by T. C. Boyle
And then she began to fill him in on Cynthia Sinclair and her fiancé and all the small details of her education, work habits and aspirations, but Delaney wasn’t listening. What she’d said about cleaning up the streetcorner had struck a chord, and it brought him back to the meeting he’d attended with Jack two nights ago. Or it wasn’t a meeting actually, but a social gathering—“A few guys getting together for a drink,” as Jack put it.
Jack had come in the door just after seven, in a pair of shorts—white, and perfectly pressed, of course—and an Izod shirt, and he and Delaney walked down the block and up two streets to Via Mariposa in the golden glow of evening. Jack hadn’t told him where they were going—“Just over to a neighbor’s house, a friend, a guy I’ve been wanting you to meet”—and as they strolled past the familiar sprawling Spanish-style homes, the walk took on the aspect of an adventure for Delaney. He and Jack were talking about everything under the sun—the Dodgers, lawn care, the situation in South Africa, the great horned owl that had taken a kitten off the Corbissons’ roof—and yet Delaney couldn’t help wondering what the whole thing was about. What friend? What neighbor? While he barely knew half the people-in the community, he was fairly confident he knew everybody in Jack’s circle, the ones in Arroyo Blanco, anyway.
But then they came to a house at the very end of Via Mariposa, where the road gave out and the hills rose in a wedge above the roof-line, and Delaney realized he had no idea who lived here. He’d been by the place a hundred times, walking the dog, taking the air, and had never really paid much attention to it one way or the other: it was just a house. Same model as his own place, only the garage was reversed, and instead of Rancho White with Navajo trim, the owner had reversed the colors too, going with the lighter shade for the trim and the darker for the stucco. The landscaping was unremarkable, no different from any of the other places on the block: two tongues of lawn on either side of a crushed stone path, shrubs that weren’t as drought-tolerant as they should be, a flagpole draped with a limp flag and a single fat starling perched atop it like a clot of something wiped on a sleeve.
“Whose place is this?” he asked Jack as they came up the walk.
“Dominick Flood’s.”
Delaney shot him a glance. “Don’t think I know him.”
“You should,” Jack said over his shoulder, and that was all.
A maid showed them in. She was small, neat, with an untraceable accent and a tight black uniform with white trim and a little white apron Delaney found excessive: who would dress a servant up like somebody’s idea of a servant, like something out of a movie? What was the point? They followed her down a corridor of genuine hand-troweled plaster, spare and bright, past a pair of rooms furnished in a Southwestern motif, Navajo blankets on the walls, heavy bleached-pine furniture, big clay pots of cactus and succulents, floors of unglazed tile. At the rear of the house, in the room Delaney used for his study, was a den with a wet bar, and eight men were gathered round it, drinks in hand. They were noisy and grew noisier when Jack stepped into the room, turning to him as one with shouts of greeting. Delaney recognized Jack Cherrystone and the bearded fat man from the meeting—Jim Shirley—and two or three others, though he couldn’t place their names.
“Jack!” a voice cried out behind them and Delaney turned to see the man he presumed to be their host coming up the hallway. Flood looked to be about sixty, tanned and hard as a walnut, with close-set eyes and a tight artificial weave of white hair swept back from his brow. He was barefooted, in a pair of shorts and an oversized Hawaiian-print shirt, and it was impossible not to notice the device on his ankle. It was a black plastic box, two inches square, and it clung tight to the flesh like some sort of high-tech parasite. A thick elastic strap held it in place.
“Dom,” Jack sang, shaking the older man’s hand, and then he turned to introduce Delaney.
“The naturalist,” Flood said without irony, and fixed him with a narrow look. “Jack’s told me all about you. And of course I follow your column in Wide Open Spaces, terrific stuff, terrific.”
Delaney made a noise of demurral. “I didn’t think anybody really paid that much attention—”
“I subscribe to them all,” Flood said, “—Nature, High Sierra, The Tule Times, even some of the more radical newsletters. To me, there’s nothing more important than the environment—hey, where would we be without it, floating in space?”
Delaney laughed.
