The Tortilla Curtain Read online

  The parking attendant gave her her keys with a smile full of teeth and a mock bow that took him almost to the ground. He was a young Latino with slicked-back hair and dancing eyes and he always made her feel good, and though it was a little thing and she knew it was his job to make the ladies feel good, she couldn’t help smiling back at him. Then she was in her ear and the rest of the world wasn’t. She switched off the car phone, fed one of her relaxation tapes into the slot in the console—waves breaking on a beach, with the odd keening cry of a seagull thrown in for variety—and eased out into the traffic snarled on the boulevard in front of the office.

  Traffic was traffic, and it didn’t faze her a bit. She moved with it, sat in it, ran with its unfathomable flow. The car was her sanctuary, and with the phone switched off and the waves rolling from the front speakers to the rear and back again, nothing could touch her. Just sitting there, locked in, the exhaust rising about her, she began to feel better.

  She was responsible for closing up five houses every night, seven days a week, and opening them again in the morning so her fellow realtors could show them. These were the houses she was keying on, and though they had lockboxes, she needed to make sure they were secure at night—she couldn’t count the times a careless realtor had left a window or even a door open—and to collect the cards of any of her colleagues who might have been through with a client. It added a good hour or more to her day, but it kept the sellers happy and she could go home and network with those cards while Delaney put up dinner and Jordan did his homework. And five houses was nothing, really—she’d had as many as twelve or thirteen during the boom years.

  She went through the first four houses on automatic pilot—in the door, douse the lights, check on the automatic timers, punch in the alarm code and lock up, key in the lockbox—but with the last house, the Da Ros place, she took her time. This was a house you could get lost in, a house that made her other listings look like bungalows. Of all the places she’d ever shown, this was the one that really spoke to her, the sort of house she would have when she was forty and kissed Mike Bender goodbye and opened her own office. It sat high on a bluff above the canyon at the end of a private drive, with an unobstructed view of the Pacific on one side and the long green-brown spine of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other. Way below it, like some sort of fungus attached to the flank of the mountain, lay the massed orange tile rooftops of Arroyo Blanco.

  There were twenty rooms, each arranged to take advantage of the views, a library, billiard room, servants’ quarters, formal gardens and fishpond. In all, the house comprised eleven thousand square feet of living space, done up in the style of an English manor house, with towering chimneys, fieldstone walls and a roof stained russet and green to counterfeit age and venerability, though it only dated back to 1988. It was on the market because of a suicide. Kyra was representing the widow, who’d gone to live in Italy after the funeral.

  Her headache was gone now, but it had been replaced by a fatigue that went deeper than any physical exhaustion, a funk, a malaise she couldn’t seem to shake. All this over a dog? It was ridiculous, she knew it. There were people out there going through Dumpsters for a scrap to eat, people lined up on the streets begging for work, people who’d lost their homes, their children, their spouses, people with real problems, real grief. What was wrong with her?

  Maybe it was her priorities, maybe that was it. What was she doing with her life? Cutting deals? Making Mike Bender richer? Seeing that Mr. and Mrs. Whoever found or sold or leased or rented their dream house while the world was falling to shit around her and dogs were dying and she got to spend an hour and a half a day with her son if she was lucky? She looked round her and it was as if she were waking from a dream, the sky on fire, the towers blazing above her. It was then, for just a moment, standing there in the tiled drive of Patricia Da Ros’s huge wheeling ark of a house, that she caught a glimpse of her own end, laid to rest in short skirt, heels and tailored jacket, a sheaf of escrow papers clutched in her hand.

  She tried to shrug it off. Tried to tell herself that what she did was important, vital, altruistic even—after food and love, what was more important than shelter?—but the cloud wouldn’t lift and she felt numb from the balls of her feet to the crown of her head. She found herself drifting through the gardens, checking to see that everything was in order—she couldn’t help herself—and there was no carelessness here because the gardener was her own and he knew just what was expected of him. All was quiet. The koi lay deep in their pools and the lawns glistened under a soft uniform mist from the sprinklers.

