The Tortilla Curtain (34 page)

He looked round him quickly, that worried look on his face, tensed a moment, then relaxed. His voice softened. “Eat,
mi vida,”
he said. “You’re going to need it to keep up your strength.”

IN THE EAST, FALL CAME IN ON A GUST OF CANADIAN air, invigorating and decisive. The leaves changed. The rain fell in cold gray splinters and the puddles developed a second skin overnight. The world was closing down, getting snug in dens and burrows, and the equinox was no casual thing. But here, in the bleached hills above Los Angeles, fall was just another aspect of the eternal summer, hotter, drier, hurled through the canyons on the breath of winds that leached all the moisture from the chaparral and brought combustible oils to the surface of every branch and twig. This was the season Delaney had the most trouble with. What was there to recommend in hundred-degree temperatures, zero-percent humidity and winds that forced fine grains of degraded sandstone up your nostrils every time you stepped out the door? Where was the charm in that? Other writers could celebrate the autumnal rituals of New England or the Great Smoky Mountains—watching the birds flock overhead, cutting wood for the stove, cranking up the cider press or stalking somnolent bears through the leafless woods with the first wet scent of snow in the air—but what could Delaney do to color the dismal reality of the season here? Sure, he educated his audience about fire-dependent germination, solvent extractives in manzanita and chamise, the release of nutrients in wood ash, but what could you do with a season that anticipated not the first soft magical transforming blanket of snow but the hellish raging infernos that vaporized everything in their path and shot roiling columns of atramental smoke twenty thousand feet into the air?

The winds blew, and Delaney sat at his desk and tried to make sense of them. He was still collecting material for a column on introduced species and population conflict, but the seasonal phenomena had to take precedence. How did the ground squirrels react to the drop in humidity? he wondered. Or the lizards? Maybe he could do something with the lizards, and not just the homed lizard, but all of them—the fence lizard, the western skink, the side-splotched lizard, the banded gecko. Did the winds change their behavior? Did the moisture content of their prey go down? Did they spend more time in their burrows during the heat of the day? He should have been out observing them, but the weather was getting him down. A high-pressure system had been stalled over the Great Basin for weeks now and every day was a replica of the day before: hot, cloudless, wind like a rope burn. He’d been out on the trails yesterday and spent most of his time applying Chap Stick and chasing his hat. Dust blew in his eyes. The scrub was whipped flat as if by the force of some great invisible hand. He cut his hike short and went home to sit in the air-conditioned living room, shades drawn, watching a joyless football contest between panting fat men who looked as if they’d rather be elsewhere.

Still, the lizard idea was a good one, definitely worth exploring, and he got up from his desk to sift through his nature library, picking up tidbits about the six-lined racer (eats the eggs of small ground-nesting birds by crushing them with its jaws and lapping up the contents), the chuckwalla (strictly vegetarian) and the gila monster (stores fat in its tail). But then, unaccountably, he thought of vultures—they must do pretty well under these conditions. No one had written much about the turkey vulture—too pedestrian—and that might make for an unusual column. And this was their season, no doubt about it. Water sources were drying up. Things were dying.

He was sitting there, lost in lizard lore and statistical analyses of disgorgement rates in nesting vultures, when the doorbell rang, a dull metallic passing of gas that hissed through the nether regions of the house like air leaking out of a balloon. He debated whether or not to answer it. This was his private time, his writing time, and he guarded it jealously. But who could it be at this hour? The mailman? Fed Ex? Curiosity got the better of him and he went to the door.

A man in a dirty T-shirt was standing there on the doormat, a cement mixer and two flatbed trucks piled high with cinder blocks looming behind him at the curb. He was wearing a hard hat and his arms were bruised with tattoos. Behind him, milling around the trucks, was a crew of Mexicans. “I just wanted to tell you we’ll be coming through here today,” he said, “and it would be a help if you could leave the side gate open.”

Coming through? Delaney wasn’t focusing, his head swarming with lizards and vultures.

The man in the T-shirt was watching him closely. “The wall,” he said. “My people are going to need access.”

