T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

They were walking hand in hand, Kyra in her Stanford windbreaker, Delaney in a lightweight Gore-Tex backcountry jacket he'd got through the Sierra Club, calling out “Kitty, Kitty,” in harmony, when Jack Jardine's classic 1953 MG TD rounded the corner, Jack at the wheel. The car was a long humped shiver of metal and the engine sounded like two French horns locked on a single note that rose or fell in volume according to what gear Jack happened to be in at the moment. He swung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb beside them, killing the engine. “Out for a stroll?” he said, leaning his head out the window.

“Sure,” Delaney said. “It's about time the weather changed. Feels good.”

“Hi, Jack.” Kyra gave him an official smile. “All settled back in? How's Erna?”

“Everything's fine,” Jack said, and his eyes dodged away from them and came back again. “Listen, actually-well, there's something I just discovered I thought you might want to take a look at, no big deal, but if you've got a minute-?”

He swung open the passenger door and Delaney and Kyra squeezed in-and it was a tight squeeze, a very tight squeeze, the floor space like the narrow end of a coffin, the head space claustrophobic at best. The car smelled of oil, leather, gasoline. “I feel like I'm in high school again,” Delaney said.

“It'll only be a minute.” Jack turned the key and pushed a button on the dash and the engine stuttered to life. The car was one of his hobbies. He liked to play with it on weekends, but he reserved the Range Rover for the freeway wars, five days a week, down the canyon road to the PCH and up the Santa Monica and 405 freeways to Sunset and his office in Century City.

They were silent a moment, the thrum of the car all-encompassing, every bump and dip instantly communicated to their thighs and backsides, and then Delaney said, “So did Dom Flood ever turn up?”

Jack gave him a quick look and turned his eyes back to the road. He was uncomfortable with the subject, Delaney could see that, and it was a revelation-he'd never seen Jack uncomfortable before. “I only represented him in the, uh, the financial matter, the banking case-he has other attorneys now.”

“So what are you saying-he ran?”

Jack seemed even less comfortable with this formulation and he shifted unnecessarily to give him an extra moment to cover himself. “I wouldn't call it running, not exactly-”

It was Kyra's turn now. “But he is a fugitive, right? And what he did to my mother, that was inexcusable. She couldn't be charged as an accessory or anything, could she?”

Jack fell all over himself. “Oh, no, no. She had nothing to do with it. Listen”-and he turned to them now, careful to make eye contact-“I really can't defend his actions. As I say, I'm no longer his attorney. But yes, it looks like, from all I hear, he's left the country.”

And then they were outside the gate and Jack was pulling over in the turn-around they'd constructed to assist those denied admission to the sacrosanct streets of the development. He shut down the engine and climbed out of the car, Delaney and Kyra following suit. “So what is it, Jack?” Delaney was saying, thinking it must have something to do with one or another of the creatures flushed out by the fire, when he looked up and saw the wall. It had been defaced with graffiti on both sides of the entrance gate, big bold angular strokes in glittering black paint, and how could he have missed it on his way back in from the airport? “I can't believe it,” Kyra said. “What next?”

Jack had gone right up to the wall, tracing the jagged hieroglyphs with his finger. “That's what they use, right? It almost looks like the writing on the stelae outside the Mayan temples-look at this-but then this looks like a Z, and that's got to be an S with a line through it, no? Is this what they wrote on that house you were selling, Kyra? I mean, can you read it?”

“They wrote in Spanish-_pinche puta__, fucking whore. They had it in for me because I chased them off the property-the same idiots that started the fire, the ones they just let off because we might be infringing on their rights or something, as if we don't have any rights, as if anybody can just come in here and burn our houses down and we have to grin and bear it. But no, this is different. This is like what you see all over the Valley-it's like their own code.”

Jack turned to Delaney. A light misting rain had begun to fall, barely a breath of moisture, but it was a start. “What do you think?”

There it was again, the hate. It came up on him so fast it choked him. There was no escape, no refuge-they were everywhere. All he could do was shrug.

“I just don't understand it,” Jack said, his voice soft and pensive. “It's like an animal reflex, isn't it? — marking their territory?”

“Only this is our territory,” Kyra said.

And now the thing in Delaney's throat let go and the taste it left was bitter, bitter. “I wouldn't be so sure,” he said.

November passed into December, Dame Edith and Dom Flood were given up for lost, the first major storm of the season soaked the hillsides with two inches of rain over a three-day period, and Delaney Mossbacher discovered his mission. He was a man of patience and resource. He'd spent half his life observing animals in the field, diving among manatees in Florida, crouching outside fox dens in upstate New York, once even roaming the Belizean jungles with the world's foremost jaguar expert, watching over kills and waiting through endless mosquito-infested nights for the magical photo of the big beast prowling among the lianas. He knew how to be unobtrusive and he knew how to wait. What it all added up to was Judgment Day for those sons of bitches who'd spray-painted the wall-he was going to stake it out, night after night, with a pair of binoculars and a trip-wire camera, and he was going to catch them in the act. Maybe no one had seen them light the fire, but he was going to make damned sure he got the evidence this time, and if the police wouldn't report them to the INS, he would. Enough was enough.

Kyra was against it. She was afraid there'd be a confrontation, afraid he'd get hurt. “Isn't that what we pay Westec for?” she'd argued. “And the guard at the gate?”

“But they're not doing the job,” he said. “Obviously. Look: somebody's got to do something.”

And he was the one to do it. This was small, simple; this was something he could contain and control. He had all the time in the world. The hills were soaked and the days so short he'd had to cut his daily hikes down to two or three miles, maximum; he'd finished a column on the fire for next month's issue and the piece on invasive species had begun to come together. He sat in his study, staring at the wall, and every time he thought of those Mexicans, especially the one he'd tangled with, the shame and hate burned in him like a twist of pitch, flickering and dying and flickering all over again. And no, he wasn't going to get confrontational-he was just going to record the evidence and call Westec and the Sheriff's Department from Kyra's cellular phone, and that was all.

He set up a pair of cheap flash cameras rigged to a trip wire and positioned them so they'd shoot down the length of the wall on either side of the gate. It was the same rig he'd used a year ago when some furtive creature of the night had been getting into the bag of cat food in the garage. Jack Cherrystone had let him use his darkroom (Jack was an avid amateur photographer, currently working on a series of portraits of “the faces behind the voices,” head shots of the unsung heroes who provided vocalization for cartoon characters and did voice-overs for commercials, and of course, the tiny cadre of his fellow trailermeisters), and Delaney, watching the image form in the developing tray, was gratified to see the dull white long-nosed face of _Di__ delphis marsupialis, the Virginia opossum, staring back at him. Now he would try the technique on a different sort of fauna.