The Tortilla Curtain (21 page)

Delaney was clutching the pen like a weapon. He felt violated, taken, ripped off—and nobody batted an eyelash, happens all the time. His stomach clamped down on nothing and the sense of futility and powerlessness he’d felt when he came up the road and saw that empty space on the shoulder flooded over him again. It was going to cost him four and a half thousand on top of the insurance to replace the car with the current year’s model, and that was bad enough, not to mention the dead certainty that his insurance premiums would go up, but the way people seemed to just accept the whole thing as if they were talking about the weather was what really got him. Own a car, it will be stolen. Simple as that. It was like a tax, like winter floods and mudslides.

The police had taken the report with all the enthusiasm of the walking dead—he might as well have been reporting a missing paper clip for all the interest they mustered—and Jack had used the occasion to deliver a sermon. “What do you expect,” he’d said, “when all you bleeding hearts want to invite the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who’s going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with his loaves and fishes. You’ve seen them lined up on the streets scrambling all over one another every time a car slows at the corner, ready to kill for the chance to make three bucks an hour. Well, did you ever stop to think what happens when they don’t get that half-day job spreading manure or stripping shingles off a roof? Where do you think they sleep? What do you think they eat? What would you do in their place?” Jack, ever calm, ever prepared, ever cynical, drew himself up and pointed an admonishing finger. “Don’t act surprised, because this is only the beginning. We’re under siege here—and there’s going to be a backlash. People are fed up with it. Even you. You’re fed up with it too, admit it.”

And now Kenny Grissom. Business as usual. A shoulder shrug, a wink of commiseration, the naked joy of moving product. From the minute Kyra had dropped Delaney off at the lot—he was determined to replace his car, exact model, color, everything—Kenny Grissom had regaled him with stories of carjackings, chop shops, criminality as pervasive as death. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not blaming it all on the Mexicans,” Kenny said, handing him yet another page of the sales agreement, “it’s everybody—Salvadorians, I-ranians, Russians, Vietnamese. There was this one woman came in here, she’s from Guatemala I think it was, wrapped up in a shawl, bad teeth, her hair in a braid, couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall. She’d heard about credit—‘we don’t refuse credit’ and that sort of thing, you know?—and even though she didn’t have any money or collateral or any credit history whatever, she just wondered if she could sign up for a new car and maybe drive it down to Guatemala—”

The broad face cracked open, the salesman’s laugh rang out, and Delaney imagined how thoroughly sick of that laugh the other salesmen must have been, not to mention the secretaries, the service manager and Kenny Grissom’s wife, if he had one. He was sick of it himself. But he signed the papers and he got his car and after Kenny handed him the keys, slapped him on the back and told him the story of the woman who’d wrecked two brand-new cars just driving out of the lot, Delaney sat there for a long while, getting used to the seats and new-car smell and the subtle difference between this model and the one he was familiar with. Little things, but they annoyed him out of all proportion. He sat there, running sweat, grimly reading through the owner’s manual, though he was late for his lunch date with Kyra. Finally, he put the car in gear and eased it out onto the road, taking surface streets all the way, careful to vary speeds and keep it under fifty, as the manual advised.

He drove twice round the block past the Indian restaurant in Woodland Hills, where they’d agreed to meet, but there was no parking at this hour: lunch was big business. The valet parking attendant was Mexican, of course—Hispanic, Latino, whatever—and Delaney sat there in his new car with thirty-eight miles on the odometer, seat belt fastened, hand on the wheel, until the driver behind him hit his horn and the attendant—he was a kid, eighteen, nineteen, black shining anxious eyes—said, “Sir?” And then Delaney was standing there in the sun, his shirt soaked through, another morning wasted, and the tires chirped and his new car shot round the corner of the building and out of sight. There were no personalized license plates this time, just a random configuration of letters and numbers. He didn’t even know his own plate number. He was losing control. A beer, he thought, stepping into the dark coolness of the restaurant through the rear door, just one. To celebrate.

The place was crowded, businesspeople perched over plates of
tandoori
chicken, housewives gossiping over delicate cups of Darjeeling tea and coffee, waiters in a flurry, voices riding up and down the scale. Kyra was sitting at a table near the front window, her back to him, her hair massed over the crown of her head like pale white feathers. A Perrier stood on the table before her, a flap of
nan
bread, a crystal dish of lime pickle and mango chutney. She was bent over a sheaf of papers, working.

