The Tortilla Curtain

syllable as if he couldn't let it go, “you look lost.”
    Jack was dressed. Three-piece suit, crisp white button-down shirt, knotted tie. His wife, a catlike bosomy woman who always insisted on the two-cheek, continental style of greeting and would clutch your shoulders with tiny fists until she'd been accommodated, as she did now, was dressed. Delaney saw that she was wearing a shroudlike evening gown, black satin, and at least sixty percent of her jewelry collection. Even Jack Jr., with his hi-tops, earrings and ridiculous haircut, was dressed, in a sport coat that accented the new spread of his shoulders and a tie he must have inherited _from__ his father.
    “I _am__ lost,” Delaney admitted. He hefted the beer and grinned. “It's too early in the afternoon for me to be drinking--you know me and alcohol, Jack--and I've got a six-course dinner to worry about. Which you're going to love, by the way. Old New England right here in California. Or old New York, anyway.”
    “Relax, Delaney,” Erna purred, “it's Thanksgiving. Enjoy the party.”
    Jack Jr. gave him a sick grin. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room. His voice cracked when he excused himself and drifted toward the suckling pig like some incubus of the food chain.
    “I see from the letters this month you've been taking some heat on that coyote column,” Jack said, and a glass of wine seemed to materialize magically in his hand. Erna grinned at Delaney, waved at someone over his shoulder.
    Leave it to Jack to bore right in. Delaney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. There've been something like thirty letters, most of them critical, but not all. But that's something. I must have pushed some buttons.”
    Actually, the response had surprised him. He'd never generated--provoked?--more than half a dozen letters before, all from literal-minded biologists taking issue with his characterization of the dusky-footed wood rat or his use of the common name of some plant in preference to the scientific. The readers, die-hard preservationists to the last man, woman and child, had seemed to feel he was advocating some sort of control on coyote populations, and though he'd been upset over Osbert when he wrote the piece, he didn't see the column as being at all environmentally incorrect. After the tenth letter had come in, he'd sat down and reread the column. Twice. And there was nothing there. They just weren't getting it--they weren't reading it in the spirit it was intended. He wasn't pushing for population controls--controls were futile and the historical record proved it. As he'd indicated. He was just elucidating the problem, opening up the issue to debate. Certainly it wasn't the coyotes that were to blame, it was us--hadn't he made that clear?
    Jack was grinning, his lips ever so slightly drawn back to reveal a strategic flash of enamel. Delaney recognized the expression. It was skeptical, faintly ironic, meant to convey to judges, jurors and district attorneys alike that the issue had yet to be decided. “So what is it, Delaney--should we bring back the traps and quotas or not? You've lost two dogs, and how many others here have lost pets too?” He made a sweeping gesture to take in the room, the house, the community at large.
    “That's right,” Kyra said, slipping up behind Delaney and taking hold of his arm, “and that's where we had our falling-out over the wall--or actually, it was war, full-on, no-holds-barred.”
    Jack laughed. Erna laughed. Delaney managed a rueful smile as greetings went round and the string quartet built to a frenzy in the _con fuoco.__ “But really,” Kyra said, unwilling to let it go, “don't you feel safer now, all of you--Jack, Erna, Delaney? Don't you?” she said, turning her face to him. “Admit it.”
    Delaney reddened. Shrugged again. The beer glass in his hand was heavy as a cannonball. “I know when I'm licked,” he was saying, but Erna Jardine had already leapt in to answer for him. “Of course we do,” she said. “We all do. The wall's barely been completed and yet I'm breathing easier to know there'll never be another rattlesnake in my garage. Or another break-in.” She gave them a pious look. “Oh, I know that doesn't mean we can let our guard down, but still, it's one more barrier, isn't it?” she said, and then she leaned into Kyra and lowered her voice confidentially. “Did you hear about Shelly Schourek? It was a follow-home. Right down the hill in Calabasas.”
    The party went on.