The Tortilla Curtain (7 page)

“The chair recognizes Doris Obst,” Jack Jardine said, his voice riding out over the currents of the room as if he were singing, as if everyone else spoke prose and he alone spoke poetry.

The woman who rose from a seat in the left-front of the auditorium was of indeterminate age. Her movements were brisk and the dress clung to the shape of her as if it had been painted on, yet her hair was gray and her skin the dead bleached merciless white of the bond paper Delaney used for business letters. Delaney had never laid eyes on her before, and the realization, coupled with the fact that he didn’t seem to recognize any of the people he was standing among, produced a faint uneasy stirring of guilt. He should be more rigorous about attending these meetings, he told himself, he really should.

“... the cost factor,” Doris Obst was saying in a brooding, almost masculine tenor, “because I’m sure there isn’t a person in this room that doesn’t feel our fees are already astronomical, and I’m just wondering if the board’s cost analysis is accurate, or if we’re going to be hit with special assessments down the line ...”

“Jim Shirley,” Jack sang, and Doris Obst sank into her seat even as a man rose in the rear, as if they were keys of the same instrument. To his consternation, Delaney didn’t recognize this man either.

“What about the break-ins?” Jim Shirley demanded, an angry tug to his voice. There was an answering murmur from the crowd, cries of umbrage and assent. Jim Shirley stood tall, a big bearded man in his fifties who looked as if he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. “Right on my block—Via Dichosa?—there’ve been two houses hit in the last month alone. The Caseys lost something like fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Oriental rugs while they were away in Europe, and their home entertainment center too—not to mention their brand-new Nissan pickup. I don’t know how many of you sitting here tonight are familiar with the modus operandi, but what the thieves do is typically they pry open the garage door—there’s always a little give in these automatic openers—then they take their sweet time, load your valuables into your own car and then drive off as if they were entitled to it. At the Caseys’ they even had the gall to broil half a dozen lobster tails from the freezer and wash them down with a couple bottles of Perrier-Jouet.”

A buzz went through the crowd, thick with ferment and anger. Even Delaney felt himself momentarily distracted from the bloody evidence in his pocket. Crime? Up here? Wasn’t that what they’d come here to escape? Wasn’t that the point of the place? All of a sudden, the gate didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Delaney was startled when the man beside him—the athlete—thrust up his arm and began to speak even before Jack Jardine had a chance to officially recognize him. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” the man said, and his long-legged wife nuzzled closer to him, her eyes shining with pride and moral authority. “If we’d wanted a gated community we would have moved to Hidden Hills or Westlake, but we didn’t. We wanted an open community, freedom to come and go—and not just for those of us privileged enough to be able to live here, but for anyone—any citizen—rich or poor. I don’t know, but I cut my teeth on the sixties, and it goes against my grain to live in a community that closes its streets to somebody just because they don’t have as fancy a car as mine or as big a house. I mean, what’s next—wrist bracelets for I.D.? Metal detectors?”

Jack Cherrystone made an impatient gesture at the president’s elbow, and Jack recognized him with a nod. “Who are we kidding here?” he demanded in a voice that thundered through the speakers like the voice of God on High. Jack Cherrystone was a little man, barely five and a half feet tall, but he had the world’s biggest voice. He made his living in Hollywood, doing movie trailers, his voice rumbling across America like a fleet of trucks, portentous, fruity, hysterical. Millions of people in theaters from San Pedro to Bangor churned in their seats as they watched the flashing images of sex and mayhem explode across the screen and felt the assault of Jack Cherrystone’s thundering wallop of a voice, and his friends and neighbors at Arroyo Blanco Estates sat up a little straighter when he spoke. “I’m as liberal as anybody in this room—my father chaired Adlai Stevenson’s campaign committee, for christsakes—but I say we’ve got to put an end to this.”

A pause. The whole room was riveted on the little man on the dais. Delaney broke out in a sweat.

“I’d like to open my arms to everybody in the world, no matter how poor they are or what country they come from; I’d like to leave my back door open and the screen door unlatched, the way it was when I was a kid, but you know as well as I do that those days are past.” He shook his head sadly. “L.A. stinks. The world stinks. Why kid ourselves? That’s why we’re here, that’s why we got out. You want to save the world, go to Calcutta and sign on with Mother Teresa. I say that gate is as necessary, as vital, essential and un-do-withoutable as the roofs over our heads and the dead bolts on our doors. Face up to it,” he rumbled. “Get real, as my daughter says. Really, truly, people: what’s the debate?”