“What kept you?” she said as he slid into the chair across from her. “Any problems?”

“No,” he murmured, trying to catch the waiter’s attention. “I just had to drive slow, that’s all—you know, till it’s broken in.”

“You did get the price we agreed on? They didn’t try anything cute at the last minute—?” She looked up from her papers, fixing him with an intent stare. A band of sunlight cut across her face, driving the color from her eyes till they were nearly translucent.

He shook his head. “No surprises. Everything’s okay.”

“Well, where is it? Can I see it?” She glanced at her watch. “I have to run at one-thirty. I’m closing that place in Arroyo Blanco—on Dolorosa?—and then, since I’ll be so close, I want to stop in and see that there’re no screwups with the fence company ...”

They’d got a variance from the Arroyo Blanco Zoning Committee on the fence height in their backyard, as a direct result of what had befallen poor Sacheverell, and they were adding two feet to the chain-link fence. Kyra hadn’t let Osbert out of her sight since the attack, insisting on walking him herself before and after work, and the cat had been strictly confined to the house. Once the fence was completed, things could go back to normal. Or so they hoped.

“I left the car out back,” he said, “with the parking attendant.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe after lunch, if you still ...” He trailed off. What he wanted to tell her was how angry he was, how he hadn’t wanted a new car—the old one barely had twenty thousand miles on it—how he felt depressed, disheartened, as if his luck had turned bad and he was sinking into an imperceptible hole that deepened centimeter by centimeter each hour of each day. There’d been a moment there, handing over the keys to the young Latino, when he felt a deep shameful stab of racist resentment—did they
all
have to be Mexican? —that went against everything he’d believed in all his life. He wanted to tell her about that, that above all else, but he couldn’t.

“I’m out front,” she said, and they both looked out the window to where Kyra’s midnight-blue Lexus sat secure at the curb.

The waiter appeared then, a pudgy balding man who spoke in the chirping singsong accent of the Subcontinent. Delaney ordered a beer—“To celebrate my new car,” he explained sourly to Kyra’s lifted eyebrows—and asked for a menu.

“Certainly, sir,” the waiter barked, and his eyes seemed to jump round in their sockets, “but the lady has—”

“I’ve already ordered,” Kyra said, cutting him off and laying a hand on Delaney’s arm. “You were late and I’ve got to run. I just got us a veggie curry and a bite of salad, and some
samosas
to start.”

That was fine, but Delaney felt irritated. It wasn’t lunch—at this point he didn’t care what he ate—it was the occasion. He wasn’t materialistic, not really, and he never bought anything on impulse, but when he did make a major purchase he felt good about it, good about himself, the future of the country and the state of the world. That was the American way. Buy something. Feel good. But he didn’t feel good, not at all. He felt like a victim.

Kyra hurried him through the meal and he drank the beer—one of those oversized Indian beers—too quickly, so that he felt a little woozy with the blast of the sun in the parking lot. He handed the ticket to one of the slim young sprinting Mexicans in shiny red vests and glanced up at the roof of the restaurant, where a string of starlings stared hopefully back at him. “I’ll just take a quick look,” Kyra said, pinching her purse under one arm and leaning forward to leaf through the papers in her briefcase, “and then I’ve got to run.”

It was then that they heard the dog barking, a muffled hoarse percussive sound that seemed to be emanating from everywhere and nowhere at once. Barking. It was a curiosity. Delaney idly scanned the windows of the apartment building that rose up squarely just beyond the line of parked cars, expecting to see a dog up there somewhere, and then he glanced behind him at an empty strip of pavement, begonias in pots, a couple emerging from the rear of the restaurant. A car went noisily up the street. Kyra looked up from her briefcase, cocked her head, listening. “Do you hear a dog somewhere?”

“Aw, the poor thing,” a woman’s voice breathed behind them and Kyra turned long enough to see where the woman was pointing: two-thirds of the way down the line of cars Was a green Jeep Cherokee, the window barely cracked and the black snout of an Afghan pressed to the opening. They could see the jaws fitfully working, the paw raised to the window. Two more percussive barks trailed off into a whine. It was all Kyra needed.

