The Tortilla Curtain (31 page)

“It’s a shame,” Jack said, “I know how you must feel,” and he went on in that ritualistic vein for a minute or two before he came to the point. “Listen, Kyra,” he said, “I know nothing’s going to bring your dog back and I know you’re hurting right now, but there is something you can do about it.” And then he’d gone into the wall business. He and Jack Cherrystone, Jim Shirley, Dom Flood and a few others had begun to see the wisdom in putting up a wall round the perimeter of the community, not only to prevent things like this and keep out the snakes and gophers and whatnot, but with an eye to the crime rate and the burglaries that had been hitting the community with some regularity now, and had she heard about Sunny DiMandia?

Kyra had cut in to say, “How high’s the wall going to be, Jack? Fifteen feet? Twenty? The Great Wall of China? Because if eight feet of chain link won’t keep them out, you’re just wasting your time.”

“We’re talking seven feet, Kyra,” he said, “all considerations of security, aesthetics and economics taken into account.” She could hear the hum of office machinery in the background, the ringing of a distant phone. His voice came back at her: “Cinder block, with a stucco finish in Navajo White. I know Delaney’s opposed on principle—without even thinking the matter through—but it so happens I talked with the coyote expert at UCLA the other day—Werner Schnitter?—and he says stucco will do the trick. You see, and I don’t want to make this any more painful for you than it already is, but if they can’t actually see the dog or cat or whatever, there’d be no reason for them to try scaling the wall, you follow me?”

She did. And though she’d never have another dog again, never, she wanted those hateful sneaking puppy-killing things kept off her property no matter what it took. She still had a cat. And a son. What if they started attacking people next?

“Sure, Jack,” she said finally. “I’ll help. Just tell me what to do.”

 

 

 

She started with Delaney that night after work. He’d fixed a salade niçoise for dinner, really put some effort into it, with chunks of fresh-seared tuna and artichoke hearts he’d marinated himself, but all she could do was pick at it. Without Jordan and Osbert around, the house was like a tomb. The late sun painted the wall over the table in a color that reminded her of nothing so much as chicken liver-chicken-liver pink—and she saw that the flowers in the vase on the counter had wilted. Beyond the windows, birds called cheerlessly to one another. She pushed her plate away and interrupted Delaney in the middle of a monologue on some little bird he’d seen on the fence, a monologue transparently intended to take her mind off Osbert, coyotes and the grimmer realities of nature. “Jack asked me to work on the wall thing,” she said.

Delaney was caught by surprise. He was in the middle of cutting a slice of the baguette he’d picked up at the French bakery in Woodland Hills, and the bread knife just stuck there in the crust like a saw caught in a tree. “What ‘wall thing’?” he said, though she could see he knew perfectly well.

She watched the knife start up again and waited for the loaf to separate before she answered. “Jack wants to put a wall around the whole place, all of Arroyo Blanco. Seven feet tall, stucco over cinder block. To keep burglars out.” She paused and held his eyes, just as she did with a reluctant seller when she was bringing in a low bid. “And coyotes.”

“But that’s crazy.” Delaney’s eyes flared behind his lenses. His voice was high with excitement. “If chain link won’t keep them out, how in god’s name do you expect—?”

“They can’t hunt what they can’t see.” She threw her napkin down beside the plate. Tears started in her eyes. “That thing stalked Osbert, right through the mesh, as if it wasn’t even there, and don’t you try to tell me it didn’t.,”

Delaney was waving the slice of bread like a flag of surrender. “I’m not. won’t. And I’m sure there’s some truth in that.” He drew in a breath. “Look, I’m as upset about this as you are, but let’s be reasonable for a minute. The whole point of this place is to be close to nature, that’s why we bought in here, that’s why we picked the last house on the block, at the end of the cul-de-sac—”

Her voice was cold, metallic with anger. “Close to nature,” she spat back at him. “Look what good it did us. And for your information, we bought in here because it was a deal. Do you have any idea how much this house has appreciated since we bought it—even in this market?”

“All I’m saying is what’s the sense of living up here if you can’t see fifty feet beyond the windows—we might as well be living in a condo or something. I need to be able to just walk out the door and be in the hills, in the wild—I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s what I do, it’s how I make my living. Christ, the damn fence is bad enough—and that fucking gate on Arroyo Blanco, you know I hate that, you know it.”

