Summary
Danny returns home from serving in World War I to find that his grandfather has bequeathed him two houses on Tortilla Flat. The responsibility of ownership depresses Danny, and a drunken spree of window breaking and the jail sentence it earns him do little to relieve his malaise. Then he runs into his friend Pilon, who moves into the larger of the two houses with him, agreeing to pay fifteen dollars a month in rent. After an argument, Pilon moves into Danny’s smaller house. The pair share wine, women, and worry. Ownership plagues Danny.
The rent Pilon that never intended to pay bothers him, but his troubles seem to be over when he strikes a deal with Pablo. Pablo agrees to move in with Pilon for fifteen dollars a month rent—money he never can or will pay.
Danny enjoys a brief affair with his neighbor, Mrs. Morales, who owns her own house and has two hundred dollars in the bank. He wants to give her a present but has no money. The suggestion that he cut squids for a day laborer’s wages incenses him, and he demands rent from Pilon and Pablo, who stalk away in anger. They find Jesus Maria Corcoran lying under a bush with a bottle of wine and learn that he has recently acquired a fortune of seven dollars. Pilon and Pablo agree to rent him space in their house for fifteen dollars a month. Masters at rationalizing self-interest into altruism, they talk Jesus Maria out of his money and buy Mrs. Morales a bottle of wine, which they then drink themselves.
Pilon, Pablo, and Jesus Maria fall into a drunken sleep in Danny’s second house, leaving a candle lit. The candle flame ignites a wall calendar, the fire spreads, and the house burns to the ground. The friends escape, dismayed that they have left a bottle of wine inside. Danny is relieved to be free of the property, and his three friends move into the big house with him.
The Pirate, along with his five dogs, lives in what had been a chicken coop. Each day he collects wood from the forest and sells it. He never spends any money, so everyone wonders where he hides his savings. In one of his finest feats of logic, Pilon convinces his friends that finding and spending the Pirate’s money for him would serve the man’s best interests, but try as they might, they cannot discover his hiding place.
The Pirate moves into Danny’s house and comes to trust his new friends so much that he hands his money over to Danny for safekeeping. He explains that he is saving to buy a gold candlestick for the church in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. He believes a prayer to the saint saved one of his dogs from death. That story ends all the hopes Danny and his friends had for diverting the money to their own uses, but the Pirate and his dogs are good to keep around. They beg food from the restaurants along the waterfront every day and bring it home for all to share.
Big Joe Portagee gets out of jail and, learning that Danny owns a house, sets off to find his friends. He joins Pilon for the traditional Saint Andrew’s Eve hunt in the forest, when, legend promises, buried treasure emits a faint phosphorescent glow through the ground. Big Joe moves in with the others, steals Danny’s blanket, and trades it for wine in anticipation of the fortune he expects to unearth. That night, he and Pilon dig up a survey marker....
(This entire section contains 1205 words.)
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They drink wine and sleep on the beach. Pilon awakes first, steals Big Joe’s pants as the Portagee is sleeping, and trades the pants for wine in retaliation for Joe’s theft of the blanket. Later, they steal back both the pants and the blanket.
Danny succumbs to an infatuation with Sweets Ramirez and buys her a vacuum cleaner, although Tortilla Flat is not wired for electricity. Sweets revels in the elevated social standing the gift brings her. Danny grows listless and pale, perhaps tiring of Sweets’s affections. The group of friends resolves to free him. They steal the vacuum cleaner and trade it for wine—probably more than a fair trade since the machine has no motor.
Jesus Maria rescues a Mexican corporal and his baby from the police and brings them home to Tortilla Flat. The corporal wants his baby son to be a general someday, so he can have a better life than his father’s. The baby dies, and the corporal returns to Mexico.
Big Joe Portagee seeks shelter from the rain in the house of a woman called Tia Ignacia. Ignoring her charms, he drinks her wine and falls asleep. She hits him and chases him outside, but he embraces her, and the physical closeness arouses passion. A police officer orders the pair out of the street for fear they might get run over. Big Joe steals the Pirate’s money from beneath Danny’s pillow and buries it by the front gate. The friends beat him, cut him, and rub salt in his wounds. Then they discover that the Pirate has saved enough to buy the golden candlestick. The Pirate goes to church dressed in his friends’ clothes to hear the priest’s thanks for his gift. Reluctantly, he leaves his dogs at home, but they burst through the church doors to join their master. Later, the Pirate feels sure that the dogs actually saw a vision of Saint Francis. The friends forgive Big Joe and nurse him back to health.
Señora Teresina Cortez feeds eight children on the beans she culls from the chaff after the threshers have cleared the fields. When the bean crop fails, Danny and his friends steal a variety of foods for her family, but the change in diet makes the children sick. All ends well when the friends deliver four hundred pounds of beans to Teresina’s home. Teresina, pregnant again, wonders which of Danny’s friends is responsible for the gift.
As Danny steps over his sleeping tenants each night, he yearns to return to the days of his freedom, when he slept outdoors and the weight of property was not upon him. He runs away and sets about a binge of drinking, vandalism, and theft. He sells the house for twenty-five dollars, but his friends burn the transfer of ownership.
After a term in jail, Danny returns home a broken man. His friends, determined to dispel his lethargy, throw a party never equaled in Tortilla Flat, so generous is the exchange of food, wine, and love. When Danny, suffused with alcohol and valor, charges out to fight some unnamed enemy, he falls to the bottom of a forty-foot gulch and dies. His friends cannot attend his funeral, for they have no suitable clothes. They lie in the grass to watch his burial. Later, when his house catches fire, they make no attempt to stop the blaze (although they have learned, from the previous fire, to save the wine). Turning away from the smoldering ruins, they go their separate ways.