T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Inside too: everything looked fine. None of the zones had been tampered with and the timed, lights had already switched on in the kitchen and the dining room. There were no realtors' cards on the table in the foyer, and that was a disappointment, a continuing disappointment, but then it would take the right buyer to appreciate the place, and it was bound to move, it was, sure it was-especially if she could convince Patricia Da Ros to drop the price. She checked her watch: five minutes gone. She made a quick circuit of the house-no need to kill herself since nobody had shown the place-then returned to the entrance hall, punched in the alarm code and stepped back out on the porch. One trip round the back and she'd be on her way.

Kyra always took long strides, even in heels-it was her natural gait. Delaney told her he found it sexy because it made her sway over her hips in an exaggerated way, but she'd never thought a thing about it-she'd always been athletic, a tomboy really, and she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't in a hurry. She went round the north side of the house first, striding over the flagstone path as if she were almost running, her head swiveling back and forth to take in every least detail. It wasn't till she turned the comer to the back of the house that she saw it, and even then she thought it was some trick of the light.

She stopped as if she'd been jerked on a leash. She was bewildered at first, then outraged, and finally just plain frightened. There, scrawled across the side of the house in six-foot-high spray-painted letters, was a message for her. Black paint, slick with the falling light, ten looping letters in Spanish: PINCHE PUTA *** *** ***

The sun was distant, a molten speck in the sky, but hot for all that. Delaney was out back of the community center, where he'd been working on his paddleball game, one-on-one with the wall. He was sitting on the back steps, a sweat-beaded Diet Coke in hand, when he became aware of the murmur of voices coming from somewhere inside the room behind him. The shades were drawn, but the window was open a crack, and as the sun flared out from the windows and the inevitable turkey vulture rode the unflagging currents high overhead, the murmur became two distinct and discrete voices, and he realized he was listening to Jack Jr. and an unknown companion engage in the deep philosophic reflections of a torpid late-summer adolescent afternoon.

“Cal State, huh?” Jack Jr. said.

“Yup. Best I could do-with my grades.” A snigger. A double snigger.

“Think you can handle Northridge? I mean, I hear it's like Little Mexico or something.”

“Yup. That's right. Fuckin' Little Mexico all the way. But you know what the bright side is?”

“What?”

“Mexican chicks.”

“Get out of here.”

A pause. Slurping sounds. A suppressed belch.

“No shit, man-they give killer head.”

“Get out of here.”

Another pause, long, reflective. “Only one thing you got to worry about-”

“What's that?”

“The ten-pounds-a-year rule.”

A tentative laugh, uncertain of itself, but game. “Yeah?”

“At sixteen”-slurp, pause-“they're killers, but from then on, every year they gain ten pounds till they wind up looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with a suntan-and who wants to stick your dick in something like that, even their mouth?”

Delaney stood. This was the punch line and it was accompanied by a virtuosic duet of sniggers. Jesus, he thought, and his legs felt heavy suddenly. This was Jack's kid. A kid who should know better, a kid with all the advantages, raised right here in Arroyo Blanco. Delaney was moving now, shaking the starch out of his legs, slapping the paddle aimlessly against his thigh. But then, maybe that was the problem, and his next thought was for Jordan: was that the way he was going to turn out? He knew the answer before he'd formulated the question. Of course it was, and there was nothing Kyra or Delaney or anybody else could do about it. That's what he'd tried to tell Kyra over this wall business-it might keep _them__ out, but look what it keeps in. It was poisonous. The whole place was poisonous, the whole state. He wished he'd stayed in New York.

He felt depressed and out of sorts as he made his way through the familiar streets, the _Vias__ and _Calles__ and _Avenidas__ of this, his exclusive private community in the hills, composed entirely of Spanish Mission-style homes with orange tile roofs, where the children grew into bigots, the incomes swelled and the property values rose disproportionately. It was four in the afternoon and he didn't know what to do with himself. Jordan was at his grandmother's still and Kyra had called to say she'd be home late, after which she'd be going over to Erna Jardine's to get on the phone and sell her neighbors a wall, so Delaney would be on his own. But Delaney didn't want to be on his own. That's why he'd got married again; that's why he'd been eager to take Jordan on, and the dogs, and all the joys and responsibilities of domestic life. He'd been on his own for eight years after he divorced his first wife, and that had been enough for him. What he really wanted, and he'd been after Kyra about it for the past year at least, was for her to have a baby, but she wouldn't hear of it-there was always another house to show, another listing, another deal to close. Yes. Sure. And here he was, on his own.

He'd just turned onto Robles, head down, oblivious to the heat, reflecting bitterly that he wouldn't even have the dogs to keep him company, when he became aware that someone was calling out his name. He swung round to see a tall, vigorous and vaguely familiar-looking man striding up the pavement toward him. “Delaney Mossbacher?” the man said, holding out his hand.

Delaney took the hand. But for the two of them, the street was deserted, held in the grip of that distant molten sun.__

“We haven't met,” the man said, “-I'm Todd Sweet? — but I saw you at the meeting-the one over the gate thing awhile back? — and I thought I'd introduce myself. I hear you do a column for one of the nature magazines.”

Delaney tried to work his face into a smile. The meeting? And then it hit him: this was the athlete with the willowy wife, the man who'd spoken out with such conviction against the gate. “Oh yes, sure,” he said vaguely; mortified to be in the presence of anyone who'd seen him waving that bloody dog's appendage, and then, realizing that this wasn't exactly an appropriate response, he added, _“Wide Open Spaces.”__

The man was grinning, beaming at him as if they'd just signed the contract for a deal that would make them both rich. He was wearing a silk sport shirt in a tiger-stripe pattern, pressed slacks and sandals, and though it was a hundred and two degrees, he showed no trace of discomfort, not even a bead of sweat at his temples. He looked both earnest and hip, a jazz musician crossed with a Bible salesman. “Listen, Delaney,” he said, dropping his voice confidentially though there was no one within a hundred yards of them, no one visible at all, in fact, not in the sun-blistered expanse of the front yards or behind the drawn shades of the darkened windows, “I'm sure you're aware of what our friend Jack Jardine has in store for us-”

_Our friend.__ Delaney couldn't help but catch the ironic emphasis. But yes, Jack was his friend, though they didn't always see eye-to-eye on the issues, and he felt defensive suddenly.

“Well, I just thought, being a naturalist-and a writer, a fine, persuasive one, I'm sure-that you might oppose what's going on here. It's coming down to a vote at next Wednesday's meeting, and I'm going house-to-house to try to talk people out of it-me and my wife, that is, we're both going around. I mean, isn't the gate bad enough? Isn't this supposed to be a democracy we're living in, with public spaces and public access?”