The wall. Of course. He should have guessed. Ninety percent of the community was already walled in, tireless dark men out there applying stucco under conditions that would have killed anybody else, and now the last link was coming to Delaney, to his own dogless yard, hemming him in, obliterating his view—protecting him despite himself. And he’d done nothing to protest it, nothing at all. He hadn’t answered Todd Sweet’s increasingly frantic telephone messages, hadn’t even gone to the decisive meeting to cast his vote. But Kyra—she’d made the wall her mission, putting all her closer’s zeal into selling the thing, stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, working cheek by jowl with Jack and Erna to ensure that the sanctity of the community was preserved and that no terrestrial thing, whether it came on two legs or four, could get in without an invitation.

“Sure,” Delaney said. “Yeah, sure,” and he walked the man around the side of the house, unlatched the gate and propped it open with a stone he kept there for that purpose. The wind lashed the trees and a pair of tumbleweeds (Russian thistle, actually, another unfortunate introduction) leapt across the yard and got hung up on the useless fence. A sudden gust threw a handful of dirt in Delaney’s face and he could feel the grit between his teeth. “Just be sure you shut it when you’re done,” he said, making a vague gesture in the direction of the pool. “We wouldn’t want any of the neighborhood kids wandering in.”

The man gave him a cursory nod and then turned and shouted something in Spanish that set his crew in motion. Men clambered up into the trucks, ropes flew from the load, wheelbarrows appeared from nowhere. Delaney didn’t know what to do. For a while he stood there at the gate as if welcoming them, as if he were hosting a pool party or cookout, and a procession of dark sober men marched past him shouldering picks, shovels, trowels, sacks of stucco and concrete, their eyes fixed on the ground. But then he began to feel self-conscious, out of place, as if he were trespassing on his own property, and he turned and went back into the house, down the hallway and through the door to his office, where he sat back down at his desk and stared at full-color photographs of turkey vultures till they began to move on the page.

He tried to concentrate, but he couldn’t. There was a constant undercurrent of noise—unintelligible shouts, revving engines, the clank of tools and the grinding ceaseless scrape of the cement mixer, all of it riding on the thin giddy bounce and thump of a boombox tuned to a Mexican station. He felt as if he were under siege. Ten minutes after he’d sat down he was at the window, watching the transformation of his backyard. The wall was complete as far as the Cherrystones’ next door on the right; on the other side, they were still three houses down, at Rudy Hernandez’s place, but the noose was tightening. They’d run a string along the property line weeks ago and now the workers were digging footings right up against the eight-foot chain-link fence, which was going to have to go, he could see that. The thing was useless anyway, and every time he looked at it he thought of Osbert. And Sacheverell,

He and Kyra would just have to pay to tear it down—yet another expense—but that wasn’t what bothered him. What really hurt, what rankled him so much he would have gone out and campaigned against the wall no matter what Jack or Kyra said, was that there was going to be no access to the hills at all—not even a gate, nothing. The Property Owners’ Association had felt the wall would be more secure if there were no breaches in it, and besides, gates cost money. But where did that leave Delaney? If he wanted to go for a stroll in the chaparral, if he wanted to investigate those lizards or the gnatcatcher or even the coyotes, he was either going to have to scale the wall or hike all the way out to the front gate and double back again. Which would tend to cut down on spontaneity, that was for sure.

He sat back down at his desk, got up again, sat down. Wind rattled the panes, workers shouted,
ranchera
music danced through the interstices with a manic tinny glee. Work was impossible. By noon the footings were in and the first eight-inch-high band of concrete block had begun to creep across the property line. How could he work? How could he even think of it? He was being walled in, buried alive, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

 

 

 

By the time Kyra came for him to go out and help her close up the Da Ros place for the night, he was like a caged beast. He resented having to escort her out there seven nights a week anyway, but the graffiti incident left him little choice. (And here he thought of that son of a bitch with his “flies” and it just stoked his mood.) “I hope you’re happy,” he said, sliding into the seat beside her.

She was all business, bright and chirpy, dressed in her property-moving best, the Lexus a massive property-moving tool ready to leap to life beneath her fingertips. It was dark. The wind beat at the windows. “What?” she said, all innocence. “What’s that face for? Did I do something?”

He looked out the window, fuming, as she put the car in gear and wheeled out the driveway and down Piñon. “The wall,” he said. “It’s in. Or most of it, anyway. It’s about a hundredth of an inch from the chain link.”

