The Tortilla Curtain

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.
    Then he skipped a night--a clear cold smog-free night that came at the tail end of the second storm--to take Kyra to dinner and a movie. They got back at midnight and the wall was blank still, but when Delaney went to the closet to change into his thermals, jeans and windbreaker, Kyra stepped out of the bathroom in her teddy and Delaney let his vigilance lapse. In the morning, the wall was still unmarked, but Delaney discovered that both cameras had been tripped. Probably coyotes, he was thinking as he took the film over to the Cherrystones, but there was always the possibility that the Mexicans had come back and been scared off by the flash--in which case he'd never catch them now. They wouldn't be back. He'd blown it. His one chance, and he'd blown it. But then, it was probably only a coyote. Or a raccoon.
    Jack was at a sound studio in Burbank, but Selda let Delaney in. She'd just had her hair done--it was the most amazing winter-ermine color, right down to the blue highlights--and she was drinking coffee from a mug and pouring words into the portable telephone in a low confidential voice. “Did you get anything?” she asked, putting a hand over the mouthpiece.
    Delaney felt awkward. Only the Cherrystones, and Kyra knew what he was doing, but in a sense the whole community was depending on him--there might be ten thousand Mexicans camped out there in the chaparral waiting to set the canyon afire, but at least these two were going to get a one-way ticket to Tijuana. If he hadn't blown it, that is. He shrugged. “I don't know.”
    Jack's darkroom was a converted half-bath just off the den and it was cramped and poorly ventilated. Delaney oriented himself, switched on the fan, located what he needed, then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked on the safelight. He got so absorbed in what he was doing he'd almost forgotten what he was looking for by the time he was pinching the water off of the curling wet strip of film and holding it up to the light.
    The face that stared back at him, as startled and harshly fixed in the light as any opossum's face, was human, was Mexican, but it wasn't the face he'd expected. He'd expected the cold hard eyes and swollen jaw of the graffiti artist with the bad dentures, the trespasser, the firebug, caught at last, proof positive, but this was a face come back to haunt him from his dreams, and how could he ever forget that silver-flecked mustache, the crushed cheekbone and the blood on a twenty-dollar bill?

The Tortilla Curtain

6
    AMéRICA NURSED HER BABY, AND CáNDIDO BUILT his house. It was a temporary house, a shelter, a place where they could keep out of the rain and lie low till he got work and they could live like human beings. The money--the apartment fund, the hoard in the peanut butter jar--wasn't going to help them. It amounted to just four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in a hard shapeless knot of plastic. Cándido had waited three days, and then, under cover of night, he'd slipped down through the chaparral and across the road into the devastation of the canyon. There was a half-moon to guide him, a pale thin coating of light that showed his feet where to step, but everything was utterly transformed; he had a hard time even finding the trailhead. The world was ash, ash two or three inches deep, and the only landmarks left to guide him were the worn humps of the rocks. Once he got to the streambed he was on familiar