by T. C. Boyle
Coming through? Delaney wasn’t focusing, his head swarming with lizards and vultures.
The man in the T-shirt was watching him closely. “The wall,” he said. “My people are going to need access.”
The wall. Of course. He should have guessed. Ninety percent of the community was already walled in, tireless dark men out there applying stucco under conditions that would have killed anybody else, and now the last link was coming to Delaney, to his own dogless yard, hemming him in, obliterating his view—protecting him despite himself. And he’d done nothing to protest it, nothing at all. He hadn’t answered Todd Sweet’s increasingly frantic telephone messages, hadn’t even gone to the decisive meeting to cast his vote. But Kyra—she’d made the wall her mission, putting all her closer’s zeal into selling the thing, stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, working cheek by jowl with Jack and Erna to ensure that the sanctity of the community was preserved and that no terrestrial thing, whether it came on two legs or four, could get in without an invitation.
“Sure,” Delaney said. “Yeah, sure,” and he walked the man around the side of the house, unlatched the gate and propped it open with a stone he kept there for that purpose. The wind lashed the trees and a pair of tumbleweeds (Russian thistle, actually, another unfortunate introduction) leapt across the yard and got hung up on the useless fence. A sudden gust threw a handful of dirt in Delaney’s face and he could feel the grit between his teeth. “Just be sure you shut it when you’re done,” he said, making a vague gesture in the direction of the pool. “We wouldn’t want any of the neighborhood kids wandering in.”
The man gave him a cursory nod and then turned and shouted something in Spanish that set his crew in motion. Men clambered up into the trucks, ropes flew from the load, wheelbarrows appeared from nowhere. Delaney didn’t know what to do. For a while he stood there at the gate as if welcoming them, as if he were hosting a pool party or cookout, and a procession of dark sober men marched past him shouldering picks, shovels, trowels, sacks of stucco and concrete, their eyes fixed on the ground. But then he began to feel self-conscious, out of place, as if he were trespassing on his own property, and he turned and went back into the house, down the hallway and through the door to his office, where he sat back down at his desk and stared at full-color photographs of turkey vultures till they began to move on the page.
He tried to concentrate, but he couldn’t. There was a constant undercurrent of noise—unintelligible shouts, revving engines, the clank of tools and the grinding ceaseless scrape of the cement mixer, all of it riding on the thin giddy bounce and thump of a boombox tuned to a Mexican station. He felt as if he were under siege. Ten minutes after he’d sat down he was at the window, watching the transformation of his backyard. The wall was complete as far as the Cherrystones’ next door on the right; on the other side, they were still three houses down, at Rudy Hernandez’s place, but the noose was tightening. They’d run a string along the property line weeks ago and now the workers were digging footings right up against the eight-foot chain-link fence, which was going to have to go, he could see that. The thing was useless anyway, and every time he looked at it he thought of Osbert. And Sacheverell,
He and Kyra would just have to pay to tear it down—yet another expense—but that wasn’t what bothered him. What really hurt, what rankled him so much he would have gone out and campaigned against the wall no matter what Jack or Kyra said, was that there was going to be no access to the hills at all—not even a gate, nothing. The Property Owners’ Association had felt the wall would be more secure if there were no breaches in it, and besides, gates cost money. But where did that leave Delaney? If he wanted to go for a stroll in the chaparral, if he wanted to investigate those lizards or the gnatcatcher or even the coyotes, he was either going to have to scale the wall or hike all the way out to the front gate and double back again. Which would tend to cut down on spontaneity, that was for sure.
He sat back down at his desk, got up again, sat down. Wind rattled the panes, workers shouted, ranchera music danced through the interstices with a manic tinny glee. Work was impossible. By noon the footings were in and the first eight-inch-high band of concrete block had begun to creep across the property line. How could he work? How could he even think of it? He was being walled in, buried alive, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
By the time Kyra came for him to go out and help her close up the Da Ros place for the night, he was like a caged beast. He resented having to escort her out there seven nights a week anyway, but the graffiti incident left him little choice. (And here he thought of that son of a bitch with his “flies” and it just stoked his mood.) “I hope you’re happy,” he said, sliding into the seat beside her.
