The Tortilla Curtain (30 page)
Read The Tortilla Curtain Online
Authors: T.C. Boyle
And then they started walking. They walked all day, up and down the streets, through the back alleys, down the boulevards and back again, Cándido gruff and short-tempered, his eyes wild. By suppertime nothing had been settled, except that they were hungry again and their feet hurt more than ever. They were sitting on a low wall out in front of a blocky government buitding—the post ofnce?—when a man in baggy pants and with his long hair held in place by a black hairnet sat down beside them. He looked to be about thirty and he wore a bold-check flannel shirt buttoned at the neck though the air was like a furnace. He offered Cándido a cigarette. “You look lost,
compadre,”
he said, and his Spanish had a North American twang to it.
compadre,”
he said, and his Spanish had a North American twang to it.
Cándido said nothing, just pulled on the cigarette, staring off into space.
“You looking for a place to stay? I know a place,” the man said, leaning forward now to look into América’s face. “Cheap. And clean. Real clean.”
“How much?” Cándido asked.
“Ten bucks.” The man breathed smoke out his nostrils. America saw that he had a tattoo circling his neck like a collar; little blue numbers or letters, she couldn’t tell which. “Apiece.”
Cándido said nothing.
“It’s my aunt’s place,” the man said, something nasal creeping into his voice, and America could hear the appeal there. “It’s real clean. Fifteen bucks for the two of you.” There was a pause. Traffic crawled by. The air was heavy and brown, thick as smoke. “Hey,” he said,
“compadre,
what’s the problem? You need a place to stay, right? You can’t let this pretty little thing sleep on the street. It’s dangerous. It’s no good. You need a place. I’ll give you two nights for twenty bucks—I mean, it’s no big deal. It’s just around the corner.”
“compadre,
what’s the problem? You need a place to stay, right? You can’t let this pretty little thing sleep on the street. It’s dangerous. It’s no good. You need a place. I’ll give you two nights for twenty bucks—I mean, it’s no big deal. It’s just around the corner.”
America watched Cándido’s face. She didn’t dare enter into the negotiations, no matter how tired and fed up she was. That wasn’t right. This was between the two men. They were feeling each other out, that was all, bargaining the way you bargained at the market. The baby moved then, a sharp kick deep inside her. She felt nauseated. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them Cándido was on his feet. So was the other man. Their eyes told her nothing. “You wait here,” Cándido.said, and she watched him limp up the street with the stranger in the hairnet and baggy trousers, one block, two, the stranger a head taller, his stride quick and anxious. Then they turned the corner and they were gone.
5
PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK
As I sit here today at the close of summer, at the hour when the very earth crackles for the breath of moisture denied it through all these long months of preordained drought, I gaze round my study at the artifacts I’ve collected during my diurnal wanderings—the tail feathers of the Cooper’s hawk, the trilobite preserved in stone since the time the ground beneath my feet was the bed of an ancient sea, the owl pellets, skeletons of mouse and kangaroo rat, the sloughed skin of the gopher snake—and my eye comes to rest finally on the specimen jar of coyote scat. There it is, on the shelf over my desk, wedged between the Mexican red-kneed tarantula and the pallid bat pickled in formalin, an innocuous jar of desiccated ropes of hair the casual observer might take for shed fur rather than the leavings of our cleverest and most resourceful large predator, the creature the Indians apotheosized as the Trickster. And why today do my eyes linger here and not on some more spectacular manifestation of nature’s plethora of wonders? Suffice it to say that lately the coyote has been much on my mind.
Here is an animal ideally suited to its environment, able to go without water for stretches at a time, deriving the lion’s share of its moisture from its prey, and yet equally happy to take advantage of urban swimming pools and sprinkler systems. One coyote, who makes his living on the fringes of my community high in the hills above Topanga Creek and the San Fernando Valley, has learned to simply chew his way through the plastic irrigation pipes whenever he wants a drink. Once a week, sometimes even more frequently, the hapless maintenance man will be confronted by a geyser of water spewing out of the xerophytic ground cover the community has planted as a firebreak. When he comes to me bewildered with three gnawed lengths of PVC pipe, I loan him a pair of Bausch & Lomb 9x35 field glasses and instruct him to keep watch at dusk along the rear perimeter of the development. Sure enough, within the week he’s caught the culprit in the act, and at my suggestion, he paints the entire length of the irrigation system with a noxious paste made of ground serrano chilies. And it works. At least until the unforgiving blast of the sun defuses the chilies’ potency. And then, no doubt to the very day, the coyote will be back.
