The Tortilla Curtain (6 page)

“Busy day?” Delaney murmured, setting Kyra’s orange juice down beside the newspaper and unscrewing the childproof caps of the sturdy plastic containers that held her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements. He did the little things for her—out of love and consideration, sure, but also in acknowledgment of the fact that she was the chief breadwinner here, the one who went off to the office while he stayed home. Which was all right by him. He had none of those juvenile macho hang-ups about role reversal and who wore the pants and all of that—real estate was her life, and he was more than happy to help her with it, so long as he got his four hours a day at the keyboard.

Kyra lifted her eyebrows, but didn’t look up. She was tucking what looked to be a small white packet into each of the envelopes in succession. “Busy?” she echoed. “Busy isn’t the word for it. I’m presenting two offers this morning, both of them real low-ball, I’ve got a buyer with cold feet on that Calabasas property—with escrow due to close in eight days—and I’m scheduled for an open house on the Via Escobar place at one ... is that the dogs I hear? What are they barking at?”

Delaney shrugged. Jordan had shucked the foil from his hi-fiber bar and was drifting toward the TV room with it—which meant he was going to be late for school if Delaney didn’t hustle him out of there
within
the next two minutes. The cat, as yet unfed, rubbed up against Delaney’s leg. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’ve been yapping since I let them out. Must be a squirrel or something. Or maybe Jack’s dog got loose again and he’s out there peeing on the fence and driving them into a frenzy.”

“Anyway,” Kyra went on, “it’s going to be hell. And it’s Carla Bayer’s birthday, so after work a bunch of us—don’t you think this is a cute idea?” She held up one of the packets she’d been stuffing the envelopes with. It was a three-by-five seed packet showing a spray of flowers and printed with the legend
Forget-Me-Not, Compliments of Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, Mike Bender Realty, Inc.

“Yeah, I guess,” he murmured, wiping at an imaginary speck on the counter. This was her way of touching base with her clients. Every month or so, usually in connection with a holiday, she went through her mailing list (consisting of anyone she’d ever sold to or for, whether they’d relocated to Nome, Singapore or Irkutsk or passed on into the Great Chain of Being) and sent a small reminder of her continued existence and willingness to deal. She called it “keeping the avenues open.” Delaney reached down to stroke the cat. “But can’t one of the secretaries do this sort of thing for you?”

“It’s the personal touch that counts—and moves property. How many times do I have to tell you?”

There was a silence, during which Delaney became aware of the cartoon jingle that had replaced the voice of the news in the other room, and then, just as he was clearing Jordan’s things from the table and checking the digital display on the microwave for the time—7:32-the morning fell apart. Or no: it was torn apart by a startled breathless shriek that rose up from beyond the windows as if out of some primal dream. This was no yip, no yelp, no bark or howl—this was something final and irrevocable, a predatory scream that took the varnish off their souls, and it froze them in place. They listened, horrified, as it rose in pitch until it choked off as suddenly as it had begun.

The aftereffect was electric. Kyra bolted up out of her chair, knocking over her coffee cup and scattering envelopes; the cat darted between Delaney’s legs and vanished; Delaney dropped the plate on the floor and groped for the counter like a blind man. And then Jordan was coming through the doorway on staccato feet, his face opened up like a pale nocturnal flower: “Delaney,” he gasped, “Delaney, something, something—”

But Delaney was already in motion. He flung open the door and shot through the courtyard, head down, rounding the corner of the house just in time to see a dun-colored blur scaling the six-foot chain-link fence with a tense white form clamped in its jaws. His brain decoded the image: a coyote had somehow managed to get into the enclosure and seize one of the dogs, and there it was, wild nature, up and over the fence as if this were some sort of circus act. Shouting to hear himself, shouting nonsense, Delaney charged across the yard as the remaining dog (Osbert? Sacheverell?) cowered in the corner and the dun blur melded with the buckwheat, chamise and stiff high grass of the wild hillside that gave onto the wild mountains beyond.

