by T. C. Boyle
She’d been prepared for this—she’d seen it before—but still, it was a shock. All that beauty, all that perfection, all that exquisite taste, and what was it worth now? She couldn’t bring herself to go any closer—what was the point? Did she really want to see the crystal chandeliers melted into a dirty gob of silica or discover a fragment of statuary pinned beneath a half-charred beam? She turned away—let the insurance adjusters work it out, let them deal with it—and started the long walk down the driveway without looking back.
Her other listing up here, a contemporary Mediterranean on two and a half acres with a corral and horse barn, hadn’t been touched, not a shingle out of place. And why couldn’t that have gone up instead? It was a choice property, on a private road and with terrific views, but it was nothing special, nothing unique or one of a kind, like the Da Ros place. What a waste, she thought, kicking angrily through the ash, bitter, enraged, fed up with the whole business. It was the Mexicans who’d done this. Illegals. Goons with their hats turned backwards on their heads. Sneaking across the border, ruining the schools, gutting property values and freeloading on welfare, and as if that wasn’t enough, now they were burning everybody else out too. They were like the barbarians outside the gates of Rome, only they were already inside, polluting the creek and crapping in the woods, threatening people and spraying graffiti all over everything, and where was it going to end?
They’d held the two Mexicans for the fire—the same two who’d sprayed that hateful filth across the walls of the house—but they’d let them go for lack of evidence. And what a joke that was. They couldn’t even be deported because the police and the INS weren’t allowed to compare notes. But they’d done it, she knew they had, just as surely as if they’d piled up the brush, doused it with gasoline and set fire to the house itself. It was incredible. Beyond belief. She was in such a state by the time she reached the car her hand trembled as she punched in the office on her phone. “Hello, Darlene?” she said.
Darlene’s voice was right there, a smooth professional chirp: “Mike Bender Realty.”
“It’s me, Kyra.”
“Oh. Hi. Everything all right?”
Kyra gazed out the windshield on the wasteland around her, real estate gone bad, gone terminally bad, and she was still trembling with anger, the sort of anger the relaxation tapes couldn’t begin to put a dent in, and she took it out on the receptionist. “No, Darlene,” she said, “everything’s not all right. If you really want to know, everything sucks.”
Delaney dropped Kit at the airport on Sunday afternoon, and it was past four by the time he and Jordan got back. He was surprised to see Kyra’s car in the driveway—Sunday was open house day and she rarely got home before dark this time of year. He found her in the TV room, the sound muted on an old black-and-white movie, the multiple-listings book facedown in her lap. She looked tired. Jordan thundered in and out of the room, a glancing “Hi, Mom!” trailing behind him. “Tough day?” Delaney asked.
She turned her face to him and he saw in the light of the lamp that she was agitated, her eyes hot, nose red, the petulant crease stamped into her brow. “The Da Ros place is gone,” she said. “I was up there this afternoon—they finally opened the road.”
His first impulse was to congratulate her—no more nighttime treks to close the place up, one less worry in their lives—but he saw that it would be a mistake. She was wearing the look that had come across her face the day the stranger had locked the dog in the car out back of the Indian restaurant, and in the absence of the stranger, all her firepower would come to bear on him and him alone. “But you knew that, didn’t you? I mean, didn’t Sally Lieberman call and say she’d seen the house on the news?”
“She wasn’t sure.” Kyra’s voice had grown quiet. “I was hoping, you know? That house reaily—I don’t know, I loved that house. I know it wasn’t for you, but if I could have had my choice of any house in all of Los Angeles County, that would have been it. And then, after all the work I put into it, to see it like that—I just don’t know.”
What could he say? Delaney wasn’t very good at consolation—he felt the loss, any loss, too much himself. He crossed the room and sat beside her on the couch, but he sensed he shouldn’t put his arm around her yet—there was something else coming.
“I can’t believe they just let them go like that,” she said suddenly.
“Who?”
“Who do you think? The Mexicans. The ones that burned down my house.”