Of course, a simpler solution (the one most homeowners resort to when one of these “brush wolves” invades the sanctum sanctorum of their fenced-in yard) is to call in the Los Angeles County Animal Control Department, which traps and euthanizes about 100 coyotes a year. This solution, to one who wishes fervently to live in harmony with the natural world, has always been anathema (after all, the coyote roamed these hills long before Homo sapiens made his first shaggy appearance on this continent), and yet, increasingly, this author has begun to feel that some sort of control must be applied if we continue to insist on encroaching on the coyote’s territory with our relentless urban and suburban development. If we invade his territory, then why indeed should we be surprised when he invades ours?
For Canis latrans is, above all, adaptable. The creature that gives birth to four or fewer pups and attains a mature weight of twenty-five pounds or less in the sere pinched environment in which it evolved has spread its range as far as Alaska in the north and Costa Rica in the south, and throughout all the states of the continental U.S. Nineteen subspecies are now recognized, and many of them, largely because of the abundant food sources we’ve inadvertently made available to them (dogs, cats, the neat plastic bowls of kibble set just outside the kitchen door, the legions of rats and mice our wasteful habits support), have grown considerably larger and more formidable than the original model, the average size of their litters growing in proportion. And the march of adaptability goes on. Werner Schnitter, the renowned UCLA biologist, has shown in his radio-collaring studies that the coyotes of the Los Angeles basin demonstrate a marked decline in activity during periods coinciding with the morning and evening rush hour. This is nothing less than astonishing: you would think the coyotes were studying us.
The problem, of course, lies at our own doorstep. In our blindness, our species-specific arrogance, we create a niche, and animals like the raccoon, the opossum, the starling and a host of other indigenous and introduced species will rush in to fill it. The urban coyote is larger than his wild cousin, he is more aggressive and less afraid of the humans who coddle and encourage him, who are so blissfully unaware of the workings of nature that they actually donate their kitchen scraps to his well-being. The disastrous results can be seen in the high mortality among small pets in the foothills and even the as yet rare but increasingly inevitable attacks on humans.
I had the infinitely sad task last year of interviewing the parents of Jennifer Tillman, the six-month-old infant taken from her crib on the patio of the Tillmans’ home in the hills of Monte Nido, directly over the ridge from my own place of residence. The coyote involved, a healthy four-year-old female with a litter of pups, had been a regular daytime visitor to the area, lured by misguided residents who routinely left tidbits for her on the edge of their lawns.
But forgive me: I don’t mean to lecture. After all, my pilgrimage is for the attainment of wonder, of involving myself in the infinite, and not for the purpose of limiting or attempting to control the uncontrollable, the unknowable and the hidden. Who can say what revolutionary purpose the coyote has in mind? Or the horned lizard, for that matter, or any creature? Or why we should presume or even desire to preserve the status quo? And yet something must be done, clearly, if we are to have any hope of coexisting harmoniously with this supple suburban raider. Trapping is utterly useless—even if traps were to be set in every backyard in the county—as countless studies have shown. The population will simply breed up to fill in the gap, the bitches having litters of seven, eight or even more pups, as, they do in times of abundance—and with our interference, those times must seem limitless to the coyote.
Sadly, the backlash is brewing. And it is not just the ranchers’ and hunters’ lobbies and the like pushing for legislation to remove protections on this animal, but the average homeowner who has lost a pet, humane and informed people, like the readers of this periodical, devoted to conservation and preservation. Once classified as a “varmint,” the coyote had a price on his head, governmental bounties paid out in cash for each skin or set of ears, and in response he retreated to the fastnesses of the hills and deserts. But we now occupy those fastnesses, with our ready water sources (even a birdbath is a boon to a coyote), our miniature pets and open trash cans, our feeble link to the wild world around us. We cannot eradicate the coyote, nor can we fence him out, not even with eight feet of chain link, as this sad but wiser pilgrim can attest. Respect him as the wild predator he is, keep your children and pets inside, leave no food source, however negligible, where he can access it.
