The Tortilla Curtain Read Free

cheekbone would knit properly if it was, in fact, broken—you couldn’t put a splint on it, could you? And where was he going to bathe and disinfect his wounds? In the creek? At a gas station?
    It was crazy to refuse treatment like that, just crazy. But he had. And that meant he was iilega!—go to the doctor, get deported. There was a desperation in that, a gulf of sadness that took Delaney out of himself for a long moment, and he just stood there in front of the office, receipt in hand, staring into space.
    He. tried to picture the man’s life—the cramped room, the bag of second-rate oranges on the streetcorner, the spade and the hoe. and the cold mashed beans dug out of the forty-nine-cent can. Unrefriger- ated tortillas. Orange soda. That oom-pah music with the accordions and the tinny harmonies. But what was he doing on Topanga Canyon Boulevard at one-thirty in the afternoon, out there in the middle of nowhere? Working? Taking a lunch break?
    And then all at once Delaney knew, and the understanding hit him with a jolt: the shopping cart, the tortillas, the trail beaten into the dirt—he was camping down there, that’s what he was doing. Camping. Living. Dwelling. Making the trees and bushes and the natural habitat of Topanga State Park into his own private domicile, crapping in the chaparral, dumping his trash behind rocks, polluting the stream and ruining it for everyone else. That was state property down there, rescued from the developers and their bulldozers and set aside for the use of the public, for nature, not for some outdoor ghetto. And what about fire danger? The canyon was a tinderbox this time of year, everyone knew that.
    Delaney felt his guilt turn to anger, to outrage.
    God, how he hated that sort of thing—the litter alone was enough to set him off. How many times had he gone down one trail or another with a group of volunteers, with the rakes and shovels and black plastic bags? And how many times had he come back, sometimes just days later, to find the whole thing trashed again? There wasn’t a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains that didn’t have its crushed beer cans, its carpet of glass, its candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and it was people like this Mexican or whatever he was who were responsible, thoughtless people, stupid people, people who wanted to turn the whole world into a garbage dump, a little Tijuana ...
    Delaney was seething, ready to write his congressman, call the sheriff, anything—but then he checked himself. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Who knew who this man was or what he was doing? Just because he spoke Spanish didn’t make him a criminal. Maybe he was a picnicker, a bird-watcher, a fisherman; maybe he was some naturalist from South of the Border studying the gnatcatcher or the canyon wren ...
    Yeah, sure. And Delaney was the King of Siam.
    When he came back to himself, he saw that he’d managed to reenter the car, drive past the glass and aluminum receptacles and into the enormous littered warehouse with its mountains of cardboard and paper and the dark intense men scrabbling through the drifts of yesterday’s news—men, he saw with a shock of recognition, who were exactly like the jack-in-the-box on the canyon road, right down to the twin pits of their eyes and the harsh black strokes of their mustaches. They were even wearing the same khaki workshirts and sacklike trousers. He’d been in Los Angeles nearly two years now, and he’d never really thought about it before, but they were everywhere, these men, ubiquitous, silently going about their business, whether it be mopping up the floors at McDonald’s, inverting trash cans in the alley out back of Emilio’s or moving purposively behind the rakes and blowers that combed the pristine lawns of Arroyo Blanco Estates twice a week. Where had they all come from? What did they want? And why did they have to throw themselves under the wheels’ of his car?
    He had the back door open and was shifting his