Purse and briefcase dropped like stones and she was off across the lot, hammering at the pavement with the spikes of her heels, her stride fierce with outrage and self-righteousness. Delaney watched numbly as she stalked up to the Jeep’s door and tried the handle. He could see the frustration in the set of her shoulders as she tugged savagely at it, once, twice, and then whirled round and came marching back across the lot, a dangerous look on her face.

“It’s a crime,” the woman behind him said and Delaney felt compelled to give her a quick look of acknowledgment. The man beside her—natty dresser, a wide painted tie standing out at an angle from his throat—looked impatiently round for one of the attendants, the parking stub clutched in his hand.

Delaney’s car and Kyra arrived at the same instant, and as the attendant jumped out to collect his tip, Kyra took hold of his arm. “Whose car is that?” she demanded, indicating the green Jeep. “The one with the dog in it.”

The attendant’s face drew in on itself; his eyes flashed on the Jeep and then came back to Kyra. “Doan know,” he said. “This,” pointing from the Acura to Delaney, “him.” He held up the ticket stub to show her.

“I know that,” Kyra said, raising her voice in exasperation. “What I want to know is whose car is that”—pointing again—“because they’re breaking the law locking a dog in like that. The animal could die of heat exhaustion, you understand?”

He didn’t understand. “Doan know,” he repeated, and broke away from her to snatch the stub from the man in the painted tie and dash across the lot.

“Hey!” Kyra shouted, the furrow Delaney knew so well cut like a scar between her furious eyes. “Come back here! I’m talking to you!”

Three men emerged from the restaurant in a burst of laughter, fumbling for their sunglasses; a fourth man stood in the doorway behind them, patting down his pockets for the parking stub. “Honey, Kyra,” Delaney coaxed, catching at her arm, “calm down, we’ll ask in the restaurant—” But she was already on her way, brushing past the knot of men with her shoulders held rigid, purse and briefcase forgotten, while the new Acura softly purred at the curb, door flung open wide, keys in the ignition. It took him a moment to reach in for the keys, scoop up her purse and briefcase and dodge back into the restaurant.

Kyra was standing in the front room, sizzling in the light through the window, the smell of curry hanging like a pall over the place, clapping her hands like an athletic coach. “Excuse me,” she called out, “excuse me!” Conversations died. Waiters froze. The maître d’ looked up miserably from his stand behind the potted palm at the front door, ready for anything. “Does anybody here own a green Jeep? License plate number 8VJ237X?”

No one responded. The waiters began to move. The maître d’ relaxed.

“Well somebody must own it,” Kyra insisted, appealing to the crowd. “It’s parked in the lot out back with a dog locked in it—an Afghan.” People had turned away from her; conversations resumed. She clapped her hands again. “Are you listening to me?” she demanded, and Delaney saw the maitre d’s face change all over again. “An Afghan? Does anybody here own an Afghan?”

Delaney was at her side now. “Kyra,” he said softly, “come on. It must be somebody else. We’ll ask outside again.”

She came, reluctantly, muttering under her breath—“I can’t believe these people, can you imagine somebody being so stupid, so unaware?” —and for a moment Delaney forgot about the miserable morning, the new car, the theft and the Mexican and his growing sense of confusion and vulnerability: she was glorious in her outrage, a saint, a crusader. This was what mattered. Principles. Right and wrong, an issue as clear-cut as the on/off switch on the TV. In that instant, the cloud was dispelled, and he felt a kind of elation that floated on the wings of the beer and made him feel that everything would ultimately work out for the best.

As soon as they passed back through the door and into the glare of the lot, the feeling was gone, killed in the cradle: the green Jeep was there, at the door, and the man who’d been patting down his pockets for the ticket stub was handing the attendant a folded-up bill. Kyra was on him like a bird of prey.

“Are you the one?” she cried, snatching at the door handle.

The man was of medium height, a little bit of a paunch, long blondish hair swept back in a graying ponytail, blue metallic discs for sunglasses. He wore a tiny diamond stud in his left ear. “Excuse me?” he said, and Delaney could see the dog panting behind him in the passenger’s seat.