  It was quarter past six and still warm—uncomfortably warm—but there was an offshore breeze and Kyra could see a skein of fog unraveling across the water below. The evening would be cool. She thought of her own house then, of Delaney going round opening the windows and turning on the big slow ceiling fans to gather in the breeze while the salad chilled and the pasta steamed and Jordan kicked a ball against the garage door. If she hurried, she could be home by seven.

  But she didn’t hurry. The more she thought of her own house, of her son, her husband, her solitary dog, the more enervated she felt. She lingered on the doorstep, wandered through the cavernous rooms like a ghost, ran her hand over the felt of the billiard table as if she were caressing the short stiff nap at the base of Jordan’s neck. She was just checking to see that everything was in order, that was all, but in a way, a growing way, a way that almost overwhelmed her, she didn’t want to leave, not ever again.

  Late morning, the house silent, light muted, telephone off the hook. Delaney sat in his office, a converted bedroom fitted but with desk, couch and filing cabinets, leaning into a pool of artificial light while the sun cut precise slashes between the slats of the drawn blinds. He’d been out earlier with shovel and pickax, the heavy clay soil like asphalt, to dispose of the dog’s remains, putting an end to that chapter. Mercifully. And now he was back at work, severed limbs, distraught wives, frightened children and public meetings behind him, putting the finishing touches to his latest column:

  PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK

  Who am I, manzanita stick in hand and nylon pack clinging to my shoulders like a furled set of wings, out abroad in the wide world? Who am I, striding into the buttery glaze of evening sun amidst stands of bright blooming mustard that reach to my elbows and beyond? I’m a pilgrim, that’s all, a seer, a worshiper at the shrine. No different from you, really: housebound half the day, a slave to the computer, a man who needs his daily fix of electricity as badly as any junkie needs his numinous drug. But different too, because I have these mountains to roam and these legs to carry me. Tonight—this evening—I am off on an adventure, a jaunt, a peregrination beneath the thin skin of the visible to breathe in the world around me as intensely as Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer and his kin: I am climbing into the fastness of the Santa Monica Mountains, within sight and sound of the second-biggest city in the country (within the city limits, for that matter), to spend a solitary night.

  I am excited. Bursting. Thrilling like a plucked string. For while I know these hills in the broad light of midday, and I know them in early morning and evening (and I’ve tasted them, as you might taste an exotic fruit) between the curtains of the night, this will be my first sojourn here under the stars. From the moment my wife drops me off at the Trippet Ranch trailhead with a kiss and a promise to come for me at nine the next morning, I feel a primeval sense of liberation, of release, and as I wend my way upward through the stands of undiscouraged shrubs, I can’t help singing out their names in a sort of mantra—bush poppy, sumac, manzanita, ceanothus, chamise, redshanks—over and over again.

  The mustard is an interloper here, by the way, an annual introduced by the Franciscan padres, who, so it is said, broadcast handfuls of seed along the Camino Real to mark the trail, but of course they had an ulterior motive too: this is the same mustard that winds up in a jar on our table. It blooms after the rains and transforms the hills, yellow flowers stretching to the horizo
n in pointillistic display, but by this time of the year it has already begun to fade. In a month there will be nothing left but shriveled leaves and dried-out stalks.

  By contrast, the manzanita and toyon, with their lode of palatable berries, are on for the long haul, as are our two hardy members of the rose family, chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) and redshanks (Adenostoma sparsifolium). Tough customers, these. They deposit toxins in the soil to inhibit germination of competing plants and carry resins in their woody stems to feed the periodic brushfires that allow them to regenerate. They will see no rain—indeed, no moisture at all save for what little may drift in on the sea mist—till November or December. But there they are, holding the ground like an army keeping the sun at bay.

