The Tortilla Curtain Read online

  But Delaney was already in motion. He flung open the door and shot through the courtyard, head down, rounding the corner of the house just in time to see a dun-colored blur scaling the six-foot chain-link fence with a tense white form clamped in its jaws. His brain decoded the image: a coyote had somehow managed to get into the enclosure and seize one of the dogs, and there it was, wild nature, up and over the fence as if this were some sort of circus act. Shouting to hear himself, shouting nonsense, Delaney charged across the yard as the remaining dog (Osbert? Sacheverell?) cowered in the corner and the dun blur melded with the buckwheat, chamise and stiff high grass of the wild hillside that gave onto the wild mountains beyond.

  He didn’t stop to think. In two bounds he was atop the fence and dropping to the other side, absently noting the paw prints in the dust, and then he was tearing headlong through the undergrowth, leaping rocks and shrubs and dodging the spines of the yucca plants clustered like breastworks across the slope. He was running, that was all he knew. Branches raked him like claws. Burrs bit into his ankles. He kept going, pursuing a streak of motion, the odd flash of white: now he saw it, now he didn’t. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, goddamnit!”

  The hillside sloped sharply upward, rising through the colorless scrub to a clump of walnut trees and jagged basalt outcroppings that looked as if they’d poked through the ground overnight. He saw the thing suddenly, the pointed snout and yellow eyes, the high stiff leggy gait as it struggled with its burden, and it was going straight up and into the trees. He shouted again and this time the shout was answered from below. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Kyra was coming up the hill with her long jogger’s strides, in blouse, skirt and stocking feet. Even at this distance he could recognize the look on her face—the grim set of her jaw, the flaring eyes and clamped mouth that spelled doom for whoever got in her way, whether it was a stranger who’d locked his dog in a car with the windows rolled up or the hapless seller who refused a cash-out bid. She was coming, and that spurred him on. If he could only stay close the coyote would have to drop the dog, it would have to.

  By the time he reached the trees his throat was burning. Sweat stung his eyes and his arms were striped with nicks and scratches. There was no sign of the dog and he pushed on through the trees to where the slope fell away to the feet of the next hill beyond it. The brush was thicker here—six feet high and so tightly interlaced it would have taken a machete to get through it in places—and he knew, despite the drumming in his ears and the glandular rush that had him pacing and whirling and clenching and unclenching his fists, that it was looking bad. Real bad. There were a thousand bushes out there—five thousand, ten thousand—and the coyote could be crouched under any one of them.

  It was watching him even now, he knew it, watching him out of slit wary eyes as he jerked back and forth, frantically scanning the mute clutter of leaf, branch and thorn, and the thought infuriated him. He shouted again, hoping to flush it out. But the coyote was too smart for him. Ears pinned back, jaws and forepaws stifling its prey, it could lie there, absolutely motionless, for hours. “Osbert!” he called out suddenly, and his voice trailed off into a hopeless bleat. “Sacheverell!”

  The poor dog. It couldn’t have defended itself from a rabbit. Delaney stood on his toes, strained his neck, poked angrily through the nearest bush. Long low shafts of sunlight fired the leaves in an indifferent display, as they did every morning, and he looked into the illuminated depths of that bush and felt desolate suddenly, empty, cored out with loss and helplessness.

  “Osbert!” The sound seemed to erupt from him, as if he couldn’t control his vocal cords. “Here, boy! Come!” Then he shouted Sacheverell’s name, over and over, but there was no answer except for a distant cry from Kyra, who seemed to be way off to his left now.

  All at once he wanted to smash something, tear the bushes out of the ground by their roots. This didn’t have to happen. It didn’t. If it wasn’t for those idiots leaving food out for the coyotes as if they were nothing more than sheep with bushy tails and eyeteeth ... and he’d warned them, time and again. You can’t be heedless of your environment. You can’t. Just last week he’d found half a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken out back of the Dagolian place—waxy red-and-white-striped cardboard with a portrait of the grinning chicken-killer himself smiling large—and he’d stood up at the bimonthly meeting of the property owners’ association to say something about it. They wouldn’t even listen. Coyotes, gophers, yellow jackets, rattlesnakes even—they were a pain in the ass, sure, but nature was the least of their problems. It was humans they were worried about. The Salvadorans, the Mexicans, the blacks, the gangbangers and taggers and carjackers they read about in the Metro section over their bran toast and coffee. That’s why they’d abandoned the flatlands of the Valley and the hills of the Westside to live up here, outside the city limits, in the midst of all this scenic splendor.