Delaney couldn’t believe it either. He’d even called Jack about it and Jack had used the occasion to shoot holes in what was left of the sinking raft of his liberal-humanist ideals. What did you expect? Jack had demanded. You give all these people the full protection of our laws the minute they cross the border and you expect them to incriminate themselves? Where’s the evidence? Yes, all right, they determined the thing was started by an illegal campfire in the lower canyon, and these two men were seen walking up the canyon road, fleeing the fire just like everybody else—where’s the proof they started it? You think they’re going to admit it, just like that?
Delaney had been outraged. The fire had given him a real scare, and though he knew it was regenerative, a natural and essential part of the chaparral environment and all that, this was no theoretical model—this was his canyon, his house, his life. It made him seethe to think of the ruined holiday, the panic of packing up and running, the loss of wildlife and habitat, and all because some jerk with a match got careless—or malicious. It made him seethe and it made him hate. So much so it frightened him. He was afraid of what he might do or say, and there was still a part of him that was deeply ashamed of what had happened at that roadblock Thursday night. “The whole thing is crazy,” he said finally. “Just crazy. But listen, it could have been a lot worse. We’re okay, we made it. Let’s just try and forget about it.”
“Look at the Da Roses, look what they lost,” Kyra said, lifting the book wearily from her lap, as if the weight of all those properties were bearing her down, and set it on the coffee table. “How can you say ‘forget about it’? The same thing’s going to happen in these canyons next year and the year after that.”
“I thought you said he killed himself.”
“That’s not the point. His wife’s alive. And their children. And all of that artwork, all those antiques—they were priceless, irreplaceable.”
There was a silence. They both stared numbly at the screen, where a couple Delaney didn’t recognize—B stars of the forties—embraced passionately against a shifting backdrop of two-lane highways and hotel lobbies rife with palms. Finally Delaney said, “How about a walk before dinner? We could look for Dame Edith—”
For a moment he was afraid he’d said the wrong thing—the cat had been missing for three days now and that was another sore point—but Kyra gave him half a smile, reached out to squeeze his hand, and then got to her feet.
Outside, it was overcast and cool, with a breeze that smelled of rain coming in off the ocean. And why couldn’t it have come four days earlier? But that was always the way: after the fires, the rains, and the rains brought their own set of complications. Still, the stink of burning embers was dissipating and the Cherrystones’ jasmine was in bloom, giving off a rich sweet nutty scent that candied the air, and things were flowering up and down the block, beds of impatiens and begonias, plumbago and oleander and Euryops daisies in huge golden masses. The windborne ash had been swept up, hosed into lawns and off the leaves of the trees, and the development looked untouched and pristine, right down to the freshly waxed cars in the driveways. Fire? What fire?
They were walking hand in hand, Kyra in her Stanford windbreaker, Delaney in a lightweight Gore-Tex backcountry jacket he’d got through the Sierra Club, calling out “Kitty, Kitty,” in harmony, when Jack Jardine’s classic 1953 MG TD rounded the corner, Jack at the wheel. The car was a long humped shiver of metal and the engine sounded like two French horns locked on a single note that rose or fell in volume according to wha
t gear Jack happened to be in at the moment. He swung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb beside them, killing the engine. “Out for a stroll?” he said, leaning his head out the window.
“Sure,” Delaney said. “It’s about time the weather changed. Feels good.”
“Hi, Jack.” Kyra gave him an official smile. “All settled back in? How’s Erna?”
“Everything’s fine,” Jack said, and his eyes dodged away from them and came back again. “Listen, actually—well, there’s something I just discovered I thought you might want to take a look at, no big deal, but if you’ve got a minute—?”
He swung open the passenger door and Delaney and Kyra squeezed in—and it was a tight squeeze, a very tight squeeze, the floor space like the narrow end of a coffin, the head space claustrophobic at best. The car smelled of oil, leather, gasoline. “I feel like I’m in high school again,” Delaney said.