Delaney found himself clutching at the thing in his pocket, the bloody relic of that innocent dog, and he couldn’t restrain himself any longer, not after the onslaught of Jack Cherrystone’s ominous tones, not after the day he’d been through, not after the look on Kyra’s face as she slumped across that narrow bed with her son and her terrified pets. His hand shot up.

“Delaney Mossbacher,” Jack Jardine crooned.

Faces turned toward him. People craned their necks. The golden couple beside him parted their lips expectantly.

“I just wanted to know,” he began, but before he could gather momentum someone up front interrupted him with a cry of “Louder!” He cleared his throat and tried to adjust his voice. His heart was hammering. “I said I just wanted to know how many of you are aware of what feeding the indigenous coyote population means—”

“Speak to the question,” a voice demanded. An exasperated sigh ran through the audience. Several hands shot up.

“This is no trivial issue,” Delaney insisted, staring wildly around him. “My dog—my wife’s dog—”

“I’m sorry, Delaney,” Jack Jardine said, leaning into the microphone, “but we have a pending question regarding construction and maintenance of a gated entryway, and I’m going to have to ask you to speak to it or yield the floor.”

“But Jack, you don’t understand what I’m saying—look, a coyote got into our backyard this morning and took—”

“Yield the floor,” a voice called.

“Speak to the question or yield.”

Delaney was angry suddenly, angry for the second time that day, burning, furious. Why wouldn’t people listen? Didn’t they know what this meant, treating wild carnivores like ducks in the park? “I won’t yield,” he said, and the audience began to hiss, and then suddenly he had it in his hand, Sacheverell’s gnawed white foreleg with its black stocking of blood, and he was waving it like a sword. He caught a glimpse of the horror-struck faces of the couple beside him as they unconsciously backed away and he was aware of movement off to his right and Jack Cherrystone’s amplified voice thundering in his ears, but he didn’t care—they would listen, they had to. “This!” he shouted over the uproar. “This is what happens!”

Later, as he sat on the steps out front of the community center and let the night cool the sweat from his face, he wondered how he was going to break the news to Kyra. When he’d left her it was with the lame assurance that the dog might turn up yet—maybe he’d got away; maybe he was lost—but now all of Arroyo Blanco knew the grisly finality of Sacheverell’s fate. And Delaney had accomplished nothing, absolutely nothing—beyond making a fool of himself. He let out a sigh, throwing back his head and staring up into the bleary pall of the night sky. It had been a rotten day. Nothing accomplished. He hadn’t written a word. Hadn’t even sat down at his desk. All he’d been able to think about was the dog and the gnawed bit of bone and flesh he’d found in a hole beneath a dusty clump of manzanita.

Inside, they were voting. The windows cut holes in the fabric of the night, bright rectilinear slashes against the black backdrop of the mountains. He heard a murmur of voices, the odd scrape and shuffle of hominid activity. He was just about to push himself up and go home when he became aware of a figure hovering at the edge of the steps. “Who is it?” he said.

“It’s me, Mr. Mossbacher,” came the voice from the shadows, and then the figure moved into the light cast by the windows and Delaney saw that it was Jack Jardine’s son, Jack Jr.

Jack Jr. swayed like a eucalyptus in the wind, a marvel of tensile strength and newly acquired height, long-limbed, big-footed, with hands the size of baseball mitts. He was eighteen, with mud-brown eyes that gave no definition to the pupils, and he didn’t look anything like his father. His hair was red, for one thing—not the pale wispy carrot-top Delaney had inherited from his Scots-Irish mother, but the deep shifting auburn you saw on the flanks of horses in an uncertain light. He wore it long on top in a frenzy of curls, and shaved to the bone from the crest of his ears down. “Hello, Jack,” Delaney said, and he could hear the weariness in his own voice.

“They got one of your dogs, huh?”