  I will spend the night not at the prescribed campground (Musch Ranch), but in a more solitary place off the Santa Ynez Canyon Trail, with nothing more elaborate between me and terra firma than an old army blanket and a foam pad. Of course, unwelcome bed-fellows are always a concern up here, with rattlesnakes heading the list, but certain oversized members of the Arachnida class—tarantulas and scorpions, specifically—can be equally disconcerting.

  A friend once joked that the scorpion has evolved his pincers in order to seize the big toe of the unsuspecting Homo sapiens and gain purchase for the fine penetrating over-the-back sting. Look at a scorpion lying there in the aperture of his burrow or scuttling about in the beam of a flashlight, and you might almost think it true. But like everything else in this Creation, the scorpion is beautiful in his way and beautifully adapted to seizing, paralyzing and absorbing his insect prey. (I once kept two of them in a jar—a mustard jar, for that matter—and fed them on spiders. Though one was half again as large as the other, they seemed to coexist peacefully enough until I went away for a week and returned to see the larger drinking up the vital juices of the smaller, which at that point resembled nothing so much as a tiny scorpion-shaped balloon that someone had let the air out of.)

  But that is why I am here instead of home in my armchair with a book in my lap: to savor not only the fixed joys and certitudes of Nature but the contingencies too. It’s a heady feeling, the sort of feeling that makes you know you’re alive and breathing and part of the whole grand scheme of things, drinking from the same fount as the red-tailed hawk, the mule deer, the centipede and the scorpion too.

  Darkness is coming on as I spread my blanket on the earth at the head of a canyon near a trickling waterfall and settle in to watch the night deepen round me. My fare is humble: an apple, a handful of trail mix, a Swiss cheese sandwich and a long thirsty swallow of aqua pura from the bota bag. From somewhere deep in the hollow space below me comes the soft, almost delicate, hoot of the great horned owl—more a coo really—and it is answered a moment later by an equally diffident hoot off to the east. By now the night has taken over and the stars have begun to extricate themselves one by one from the haze. An hour passes. Two. I am waiting for something, I don’t know what, but if I can filter out the glowing evidence of our omnipresent civilization (passenger jets, streaking high overhead on their incessant journeys, the light pollution that makes the eastern sky glow as if with the first trembling light of dawn), I feel that all this is mine to have and hold, for this night at least.

  And then I hear it, a high tenuous glissade of sound that I might almost have mistaken for a siren if I didn’t know better, and I realize that this is what I’ve been waiting for all along: the coyote chorus. The song of the survivor, the Trickster, the four-legged wonder who can find water where there is none and eat hearty among the rocks and the waste places. He is out there now, ringing-in the night, gathering in his powers and dominions, hunting, gamboling, stealing like a shadow through the scrub around me, and singing, singing for my benefit alone on this balmy seamless night. And I? I lie back and listen, as on another night I might listen to Mozart or Mendelssohn, lulled by the impassioned beauty of it. The waterfall trickles. The coyotes sing. I have a handful of raisins and a blanket: what more could I want? All the world knows I am content.

  6

  THE BEANS WERE GONE, THE TORTILLAS, THE LARD, the last few grains of rice. And what were they going to eat—grass? Like the cows? That was the question she put to Cándido when he tried to prevent her from going up the hill to the labor exchange for the fifth weary day in a row, and so what if it had a sting in it? What right did he have to tell her where she could go and what she could do? He wasn’t helping any. He could barely get up and take a pee on his own—and what of the gabacho boys who’d ripped up her dress and flung their blanket into the creek, where was he then? She threw it all at him, angry, hurt, terrified; and then he rose up off the blanket and slapped her. Hard. Slapped her in the pale rocky dawn of the ravine till her head snapped back on her neck like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle. “Don’t you tell me,” he growled through his teeth. “It’s an insult. A kick in the ass when I’m down.” He spat at her feet. “You’re no better than your sister, no better than a whore.”

