The Tortilla Curtain (23 page)

Since she still had time before her four o’clock, she took Osbert out on the leash for ten minutes and chatted with Al while his men poured concrete and set new eight-foot posts into the holes where the old posts had stood. He’d told her at the outset that he could simply extend the existing poles at half the price, but she didn’t want anything tacky-looking, and above all, she told him, she wanted strength and impregnability. “I don’t want anything getting in here ever again,” she’d said.

Now, as she stood there with Osbert, making small talk about traffic, smog, the heat and the housing market, Al said casually, almost slyly, “Of course, there’s not much you can do about snakes—”

Snakes. An image rose up in her head, cold and primordial, the coil and shuffle, the wicked glittering reptilian eyes: she hated snakes. Worse than coyotes, worse than anything. She’d never given a thought to coyotes when they moved in—it was Delaney who’d insisted on the fence—but no one had to warn her about the snakes. Selda Cherrystone had discovered one coiled up in her dryer and its mate beneath the washing machine, and half the people on the block had found rattlesnakes in their garages at one time or another. “Can’t you run something along the base of the fence?” she asked, thinking of a miniature trap or net or maybe a weak electric current.

Al looked away, his eyes squinted into the globes of his cheeks. He was heavyset, in his fifties, with white hair and skin the color and texture of an old medicine ball. “We’ve got a product,” he said, still fixing his gaze on the distant tree-studded crotch of the canyon, and then he turned back to her. “Plastic strips, a real tight weave in the mesh of’ the fence—we go about three feet and down under the ground maybe six inches. That takes care of your snakes.”

“How much?” Kyra asked, gazing off into the distance herself now.

“Two-fifty.”

“Two hundred,” she said, and it was a reflex.

“Two-twenty-five.”

“I don’t know, Al,” she said, “we’ve never had a snake here yet.”

He bent strategically to stroke Osbert’s ears. “Rattlers,” he sighed, “they get in under the fence, nothing to stop ’em really, and they bite a little dog like this. I’ve seen it happen. Up here especially.” He straightened up and forced out a deep moaning trail of breath with the effort. “I’ll give it to you for two-ten, just say the word.”

She nodded yes and he shouted something in Spanish to one of the men bent over the cement mixer, and that was when she noticed him for the first time, the man with the limp and the graying mustache, his face bruised and swollen like bad fruit. He went right by her on his way to the truck and she sucked in her breath as if she’d burned herself. This was the man, the very man—it had to be. She watched him slide the long plastic strips from the back of the truck and balance them on one shoulder, and she felt a space open up inside her, a great sad empty space that made her feel as if she’d given birth to something weak and unformed. And as he passed by her again, jaunty on his bad leg, the space opened so wide it could have sucked in the whole universe. He was whistling, whistling under his breath.

Later, after she’d shown the Monte Nido house to a crabbed old couple with penurious noses and swollen checkbooks who added up to a strong maybe, she went round shutting up her houses as briskly and efficiently as she could, hoping to be home by six. Everything was in order at the first four places, but as she punched in the code at the Da Roses’ gate, something caught her eye in the brush along the gully on the right-hand side of the road, just inside the gate. Something shiny, throwing light back at the hard hot cauldron of the evening sun. She hit the command key, let the gate swing back, and walked up the road to investigate.

It was a shopping cart, flung on its side in the ditch and all but buried in the vegetation. The red plastic flap on the baby seat bore the name of a local supermarket—Von’s—but the nearest Von’s was miles from here. For that matter, there wasn’t a store of any kind within miles. Kyra bent to examine the thing, her skirt pulled tight against her haunches, heels sinking into the friable dirt, as if it would give a clue as to how it had gotten here. But there was no clue. The cart seemed new, bright in its coat of coruscating metal, barely used. She went back to the car, which she’d left running, to get a pen and her memo book so she could jot down the store’s number and have someone come out and pick the thing up. After dragging it out of the ditch and wheeling it beyond the gate so they could get to it, she slid back into the car and wound her way up the road to the house, puzzled still, and suspicious, her eyes fastening on every detail.