“Besides, I have a lot of time on my hands”—at this, they both glanced down at the box on his ankle and Delaney had his first intimation of just what its function might be—“and reading sustains me, on all issues. But come on in and have a drink,” he was saying, already in motion, and a moment later they were standing at the bar with the others while a man in a blue satin jacket and bow tie fixed their drinks—Scotch, no ice, for Jack, and a glass of sauvignon blanc for Delaney.
It was a convivial evening, a social gathering and nothing more—at least for the first hour—and Delaney had begun to enjoy himself, set at ease immediately by his host’s praise and the easy familiarity of the others—they were his neighbors, after all—when the smaller conversations began to be subsumed in a larger one, and the theme of the evening gradually began to reveal itself. Jim Shirley, sweating and huge in a Disneyland T-shirt, was leaning forward on the sofa with a drink in his hand, addressing Bill Vogel and Charlie Tillerman, the two men Delaney had recognized on entering, and the room fell silent to pick up his words. “Go unlisted, that’s what I say. And I’m going to raise the issue at the next community meeting, just to warn everybody—”
“I don’t think I’m following you, Jim,” Jack Cherrystone rumbled from the bar, the seismic blast of his everyday voice setting the glass ashtrays in motion on the coffee table. “What do you mean, go unlisted? What difference would that make?”
Jim Shirley was a querulous fat man, bringer of bad tidings, a paranoiac, and Delaney didn’t like him. But the moment belonged to Jim Shirley, and he seized it. “I’m talking the latest rash of burglaries? The three houses on Esperanza that got hit two weeks back? Well, the gate helps, no doubt about it, but these characters came in in a pickup truck, ratty old clothes, a couple rakes and a mower in back, and said they were doing the Levines’ place, 37 Via Esperanza. The guard waves them through. But the thing is, they got the address out of the phone book, called the Levines to make sure they were out, and hit the place. And while they were at it, they got the Farrells and the Cochrans too. So my advice is, go unlisted. And I mean everybody in the development.”
It had gotten dark, and Delaney looked through his reflection to the shadowy lawn out back, half-expecting to see criminals disguised as gardeners tiptoeing past with rolled-up Karastan rugs and CD players. Was nobody safe—anywhere, ever?
“I like the advice, Jim,” Jack Jardine said. He was sitting at the bar still, nursing his second Scotch. A single thick strand of hair had fallen across his forehead, giving him the look of an earnest high-school debater. “And I think you should bring it up at the next meeting, but what we should really be looking at is the larger issue of how these people are getting into our community to begin with and the fact that the gate is just a stopgap—hell, anybody can just park out on the canyon road and walk in from the south or take any one of half a dozen off-the-road tracks and be out back of the development in five minutes. We’re all vulnerable to that. And what Jim didn’t tell you—or hasn’t told you yet—is what happened to Sunny DiMandia.”
There was a portentousness to Jack’s tone that put Delaney off—he was manipulating the room the way he manipulated a courtroom, and Delaney resented him for it. Was this what Jack had brought him for—to get him on his team? Jim Shirley, who seemed to be the official trader in horror stories, was about to lay bare the Sunny DiMandia episode in all its lurid detail, when Delaney heard his own voice plunging into the gap: “So what do you mean, Jack? Isn’t the gate enough? Next thing you’ll want to wall the whole place in like a medieval city or so
mething—”
Delaney had expected laughter, a murmur or two of assent, anything to confirm the absurdity of the proposition, but he was met by silence. Everyone was watching him. He felt uneasy suddenly, all the spirit of camaraderie dissolved in that instant. Wall the place in. That was exactly what they intended to do. That was what they were here for. That was the purpose of the gathering.
“We’re all praying for Sunny,” Jim Shirley said then, “and the latest prognosis is for a full and speedy recovery, but the man—or men, the police aren’t sure yet—who got in there last week did a lot of damage, and I don’t mean just physical damage, because I don’t know if a woman ever really recovers from something like this...” He paused to heave a deep alveolar sigh. A hand went to his face, moist and doughy, and he pressed his drink to his brow like a wet cloth. “You all know Sunny, don’t you?” he said finally, lifting his head to survey the room. “Fabulous woman, one of the best. Sixty-two years old and as active in this community as anybody.” Another sigh, a rigid compression of the jowls. “She left the back door open, that was her mistake. Thinking it was safe up here—what an irony, huh?”