  But you couldn’t eat grass, and for all his bluster, he must have realized that. He was healing, but he was still in no shape to climb up out of the canyon and throw himself back into la lucha, the struggle to find a job, to be the one man picked out of a crowd, and then to work like ten men to show the patrón you wanted to come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. She understood his frustration, his fear, and she loved him, she did, to the bottom of her heart. But it hurt to be the target of those hard and filthy words, hurt more than the blow itself. And when it was all over, when the birds had started in again and the stream made its noise against the rocks and the cars clawed at the road above, what had been accomplished? Bitterness, that was all. She turned her back on him and made her way up that crucible of a hill for the fifth useless time in as many useless days.

  Somebody handed her a cup of coffee. A man she’d seen the last two mornings, a newcomer—he said he was from the South, that was all. He was tall—nearly six feet, she guessed—and he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head like one of the gringos in the supermarket. His skin was light, so light he could almost have passed for one of them, but it was his eyes that gave him away, hard burnished unblinking eyes the color of calf’s liver. He’d been damaged somehow, she could see that, damaged in the way of a man who has to scrape and grovel and kiss the hind end of some irrecusable yankee boss, and his eyes showed it, jabbing out at the world like two weapons. He was Mexican, all right.

  She had to turn away from those eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t have accepted the coffee—steaming, with milk and so much sugar it was like a confection, in a styrofoam cup with a little plastic lid to keep the heat in—but she couldn’t help herself. There was nothing in her stomach, nothing at all, and she was faint with the need of it. She was in her fourth month now, and the sickness was gone, but she was ravenous, mad with hunger, eating for two when there wasn’t enough for one. She dreamed of food, of the romeritos stew her mother made on Holy Thursday, tortillas baked with chopped tomatoes, chiles and grated cheese, chicken heads fried in oil, shrimp and oysters and a mole sauce so rich and piquant with serranos it made the juices come to her mouth just to think about it. She stood there in the warm flowing flower-scented dawn and sipped the coffee, and it only made her hungrier.

  By seven, three pickup trucks had already swung into the lot, Candelario Pérez had separated out three, four and three men again, and they were gone. The stranger from the South was not chosen, and there were still ten men who’d arrived before him. Out of the corner of her eye, America watched him contend with Candelario Pérez—she couldn’t hear the words, but the man’s violent gestures and the contortions of his scowling pale half-a-gringo’s face were enough to let her know that he wasn’t happy waiting his turn, that he was a grumbler, a complainer, a sorehead. “Son of a bitch,” she heard him say, and she averted her eyes. Please, she was praying, don’t let him come over to me.

  But he did come over. He’d given her a cup of coffee�
��she still had the evidence in her hand, styrofoam drained to the last sugary caffeinated drop—and she was his ally. She was sitting in her usual spot, her back pressed to the pillar nearest the entrance, ready to spring to her feet the minute some gringo or gringa pulled in needing a maid or a cook or a laundress, and the stranger eased down beside her. “Hello, pretty,” he said, and his voice was a high hoarse gasp, as if he’d been poked in the throat, “—enjoy the coffee?”

  She wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t speak.

  “I saw you sitting here yesterday,” he went on, the voice too high, too ragged, “and I said to myself, ‘There’s a woman that looks like she could use a cup of coffee, a woman that deserves a cup of coffee, a woman so pretty she should have the whole plantation,’ and so I brought you one today. What do you think of that, eh, linda?” And he touched her chin with two grimy hard fingers, to turn her face toward him.

  Miserable, guilty—she’d taken the coffee, hadn’t she?—she didn’t resist. The weird tan eyes stared into hers. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He smiled then and she saw that there was something wrong with his teeth, something catastrophic, each visible tooth a maze of fracture lines like an old picture in a church. Dentures, he was wearing dentures, that was it, cheap dentures. And then he breathed out and she had to turn away again—there was something rotting inside of him. “Me llamo José,” he said, holding out a hand to shake, “José Navidad. ¿Y tú? ¿Cómo te llamas, pretty?”