T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Two voices, point/counterpoint. He couldn't make out the words, only the timbre. One was like the high rasp of a saw cutting through a log, on and on till the pieces dropped away, and then the second voice joined in, pitched low, abrupt and arrhythmic.

Some hikers carried guns. Delaney had heard of robberies on the Backbone Trail, of physical violence, assault, rape. The four-wheel-drive faction came up into the hills to shoot off their weapons, gang members annihilated rocks, bottles and trees with their assault rifles. The city was here, now, crouched in the ravine. Delaney didn't know what to do-slink away like some wounded animal and give up possession of the place forever? Or challenge them, assert his rights? But maybe he was making too much of it. Maybe they were hikers, day-trippers, maybe they were only teenagers skipping school.

And then he remembered the girl from the birding class he'd taken out of boredom. It was just after he'd got to California, before he met Kyra. He couldn't recall her name now, but he could see her, bent over the plates in Clarke's _An Introduction to Southern California Birds__ or squinting into the glow of the slide projector in the darkened room. She was young, early twenties, with thin black hair parted in the middle and a pleasing kind of bulkiness to her, to the way she moved her shoulders and walked squarely from the anchors of her heels. And he remembered her cheeks-the cheeks of an Eskimo, of a baby, of Alfred Hitchcock staring dourly from the screen, cheeks that gave her face a freshness and naivete that made her look even younger than she was. Delaney was thirty-nine. He asked her out for a sandwich after class and she told him why she never hiked alone, never, not ever again.

Up until the year before she'd been pretty blithe about it. The streets might have been unsafe, particularly at night, but the chaparral, the woods, the trails no one knew? She had a passion for hiking, for solitary rambles, for getting close enough to feel the massive shifting heartbeat of the world. She spent two months on the Appalachian Trail after graduating from high school, and she'd been over most of the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mexican border to San Francisco. One afternoon in May she went out for a short hike up one of the feeder streams of the Big Tujunga Creek, in the San Gabriels. She'd worked past two, waitressing for the lunch crowd at a grill in Pasadena, but she thought she'd get two or maybe three hours in before dinner. Less than a mile up there was a pool she knew at the base of a cliff that rose to a thin spray of water-she'd never been beyond the pool and planned to climb round the cliff and follow the stream to its source.

They were Mexicans, she thought. Or maybe Armenians. They spoke English. Young guys in baggy pants and shiny black boots. She surprised them at the pool, the light faded to gray, a faint chill in the air, their eyes glazed with the beer and the endless bullshit, stories about women and cars and drugs. There was an uncomfortable moment, all five of them drilling her with looks that automatically appraised the shape of her beneath the loose sweatshirt and jeans and calculated the distance to the road, how far a scream would carry. She was working her way around the cliff, unsteady on the loose rock, her back to them, when she felt the grip of the first hand, right there-she showed him-right there on her calf.

Delaney held his breath. The voices had stopped abruptly, replaced by a brooding silence that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity before they started up again, lazy now, contented, the buzz of a pair of flies settling down on the sidewalk. And then, through some auditory quirk of the canyon walls, the voices suddenly crystallized and every word came to him true and distinct. It took him a moment, and then he understood: Spanish, they were talking Spanish.

He was already angry with himself, angry even before he turned away and tried to slink out of the reeds like a voyeur, angry before the choice was made. The hike was over, the day ruined. There was no way he was just going to waltz out of the bushes and surprise these people, whoever they were, and the defile was too narrow to allow him to go round them undetected. He lifted one foot from the mud and then the other, parting the reeds with the delicacy of a man tucking a blanket under the chin of a sleeping child. The sound of the creek, which to this point had been a whisper, rose to a roar, and it seemed as if every bird in the canyon was suddenly screaming. He looked up into the face of a tall raw-boned Latino with eyes like sinkholes and a San Diego Padres cap reversed on his head.

The man was perched on a boulder just behind and above Delaney, no more than twenty feet away, and how he'd got there or whether he'd been there all along, Delaney had no idea. He wore a pair of tight new blue jeans tucked into the tops of his scuffed workboots, and he sat hunched against his knees, prying a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket with exaggerated care. He attempted a smile, spreading his lips in a show of bravado, but Delaney could see that the man was flustered, as confounded by Delaney's sudden appearance as Delaney was by his. “Hey, _amigo,__ how's it going?” he said in a voice that didn't seem to fit him, a voice that was almost feminine but for the rasp of it. His English was flat and graceless.

Delaney barely nodded. He didn't return the smile and he didn't reply. He would have moved on right then, marching back to his car without a word, but something tugged at his pack and he saw that one of the reeds had caught in his shoulder strap. He bent to release it, his heart pounding, and the man on the rock sprawled out his legs as if he were sinking into a sofa, folded the stick of gum into his mouth and casually flicked the wrapper into the stream. “Hiking, huh?” the man said, and he was smiling still, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Me,” he said, “I'm hiking too. Me and my friend.” He jerked his head to indicate the friend, who appeared behind Delaney now, just beyond the reeds.

The friend regarded Delaney out of an expressionless face. His hair hung in coils to his shoulders and a thin wisp of beard trailed away from the base of his chin. He was wearing some sort of poncho or _serape,__ jagged diamonds of color that leapt out against the quiet greens of the streambed. He had nothing to add to the first man's description. They were hiking, and that was it.

Delaney looked from the first man to his companion and back again. He wasn't alarmed, not exactly-he was too angry for that. All he could think of was the sheriff and getting these people and their garbage heap out of here, of hustling them right back to wherever they'd come from, slums, _favelas, barrios,__ whatever they called them. They didn't belong here, that was for sure. He jerked the reed out of the ground and flung it away from him, adjusted his pack and began picking his way back down the streambed.

“Hey, _amigo”__-the man's voice came at him in a wild high whinny-“you have a nice day, huh?”

The walk to the road was nothing-it barely stretched his muscles. The anticipation had gone sour in his throat, and it rankled him-it wasn't even noon yet and the day was shot. He cursed as he passed by the sleeping bags again, and then he took the bank in five strides and he was out in the glare of the canyon road. He had a sudden impulse to continue on down the stream, under the bridge and around the bend, but dismissed it: this was where the creek fanned out into its floodplain before running into the ocean, and any idiot who could park a car and clamber down a three-foot embankment could roam it at will, as the successive layers of garbage spread out over the rocks gave testimony. There was no adventure here, no privacy, no experience of nature. It would be about as exciting as pulling into the McDonald's lot and counting the starlings.