“It was our first violent crime,” Jack put in. “The first, and let’s make damn sure it’s the last.”
“Amen,” Jim Shirley said, and then he went into the grisly details, step by step, moment by moment, sparing them nothing.
Delaney filtered him out. He was watching his host, who was curled up now in the corner of a pastel couch, his bare legs propped on the coffee table, idly scratching his calf. As they’d sat together earlier at the bar, Jack had given him an abbreviated explanation of the device on Flood’s ankle. He was a client of Jack’s, a good guy, ambitious, and his bank—there’d been three local branches and he personally oversaw them all—had got entangled in some unwise investments, as Jack put it. The device was on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service house-arrest program, and he would be wearing it, night and day, for the next three years. Delaney had been stunned. “Three years?” he’d whispered, glancing in awe at the black plastic manacle on Flood’s ankle. “You mean he can’t leave this house for three years?” Jack had nodded curtly. “Better than prison, wouldn’t you say?”
Now, as Jim Shirley droned on, practically slavering over the nasty little details of the assault on Sunny DiMandia (who’d begun to take on a mythical dimension since Delaney didn’t know her from Queen Ida or Hillary Clinton), Delaney couldn’t help studying Dominick Flood out of the corner of his eye. Three years without a walk in the woods, dinner out, even a stroll down the supermarket aisles: it was unthinkable. And yet there it was: if he left the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot radius they’d given him, a buzzer would go off and the police would come and lock him away in a place with a lot fewer amenities than this one. No wonder he liked to read about the great outdoors—he wasn’t going to see anything beyond the backyard fence for a long time to come.
The conversation had focused for a while on Sunny DiMandia—expressions of concern, outrage, fear and loathing—and now the maid reappeared with coffee and a tray of cakes and brioches. The distraction was welcome, and as the eleven men settled down to the quotidian tasks of stirring the hot liquid, measuring out sugar and Sweet’n Low, plying knife and fork, chewing, swallowing, belching softly to themselves, a peace fell over the room, dispelling the news of rapes and break-ins and the general decline and disintegration of the world around them. Someone mentioned baseball and the conversation chased off after the subject with a sense of genuine relief. From the hills behind the house came the distant breathless barking yelp of a coyote, answered almost immediately by another, somewhere off to the north.
“The natives are getting restless,” Jack Cherrystone rumbled, and everyone laughed.
“You think they want to come in and join us?” Bill Vogel said. He was a tall, wraithlike man bowed under the weight of a sickle nose. “ They probably get a little tired of raw rat or whatever they’re eating out there—if! I was a coyote I’ll bet a bit of this cheesecake would really hit the spot.”
Jack Cherrystone, diminutive, his head too big for his frame, his eyes too big for his head, turned to Delaney. “I don’t think Delaney would approve, Bill,” he said, his voice carving canyons beneath their feet. “Would you, Delaney?”
Delaney reddened. How many of these men had been present at the meeting the night he’d made such an ass of himself? “No,” he said, and he tried to smile, “no, I’m afraid I wouldn’t.”
“What about that labor-exchange business, Dom?” Jack Jardine said out of nowhere, and the grinning faces turned from Delaney to him, and then to their host.
Flood was standing now, dipping his chin delicately to take a sip of coffee from the cup he held over the saucer in his hand. He gave Jack a wink, moved across the floor to lay an arm over his shoulder, and addressed the room in general. “That little matter’s been taken care of. And it was no big deal, believe me—just a matter of a few phone calls to the right people. Joe Nardone of the Topanga Homeowners’ Association told me the people down there were good and sick of the whole business anyway—it was an experiment that didn’t work.”
“Good.” Jack Cherrystone was perched on a barstool, his legs barely reaching the bottom rung. “I mean, I’m as sympathetic as the next guy and I feel bad about it—and I can see where the Topanga property owners really wanted to do something for these people, but the whole thing was wrongheaded from the start.”