The house rose up before her, its windows solid with light, commanding the hilltop like a fortress looking out on the coast of Brittany instead of the deep blue pit of the Pacific. She pulled up in front of the big wooden doors of the garage and killed the engine. For a long moment she just sat there, windows down, breathing in the air and listening. Then she got out of the car and walked round the house twice, checking each door and window at ground level. At the same time she scanned the upper windows, looking for signs of entry or vandalism, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Finally, with a glance over her shoulder, she went inside.

The interior was cool and quiet and it smelled faintly of almonds. That was a good smell for a house to have, a clean patrician smell, and Kyra realized it must have come from the furniture polish the maid used. Or could it have been an air freshener? She stood for a moment by the alarm panel, which she’d shut down this morning so Claudia Insty from Red House could show the place, and now she punched in the code to see if any of the twenty-three zones had been tampered with. They hadn’t. The place was secure. She made a quick tour of the rooms, out of habit, all the while trying to imagine possible scenarios to explain away the shopping cart: the gardener had been using it and left it behind by mistake, teenagers had stolen it as a prank and flung it from their car, yes, sure, that had to be it. And yet how had it gotten inside the gate? Why would they go to the effort of lifting it to that height—why would anyone? Unless, of course, they’d gone round the gate through the scrub and valley oaks—but that didn’t answer the why part of the question.

She’d locked up and was standing at the door of the car, the air alive with birds and insects, when it hit her: transients used those carts. Bums. The homeless and displaced. Crazies. Mexicans. Winos. But no, that was a city problem, the sort of thing she’d expect to find out back of the 7-Eleven, in Canoga Park, Hollywood, downtown L.A. This was just too remote. Wasn’t it?

She’d swung open the door of the car, and now she shut it again. If someone was camping here, squatting, living out in the bushes ... Delaney had told her they were camping in the canyon, miles from anything. If they could camp there, why not here? Suddenly the image of a village she’d seen on a tour of the Yucatán ruins came back to her in all its immediacy: naked children, pigs, cookfires, wattle huts—she couldn’t have that. Not here. Not on the Da Ros property. How could you explain something like that to a prospective buyer?

But maybe she was jumping to conclusions—all she’d seen was a shopping cart, and a new one at that, empty and innocuous. Still, she thought, she’d better take a tour of the grounds, just in case, and though she wanted to get home early she left the car where it stood and struck off to the south, in heels and stockings, to trace the perimeter of the property. It was a mistake. The lawn gave out less than a hundred feet from the back of the garage and a ten-foot-tall hedge of red oleander camouflaged the fact that the property sloped down into the scrub from there. She ruined a good pair of stockings pushing through the oleanders and hadn’t gone five steps beyond that before she twisted her ankle in a gopher hole and damned near snapped the heel off her shoe. She saw the fence line in the distance, chain link buried in scrub so thick it was almost invisible, a meandering border that roughly followed what must have been a dry streambed and then plunged precipitously over the cliff the house commanded. Kyra leaned into a tree to remove her shoes, then turned to wade back through the oleanders to the lawn.

That was when she noticed something moving at the base of the main lawn, sunk down out of sight of the front of the house. Buff-colored. A deer, she thought. A coyote. But the movement didn’t halt or hesitate in the way of an animal, and in the next instant she watched the head and shoulders of a man appear over the rim of the slope, followed by his torso, hips and striding legs, and then a second man, close at his heels. They were Mexicans, she was sure of it, even at this distance, and the origin of the shopping cart suddenly became clear to her. She didn’t think to be afraid. In her suit, the sweat beading her makeup, stockings torn and heels in her hand, she stalked across the lawn to confront them.

When she came round the corner of the garage, they were no more than thirty feet away, arrested by the sight of the car. The taller one—he wore a baseball cap reversed on his head and had a bedroll thrust over one shoulder—had stopped short, hunched inside himself, and he’d turned to say something to the other. The second man spotted her first and she could see him flinch in recognition and mouth a warning to his companion as she turned the corner and came toward them. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she cried, her voice shrill with authority. “This is private property.”