“It’ll only be a minute.” Jack turned the key and pushed a button on the dash and the engine stuttered to life. The car was one of his hobbies. He liked to play with it on weekends, but he reserved the Range Rover for the freeway wars, five days a week, down the canyon road to the PCH and up the Santa Monica and 405 freeways to Sunset and his office in Century City.
They were silent a moment, the thrum of the car all-encompassing, every bump and dip instantly communicated to their thighs and backsides, and then Delaney said, “So did Dom Flood ever turn up?”
Jack gave him a quick look and turned his eyes back to the road. He was uncomfortable with the subject, Delaney could see that, and it was a revelation—he’d never seen Jack uncomfortable before. “I only represented him in the, uh, the financial matter, the banking case—he has other attorneys now.”
“So what are you saying—he ran?”
Jack seemed even less comfortable with this formulation and he shifted unnecessarily to give him an extra moment to cover himself. “I wouldn’t call it running, not exactly—”
It was Kyra’s turn now. “But he is a fugitive, right? And what he did to my mother, that was inexcusable. She couldn’t be charged as an accessory or anything, could she?”
Jack fell all over himself. “Oh, no, no. She had nothing to do with it. Listen”—and he turned to them now, careful to make eye contact—“I really can’t defend his actions. As I say, I’m no longer his attorney. But yes, it looks like, from all I hear, he’s left the country.”
And then they were outside the gate and Jack was pulling over in the turn-around they’d constructed to assist those denied admission to the sacrosanct streets of the development. He shut down the engine and climbed out of the car, Delaney and Kyra following suit. “So what is it, Jack?” Delaney was saying, thinking it must have something to do with one or another of the creatures flushed out by the fire, when he looked up and saw the wall. It had been defaced with graffiti on both sides of the entrance gate, big bold angular strokes in glittering black paint, and how could he have missed it on his way back in from the airport? “I can’t believe it,” Kyra said. “What next?”
Jack had gone right up to the wall, tracing the jagged hieroglyphs with his finger. “That’s what they use, right? It almost looks like the writing on the stelae outside the Mayan temples—look at this—but then this looks like a Z, and that’s got to be an S with a line through it, no? Is this what they wrote on that house you were selling, Kyra? I mean, can you read it?”
“They wrote in Spanish—pinche puta, fucking whore. They had it in for me because I chased them off the property—the same idiots that started the fire, the ones they just let off because we might be infringing on their rights or something, as if we don’t have any rights, as if anybody can just come in here and burn our houses down and we have to grin and bear it. But no, this is different. This is like what you see all over the Valley—it’s like their own code.”
Jack turned to Delaney. A light misting rain had begun to fall, barely a breath of moisture, but it was a start. “What do you think?”
There it was again, the hate. It came up on him so fast it choked him. There was no escape, no refuge—they were everywhere. All he could do was shrug.
“I just don’t understand it,” Jack said, his voice soft and pensive. “It’s like an animal reflex, isn’t it?—marking their territory?” “Only this is our territory,” Kyra said.
And now the thing in Delaney’s throat let go and the taste it left was bitter, bitter. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said.
November passed into December, Dame Edith and Dom Flood were given up for lost, the first major storm of the season soaked the hillsides with two inches of rain over a three-day period, and Delaney Mossbacher discovered his mission. He was a man of patience and resource. He’d spent half his life observing animals in the field, diving among manatees in Florida, crouching outside fox dens in upstate New York, once even roaming the Belizean jungles with the world’s foremost jaguar expert, watching over kills and waiting through endless mosquito-infested nights for the magical photo of the big beast prowling among the lianas. He knew how to be unobtrusive and he knew how to wait. What it all added up to was Judgment Day for those sons of bitches who’d spray-painted the wall—he was going to stake it out, night after night, with a pair of binoculars and a trip-wire camera, and he was going to catch them in the act. Maybe no one had seen them light the fire, but he was going to make damned sure he got the evidence this time, and if the police wouldn’t report them to the INS, he would. Enough was enough.