Little Jennifer’s neck was broken as neatly as a rabbit’s: that is the coyote’s way. But do not attempt to impose human standards on the world of nature, the world that has generated a parasite or predator for every species in existence, including our own. The coyote is not to blame—he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him. I sit here in the comfort of my air-conditioned office staring at a jar of scat and thinking of all the benefit this animal does us, of the hordes of rats and mice and ground squirrels he culls and the thrill of the wild he gives us all, and yet I can’t help thinking too of the missing pets, the trail of suspicion, the next baby left unattended on the patio.
The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable.
6
THE DA ROS PLACE WAS A WHITE ELEPHANT. THERE was no way it was going to move in this market, unless at a significantly reduced price, and though the house had cast a spell over Kyra, she was beginning to wonder if it would ever cast the same kind of spell over a qualified buyer. No one had even looked at the place in the past two weeks and the maintenance issue was becoming one big emotional drain. She’d called Westec about the two men she’d encountered on the property and Delaney had insisted on putting in a report with the Sheriff’s Department too, but nothing came of it. The Westec people had poked around and found no evidence that the men had been back. They didn’t think anyone had been camping there either, at least not recently, though they did find a ring of blackened stone in the scrub at the northwest corner of the property. “But what you got to realize is that could’ve been there for years,” the security officer explained to her over the phone, “there’s just no way of telling.”
Kyra wasn’t satisfied., She warned the gardener to keep an eye out for anything unusual, and of course she was there herself twice a day, opening the place up in the morning and closing it down again at night. Which had become a real chore. She wasn’t frightened exactly, not anymore, but every time she turned up the drive her stomach sank— almost as if someone had knocked the wind out of her—and she had to bend forward to the air-conditioning vent and take little gulps of air till her breathing went back to normal. The encounter with those men—those drifters or bums or whatever they were—had shaken her more than she would admit, a whole lot more. She’d always been in command of her life, used to getting her way, trading on her looks and her brains and the kind of preparation that would have prostrated anybody else, man or woman, and she felt the equal of any situation, but that night she saw how empty all of that was.
She’d been scared. As scared as she’d ever been. If it hadn’t been for her quick thinking—the lie about her husband, the fictitious brother, cocktails for god’s sake—who knew what might have happened? Of course, it could have been innocent—maybe they were just hikers, as they claimed—but that wasn’t the feeling she got. She looked into that man’s eyes—the tall one, the one with the hat—and knew that anything could happen.
She was thinking about that as she wound her way up the road to the Da Ros place, hurrying, a little annoyed at the thought of the burden she’d taken on when she’d jumped at the listing. Now it almost seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth. And tonight of all nights. It was almost seven, she hadn’t been home yet, and she’d agreed to help Erna Jardine and Selda Cherrystone canvas the community on the wall issue at eight.
That was Jack’s doing. He’d called her two days after Osbert had been killed, and she was still in a state of shock. To see her puppy taken like that, right before her eyes, and on top of everything else ... it had been too much, one of the worst experiences of her life, maybe
the
worst. And Jordan—he was just a baby and he had to see that? Dr. Reineger had prescribed a sedative and she’d wound up missing a day at the office, and Jordan had gone to his grandmother’s for a few days—she just wouldn’t let him stay in that house, she couldn’t. She was sitting at her desk the next day, feeling woozy, as if her mind and body had been packed away in two separate drawers for the summer, when the phone rang.
the
worst. And Jordan—he was just a baby and he had to see that? Dr. Reineger had prescribed a sedative and she’d wound up missing a day at the office, and Jordan had gone to his grandmother’s for a few days—she just wouldn’t let him stay in that house, she couldn’t. She was sitting at her desk the next day, feeling woozy, as if her mind and body had been packed away in two separate drawers for the summer, when the phone rang.
It was Jack. “I heard about your little dog,” he said, “and I’m sorry.”
She felt herself choking up, the whole scene playing before her eyes for the thousandth time, that slinking vicious thing, the useless fence, and Osbert, poor Osbert, but she fought it back and managed to croak out a reply. “Thanks” was all she could say.
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