The Tortilla Curtain (46 page)

The man looked at him then, really looked at him, but all he said was “This isn’t a good place for you to be.”

Dispirited, Cándido crossed the road and shambled over the bridge in the direction of the Chinese market and the lumberyard beyond it. He’d hardly even noticed the bridge before—it was just a section of the road suspended over the dead brush of the streambed—but now its function was revealed to him as the churning yellow water pounded at its concrete abutments and the boulders slammed into it with a rumble that was like the grinding of the earth’s molars—all through the summer and fall there had been no water, and now suddenly there was too much. Cándido stood for a while outside the Chinese store, though he was nervous about that, and sure enough, the old Chinaman, the one with the goggle glasses and the suspenders to hold the pants up over his skinny hips, came out to shoo him away in his weird up-and-down language. But Cándido wouldn’t give up and so he stood just down the street from the lumberyard, hoping some contractor picking up materials might see him there and give him work. It wasn’t a propitious place, even in the best of times, and Cándido had never seen a single
bracero
hunkered over his heels here. Rumor had it that the lumberyard boss would call the cops the minute he saw a Mexican in the lot.

Cándido stood there for two hours, trying to attract the attention of every pickup that pulled into the lumberyard, so desperate now he didn’t care if La
Migra
picked him up or not, but no one gave him even so much as a glance. His feet hurt and his stomach rumbled. He was cold. It must have been about half-past four when he finally gave it up and started back along the road, looking for cans to redeem and thinking he would watch for his chance to stick his head in the dumpster out back of the
paisano’s
market—he had to bring something back with him, anything. Every once in a while they would throw out a bag of onions with nothing worse than a few black spots on them or potatoes that had sprouted eyes—you never knew. He was keeping his head down and watching his feet, thinking maybe there’d be some meat that wouldn’t be so bad if you boiled it long enough or some bones and fat from the beef they’d trimmed out, when a car swerved in across the shoulder just ahead of him.

He froze, thinking of the accident all over again, wet roads,
norteamericanos
in a hurry, always in a hurry, and the next car blared its horn in a shrill mechanical curse because the rear end of the first car, the one right there on the shoulder, was sticking out into the roadway and all the endless line of cars coming up the hill with their wipers clapping and headlights glaring had to break the flow to swerve around it. But now the door was swinging open and another horn blared and Cándido was poisoned with déjà vu: this inescapable white, the fiery red brake lights and the yellow blinker, it was all so familiar. Before he had a chance to react, there he was, the
pelirrojo
who’d run him down all those months ago and then sent his gangling ugly
pelirrojo
of a son down into the canyon to harass and torment him, and the look on his face was pure malice. “You!” he shouted. “You stay right there!”

“You!” DELANEY SHOUTED. “YOU STAY RIGHT THERE!” He’d been coming up the road from the nursery on the Coast Highway, the trunk crammed with bags of ammonium sulfate and fescue seed, his view out the back partially obscured by a pair of areca palms for the front hallway, when he spotted the hunched shoulders, the weather-bleached khaki shirt and the pale soles of the Mexican’s dark feet working against the straps of his sandals. He slowed automatically, without thinking—could this be the man, was this him?—and then he jerked the wheel and felt the rear tires yaw away from him even as the driver behind him hit the horn, and he was up on the shoulder spewing gravel, his rear end sticking out in the road. Delaney didn’t care. He didn’t care about the hazard, didn’t care about the other drivers or the wet road or his insurance rates—all he cared about was this Mexican, the man who’d invaded his life like some unshakable parasite, like a disease. It was here, almost at the very spot, that he’d flung himself under the wheels of the car, everything come full circle, and this time Delaney wasn’t going to let him off, this time he had proof, photographic proof. “You stay right there!” Delaney roared, and he punched 911 into the car phone Kyra had given him as an early Christmas present.

The Mexican stood there dumbfounded, leaner and harder-looking than Delaney remembered him, the eyes black and startled, the thick brush of the mustache making a wound of his mouth. “Hello?” Delaney bawled into the receiver, “my name is Delaney Mossbacher and I want to report a crime in progress—or no, an apprehension of a suspect—on Topanga Canyon Road near Topanga Village, just south of—” but before he could finish, the suspect had begun to move. The Mexican looked at Delaney, looked at the telephone in his hand, and then he just stepped right out into the traffic like a sleepwalker.

