The Tortilla Curtain (44 page)

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.

The first night he watched from ten till past one, saw nothing—not even an opossum or a cat—and dragged through the following morning’s routine as if he were comatose, burning Kyra’s toast and getting Jordan to school twelve minutes late. He napped when he should have been writing and he curtailed his afternoon hike, unable to focus on the natural world when the unnatural one was encroaching on everything he held sacred. The second night he went out just after nine, prowled around a bit, came home to watch a news show with Kyra, and then went back out at eleven and sat there hidden, within sight of the gate, till two. He slept through the alarm the next morning and Kyra had to take Jordan to school.

During the ensuing week he averaged three hours a night in the blind he’d created in the lee of a ceanothus bush, but he didn’t see a thing. He watched his neighbors drive in and out of the gate, knew who was going to the liquor store and who to the movies and when they got back, but the vandals never showed. A second storm rolled in during the middle of the week and it got cold, down into the low forties, and though he knew it was unlikely that any Hispanics, Mexican or otherwise, would be out tagging in the rain, he stayed put anyway, hunched under his parka, experiencing the night and letting his thoughts wander. The rain playing off the slick blacktop at the gate made him think of Florida and the way the roads would disappear under a glistening field of flesh when the Siamese walking catfish were on the move in all their ambulatory millions. He remembered being awed by the sheer seething protoplasmic power of them, their jaws gaping and eyes aglitter as they waddled from one canal to the next, an army on the march. No one, least of all the exotic aquaria importer who brought them into the country, suspected that they could actually walk, despite the powerful intimation of their common name, and they’d slithered right out of their holding tanks and into the empty niche awaiting them in the soft moist subtropical night. Now they were unstoppable, endlessly breeding, straining the resources of the environment and gobbling up the native fishes like popcorn. And all because of some shortsighted enthusiast who thought they might look amusing in an aquarium.

But there were no catfish here, walking or otherwise. The rain fell. Water ran off into the ditches in tight yellow braids. Delaney periodically scanned the shrubbery at the base of the wall through his night-vision binoculars. The graffiti had been painted over almost immediately by the maintenance man—that was the best way, everyone said, of frustrating the taggers—and Delaney sat there watching a blank wall, a clean slate that had to be a gall and an incitement to that shithead with the weird eyes and the hat turned backwards on his head, and he watched as the Christmas lights went on over the entranceway and the sign that announced ARROYO BLANCO ESTATES, red and green lights, blinking against the blank wall in the rain. He didn’t mind. This was a crusade, a vendetta.

Then he skipped a night—a clear cold smog-free night that came at the tail end of the second storm—to take Kyra to dinner and a movie. They got back at midnight and the wall was blank still, but when Delaney went to the closet to change into his thermals, jeans and windbreaker, Kyra stepped out of the bathroom in her teddy and Delaney let his vigilance lapse. In the morning, the wall was still unmarked, but Delaney discovered that both cameras had been tripped. Probably coyotes, he was thinking as he took the film over to the Cherrystones, but there was always the possibility that the Mexicans had come back and been scared off by the flash—in which case he’d never catch them now. They wouldn’t be back. He’d blown it. His one chance, and he’d blown it. But then, it was probably only a coyote. Or a raccoon.

Jack was at a sound studio in Burbank, but Selda let Delaney in. She’d just had her hair done—it was the most amazing winter-ermine color, right down to the blue highlights—and she was drinking coffee from a mug and pouring words into the portable telephone in a low confidential voice. “Did you get anything?” she asked, putting a hand over the mouthpiece.

Delaney felt awkward. Only the Cherrystones, and Kyra knew what he was doing, but in a sense the whole community was depending on him—there might be ten thousand Mexicans camped out there in the chaparral waiting to set the canyon afire, but at least these two were going to get a one-way ticket to Tijuana. If he hadn’t blown it, that is. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Jack’s darkroom was a converted half-bath just off the den and it was cramped and poorly ventilated. Delaney oriented himself, switched on the fan, located what he needed, then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked on the safelight. He got so absorbed in what he was doing he’d almost forgotten what he was looking for by the time he was pinching the water off of the curling wet strip of film and holding it up to the light.

The face that stared back at him, as startled and harshly fixed in the light as any opossum’s face, was human, was Mexican, but it wasn’t the face he’d expected. He’d expected the cold hard eyes and swollen jaw of the graffiti artist with the bad dentures, the trespasser, the firebug, caught at last, proof positive, but this was a face come back to haunt him from his dreams, and how could he ever forget that silver-flecked mustache, the crushed cheekbone and the blood on a twenty-dollar bill?

AMÉRICA NURSED HER BABY, AND CÁNDIDO BUILT his house. It was a temporary house, a shelter, a place where they could keep out of the rain and lie low till he got work and they could live like human beings. The money—the apartment fund, the hoard in the peanut butter jar—wasn’t going to help them. It amounted to just four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in a hard shapeless knot of plastic. Cándido had waited three days, and then, under cover of night, he’d slipped down through the chaparral and across the road into the devastation of the canyon. There was a half-moon to guide him, a pale thin coating of light that showed his feet where to step, but everything was utterly transformed; he had a hard time even finding the trailhead. The world was ash, ash two or three inches deep, and the only landmarks left to guide him were the worn humps of the rocks. Once he got to the streambed he was on familiar ground, stumbling through the rock-strewn puddles to the dying murmur of the stream in the sterilized night. There was no chirrup of frog or cricket, no hoot of owl or even the parasitic whine of a single mosquito: the world was ash and the ash was dead. He found the pool, the wreck of the car, the sandspit and the stone, the very stone. But even before he lifted it and felt in the recess beneath it for his hoard, the money that would at least get them back to Tepoztlán, if nothing else, he knew what he would find: melted plastic, fused coins, U.S. Federal Reserve Notes converted to dust through the alchemy of the fire. And oh, what stinking luck he had.

It was beyond irony, beyond questions of sin and culpability, beyond superstition: he couldn’t live in his own country and he couldn’t live in this one either. He was a failure, a fool, a hick who put his trust in a
coyote or a cholo
with a tattoo on his neck, a man who couldn’t even roast a turkey without burning down half the county in the process. His life had been cursed ever since his mother died and his father brought that bitch Consuelo into the house and she gave the old man nine children he loved more than he’d ever loved his own firstborn son. Cándido sat there in the ashes, rocking back and forth and pressing his hands to his temples, thinking how worthless he was, how unworthy of America, whose life he’d ruined too, and of his daughter, his beautiful dark-eyed little daughter, and what she could hope to expect. The idea that came into his head in the dark of that obliterated canyon was to run, run and leave America and Socorro in the ramshackle hut with the half pot of cat stew that America thought was rabbit (The cat? She’s gone home to the rich people, sure she has ... ), run and never come back again. They’d be better off without him. The authorities would be looking for him, the agent of all this destruction, but they wouldn’t be looking for America, the mother of a U.S. citizen, and Cándido had heard over and over how they had clinics and housing and food slips for poor Americans, and why couldn’t his daughter get that sort of help? Why not?

He sat there for half an hour, awash in self-pity, as big a fool as any man alive, and then he knew what he had to do and he picked himself up, took the lump of plastic, the bent and blackened remnant of a grill from their old cookfire and the sixteen dollars he had in his pockets and climbed up the hill to the Chinese market, where they wouldn’t be so sure to recognize him, and went in to buy cheese, milk, eggs,
tortillas
and half a dozen disposable diapers. There were only two people in the store, a
gringo
customer who ignored him, and the Chinaman behind the counter, who took his money in silence.