The Tortilla Curtain

photographic proof. “You stay right there!” Delaney roared, and he punched 911 into the car phone Kyra had given him as an early Christmas present.
    The Mexican stood there dumbfounded, leaner and harder-looking than Delaney remembered him, the eyes black and startled, the thick brush of the mustache making a wound of his mouth. “Hello?” Delaney bawled into the receiver, “my name is Delaney Mossbacher and I want to report a crime in progress--or no, an apprehension of a suspect--on Topanga Canyon Road near Topanga Village, just south of--” but before he could finish, the suspect had begun to move. The Mexican looked at Delaney, looked at the telephone in his hand, and then he just stepped right out into the traffic like a sleepwalker.
    Delaney watched in shock as the high blue surging apparition of a pickup cab with a woman's face frozen behind the windshield framed the Mexican's spindly legs and humped-over torso in a portrait of unquenchable momentum, and then, at the last possible moment, veered away in a screeching, rattling, fishtailing blur that hit the guardrail and ricocheted into the back end of his Acura Vigor GS, his new milk-white Acura Vigor GS with the tan leather upholstery and only thirty-eight hundred and sixteen miles on the odometer, where it finally came to rest in all its trembling wide-bodied authority. And the Mexican? He was unscathed, jogging up the opposite side of the road while horns blared and bumpers kissed all up and down the frantically braking string of cars. It was the commuter's nightmare. It was Delaney's nightmare. “Hello, hello--are you there?” cried a voice through the speaker of the phone.
    Delaney didn't call Kyra. He didn't call Jack. He didn't bother with Kenny Grissom or the body shop or even his insurer. As the rain started up again, a blanketing drizzle that seeped into his every pore, he stood at the side of the road and exchanged information with the woman in the pickup. She was in a rage, trembling all over, showing her teeth like a cornered rodent and stamping her feet in the mud. “What's wrong with you?” she demanded. “Are you out of your mind stopping like that with your back end sticking halfway out across the road? And what's with your friend--is he drunk or something, just strolling right out in front of me without even turning his head? You're both drunk, you've got to be, and believe me you're in trouble, mister, and I'm going to demand the cops give you a breath test, right here and now--”
    The policeman who showed up twenty minutes later was grim and harried. He questioned Delaney and the woman separately about the details of the accident, and Delaney tried to tell him about the Mexican, but the cop wasn't interested.
    “I'm trying to tell you, it was this Mexican--he's crazy, he throws himself in front of cars to try and collect on the insurance, he's the one, and I've got a photograph, I caught him out front of Arroyo Blanco, that's where I live, where we've had all that trouble with graffiti lately?”
    They were seated in the patrol car, Delaney in the passenger seat, the cop bent over his pad, laboriously writing out his report in a jagged left-handed script. The radio sputtered and crackled. Rain spilled across the windshield in sheets, drummed on the roof, really coming down now. There were accidents on the Coast Highway, Malibu Canyon Road, 101, the dispatcher's voice numb with the monotony of disaster. “Your vehicle was obstructing the road,” the cop said finally, and that was all.
    Delaney sat in his car till the tow truck arrived; he showed the driver his Triple A card and then refused a ride home. “I'm going to walk,” he said, “it's only a mile and a half.”
    The driver studied him a moment, then handed him a receipt and pulled the door closed. The rain had slackened, but Delaney was already wet through to the skin, the Gore-Tex jacket clinging to his shoulders like a sodden pelt, the hair stamped to his forehead and dancing round his ears in a lank red fringe. “Suit yourself,” the man said through the crack of the window, and then Delaney was walking up the shoulder of the road as the pale shell of his car faded away into the mist ahead of him. He was walking, but this time he wasn't merely walking to get somewhere, as on the torrid high-ceilinged summer morning when his first car was stolen--this time he had a purpose. This time--as he waited for a break in the traffic and dashed across the road--this time