The tall man turned his head to look at her then and she stopped where she was. There was something in his look that warned her off—this was no confrontation over a dog in a restaurant parking lot. His eyes flashed at her and she saw the hate and contempt in them, the potential for cruelty, the knowledge and certainty of it. He was chewing something. He turned his head to spit casually in the grass. She was ten feet from them and ten feet at least from the car. “I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice quavered, she could hear it herself, gone lame and flat, “but you can’t be here. You’re, you’re trespassing.”

She saw the look the two exchanged, flickering, electric, a look of instant and absolute accord. The nearest house was a quarter mile down the ridge, out of sight, out of hearing. She was afraid suddenly, struck deep in the root of her with the primitive intimate shock of it.

“You own these place, lady?” the tall one said, fixing her with his steady unblinking gaze.

She looked at him, then at the other man. He was darker, shorter, with hair to his shoulders and a silky peltlike streak of hair on his chin. “Yes,” she lied, addressing them both, trying to maintain eye contact, trying to sell them. “My husband and I do. And my brother.” She gestured toward the house. “They’re in there now, making drinks for dinner.”

The tall one looked dubiously toward the house, the great broad artifact of stone, lumber and glass that cut across the horizon like a monument to the ruling tribe, and then said something in Spanish to his companion, a quick sudden spurt of language. She wanted to break for the car, fling open the door and hit the automatic locks before they could get to her; then she could start it up with a roar and swing round in a vicious circle, jam the wheel, hit the accelerator—

“We are sorry too much,” the tall one said, and he ducked his head, false and obsequious at the same time, then came back to her with a smile. She saw false teeth, yellowed gums. His eyes bored right through her. “Me and my friend? We don’t know these place, you know? We hike, that’s all. Just hike.”

She had nothing to say to this, but she forced herself to stand firm, watching for sudden movement.

The man turned his head, spat out something to his companion, and for the first time she noticed the strange high breathy quality of his voice. “Sorry,” he repeated, coming back to her eyes. “A mistake, that’s all. No problem, huh?”

The blood pounded in her temples. She could hardly breathe. “No problem,” she heard herself say.

“Okay,” the man said, and his voice boomed out as he tugged at his bedroll and turned to leave, the decision made, the moment expended, “okay, no problem.” She watched them head back the way they came, and she’d begun, almost involuntarily, to drift toward the car, when the tall one suddenly stopped short, as if he’d forgotten something, and turned back to level his smile on her. “You have a nice day, huh?” he said, “—you and your husband. And your brother too.”

CÁNDIDO HAD BEEN LUCKY. DESPITE HIS FACE AND his limp and the fact that it was half an hour after the labor exchange closed down for the day and everyone had gone home, he got work, good work, setting fence posts for five dollars an hour, and then later painting the inside of a house till past dark. The boss was a Mexican-American who could speak English like a
gringo
but still had command of his native tongue. Cándido had been sitting there in the dirt by the closed-down labor exchange, feeling hopeless and angry, feeling sorry for himself—his wife had got work, a seventeen-year-old village girl who didn’t know the first thing about anything, and he hadn’t, though he could do any job you asked him, from finish carpentry to machine work to roofing—when Al Lopez pulled into the lot. He had an Indian from Chiapas in the back of the truck and the Indian called out to him,
“¿Quieres trabajar?”
And then Al Lopez had stuck his head out the window and said,
“Cinco dólares
,” because his regular man, another Indian, had got sick on the job, too sick to work.

It was nearly one o’clock by the time they got to the place, a big house in a development of big houses locked away behind a brand-new set of gates. Cándido knew what those gates were for and who they were meant to keep out, but that didn’t bother him. He wasn’t resentful. He wasn’t envious. He didn’t need a million dollars—he wasn’t born for that, and if he was he would have won the lottery. No, all he needed was work, steady work, and this was a beginning. He mixed concrete, dug holes, hustled as best he could with the hollow metal posts and the plastic strips, all the while amazed at the houses that had sprouted up here, proud and substantial, big
gringo
houses, where before there’d been nothing. Six years ago, the first time Cándido had laid eyes on this canyon, there had been nothing here but hills of golden grass, humped like the back of some immemorial animal, and the dusty green canopies of the canyon oaks.