“Afraid so.” Delaney sighed. “That’s what I was trying to tell them in there—you can’t feed wild animals, that’s about the long and short of it. But nobody wants to listen.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt with the toe of one of his big leather hi-tops. In this light, the shoes seemed to grow out of the ground and meld with his body, trunks to anchor the length of him. There was a pause during which Delaney again contemplated pushing himself up and heading home, but he hesitated. Here was a sympathetic ear, an impressionable mind.

“What they don’t realize,” Delaney began, but before he could finish the thought, Jack Jr. cut him off.

“By the way—the other night? When you came to see my father about the Mexican?”

The Mexican.
Suddenly the man’s face floated up again to press at the edges of Delaney’s consciousness, fill him up like some pregnant ghost with images of rotten teeth and stained mustaches. The Mexican. What with Sacheverell, he’d forgotten all about him. Now he remembered. The boy had been stretched out on the sofa like a recumbent monarch when Delaney had gone over to Jack’s to confer with him about the accident, and Delaney had thought it odd that Jack didn’t offer to take him into another room or out on the patio where they could talk in private. Jack took no notice of his son—he might just as well have been part of the furniture. He put an arm round Delaney’s shoulder, made him a drink, listened to his story and assured him that he had nothing to worry about, nothing at all—if the man was legal, why would he refuse aid? And if he was illegal, what were the chances he’d find an attorney to represent him—and on what grounds? “But Jack,” Delaney had protested, “I didn’t report the accident.” Jack had turned to him, calm and complicitous. “What accident?” he said, and he was the most reasonable man in the world, judge, jury and advocate all rolled into one. “You stopped and offered to help—the man refused assistance. What more could you do?”

Indeed. But now Jack Jr. wanted to know, and the thought of it made Delaney’s stomach sink. There were five people in the world who knew what had happened out on that road, and by luck of the draw Jack Jr. was one of them. “Yeah?” he said. “What of it?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where it happened—you said they were camping and all.”

“Out on the canyon road. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt. “I was just wondering. I see an awful lot of them down there lately. You said it was down below the lumberyard, right? Where that trail cuts off into the ravine?”

For the life of him Delaney couldn’t grasp what the boy was getting at—what was it to him? But he answered the question almost reflexively—he had nothing to hide. “Right,” he said. And then he got to his feet, murmured, “Well, I’ve got to be going,” and strode off into the darkness fingering the sorry lump of flesh in his jacket pocket.

He made a mental note to put it in the freezer when he got home. It would begin to stink before long.

THE MORNING AFTER AMÉRICA CLIMBED UP OUT OF the canyon to offer herself at the labor exchange—futilely, as it turned out—she insisted on going again. Cándido was against it. Vehemently. The day before, he’d waited through the slow-crawling morning till the sun stood directly overhead—twelve noon, the hour at which the labor exchange closed down for the day—and then he’d waited another hour, and another, torn by worry and suspicion. If she’d somehow managed to get work she might not be back till dark, and that was almost worse than if she hadn’t, what with the worry—and worse still, the shame. He kept picturing her in some rich man’s house, down on her knees scrubbing one of those tiled kitchens with a refrigerator the size of a meat locker and one of those dark-faced ovens that boil water in sixty seconds, and the rich man watching her ass as it waved in the air and trembled with the hard push of her shoulders. Finally—and it must have been three in the afternoon—she appeared, a dark speck creeping over the sun-bleached rocks, and in her hand one of those thin plastic market bags the
gringos
use once and throw away. Cándido had to squint to see her against the pain that filmed his eyes. “Where were you?” he demanded when she was close enough to hear him. And then, in a weaker voice, a voice of apology and release: “Did you get work?”

No smile. That gave him his answer. But she did hand him the bag as an offering and kneel down on the blanket to kiss the good side of his face like a dutiful wife. In the bag: two overripe tomatoes, half a dozen hard greenish oranges and a turnip, stained black with earth. He sucked the sour oranges and ate a stew made from the turnip and tomatoes. He didn’t ask her where she’d gotten them.

And now she wanted to go again. It was the same ritual as the day before: slipping up from the blanket like a thief, pulling the one good dress over her head, combing out her hair by the stream. It was dark still. The night clung to them like a second skin. No bird had even begun to breathe. “Where are you going?” he croaked.