Kyra was against it. She was afraid there’d be a confrontation, afraid he’d get hurt. “Isn’t that what we pay Westec for?” she’d argued. “And the guard at the gate?”
“But they’re not doing the job,” he said. “Obviously. Look: somebody’s got to do something.”
And he was the one to do it. This was small, simple; this was something he could contain and control. He had all the time in the world. The hills were soaked and the days so short he’d had to cut his daily hikes down to two or three miles, maximum; he’d finished a column on the fire for next month’s issue and the piece on invasive species had begun to come together. He sat in his study, staring at the wall, and every time he thought of those Mexicans, especially the one he’d tangled with, the shame and hate burned in him like a twist of pitch, flickering and dying and flickering all over again. And no, he wasn’t going to get confrontational—he was just going to record the evidence and call Westec and the Sheriff’s Department from Kyra’s cellular phone, and that was all.
He set up a pair of cheap flash cameras rigged to a trip wire and positioned them so they’d shoot down the length of the wall on either side of the gate. It was the same rig he’d used a year ago when some furtive creature of the night had been getting into the bag of cat food in the garage. Jack Cherrystone had let him use his darkroom (Jack was an avid amateur photographer, currently working on a series of portraits of “the faces behind the voices,” head shots of the unsung heroes who provided vocalization for cartoon characters and did voice-overs for commercials, and of course, the tiny cadre of his fellow trailermeisters), and Delaney, watching the image form in the developing tray, was gratified to see the dull white long-nosed face of Di delphis marsupialis, the Virginia opossum, staring back at him. Now he would try the technique on a different sort of fauna.
The first night he watched from ten till past one, saw nothing—not even an opossum or a cat—and dragged through the following morning’s routine as if he were comatose, burning Kyra’s toast and getting Jordan to school twelve minutes late. He napped when he should have been writing and he curtailed his afternoon hike, unable to focus on the natural world when the unnatural one was encroaching on everything he held sacred. The second night he went out just after nine, prowled around a bit, came home to watch a news show with Kyra, and then went back out at eleven and sat there hidden, within sight of the gate, till two. He slept through the alarm the next morning and Kyra had to take Jordan to school.
During the ensuing week he averaged three
hours a night in the blind he’d created in the lee of a ceanothus bush, but he didn’t see a thing. He watched his neighbors drive in and out of the gate, knew who was going to the liquor store and who to the movies and when they got back, but the vandals never showed. A second storm rolled in during the middle of the week and it got cold, down into the low forties, and though he knew it was unlikely that any Hispanics, Mexican or otherwise, would be out tagging in the rain, he stayed put anyway, hunched under his parka, experiencing the night and letting his thoughts wander. The rain playing off the slick blacktop at the gate made him think of Florida and the way the roads would disappear under a glistening field of flesh when the Siamese walking catfish were on the move in all their ambulatory millions. He remembered being awed by the sheer seething protoplasmic power of them, their jaws gaping and eyes aglitter as they waddled from one canal to the next, an army on the march. No one, least of all the exotic aquaria importer who brought them into the country, suspected that they could actually walk, despite the powerful intimation of their common name, and they’d slithered right out of their holding tanks and into the empty niche awaiting them in the soft moist subtropical night. Now they were unstoppable, endlessly breeding, straining the resources of the environment and gobbling up the native fishes like popcorn. And all because of some shortsighted enthusiast who thought they might look amusing in an aquarium.
But there were no catfish here, walking or otherwise. The rain fell. Water ran off into the ditches in tight yellow braids. Delaney periodically scanned the shrubbery at the base of the wall through his night-vision binoculars. The graffiti had been painted over almost immediately by the maintenance man—that was the best way, everyone said, of frustrating the taggers—and Delaney sat there watching a blank wall, a clean slate that had to be a gall and an incitement to that shithead with the weird eyes and the hat turned backwards on his head, and he watched as the Christmas lights went on over the entranceway and the sign that announced ARROYO BLANCO ESTATES, red and green lights, blinking against the blank wall in the rain. He didn’t mind. This was a crusade, a vendetta.