He didn’t stop to think. In two bounds he was atop the fence and dropping to the other side, absently noting the paw prints in the dust, and then he was tearing headlong through the undergrowth, leaping rocks and shrubs and dodging the spines of the yucca plants clustered like breastworks across the slope. He was running, that was all he knew. Branches raked him like claws. Burrs bit into his ankles. He kept going, pursuing a streak of motion, the odd flash of white: now he saw it, now he didn’t. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, goddamnit!”

The hillside sloped sharply upward, rising through the colorless scrub to a clump of walnut trees and jagged basalt outcroppings that looked as if they’d poked through the ground overnight. He saw the thing suddenly, the pointed snout and yellow eyes, the high stiff leggy gait as it struggled with its burden, and it was going straight up and into the trees. He shouted again and this time the shout was answered from below. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Kyra was coming up the hill with her long jogger’s strides, in blouse, skirt and stocking feet. Even at this distance he could recognize the look on her face—the grim set of her jaw, the flaring eyes and clamped mouth that spelled doom for whoever got in her way, whether it was a stranger who’d locked his dog in a car with the windows rolled up or the hapless seller who refused a cash-out bid. She was coming, and that spurred him on. If he could only stay close the coyote would have to drop the dog, it would have to.

By the time he reached the trees his throat was burning. Sweat stung his eyes and his arms were striped with nicks and scratches. There was no sign of the dog and he pushed on through the trees to where the slope fell away to the feet of the next hill beyond it. The brush was thicker here—six feet high and so tightly interlaced it would have taken a machete to get through it in places—and he knew, despite the drumming in his ears and the glandular rush that had him pacing and whirling and clenching and unclenching his fists, that it was looking bad. Real bad. There were a thousand bushes out there—five thousand, ten thousand—and the coyote could be crouched under any one of them.

It was watching him even now, he knew it, watching him out of slit wary eyes as he jerked back and forth, frantically scanning the mute clutter of leaf, branch and thorn, and the thought infuriated him. He shouted again, hoping to flush it out. But the coyote was too smart for him. Ears pinned back, jaws and forepaws stifling its prey, it could lie there, absolutely motionless, for hours. “Osbert!” he called out suddenly, and his voice trailed off into a hopeless bleat. “Sacheverell!”

The poor dog. It couldn’t have defended itself from a rabbit. Delaney stood on his toes, strained his neck, poked angrily through the nearest bush. Long low shafts of sunlight fired the leaves in an indifferent display, as they did every morning, and he looked into the illuminated depths of that bush and felt desolate suddenly, empty, cored out with loss and helplessness.

“Osbert!” The sound seemed to erupt from him, as if he couldn’t control his vocal cords. “Here, boy! Come!” Then he shouted Sacheverell’s name, over and over, but there was no answer except for a distant cry from Kyra, who seemed to be way off to his left now.

All at once he wanted to smash something, tear the bushes out of the ground by their roots. This didn’t have to happen. It didn’t. If it wasn’t for those idiots leaving food out for the coyotes as if they were nothing more than sheep with bushy tails and eyeteeth ... and he’d warned them, time and again. You can’t be heedless of your environment. You can’t. Just last week he’d found half a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken out back of the Dagolian place—waxy red-and-white-striped cardboard with a portrait of the grinning chicken-killer himself smiling large—and he’d stood up at the bimonthly meeting of the property owners’ association to say something about it. They wouldn’t even listen. Coyotes, gophers, yellow jackets, rattlesnakes even—they were a pain in the ass, sure, but nature was the least of their problems. It was humans they were worried about. The Salvadorans, the Mexicans, the blacks, the gangbangers and taggers and carjackers they read about in the Metro section over their bran toast and coffee. That’s why they’d abandoned the flatlands of the Valley and the hills of the Westside to live up here, outside the city limits, in the midst of all this scenic splendor.

Coyotes? Coyotes were quaint. Little demi-dogs out there howling at the sunset, another amenity like the oaks, the chaparral and the views. No, all Delaney’s neighbors could talk about, back and forth and on and on as if it were the key to all existence, was gates. A gate, specifically. To be erected at the main entrance and manned by a twenty-four-hour guard to keep out those very gangbangers, taggers and carjackers they’d come here to escape. Sure. And now poor Osbert—or Sacheverell—was nothing more than breakfast.

The fools. The idiots.

Delaney picked up a stick and began to beat methodically at the bushes.

