to startle her—“It’s me, mi
vida”
—and then he’d crawled through the dripping flap of rug they’d hung across the entrance, bringing the wet with him. He’d kicked the
huaraches
off outside, but his feet were balls of mud all the way up to his ankles, and his shirt and pants were dark with rain and pressed to his skin. He didn’t have a jacket. Or a hat.

America was about to say,
Cándido, mi amor, you need to rinse your feet out the door, this place is bad enough as it is, it’s leaking in the corner and that smell of mold or rot or whatever it is is driving me crazy,
but she took another look at his face and changed her mind. He didn’t have anything with him, either, and that was strange—he always brought something back, a scrap of cloth she could make into a dress for the baby, a package of
tortillas
or rice or sometimes a candy bar. Tonight there was nothing, only that face. “Is there something wrong?” she said.

He pulled his muddy feet up beneath him in that little space that was like a packing crate, the whole place hardly bigger than the king-size beds the
gringos
slept in, and she saw how thin and worn he’d become and she felt she was going to cry, she couldn’t hold it back, and it sounded like the whimper of a dog in her own ears. She was crying, sucking the sounds in before they could escape her, the rain drilling the green plastic roof and trickling down the clear plastic sheeting Cándido had dug up somewhere to protect the walls, and still he didn’t answer her. She watched a shiver pass through him, and then another.

“I wish it was only a ghost,” he said after a while, and he reached for the aluminum dish of
cocido
where it sat on the shelf he’d built in the corner to hold their poor stock of groceries.

She watched him put the dish on the grill, poke up the fire and lay a few sticks of the bigger wood in under it.
Camping,
how she hated camping.

“It was that
gabacho,”
he said, “the one with the red hair who hit me with his car. He scares me. He’s like a madman. If we were back at home, back in the village, they’d take him to the city in a straitjacket and lock him up in the asylum.”

Her voice was hushed. The rain pounded at the door. “What happened?”

“What do you think?” He curled his lip and the sheen of the fire made his face come back to life. “I was walking along the road, minding my own business—and this was the worst day yet, nothing, not a chance of work—and suddenly there’s this car coming up behind me and I swear to Christ on his cross the lunatic tried to hit me again. It was inches. He missed me by inches.”

She could smell the
cocido
now—there was meat in it, something he’d trapped—and potatoes and
chiles
and a good strong broth. She couldn’t tell him now, couldn’t tell him yet, though she’d been working up her nerve all day—Socorro had to have a doctor, right away, she had to—but when he’d finished eating and warmed himself, then, it would have to be then.

Cándido’s voice was low with wonder. “Then he got out of the car and came after me—and with one of those telephones in his hand, the wireless ones—and I think he was calling the police, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out, you can bet your life on that. But what is it? What did I ever do to him? He can’t know about the fire, can he? And that was an accident, God knows—”

“Maybe he tried to hit you the first time too. Maybe he’s a racist. Maybe he’s a pig. Maybe he hates us because we’re Mexican.”

“I can’t believe it. How could anybody be that vicious? He gave me twenty dollars, remember?”

“Twenty dollars,” she spat, and she jerked her hand so violently she woke the baby. “And he sent his son down into the canyon to abuse us, didn’t he?”

Later, after Cándido had cleaned up the last of the
cocido
with three hot tortillas and his shirt had dried and the mud that had caked on his feet crumbled and fell through the slats of the floor, she steeled herself and came back to the question of Socorro and the doctor. “There’s something wrong with her,” America said, and a volley of wind-driven rain played off the plastic sheeting like spent ammunition. “It’s her eyes. I’m afraid, I’m afraid—” but she couldn’t go on.

“What do you mean, her eyes?” Cándido didn’t need this, he didn’t need another worry. “There’s nothing wrong with her eyes,” he said, and as if to prove it he took the baby from her and Socorro kicked out her arms in reflex and gave a harsh rasping cry: He looked into her face a moment—not too hard, he was afraid to look too hard—and then he glanced at America and said, “You’re crazy. She’s beautiful, she’s perfect—what more do you want?” Socorro passed between them again, soft and fragile and wrapped up in her towel, but for all that, Cándido handled her as if she were a bundle of sticks, a loaf of bread, just another object.

“She, she can’t see me, Cándido—she can’t see anything, and I’m afraid.”

Thunder struck his face. The rain screamed. “You’re crazy.”

“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—