The Tortilla Curtain, page 12
Jack Jr. stood rooted to the spot by the black leather blocks of his hi-tops, clenching his fists. Unruffled, Jack Sr. had stepped neatly aside, the pleats of his pants like two plumb lines, his mouth pursed in distaste. Delaney was reaching for his keys when the altercation swept toward them, and now he stood poised over the trunk of his car, groceries pressed like a shield to his chest, keys dangling limply from his fingers, looking on numbly as the dark man got shakily to his feet, muttering apologies in his own dark language. The Mexican seemed dazed--or maybe deranged. He lifted his heavy eyes to focus blearily on Jack, then Jack Jr. and finally Delaney. Faintly, from inside the car, came the thin tinny sound effects of Jordan's electronic war. The man stood there a long moment, squinting into Delaney's eyes, the rag of a sling hanging from his arm, his face sunk in its helmet of bruises, and then he turned away and limped across the lot, hunched under a rain of imaginary blows.
“See what I mean?” Jack said.
“What would you do with all this space?” Kyra heard herself asking, and even before the question passed her lips she knew it was wrong. She should have exclaimed, _And look at all this space!__ with the rising inflection of a cheerleader, but somehow she'd put a negative spin on it, the very question implying that the expanse of brilliantly buffed floors and high beamed ceilings was excessive, de trop, somehow too much, that the living room was the size of a basketball court and the master bedroom bigger than most people's houses--and who needed all that? Who but a monster of ego, a parvenu, a robber baron? It wasn't the sort of question a closer should ask.
Louisa Greutert gave her a curious look--nothing more than the briefest darting glance of surprise--but it was enough. Kyra knew what she was thinking.
Louisa's husband, Bill--thin, nervous, with a tonsure of silver hair and the face of an ascetic--was wandering through the immensity of the dining room, hands clasped behind his back. He was president of his own company, Pacific Rim Investments, and he'd lived in Bel Air for the past twenty years, the majority of that time with his first wife, who'd kept the house as part of the divorce settlement. Kyra pegged him for sixty-five or so, though he looked younger; Louisa was in her late forties.
“You know we know the Da Roses socially,” Louisa murmured, running a jeweled hand over the surface of a built-in mahogany china cabinet, “or we did, that is, before Albert took his life... They made some bad investments, is what I hear...” This wasn't so much a statement of fact as a supposition, an opening: she wanted gossip. And gossip was a commodity Kyra readily served up, if it suited her purposes. This time, though, she merely said: “She's living in Italy.”
“Italy?”
“Her family has an estate there. Near Turin. Didn't you know?” In fact, Kyra barely knew Patricia Da Ros--the referral had come to her from an associate at the Beverly Hills office, and aside from two long-distance calls, all the arrangements had been made via fax.
Louisa was silent a moment, lingering over some ceramic figurines displayed on a brightly painted Gothic Revival dresser; then she lifted her head like a hunting dog attuned to the faintest distant sound. It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the curtains of the big central room were aflame with light. “They were funny about this house. Did you know they never entertained. I mean never?”
Kyra let a small vaguely interrogatory noise escape her. This was her signal to talk the place up, rhapsodize over the views, the privacy, the value and exclusivity, but something held her back. She was reticent today, not herself at all, and as she watched this lithe busy woman stalk through the corridors and poke into the cupboards she had a revelation that took her by surprise--she realized that deep down she didn't want to sell the place. She wanted the listing, yes, and she was born to move property and the commission would put her over the top and ensure her of the sales crown for the fourth consecutive year, but she'd never felt this way about a house before. The more time she spent in it, cushioned from the hot, dry, hard-driving world, the more she began to feel it was hers--really hers, and not just in some metaphorical sense. How could these people even begin to appreciate it the way she did? How could anyone?
“Of course,” the woman went on now, trying the lower drawer of a locked sideboard, “they were a bit out of the way up here... and yet it's a terrific location, I don't mean to say that, right on the edge of Malibu and only, what, twenty minutes from Santa Monica? Still, I wonder who'd want to schlepp all the way out here even if they were the type to entertain...”
Kyra had nothing to say to this, one way or the other. Bill Greutert had already confided to her that he and his wife were looking for something out of the way and had specifically asked about this house. _It's just so crowded down there, he said, you get this feeling of the city closing in on you, even in Bel Air. There's just so many__--he'd waved his hand in exasperation, searching for the judicious term--people, _you know what I mean?__
Kyra knew. Since the riots she'd met dozens of couples like the Greuterts. They all wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe--something removed from people of whatever class and color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants pouring in from Mexico and Central America, from Dubai, Burundi and Lithuania, from Asia and India and everywhere else in the known world. Brown people. Colored people. People in saris, _serapes__ and kaffiyehs. That was what Bill Greutert meant. He didn't have to say anything more.