She was all business, bright and chirpy, dressed in her property-moving best, the Lexus a massive property-moving tool ready to leap to life beneath her fingertips. It was dark. The wind beat at the windows. “What?” she said, all innocence. “What’s that face for? Did I do something?”
He looked out the window, fuming, as she put the car in gear and wheeled out the driveway and down Piñon. “The wall,” he said. “It’s in. Or most of it, anyway. It’s about a hundredth of an inch from the chain link.”
They were on Arroyo Blanco now, Kyra giving a little wave to the moron at the front gate. This was their ritual, six o’clock every night, while dinner waited on the stove and an already fed Jordan sat before Selda Cherrystone’s TV set: out the gate, up the hill and down the winding drive to the Da Ros place, out of the car, into the house, a quick look round the yard and back again. He hated it. Resented it. It was a waste of his time, and how could she expect him to put a decent dinner together if he was up here every night looking for phantoms? She should drop the listing, that’s what she should do, get rid of it, let somebody else worry about the flowers and the fish and the Mexicans in the bushes.
“All right,” she said, shrugging, her eyes on the road, “we’ll have Al Lopez take the fence down; it’s not like we need it anymore”—and here was the sting of guilt, the counterattack—“if we ever did.”
“I can’t walk out of my own yard,” he said.
She was smiling, serene. The wind blew. Bits of chaff and the odd tumbleweed shot through the thin luminous stream of the headlights. “In the backseat,” she said. “A present. For you.”
He turned to look. A car came up behind them and lighted his face. There was a stepladder in the backseat, a little three-foot aluminum one, the sort of thing you might use for hanging curtains or changing the lightbulb in the front hallway. It was nestled against the leather seat and there was a red satin bow taped to the front of it.
“There’s your solution,” she said. “Anytime you want. Just hoist yourself over.”
“Yeah, sure. And what about the ramparts and the boiling oil?”
She ignored the sarcasm. She stared out at the road, her face serene and composed.
Of course, she was right. If the wall had to be there, and through the tyranny of the majority it did, 127 votes for, 87 against, then he’d have to get used to it—and this was a simple expedient. He had a sudden ephemeral vision of himself perched atop the wall with his daypack, and it came to him then that the wall might not be as bad as he’d thought, if he could get over the bruise to his self-esteem. Not only would it keep burglars, rapists, graffiti artists and coyotes out of the development, it would keep people like the Dagolians out of the hills. He couldn’t really see Jack and Selda Cherrystone hoisting themselves over the wall for an evening stroll, or Doris Obst or even Jack Jardine. Delaney would have the hills to himself, his own private nature preserve. The idea took hold of him, exhilarated him, but he couldn’t admit it. Not to Kyra, not yet. “I don’t want to do any hoisting,” he said finally, injecting as much venom into the participle as he could, “I just want to walk. You know, like on my feet?”
There was no one at the Da Ros place, no muggers, no bogeymen, no realtors or buyers. Kyra walked him through the house, as she d
id every third or fourth night, extolling its virtues as if she were trying to sell it to him, and he asked her point-blank if she shouldn’t consider dropping the listing. “It’s been, what,” he said, “nine months now without so much as a nibble?”
They were in the library, the leather-bound spines of six thousand books carefully selected by a suicide glowing softly in the light of the wall sconces, and Kyra swung round to tell him he didn’t know a thing about business, especially the real-estate business. “People would kill for a listing like this,” she said. “Literally kill for it. And with a property this unique, you sometimes have to just sit on it till the right buyer comes along—and they will, believe me. I know it. I know they will.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
A gust rattled the panes. The Santa Anas were in full force and the koi pools would be clogged with litter. Kyra gave him her widest smile—nothing could dampen her mood tonight—and she took hold of both his hands and lifted them as if they were at the very start of an elaborate dance. “Maybe I am,” she said, and he let it drop.
