The Tortilla Curtain By T.C. Boyle
(Part 2, Chapter 2 pages 167-168)
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It was nearly one o’clock by the time they got to the place, a big house in a
development of big houses locked away behind a brand new set of gates. Candido
knew what those gates were for and who they were meant to keep out, but that
didn’t bother him. He wasn’t resentful. He wasn’t envious. He didn’t need a million
dollars—he wasn’t born for that, and if he was he would have won the lottery. No, all
he needed was work, steady work and this was a beginning. He mixed concrete, dug
holes, hustled as best he could with the hollow metal posts and the plastic strips, all
the while amazed at the houses that had sprouted up here, proud and substantial,
big gringo houses, where before there had been nothing here but hills of golden
grass, humped like the back of some immemorial animal, and the dusty green
canopies of the canyon oaks.
He’d been working up in Idaho, in the potatoes, sending all his money home
to Resurreccion, 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 the cock of the walk until spring. But
Hilario convinced him: You’re here already, he ‘s 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 Candido 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.
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 Candido 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 the huge
howling long semitrailers roared past them like Death flapping its wings over the
deepest pit. Candido 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 with paralyzed hands, helpless to keep the car from
skittering like a hocky 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
The Tortilla Curtain By T.C. Boyle
(Part 2, Chapter 2 pages 167-168)
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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 Candido 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 Candido and two of the
other men kept on running. Candido ran until 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.