  Coyotes? Coyotes were quaint. Little demi-dogs out there howling at the sunset, another amenity like the oaks, the chaparral and the views. No, all Delaney’s neighbors could talk about, back and forth and on and on as if it were the key to all existence, was gates. A gate, specifically. To be erected at the main entrance and manned by a twenty-four-hour guard to keep out those very gangbangers, taggers and carjackers they’d come here to escape. Sure. And now poor Osbert—or Sacheverell—was nothing more than breakfast.

  The fools. The idiots.

  Delaney picked up a stick and began to beat methodically at the bushes.

  The Arroyo Blanco Community Center was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the private road, Arroyo Blanco Drive, that snaked off it and wound its way through the oaks and into the grid of streets that comprised the subdivision. It was a single-story white stucco building with an, orange tile roof, in the Spanish Mission style, and it featured a kitchen, wet bar, stage, P.A. system and seating for two hundred. The hall was full—standing room only—by the time Delaney arrived. He’d been delayed because Kyra had been late getting home from work, and since it was the maid’s day off, there’d been no one to watch Jordan.

  Kyra was in a state. She’d come in the door looking like a refugee, her eyes reddened and a tissue pinned to the tip of her reddened nose, grieving for Sacheverell (Sacheverell it was: she’d been able to identify the surviving dog as Osbert by means of an indisputable mole clinging to his underlip). For an hour or more that morning she’d helped Delaney beat the bushes, frantic, tearful, her breath coming in ragged gasps—she’d had those dogs forever, long before she’d met Delaney, before Jordan was born even—but finally, reluctantly, she’d given it up and gone off to work, where she was already late for her ten o’clock. She’d changed her clothes, reapplied her makeup, comforted Jordan as best she could and dropped him off at school, leaving Delaney with the injunction to find the dog at all cost. Every half hour throughout the day she called him for news, and though he had news by noon—grim, definitive news, news wrapped up in half a dozen paper towels and sequestered even now in the pocket of his windbreaker—he kept it from her, figuring she’d had enough of a jolt for one day. When she came home he held her for a long moment, murmuring the soft consolatory things she needed to hear, and then she went in to Jordan, who’d been sent home early from school with chills and a fever. It was a sad scene. Just before he left for the meeting, Delaney looked in on them, mother and son, huddled in Jordan’s narrow bed with Osbert and Dame Edith, the cat, looking like survivors of a shipwreck adrift on a raft.

  Delaney edged in at the rear of the auditorium beside a couple he didn’t recognize. The man was in his forties, but he had the hips and shoulders of a college athlete and looked as if he’d just come back from doing something heroic. The woman, six feet tall at least, was around Kyra’s age—mid-thirties, he guessed—and she was dressed in black Lycra shorts and a USC jersey. She leaned into her husband like a sapling leaning into a rock ledge. Delaney couldn’t help noticing the way the shorts cradled the woman’s buttocks in a
flawless illustration of form and function, but then he recalled the thing in his pocket and looked up into a sea of heads and the harsh white rinse of the fluorescent lights.

  Jack Jardine was up on the dais, along with Jack Cherrystone, the association’s secretary, and Linda Portis, the treasurer. The regularly scheduled meeting, the one at which Delaney had stood to warn his neighbors of the dangers of feeding the local fauna, had adjourned past twelve after prolonged debate on the gate issue, and Jack had convened tonight’s special session to put it to a vote. Under normal circumstances, Delaney would have stayed home and lost himself in John Muir or Edwin Way Teale, but these were not normal circumstances. Not that he was indifferent to the issue—the gate was an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even, and he’d spoken against it privately—but to his mind it was a fait accompli. His neighbors were overwhelmingly for it, whipped into a reactionary frenzy by the newspapers and the eyewitness news, and he didn’t relish being one of the few dissenting voices, a crank like Rudy Hernandez, who liked to hear himself talk and would argue any side of any issue till everyone in the room was ready to rise up and throttle him. The gate was going up and there was nothing Delaney could do about it. But he was here. Uncomfortably here. Here because tonight he had a private agendum, an agendum that lay hard against his hip in the lower pocket of his windbreaker, and his throat went dry at the thought of it.

  Someone spoke to the question, but Delaney was so wound up in his thoughts he didn’t register what was being said. There would be discussion, and then a vote, and for the rest of his days he’d have to feel like a criminal driving into his own community, excusing himself to some jerk in a crypto-fascist uniform, making special arrangements every time a friend visited or a package needed to be delivered. He thought of the development he’d grown up in, the fenceless expanse of lawns, the shared space, the deep lush marshy woods where he’d first discovered ferns, frogs, garter snakes, the whole shining envelope of creation. There was nothing like that anymore. Now there were fences. Now there were gates.

  “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.r />
  “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.