On the way home they stopped in at Gitello’s to pick up a few things—odds and ends—for the feast they were planning on Thursday, for Thanksgiving. They were having the Cherrystones and the Jardines over, as well as Kyra’s sister and brother-in-law, with their three children, and Kyra’s mother, who was flying in from San Francisco. They’d already spent two hundred and eighty dollars at the Von’s in Woodland Hills, where nearly everything was cheaper, but the list of odds and ends had grown to daunting proportions. Kyra was doing the cooking, with Delaney as sous chef and the maid, Orbalina, on cleanup detail, and she was planning a traditional dinner: roast turkey with chestnut dressing and giblet gravy, mashed potatoes and turnips, a cranberry compote, steamed asparagus, three California wines and two French, baked winter squash soup and a salad of mixed field greens to start, a cheese course, a home-blended granité of grapefruit and nectarine, and a hazelnut-risotto pudding and crème brûlée for dessert with espresso, Viennese coffee and Armagnac on the side.
Delaney retrieved the preliminary list from the folds of his wallet as Kyra strode brusquely through the door and selected a cart. The list was formidable. They needed whipping cream, baby carrots, heavy syrup, ground mace, five pounds of confectioners’ sugar, balsamic vinegar, celery sticks and capers, among other things, as well as an assortment of cold cuts, marinated artichoke hearts, Greek olives and caponata for an antipasto platter she’d only just now decided on. As he followed her down the familiar aisles, watching her as she stood there examining the label on a can of smoked baby oysters or button mushrooms in their own juice, Delaney began to feel his mood lifting. There was nothing wrong, nothing at all. She was beautiful. She was his wife. He loved her. Why mope, why brood, why spend another angry night on the couch? The wall was there, a physical presence, undeniable, and it worked two ways, both for and against him, and if he was clever he could use it to his own advantage. It was Thanksgiving, and he should be thankful.
He stood at Kyra’s side, touching her, offering suggestions and advice, inhaling the rich complex odor of her hair and body as she piled the cart high with bright irresistible packages, things they needed, things they’d run out of, things they might need or never need. Here it was, cornucopian, superabundant, all the fruits of the earth gathered and packaged and displayed for their benefit, for them and them alone. He felt better just being here, so much better he could barely contain himself. How could he have let such a petty thing come between them? He watched her select a jar of piccalilli relish and bend to set it in the cart, and a wave of tenderness swept over him. Suddenly he had his hands on her hips and he was pulling her to him and kissing her right there beneath the Diet Pepsi banner, under the full gaze of the lights and all the other shoppers with their carts and children and bland self-absorbed faces. And she kissed him back, with enthusiasm, and the promise of more to come.
And then, at the checkout, he was amazed all over again.
“You want your turkey?” the girl asked after she’d rung up the purchases—a hundred and six dollars and thirty-nine cents, and why not? The girl was dark-eyed, with a wild pouf of sprayed-up hair and penciled-in eyebrows, like a worldly waif in the silent films. She was snapping gum, animated, bathing in the endless shower of all this abundance.
“Turkey?” Delaney said. “What turkey?” Their turkey was home in the refrigerator, eighteen pounds, four ounces, range-fed and fresh-killed.
“It’s a special offer, just this week only,” the girl said, her voice a breathless trill playing over the wad of pink gum Delaney could just catch a glimpse of when she opened her mouth to say “special.” “If your order totals over fifty dollars you get a free twelve-pound turkey, one to a customer.”
“But we already—” Delaney began, and Kyra cut him off. “Yes,” she said, looking up from her compact, “thank you.”
“Carlos!” the girl sang out, shouting toward the distant fluorescent glare of the meat department at the back of the store. “Bring me another turkey, will you?”