Delaney watched in shock as the high blue surging apparition of a pickup cab with a woman’s face frozen behind the windshield framed the Mexican’s spindly legs and humped-over torso in a portrait of unquenchable momentum, and then, at the last possible moment, veered away in a screeching, rattling, fishtailing blur that hit the guardrail and ricocheted into the back end of his Acura Vigor GS, his new milk-white Acura Vigor GS with the tan leather upholstery and only thirty-eight hundred and sixteen miles on the odometer, where it finally came to rest in all its trembling wide-bodied authority. And the Mexican? He was unscathed, jogging up the opposite side of the road while horns blared and bumpers kissed all up and down the frantically braking string of cars. It was the commuter’s nightmare. It was Delaney’s nightmare. “Hello, hello—are you there?” cried a voice through the speaker of the phone.

Delaney didn’t call Kyra. He didn’t call Jack. He didn’t bother with Kenny Grissom or the body shop or even his insurer. As the rain started up again, a blanketing drizzle that seeped into his every pore, he stood at the side of the road and exchanged information with the woman in the pickup. She was in a rage, trembling all over, showing her teeth like a cornered rodent and stamping her feet in the mud. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you out of your mind stopping like that with your back end sticking halfway out across the road? And what’s with your friend—is he drunk or something, just strolling right out in front of me without even turning his head? You’re both drunk, you’ve got to be, and believe me you’re in trouble, mister, and I’m going to demand the cops give you a breath test, right here and now—”

The policeman who showed up twenty minutes later was grim and harried. He questioned Delaney and the woman separately about the details of the accident, and Delaney tried to tell him about the Mexican, but the cop wasn’t interested.

“I’m trying to tell you, it was this Mexican—he’s crazy, he throws himself in front of cars to try and collect on the insurance, he’s the one, and I’ve got a photograph, I caught him out front of Arroyo Blanco, that’s where I live, where we’ve had all that trouble with graffiti lately?”

They were seated in the patrol car, Delaney in the passenger seat, the cop bent over his pad, laboriously writing out his report in a jagged left-handed script. The radio sputtered and crackled. Rain spilled across the windshield in sheets, drummed on the roof, really coming down now. There were accidents on the Coast Highway, Malibu Canyon Road, 101, the dispatcher’s voice numb with the monotony of disaster. “Your vehicle was obstructing the road,” the cop said finally, and that was all.

Delaney sat in his car till the tow truck arrived; he showed the driver his Triple A card and then refused a ride home. “I’m going to walk,” he said, “it’s only a mile and a half.”

The driver studied him a moment, then handed him a receipt and pulled the door closed. The rain had slackened, but Delaney was already wet through to the skin, the Gore-Tex jacket clinging to his shoulders like a sodden pelt, the hair stamped to his forehead and dancing round his ears in a lank red fringe. “Suit yourself,” the man said through the crack of the window, and then Delaney was walking up the shoulder of the road as the pale shell of his car faded away into the mist ahead of him. He was walking, but this time he wasn’t merely walking to get somewhere, as on the torrid high-ceilinged summer morning when his first car was stolen—this time he had a purpose. This time—as he waited for a break in the traffic and dashed across the road—this time he was following a set of footprints up the muddy shoulder, very distinctive prints, unmistakable, cut in the rippled pattern of a tire tread.

 

 

 

Kyra could barely see the road. The rain had come up suddenly, closing off her view like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, and she had no choice but to hit her emergency flasher and pull off onto the shoulder to wait it out. She took advantage of the delay to thumb through her
Thomas Guide
and compare the map with the directions Delaney had scrawled on the notepad by the telephone. It was just past four and she’d taken the afternoon off to do some Christmas shopping—business was slow, dead in the water, actually, and for as long as she could remember she’d been meaning to start making a little more time for her family and for herself too—and she’d volunteered to pick up Jordan at his friend’s house. She didn’t know the boy—he was a friend from school—and since Delaney had dropped Jordan off, she didn’t know the house either. Or the street, which she was having trouble finding.

