The Tortilla Curtain

would be a help if you could leave the side gate open.”
    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