 

 

 

The Arroyo Blanco Community Center was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the private road, Arroyo Blanco Drive, that snaked off it and wound its way through the oaks and into the grid of streets that comprised the subdivision. It was a single-story white stucco building with an, orange tile roof, in the Spanish Mission style, and it featured a kitchen, wet bar, stage, P.A. system and seating for two hundred. The hall was full—standing room only—by the time Delaney arrived. He’d been delayed because Kyra had been late getting home from work, and since it was the maid’s day off, there’d been no one to watch Jordan.

Kyra was in a state. She’d come in the door looking like a refugee, her eyes reddened and a tissue pinned to the tip of her reddened nose, grieving for Sacheverell (Sacheverell it was: she’d been able to identify the surviving dog as Osbert by means of an indisputable mole clinging to his underlip). For an hour or more that morning she’d helped Delaney beat the bushes, frantic, tearful, her breath coming in ragged gasps—she’d had those dogs forever, long before she’d met Delaney, before Jordan was born even—but finally, reluctantly, she’d given it up and gone off to work, where she was already late for her ten o’clock. She’d changed her clothes, reapplied her makeup, comforted Jordan as best she could and dropped him off at school, leaving Delaney with the injunction to find the dog at all cost. Every half hour throughout the day she called him for news, and though he had news by noon—grim, definitive news, news wrapped up in half a dozen paper towels and sequestered even now in the pocket of his windbreaker—he kept it from her, figuring she’d had enough of a jolt for one day. When she came home he held her for a long moment, murmuring the soft consolatory things she needed to hear, and then she went in to Jordan, who’d been sent home early from school with chills and a fever. It was a sad scene. Just before he left for the meeting, Delaney looked in on them, mother and son, huddled in Jordan’s narrow bed with Osbert and Dame Edith, the cat, looking like survivors of a shipwreck adrift on a raft.

Delaney edged in at the rear of the auditorium beside a couple he didn’t recognize. The man was in his forties, but he had the hips and shoulders of a college athlete and looked as if he’d just come back from doing something heroic. The woman, six feet tall at least, was around Kyra’s age—mid-thirties, he guessed—and she was dressed in black Lycra shorts and a USC jersey. She leaned into her husband like a sapling leaning into a rock ledge. Delaney couldn’t help noticing the way the shorts cradled the woman’s buttocks in a flawless illustration of form and function, but then he recalled the thing in his pocket and looked up into a sea of heads and the harsh white rinse of the fluorescent lights.

Jack Jardine was up on the dais, along with Jack Cherrystone, the association’s secretary, and Linda Portis, the treasurer. The regularly scheduled meeting, the one at which Delaney had stood to warn his neighbors of the dangers of feeding the local fauna, had adjourned past twelve after prolonged debate on the gate issue, and Jack had convened tonight’s special session to put it to a vote. Under normal circumstances, Delaney would have stayed home and lost himself in John Muir or Edwin Way Teale, but these were not normal circumstances. Not that he was indifferent to the issue—the gate was an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even, and he’d spoken against it privately—but to his mind it was a fait accompli. His neighbors were overwhelmingly for it, whipped into a reactionary frenzy by the newspapers and the eyewitness news, and he didn’t relish being one of the few dissenting voices, a crank like Rudy Hernandez, who liked to hear himself talk and would argue any side of any issue till everyone in the room was ready to rise up and throttle him. The gate was going up and there was nothing Delaney could do about it. But he was here. Uncomfortably here. Here because tonight he had a private agendum, an agendum that lay hard against his hip in the lower pocket of his windbreaker, and his throat went dry at the thought of it.

Someone spoke to the question, but Delaney was so wound up in his thoughts he didn’t register what was being said. There would be discussion, and then a vote, and for the rest of his days he’d have to feel like a criminal driving into his own community, excusing himself to some jerk in a crypto-fascist uniform, making special arrangements every time a friend visited or a package needed to be delivered. He thought of the development he’d grown up in, the fenceless expanse of lawns, the shared space, the deep lush marshy woods where he’d first discovered ferns, frogs, garter snakes, the whole shining envelope of creation. There was nothing like that anymore. Now there were fences. Now there were gates.