He set the bread down on his plate, untouched. “This isn’t about coyotes, don’t kid yourself. It’s about Mexicans, it’s about blacks. It’s about exclusion, division, hate. You think Jack gives a damn about coyotes?”

She couldn’t help herself. She was leaning forward now, belligerent, angry, channeling it all into this feckless naive unrealistic impossible man sitting across the table from her—he was the one, he was guilty, he was the big protector of the coyotes and the snakes and weasels and tarantulas and whatever in christ’s name else was out there, and now he was trying to hide behind politics. “I don’t ever,” she shouted, “want one of those things on my property again. I’d move first, that’s what I’d do. Bulldoze the hills. Pave it over. The hell with nature. And politics too.”

“You’re crazy,” he said, and his face was ugly.

“Me? That’s a laugh. What do you think this is—some kind of nature preserve? This is a community, for your information, a place to raise kids and grow old—in an exclusive private highly desirable location. And what do you think’s going to happen to property values if your filthy coyotes start attacking children—that’s next, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”

He put on his exasperated look. “Kyra, honey, you know that’s not going to happen—that incident in Monte Nido, that was an aberration, a one-in-a-million chance, and it was only because the people were
feeding
the animals—”

“Tell that to the parents. Tell it to Osbert. And Sacheverell, don’t forget Sacheverell.”

Dinner didn’t go well. Nor the rest of the evening either. Delaney forbade her to work on the wall committee. She defied him. Then she took over the living room, put on her relaxation tapes and buried herself in her work. That night she slept in Jordan’s room, and the next night too.

All that was on her mind as she punched in the code, waited for the gate to swing back, and turned into the long, familiar Da Ros drive. The gate closed automatically behind her and she felt the flutter in her stomach, but it wasn’t as bad as usual—she was in too much of a hurry to dwell on it and she was preoccupied with Delaney and the wall and too many other things to count. She did take what had now become the standard precaution of dialing Darlene, the receptionist at the office, to tell her she’d just entered the Da Ros property. They’d agreed on a fifteen-minute time limit—no lingering anymore, no daydreaming, no letting the house cast its spell. If Kyra didn’t get back to Darlene at the end of those fifteen minutes to say she was leaving, Darlene would dial 911. Still, as Kyra cruised slowly up the drive, she was intensely aware of everything around her—it had been almost three weeks now, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that had come over her that night when she understood just how vulnerable she was out here in the middle of nowhere. And in a way, she didn’t want to shake it. Get complacent, and you become a statistic.

The house emerged through the trees, the front windows struck with light. She softened when she saw it. The place was something, after all, one of a kind, the fairy-tale castle you see on the underside of your eyelids when you close your eyes and dream. And it was hers in a way no other had ever been, white elephant or not. She’d seen it happen a thousand times with her buyers, that look in their eyes, that click of recognition. Well, this was her click of recognition, the place she would have bought if she was in the market. And yes, Delaney, she thought, I’d wall it in with seven feet of cinder block and stucco, that’s the first thing I’d do.

Kyra swung round in the driveway, the car facing the way she’d just come, and before she switched off the engine she took a good long penetrating look out across the lawns and into the trees at the edge of the property. Then she lowered the window and listened. All was still. There was no breeze, no sound anywhere. The shrubs and trees hung against the backdrop of the mountains as if they’d been painted in place, flat and two-dimensional, and the mountains themselves seemed as lifeless as the mountains of the moon. Kyra stepped out of the car, leaving the door open behind her as a precaution.

Nothing’s going to happen, she told herself as she strode up the walk. They were hikers, that was all. And if they weren’t, well, they were gone now and wouldn’t be back. She concentrated on the little things: the way the grass had been hand-clipped between the flag-stones, the care with which the flowerbeds had been mulched and the shrubs trimmed. She saw that the oleander and crape myrtle were in bloom, and the bed of clivia beneath the library windows. Everything was as it should be, nothing amiss, nothing forgotten. She’d have to remember to compliment the gardener.