An hour later, Louisa Greutert was still making the rounds of the house, poking through drawers like a detective at the scene of a crime, while her husband paced back and forth against the backdrop of the canyon, hands clasped rigidly behind his back. Kyra tried to remain attentive, tried her best to look sincere and helpful, but her heart wasn't in it. She stood to make a commission on both ends of the deal--there was no other realtor involved--but still she just couldn't seem to motivate herself. By the end of the second hour she'd settled into a leather wing chair in the library, gazing out into the hazy sunstruck distance, idly thumbing through one of Albert Da Ros's leather-bound volumes--poetry, as it turned out. Louisa Greutert had to come looking for her finally, her voice echoing through the vast empty space of the house, the sound of her heels like gunshots coming up the corridor. “Through already?” Kyra murmured, rising guiltily from the chair.
And there was that look again, the head tilted to one side, the cold hard eyes fixing her with a look of amusement and disdain. “We've been here nearly two and a half hours.”
“Oh, well, I didn't mean--I didn't realize it had been that long.” Kyra let her gaze wander over the shelves of books, the leather-backed chairs, the wainscoting, the lamps in their sconces, and it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. “It's just that the place is so restful--”
She was aware in that moment of the presence of the husband in the hallway behind her, a ghostly figure like some unsettled spirit of the place. He crossed the room to his wife, there was a brief whispered consultation, and then the wife's voice came back at her with the suddenness of a twig snapping underfoot: “I'm afraid it's not for us.”
In the morning, Delaney sat at his keyboard, his face illuminated by the pale glow of the monitor. Over breakfast, he'd watched a pair of starlings crowding out the wrens and finches at the bird feeder, and an idea came to him: why not do a series of sketches on introduced species? The idea excited him--the whole thrust of the “Pilgrim” columns was that he himself was a recent transplant, seeing the flora and fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte, and a series on creatures like the opossum, the escargot, the starling and the parakeet would be perfect. The only problem was, the words wouldn't come, or the images either. When he tried to envision the canyon, the white dust trails threaded through stands of mesquite and yucca till the very bones of the mountains lay exposed, or even the parking lot at the Woodland Hills McDonald's, swarming with one-legged blackbirds and rumpled, diseased-looking starlings, he saw only the Mexican. His Mexican. The man he had to forget all over again.
He'd wanted to shout out an indictment--“That's him! That's the one!”--but something held him back. What, exactly, he didn't know. Misplaced sympathy? Guilt? Pity? It was a wasted opportunity because Jack was there to see for himself how blameless Delaney was--the man was a nuisance, a bum, a panhandler. If anything, Delaney was the victim, his twenty dollars separated from him through a kind of extortion, an emotional sleight of hand that preyed on his good nature and fellow feeling. He'd read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn't this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in front of a car for the thin hope of twenty bucks?
Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he'd turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty. Jordan wasn't hungry. Kyra was dreamy and distant. Osbert mourned his lost sibling, crouching behind the sofa for the better part of the evening, and even the cat lapped halfheartedly at a can of Tuna & Liver Flavor Complete Feline Dinner. A gloom seemed to hang over the household, and they turned in early.
But now it was another day and the house was quiet and Delaney had nothing to occupy him but nature and the words to contain it, yet there he sat, staring into the screen. After several false starts, he poked halfheartedly through his natural-history collection and discovered that the starlings he saw in the McDonald's lot were descendants of a flock released in Central Park a hundred years ago by an amateur ornithologist and Shakespeare buff who felt that all the birds mentioned in the Bard's works should roost in North America, and that the snails ravaging his garden and flowerbeds were imported by a French chef who'd envisioned them roasting in their own shells with a sauce of garlic and butter. It was rich material, fascinating in its way--how could people be so blind?--and he could feel the germ of it growing in him, but ultimately he was too unsettled to work. Though it was barely half-past ten, he shut down the computer and went out early for his afternoon hike.
There was a year-round stream he'd been meaning to explore up off the main canyon, a sharp brushy ascent cut into the face of the rock, and the extra two and a half hours would enable him to do it. It would require parking along the canyon road, in an area of heavy morning and afternoon traffic and narrow shoulders, hiking down into the main canyon and following the creekbed until he hit the smaller, unnamed canyon, and finally making his way up it. The prospect invigorated him. He pulled on his shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots, and he added two cream-cheese-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches to the _bota__ bag of water, snakebite kit, sunblock, map, compass, windbreaker and binoculars he always kept in his blue nylon daypack and unfailingly carried with him, no matter how short the hike. He didn't leave a note. He figured he'd be back in plenty of time to pick up Jordan from the summer activities program at the elementary school, after which he'd fix the boy a snack, and then when Kyra got home they'd go out to Emilio's. He just didn't feel like cooking. Not after last night.
It was clear and dry, the last day of June, the coastal fog that had lingered through the spring giving way to the high arching skies of summer. Delaney enjoyed the drive. The traffic was minimal at this hour and the Acura clung effortlessly to the road as he looped through the canyon, cutting cleanly through one curve only to accelerate into the next. He passed Gitello's, the lumberyard, the place where he'd hit the Mexican, and he didn't think twice about it--he was free of his desk and heading out into the wild and he felt blessed and unconquerable. He rolled down the window to catch the breeze in his face.