They were on Arroyo Blanco now, Kyra giving a little wave to the moron at the front gate. This was their ritual, six o’clock every night, while dinner waited on the stove and an already fed Jordan sat before Selda Cherrystone’s TV set: out the gate, up the hill and down the winding drive to the Da Ros place, out of the car, into the house, a quick look round the yard and back again. He hated it. Resented it. It was a waste of his time, and how could she expect him to put a decent dinner together if he was up here every night looking for phantoms? She should drop the listing, that’s what she should do, get rid of it, let somebody else worry about the flowers and the fish and the Mexicans in the bushes.

“All right,” she said, shrugging, her eyes on the road, “we’ll have Al Lopez take the fence down; it’s not like we need it anymore”—and here was the sting of guilt, the counterattack—“if we ever did.”

“I can’t walk out of my own yard,” he said.

She was smiling, serene. The wind blew. Bits of chaff and the odd tumbleweed shot through the thin luminous stream of the headlights. “In the backseat,” she said. “A present. For you.”

He turned to look. A car came up behind them and lighted his face. There was a stepladder in the backseat, a little three-foot aluminum one, the sort of thing you might use for hanging curtains or changing the lightbulb in the front hallway. It was nestled against the leather seat and there was a red satin bow taped to the front of it.

“There’s your solution,” she said. “Anytime you want. Just hoist yourself over.”

“Yeah, sure. And what about the ramparts and the boiling oil?”

She ignored the sarcasm. She stared out at the road, her face serene and composed.

Of course, she was right. If the wall had to be there, and through the tyranny of the majority it did, 127 votes for, 87 against, then he’d have to get used to it—and this was a simple expedient. He had a sudden ephemeral vision of himself perched atop the wall with his daypack, and it came to him then that the wall might not be as bad as he’d thought, if he could get over the bruise to his self-esteem. Not only would it keep burglars, rapists, graffiti artists and coyotes out of the development, it would keep people like the Dagolians out of the hills. He couldn’t really see Jack and Selda Cherrystone hoisting themselves over the wall for an evening stroll, or Doris Obst or even Jack Jardine. Delaney would have the hills to himself, his own private nature preserve. The idea took hold of him, exhilarated him, but he couldn’t admit it. Not to Kyra, not yet. “I don’t want to do any hoisting,” he said finally, injecting as much venom into the participle as he could, “I just want to walk. You know, like on my feet?”

There was no one at the Da Ros place, no muggers, no bogeymen, no realtors or buyers. Kyra walked him through the house, as she did every third or fourth night, extolling its virtues as if she were trying to sell it to him, and he asked her point-blank if she shouldn’t consider dropping the listing. “It’s been, what,” he said, “nine months now without so much as a nibble?”

They were in the library, the leather-bound spines of six thousand books carefully selected by a suicide glowing softly in the light of the wall sconces, and Kyra swung round to tell him he didn’t know a thing about business, especially the real-estate business. “People would kill for a listing like this,” she said. “Literally kill for it. And with a property this unique, you sometimes have to just sit on it till the right buyer comes along—and they will, believe me. I know it. I know they will.”

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

A gust rattled the panes. The Santa Anas were in full force and the koi pools would be clogged with litter. Kyra gave him her widest smile—nothing could dampen her mood tonight—and she took hold of both his hands and lifted them as if they were at the very start of an elaborate dance. “Maybe I am,” she said, and he let it drop.

On the way home they stopped in at Gitello’s to pick up a few things—odds and ends—for the feast they were planning on Thursday, for Thanksgiving. They were having the Cherrystones and the Jardines over, as well as Kyra’s sister and brother-in-law, with their three children, and Kyra’s mother, who was flying in from San Francisco. They’d already spent two hundred and eighty dollars at the Von’s in Woodland Hills, where nearly everything was cheaper, but the list of odds and ends had grown to daunting proportions. Kyra was doing the cooking, with Delaney as sous chef and the maid, Orbalina, on cleanup detail, and she was planning a traditional dinner: roast turkey with chestnut dressing and giblet gravy, mashed potatoes and turnips, a cranberry compote, steamed asparagus, three California wines and two French, baked winter squash soup and a salad of mixed field greens to start, a cheese course, a home-blended
granité
of grapefruit and nectarine, and a hazelnut-risotto pudding and crème brûlée for dessert with espresso, Viennese coffee and Armagnac on the side.