Inside too: everything looked fine. None of the zones had been tampered with and the timed, lights had already switched on in the kitchen and the dining room. There were no realtors’ cards on the table in the foyer, and that was a disappointment, a continuing disappointment, but then it would take the right buyer to appreciate the place, and it was bound to move, it was, sure it was—especially if she could convince Patricia Da Ros to drop the price. She checked her watch: five minutes gone. She made a quick circuit of the house—no need to kill herself since nobody had shown the place—then returned to the entrance hall, punched in the alarm code and stepped back out on the porch. One trip round the back and she’d be on her way.

Kyra always took long strides, even in heels—it was her natural gait. Delaney told her he found it sexy because it made her sway over her hips in an exaggerated way, but she’d never thought a thing about it—she’d always been athletic, a tomboy really, and she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t in a hurry. She went round the north side of the house first, striding over the flagstone path as if she were almost running, her head swiveling back and forth to take in every least detail. It wasn’t till she turned the comer to the back of the house that she saw it, and even then she thought it was some trick of the light.

She stopped as if she’d been jerked on a leash. She was bewildered at first, then outraged, and finally just plain frightened. There, scrawled across the side of the house in six-foot-high spray-painted letters, was a message for her. Black paint, slick with the falling light, ten looping letters in Spanish:

PINCHE PUTA

 

 

 

The sun was distant, a molten speck in the sky, but hot for all that. Delaney was out back of the community center, where he’d been working on his paddleball game, one-on-one with the wall. He was sitting on the back steps, a sweat-beaded Diet Coke in hand, when he became aware of the murmur of voices coming from somewhere inside the room behind him. The shades were drawn, but the window was open a crack, and as the sun flared out from the windows and the inevitable turkey vulture rode the unflagging currents high overhead, the murmur became two distinct and discrete voices, and he realized he was listening to Jack Jr. and an unknown companion engage in the deep philosophic reflections of a torpid late-summer adolescent afternoon.

“Cal State, huh?” Jack Jr. said.

“Yup. Best I could do—with my grades.” A snigger. A double snigger.

“Think you can handle Northridge? I mean, I hear it’s like Little Mexico or something.”

“Yup. That’s right. Fuckin’ Little Mexico all the way. But you know what the bright side is?”

“What?”

“Mexican chicks.”

“Get out of here.”

A pause. Slurping sounds. A suppressed belch.

“No shit, man—they give killer head.”

“Get out of here.”

Another pause, long, reflective. “Only one thing you got to worry about—”

“What’s that?”

“The ten-pounds-a-year rule.”

A tentative laugh, uncertain of itself, but game. “Yeah?”

“At sixteen”—slurp, pause—“they’re killers, but from then on, every year they gain ten pounds till they wind up looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with a suntan—and who wants to stick your dick in something like that, even their mouth?”

Delaney stood. This was the punch line and it was accompanied by a virtuosic duet of sniggers. Jesus, he thought, and his legs felt heavy suddenly. This was Jack’s kid. A kid who should know better, a kid with all the advantages, raised right here in Arroyo Blanco. Delaney was moving now, shaking the starch out of his legs, slapping the paddle aimlessly against his thigh. But then, maybe that was the problem, and his next thought was for Jordan: was that the way he was going to turn out? He knew the answer before he’d formulated the question. Of course it was, and there was nothing Kyra or Delaney or anybody else could do about it. That’s what he’d tried to tell Kyra over this wall business—it might keep
them
out, but look what it keeps in. It was poisonous. The whole place was poisonous, the whole state. He wished he’d stayed in New York.

He felt depressed and out of sorts as he made his way through the familiar streets, the
Vias
and
Calles
and
Avenidas
of this, his exclusive private community in the hills, composed entirely of Spanish Mission-style homes with orange tile roofs, where the children grew into bigots, the incomes swelled and the property values rose disproportionately. It was four in the afternoon and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Jordan was at his grandmother’s still and Kyra had called to say she’d be home late, after which she’d be going over to Erna Jardine’s to get on the phone and sell her neighbors a wall, so Delaney would be on his own. But Delaney didn’t want to be on his own. That’s why he’d got married again; that’s why he’d been eager to take Jordan on, and the dogs, and all the joys and responsibilities of domestic life. He’d been on his own for eight years after he divorced his first wife, and that had been enough for him. What he really wanted, and he’d been after Kyra about it for the past year at least, was for her to have a baby, but she wouldn’t hear of it—there was always another house to show, another listing, another deal to close. Yes. Sure. And here he was, on his own.