“I’ll say,” Bill Vogel put in with real vehemence, “the more you give them the more they want, and the more of them there are,” but the professional boom of Jack Cherrystone’s voice absorbed and flattened his words, and Jack went on without missing a beat.
“Why should we be providing jobs for these people when we’re looking at a ten percent unemployment rate right here in California—and that’s for citizens. Furthermore, I’m willing to bet you’ll see a big reduction in the crime rate once the thing’s closed down. And if that isn’t enough of a reason, I’m sorry, but quite frankly I resent having to wade through them all every time I go to the post office. No offense, but it’s beginning to look like fucking Guadalajara or something down there.”
Dominick Flood was beaming. He was the host, the man of the house, the man of the hour. He shrugged his shoulders in deprecation—what he’d done was nothing, the least thing, a little favor, that was all, and they should all rest easy. “By this time next week,” he announced, “the labor exchange is history.”
Delaney was thinking about that as Kyra came to the end of her dissertation on Cynthia Sinclair: Kyra had cleaned up the corner of Shoup and Ventura, and Dominick Flood had cleaned up the labor exchange. All right. But where were these people supposed to go? Back to Mexico? Delaney doubted it, knowing what he did about migratory animal species and how one population responded to being displaced by another. It made for war, for violence and killing, until one group had decimated the other and reestablished its claim to the prime hunting, breeding or grazing grounds. It was a sad fact, but true.
He tried to shrug it off—the evening was perfect, his life on track again, his hikes as stimulating as ever and his powers of observation and description growing sharper as he relaxed into the environment. Why dwell on the negative, the paranoiac, the wall-builders and excluders? He was part of it now, complicit by his very presence here, and he might as well enjoy it. Looking up from his food, he said: “Want to take in a movie tonight?”
“Yes!” Jordan shouted, raising his clenched fists in triumph. “Can we?”
Kyra carefully set down her glass. “Paperwork,” she said. “I couldn’t dream of it. Really, I couldn’t.”
Jordan emitted little batlike squeals of disappointment and protest. His features flattened, his eyebrows sank into his head. His hair was so light it was almost invisible. He might have been a shrunken bald-headed old man who’s just been told his prescription can’t be refilled.
“Come on,” Delaney coaxed, “it’s only
a movie. Two hours. You can spare two hours, hon, can’t you?”
“Please,” Jordan squealed.
Kyra wouldn’t hear of it. Her face was neutral, but Delaney could see that her mind was made up. “You know it’s my second-busiest time of the year, all these buyers with children popping up out of nowhere to try and get in before school starts... You know it is. And Jordan, honey”—turning to her son—“you know how busy Mama is right now, don’t you? Once the summer’s over I’ll take you to any movie you want—and you can bring a friend along too, anybody you want.”
Delaney watched as she helped herself to the salad and squirted a little tube of no-fat dressing over her portion. “And we’ll get treats too,” she was saying, “bonbons and Coke and any kind of candy you want to pick out.” And then, to Delaney: “What movie?”
He was about to say that he hadn’t really decided, but there were two foreign films in Santa Monica, one at eight-forty-five and one at nine-oh-five, but of course that would exclude Jordan, and he was wondering if they could get the Solomon girl in to babysit on such short notice, when he saw the transformation in Kyra’s face. She was looking past him, out beyond the pool and the deep lush fescue lawn she’d insisted on, though Delaney thought it was wasteful, and her eyes suddenly locked. He saw surprise first, then recognition, shock, and finally horror. When he whipped round in his seat, he saw the coyote.
It was inside the fence, pressed to the ground, a fearful calculation in its eyes as it stalked the grass to where Osbert lay sprawled in the shade of a potted palm, obliviously gnawing at the rawhide bone. Wings, he was thinking as he leapt from the chair with a shout, the damned thing must have wings to get over eight feet of chain link, and then, though he was in motion and though he wanted nothing more in the world than to prevent the sequel, he watched in absolute stupefaction as the animal swept across the grass in five quick strides, snatched the dog up by the back of the neck and hit the fence on the fly.