For his part, Cándido Rincón didn’t exactly welcome the season either. That it was hot, that the winds blew and the sweat dried from your skin almost before it had a chance to spill from the pores, was fine and good, ideal even—if only it could be sustained indefinitely, if only the sun would grace him for another two or three months. But he knew that the winds would soon blow themselves out and the sky would blacken and rot far out over the ocean and then come ashore to die. He couldn’t smell the rains yet, but he knew they were coming. The days were truncated. The nights were cold. And where was his son going to be born—in a bed with a doctor looking on or in a hut with the rain driving down and nobody there but Cándido with a pot of water and his rusty knife?
None of this sat easy with him as he trudged up the rutted trail to the market. América was down below, in a funk—she wouldn’t leave the lean-to, no matter how much he might beg or plead. She was like a deranged person, sitting there over her swollen belly, rocking back and forth and chanting to herself. She scared him. No matter what he did, no matter what he brought her—magazines, clothes, things to eat, a rattle and a pair of booties for the baby—she’d just give him the same numbed look, as if she didn’t recognize him—or didn’t want to recognize him.
It was this place, he knew it. The defeat of having to come back here, of having to live like vagos after the promise of that day in Canoga Park, after the luncheonette and the flush toilet and all those rich things and the houses with the cars out front and the peace and security inside. She’d had a breakdown then, like nothing he’d ever seen—even on the streets of Tijuana, even in the worst and lowest places. He’d seen women in hysterics before, but this was something else altogether, this was like a fit, a spell, as if somebody had put a curse on her. She wouldn’t stand up. Wouldn’t walk. Wouldn’t eat the chicken he’d found for her, perfectly good pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken the gabachos had thrown away untouched, and he’d had to drag her back down to their camp, fighting her all the way. Yes, they were desperate. Yes, they’d lost everything. Yes, he was a fool and a liar and he’d failed her yet again. But still they had to make the best of it, had to survive, didn’t she see that?
She didn’t. For the first few days she just sat there, immobilized, catatonic. He’d leave to go out scrounging for food, for work, for the cans he found along the roadway and turned in for a handful of nickels and pennies, and when he came back, whether it was two hours later or six or eight, there she’d be, just as he’d left her, sometimes in the same pose even. She wouldn’t talk to him. She refused to cook. She stopped washing her hair and her body and within the week she stank like one of the homeless, like a wild thing, like a corpse. Her eyes gored him. He began to think he hated her.
Then he met Señor Willis. It was serendipity, good luck instead of bad. He’d got work a few times over the course of the first two weeks after the Canoga Park idiocy, standing ou
t front of the post office with a knot of other men, not so many now, and keeping a sharp eye out for the INS or some vigilante gabacho, defying them, yes, but what choice did he have? The labor exchange was gone. Someone had come in and planted some pepper trees, little sticks six or eight feet high with a puff of foliage at the top, black plastic hose running from tree to tree like a lifeline. That was the labor exchange now: saplings in the ground and the dead blasted earth. So he stood there outside the post office and took his chances, breathing hard every time a car slowed—was it a job or a bust?—and he was there late one howling hot dry-as-a-bone day, two o‘clock probably, and a sledgehammered old Corvair pulled into the lot like some arthritic bird, and there, sitting at the wheel, was a man in the same shape as the car, an old white man with a sunken chest and turtle-meat arms, white hairs growing out of his nose and ears. He just sat there, looking at Cándido out of watery old gray-blue eyes that were distended by the lenses of his glasses till they didn’t look like eyes at all, till they looked like mouths, grasping crazy wide-open gray-blue mouths. He was drunk. You could see that from twenty feet away. “Hey, muchacho,” he called out of the passenger’s-side window, which still had the sparse teeth of broken glass sprouting from the frame, the rest a vacancy. “¿Quieres trabajar?”
It was a joke. It had to be. They let the old gabachos out of the nursing home and sent them down here to taunt honest men, that’s what it was, Cándido was sure of it, and he felt his jaws clench with hate and anger. He didn’t move a muscle. Just stood there rigid.
“Muchacho,” the old man said after a minute, and the wind, the tireless Santa Ana, pinched his voice till it was barely there, “¿qué pasa? ¿Eres sordo? Are you deaf? I said, do you want to work?”