If she’d smoked, she would have lit a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke, so she put in a relaxation tape and listened to the artificial waves soughing through the speakers while the rain, palpable and real, sizzled on the pavement and rapped like a medium’s knuckles at the roof of the car. It gave her a cozy feeling, a feeling of being impervious to the elements, sealed in and secure, and she looked at the map and listened to her tape and realized that for the first time in as long as she could remember she was in no hurry to get anywhere. She’d been driving herself too hard for too long, and for what? Even before the Da Ros place went up she’d begun to have days when she just couldn’t seem to muster the enthusiasm to stuff envelopes with potholders or write up ads with the same tired old stock adjectives and banal abbreviations—CHARMING Monte Nido Rustic Contemp., Las Virgenes Schools, 2 ac. horse prop., 6 BR/4.5 BA, fam. rm., pool, priced to sell—or even show Mr. and Mrs. Nobody through the eternal hallways of all the eternal houses they had neither the taste nor the money to buy and then arranging creative financing and holding their hands through a sixty-day escrow that was as likely as not to fall out. It was about as exciting as going to the toilet. The deal-making-slipping the needle in and pulling it out so quickly and painlessly they didn’t even know they’d been pricked—that still got her pulse pounding, and so did beating everybody else out for a listing, especially a to-kill-for one like the Da Ros place, but the thrills were all too few and far between.

Ah, there was the problem—she didn’t know this part of Agoura as well as she should have, and she’d confused Foothill Place with Foothill Drive. She was on Foothill Drive now—and there, there it was, Comado Canyon Road, in the upper-left-hand corner of the map. She’d never heard of it before—it must be one of those new streets that jog up and down the grassy hills like roller coasters. Everything was new out here, a burgeoning, bustling, mini-mall-building testimonial to white flight, the megalopolis encroaching on the countryside. Ten years ago this was rural. Ten years before that you couldn’t find it on the map. Kyra was sure there must be some really primo properties up here, older houses, estates, ranches the developers hadn’t got to yet. The schools were good, property values holding their own, maybe even rising a bit—and it was just a hop, skip and jump from Woodland Hills, Malibu and Calabasas. She should look into it, she really should.

The rain fell off as abruptly as it had begun, gray banks of drizzle bellying up to the hills like inverted clouds, and Kyra started up the engine, looked over her shoulder and wheeled out onto the blacktop road. She came to a T and bore left, past a tract of single-family homes and up into the undulating hills where the houses were farther apart—nothing special, but they had property, an acre or more, it looked like—and she saw half a dozen blond-haired children going up and down a long drive, and a flock of sheep patched into a greening hillside. The trees seemed to stand up a bit straighter here, their leaves washed clean of six months’ accumulation of dust, particulates and hydrocarbons and whatever else the air held in suspension. It was pretty country—real estate—and it made her feel good.

The road forked again and became narrower, a remnant of the cart path that must once have been here, ranchers hauling hay or whatever to feed their cattle, Model T’s and A’s digging narrow ruts along the inside shoulders of the switchbacks, woodstoves and candlelight, chickens running free—Kyra didn’t know what it was, but she was swept up in a vision of a time before this one, composed in equal parts of
Saturday Evening
Post covers,
Lassie
reruns and a nostalgia for what she’d never known. These people really lived in the middle of nowhere—Arroyo Blanco was like Pershing Square compared to this. It was amazing. She had no idea there was so much open space out here—and not five miles from 101, she bet, and no more than twelve or fifteen from the city limits, if that. Was it still in L.A. County, she wondered, or had she crossed the line?

It was then, wondering and relaxed, enjoying the day, the scenery, the season, that she spotted the inconspicuous little sign at the head of a blacktop drive tucked away in a grove of eucalyptus just past the Comado Canyon turnoff: FOR SALE BY OWNER. She drove right past it, parting the veil of blue-gray mist that shrouded the road, but then she checked herself, pulled over onto the shoulder and made a U-turn that took her back to the driveway. The sign wasn’t very revealing—FOR SALE BY OWNER was all it said, and then there was a phone number beneath it. Was there a house in there? A ranch? An estate? Judging from the size of the eucalyptus—huge pale shedding old relics with mounds of sloughed bark at their feet—the place hadn’t been thrown together yesterday. But it was probably nothing. Probably a paint-blistered old chicken shack with a bunch of rusted-out cars in the yard—or a trailer.