From here he could see where the previous year's firestorm had cut the canyon in two, the naked bones of the trees and bushes painted in black against the hillside, but even that cheered him. The canyon had already recovered, and he noted with satisfaction that the pyromaniac who'd set the blaze couldn't have conceived of the abundance of vegetation that would succeed it. Fertilized by ash, the grasses and wildflowers had put out a bumper crop, and the hills stood waist-deep in stiff golden grass, all part of the cycle, as undeniable as the swing of the earth over its axis.
After a while he began slowing to look for a safe place to pull over, but there were several cars behind him, including one of those pickups that sit about six feet off the ground and are invariably driven by some tailgating troglodyte--as this one was--and he had to go all the way down to the bottom of the canyon before swinging round in a gas station on the Coast Highway and starting back up. The ocean was there momentarily, filling the horizon, and then it was in his rearview mirror, reduced to a nine-by-three-inch strip. The first curve erased it.
There was a road crew up ahead on the right, just beyond the bridge where the road crossed the creek at the lower mouth of the canyon. He'd been slowed by them on his way down, and now, impulsively, he swung off the road just beyond the line of big yellow earthmovers. Why not start out here, he was thinking, where the banks were only twenty or thirty feet above the streambed? He'd have to work his way all the farther upstream, but he would save himself the long hike down from above. Of course, he didn't really like leaving the car at the side of the road, but there wasn't much choice. At least the road crew would slow traffic down some and hopefully keep the drunks and sideswipers at bay. He shouldered the pack, took a last admiring look at the car and the way its sleek white lines were set off against the chaparral, as if in one of those back-to-nature car commercials, then turned to plunge down the gravelly slope and into the cool dapple of the streambed.
The first thing he saw, within sixty seconds of reaching the stream and before he'd had a chance to admire the light in the sycamores or the water uncoiling over the rocks like an endless rope, was a pair of dirty sleeping bags laid out on the high sandy bank opposite. Sleeping bags. He was amazed. Not two hundred feet from the road, and here they were, brazen, thoughtless, camping under the very nose of the authorities. He climbed atop a rock for a better look and saw a blackened ring of stones to the immediate right of the sleeping bags and a moth-eaten khaki satchel hanging from the low branch of a tree. And refuse. Refuse everywhere. Cans, bottles, the shucked wrappers of ready-made sandwiches and _burritos,__ toilet paper, magazines--all of it scattered across the ground as if dropped there by a dying wind. Delaney sucked in his breath. The first thing he felt wasn't surprise or even anger--it was embarrassment, as if he'd broken into some stranger's bedroom and gone snooping through the drawers. Invisible eyes locked on him. He looked over his shoulder, darted a quick glance up and down the streambed and then peered up into the branches of the trees.
For a long moment he stood there, frozen to the spot, fighting the impulse to cross the stream, bundle the whole mess up and haul it back to the nearest trash can--that'd send a message, all right. This was intolerable. A desecration. Worse than graffiti, worse than anything. Wasn't it enough that they'd degraded the better part of the planet, paved over the land and saturated the landfills till they'd created whole new cordilleras of garbage? There was plastic in the guts of Arctic seals, methanol in the veins of the poisoned condor spread out like a collapsed parasol in the Sespe hills. There was no end to it.
He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. He tried to calm himself. He was no vigilante. It wasn't his place to enforce the law, no matter how flagrant the abuse--that was what he paid taxes for, wasn't it? Why let a thing like this ruin his day? He'd take his hike, that's what he'd do, put miles between him and this sordid little camp, this shithouse in the woods, and then, when he got back home, he'd call the Sheriff's Department. Let them handle it. At night, preferably, when whoever had created this unholy mess was sunk to their elbows in it, nodding over their dope and their cheap wine. The image of his Mexican rose up yet again, but this time it was no more than a flicker, and he fought it down. Then he turned and moved off up the stream.
It was rough going, clambering over boulders and through battlements of winter-run brush, but the air was clean and cool and as the walls of the canyon grew higher around him the sound of the road faded away and the music of running water took over. Bushtits flickered in the trees, a flycatcher shot up the gap of the canyon, gilded in light. By the time he'd gone a hundred yards upstream, he'd forgotten all about the sleeping bags in the dirt and the sad tarnished state of the world. This was nature, pure and unalloyed. This was what he'd come for.
He was making his way through a stand of reeds, trying to keep his feet dry and watching for the tracks of raccoon, skunk and coyote in the mud, when the image of those sleeping bags came back to him with the force of a blow: _voices,__ he heard voices up ahead. He froze, as alert suddenly as any stalking beast. He'd never encountered another human being down here, never, and the thought of seeing anyone was enough to spoil his pleasure in the day, but this was something else altogether, something desperate, dangerous even. The sleeping bags behind him, the voices ahead: these were transients, bums, criminals, and there was no law here.
Two voices, point/counterpoint. He couldn't make out the words, only the timbre. One was like the high rasp of a saw cutting through a log, on and on till the pieces dropped away, and then the second voice joined in, pitched low, abrupt and arrhythmic.
