T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Now, as Jim Shirley droned on, practically slavering over the nasty little details of the assault on Sunny DiMandia (who'd begun to take on a mythical dimension since Delaney didn't know her from Queen Ida or Hillary Clinton), Delaney couldn't hewasñ couldn'tlp studying Dominick Flood out of the corner of his eye. Three years without a walk in the woods, dinner out, even a stroll down the supermarket aisles: it was unthinkable. And yet there it was: if he left the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot radius they'd given him, a buzzer would go off and the police would come and lock him away in a place with a lot fewer amenities than this one. No wonder he liked to read about the great outdoors-he wasn't going to see anything beyond the backyard fence for a long time to come.

The conversation had focused for a while on Sunny DiMandia-expressions of concern, outrage, fear and loathing-and now the maid reappeared with coffee and a tray of cakes and brioches. The distraction was welcome, and as the eleven men settled down to the quotidian tasks of stirring the hot liquid, measuring out sugar and Sweet'n Low, plying knife and fork, chewing, swallowing, belching softly to themselves, a peace fell over the room, dispelling the news of rapes and break-ins and the general decline and disintegration of the world around them. Someone mentioned baseball and the conversation chased off after the subject with a sense of genuine relief. From the hills behind the house came the distant breathless barking yelp of a coyote, answered almost immediately by another, somewhere off to the north.

“The natives are getting restless,” Jack Cherrystone rumbled, and everyone laughed.

“You think they want to come in and join us?” Bill Vogel said. He was a tall, wraithlike man bowed under the weight of a sickle nose. “ They probably get a little tired of raw rat or whatever they're eating out there-if! I was a coyote I'll bet a bit of this cheesecake would really hit the spot.”

Jack Cherrystone, diminutive, his head too big for his frame, his eyes too big for his head, turned to Delaney. “I don't think Delaney would approve, Bill,” he said, his voice carving canyons beneath their feet. “Would you, Delaney?”

Delaney reddened. How many of these men had been present at the meeting the night he'd made such an ass of himself? “No,” he said, and he tried to smile, “no, I'm afraid I wouldn't.”

“What about that labor-exchange business, Dom?” Jack Jardine said out of nowhere, and the grinning faces turned from Delaney to him, and then to their host.

Flood was standing now, dipping his chin delicately to take a sip of coffee from the cup he held over the saucer in his hand. He gave Jack a wink, moved across the floor to lay an arm over his shoulder, and addressed the room in general. “That little matter's been taken care of. And it was no big deal, believe me-just a matter of a few phone calls to the right people. Joe Nardone of the Topanga Homeowners' Association told me the people down there were good and sick of the whole business anyway-it was an experiment that didn't work.”

“Good.” Jack Cherrystone was perched on a barstool, his legs barely reaching the bottom rung. “I mean, I'm as sympathetic as the next guy and I feel bad about it-and I can see where the Topanga property owners really wanted to do something for these people, but the whole thing was wrongheaded from the start.”

“I'll say,” Bill Vogel put in with real vehemence, “the more you give them the more they want, and the more of them there are,” but the professional boom of Jack Cherrystone's voice absorbed and flattened his words, and Jack went on without missing a beat.

“Why should we be providing jobs for these people when we're looking at a ten percent unemployment rate right here in California-and that's for _citizens.__ Furthermore, I'm willing to bet you'll see a big reduction in the crime rate once the thing anñce the th's closed down. And if that isn't enough of a reason, I'm sorry, but quite frankly I resent having to wade through them all every time I go to the post office. No offense, but it's beginning to look like fucking Guadalajara or something down there.”

Dominick Flood was beaming. He was the host, the man of the house, the man of the hour. He shrugged his shoulders in deprecation-what he'd done was nothing, the least thing, a little favor, that was all, and they should all rest easy. “By this time next week,” he announced, “the labor exchange is history.”

Delaney was thinking about that as Kyra came to the end of her dissertation on Cynthia Sinclair: Kyra had cleaned up the corner of Shoup and Ventura, and Dominick Flood had cleaned up the labor exchange. All right. But where were these people supposed to go? Back to Mexico? Delaney doubted it, knowing what he did about migratory animal species and how one population responded to being displaced by another. It made for war, for violence and killing, until one group had decimated the other and reestablished its claim to the prime hunting, breeding or grazing grounds. It was a sad fact, but true.

He tried to shrug it off-the evening was perfect, his life on track again, his hikes as stimulating as ever and his powers of observation and description growing sharper as he relaxed into the environment. Why dwell on the negative, the paranoiac, the wall-builders and excluders? He was part of it now, complicit by his very presence here, and he might as well enjoy it. Looking up from his food, he said: “Want to take in a movie tonight?”

“Yes!” Jordan shouted, raising his clenched fists in triumph. “Can we?”

Kyra carefully set down her glass. “Paperwork,” she said. “I couldn't dream of it. Really, I couldn't.”

Jordan emitted little batlike squeals of disappointment and protest. His features flattened, his eyebrows sank into his head. His hair was so light it was almost invisible. He might have been a shrunken bald-headed old man who's just been told his prescription can't be refilled.

“Come on,” Delaney coaxed, “it's only a movie. Two hours. You can spare two hours, hon, can't you?”

_“Please,”__ Jordan squealed.

Kyra wouldn't hear of it. Her face was neutral, but Delaney could see that her mind was made up. “You know it's my second-busiest time of the year, all these buyers with children popping up out of nowhere to try and get in before school starts… You know it is. And Jordan, honey”-turning to her son-“you know how busy Mama is right now, don't you? Once the summer's over I'll take you to any movie you want-and you can bring a friend along too, anybody you want.”

Delaney watched as she helped herself to the salad and squirted a little tube of no-fat dressing over her portion. “And we'll get treats too,” she was saying, “bonbons and Coke and any kind of candy you want to pick out.” And then, to Delaney: “What movie?”

He was about to say that he hadn't really decided, but there were two foreign films in Santa Monica, one at eight-forty-five and one at nine-oh-five, but of course that would exclude Jordan, and he was wondering if they could get the Solomon girl in to babysit on such short notice, when he saw the transformation in Kyra's face. She was looking past him, out beyond the pool and the deep lush fescue lawn she'd insisted on, though Delaney thought it was wasteful, and her eyes suddenly locked. He saw surprise first, then recognition, shock, and finally horror. When he whipped round in his seat, he saw the coyote.

It was inside the fence, pressed to the ground, a fearful calculation in its eyes as it stalked the grass to where Osbert lay sprawled in the shade of a potted palm, obliviously gnawing at the rawhide bone. Wings, he was thinking as he leapt from the chair with a shout, the damned thing must have wings to get over eight feet of chain link, and then, though he was in motion and though he wanted nothing more in the world than to prevent the sequel, he watched in absolute stupefaction as the animal swept across the grass in five quick strides, snatched the dog up by the back of the neck and hit the fence on the fly.