The Tortilla Curtain

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