The Tortilla Curtain

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 selfesteem. 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 did 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