T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

She was on her way back to the car, thinking she'd drive Mike Bender by here tomorrow and see if he couldn't exert some pressure in the right places, call the INS out here, get the police to crack down, something, anything. In an ironic way, the invasion from the South had been good for business to this point because it had driven the entire white middle class out of Los Angeles proper and into the areas she specialized in: Calabasas, Topanga, Arroyo Blanco. She still sold houses in Woodland Hills-that's where the offices were, after all, and it was still considered a very desirable upper-middle-class neighborhood-but all the smart buyers had already retreated beyond the city limits. Schools, that's what it was all about. They didn't bus in the county, only in the city.

Still, this congregation was disturbing. There had to be a limit, a boundary, a cap, or they'd be in Calabasas next and then Thousand Oaks and on and on up the coast till there was no real estate left. That's what she was thinking, not in any heartless or calculating way-everybody had a right to live-but in terms of simple business sense, when she became aware that one of the men hadn't stepped aside as she crossed back into the parking lot. There was a lamppost on her left, a car parked to the right, and she had to pull up short to avoid walking right into him.

He looked up at her, sought out her eyes and smiled. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, his hair long and frozen to his scalp with oil, pants neatly pressed, shirt buttoned up to the collar though it must have been ninety-five degrees or more. “You want work, Miss?” he said.

“No,” she said, “no thank you,” and stepped around him.

“Cheap,” he said at her back, and then he was right there again at her elbow, like something that had stuck to the fabric of her jacket. “Pleese,” he said. “I do anything.” And then he added, again, as she inserted the key in the door of the car, swung it open and escaped into the cool familiar embrace of the leather interior: “Cheap.”

The Kaufmans were pleased, though she was a few minutes late, and the fence people knew exactly what they were doing. She pulled into her driveway and Al Lopez's truck was there, in Delaney's spot. She'd worked with Al before, through the office, hiring him to do everything from replacing cracked kitchen tiles to plumbing and electrical and patching stucco on the houses she had in escrow. Anytime there was a dispute, she could bring Al in and do a quick cosmetic job on whatever the buyers got hung up on. He'd seemed a natural for the fence, especially since she wouldn't consider going back to the idiot who'd put up the original fence and assured her that nothing could get over six feet of chain link.

Since she still had time before her four o'clock, she took Osbert out on the leash for ten minutes and chatted with Al while his men poured concrete and set new eight-foot posts into the holes where the old posts had stood. He'd told her at the outset that he could simply extend the existing poles at half the price, but she didn't want anything tacky-looking, and above all, she told him, she wanted strength and impregnability. “I don't want anything getting in here ever again,” she'd said.

Now, as she stood there with Osbert, making small talk about traffic, smog, the heat and the housing market, Al said casually, almost slyly, “Of course, there's not much you can do about snakes-”

Snakes. An image rose up in her head, cold and primordial, the coil and shuffle, the wicked glittering reptilian eyes: she hated snakes. Worse than coyotes, worse than anything. She'd never given a thought to coyotes when they moved in-it was Delaney who'd insisted on the fence-but no one had to warn her about the snakes. Selda Cherrystone had discovered one coiled up in her dryer and its mate beneath the washing machine, and half the people on the block had found rattlesnakes in their garages at one time or another. “Can't you run something along the base of the fence?” she asked, thinking of a miniature trap or net or maybe a weak electric current.

Al looked away, his eyes squinted into the globes of his cheeks. He was heavyset, in his fifties, with white hair and skin the color and texture of an old medicine ball. “We've got a product,” he said, still fixing his gaze on the distant tree-studded crotch of the canyon, and then he turned back to her. “Plastic strips, a real tight weave in the mesh of' the fence-we go about three feet and down under the ground maybe six inches. That takes care of your snakes.”

“How much?” Kyra asked, gazing off into the distance herself now.

“Two-fifty.”

“Two hundred,” she said, and it was a reflex.

“Two-twenty-five.”

“I don't know, Al,” she said, “we've never had a snake here yet.”

He bent strategically to stroke Osbert's ears. “Rattlers,” he sighed, “they get in under the fence, nothing to stop 'em really, and they bite a little dog like this. I've seen it happen. Up here especially.” He straightened up and forced out a deep moaning trail of breath with the effort. “I'll give it to you for two-ten, just say the word.”

She nodded yes and he shouted something in Spanish to one of the men bent over the cement mixer, and that was when she noticed him for the first time, the man with the limp and the graying mustache, his face bruised and swollen like bad fruit. He went right by her on his way to the truck and she sucked in her breath as if she'd burned herself. This was the man, the very man-it had to be. She watched him slide the long plastic strips from the back of the truck and balance them on one shoulder, and she felt a space open up inside her, a great sad empty space that made her feel as if she'd given birth to something weak and unformed. And as he passed by her again, jaunty on his bad leg, the space opened so wide it could have sucked in the whole universe. He was whistling, whistling under his breath.

Later, after she'd shown the Monte Nido house to a crabbed old couple with penurious noses and swollen checkbooks who added up to a strong maybe, she went round shutting up her houses as briskly and efficiently as she could, hoping to be home by six. Everything was in order at the first four places, but as she punched in the code at the Da Roses' gate, something caught her eye in the brush along the gully on the right-hand side of the road, just inside the gate. Something shiny, throwing light back at the hard hot cauldron of the evening sun. She hit the command key, let the gate swing back, and walked up the road to investigate.

It was a shopping cart, flung on its side in the ditch and all but buried in the vegetation. The red plastic flap on the baby seat bore the name of a local supermarket-Von's-but the nearest Von's was miles from here. For that matter, there wasn't a store of any kind within miles. Kyra bent to examine the thing, her skirt pulled tight against her haunches, heels sinking into the friable dirt, as if it would give a clue as to how it had gotten here. But there was no clue. The cart seemed new, bright in its coat of coruscating metal, barely used. She went back to the car, which she'd left running, to get a pen and her memo book so she could jot down the store's number and have someone come out and pick the thing up. After dragging it out of the ditch and wheeling it beyond the gate so they could get to it, she slid back into the car and wound her way up the road to the house, puzzled still, and suspicious, her eyes fastening on every detail.

The house rose up before her, its windows solid with light, commanding the hilltop like a fortress looking out on the coast of Brittany instead of the deep blue pit of the Pacific. She pulled up in front of the big wooden doors of the garage and killed the engine. For a long moment she just sat there, windows down, breathing in the air and listening. Then she got out of the car and walked round the house twice, checking each door and window at ground level. At the same time she scanned the upper windows, looking for signs of entry or vandalism, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Finally, with a glance over her shoulder, she went inside.