The Tortilla Curtain

breakfast.
    The fools. The idiots.
    Delaney picked up a stick and began to beat methodically at the bushes.
    The Arroyo Blanco Community Center was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the private road, Arroyo Blanco Drive, that snaked off it and wound its way through the oaks and into the grid of streets that comprised the subdivision. It was a single-story white stucco building with an, orange tile roof, in the Spanish Mission style, and it featured a kitchen, wet bar, stage, P. A. system and seating for two hundred. Thre, ahundred. e hall was full--standing room only--by the time Delaney arrived. He'd been delayed because Kyra had been late getting home from work, and since it was the maid's day off, there'd been no one to watch Jordan.
    Kyra was in a state. She'd come in the door looking like a refugee, her eyes reddened and a tissue pinned to the tip of her reddened nose, grieving for Sacheverell (Sacheverell it was: she'd been able to identify the surviving dog as Osbert by means of an indisputable mole clinging to his underlip). For an hour or more that morning she'd helped Delaney beat the bushes, frantic, tearful, her breath coming in ragged gasps--she'd had those dogs forever, long before she'd met Delaney, before Jordan was born even--but finally, reluctantly, she'd given it up and gone off to work, where she was already late for her ten o'clock. She'd changed her clothes, reapplied her makeup, comforted Jordan as best she could and dropped him off at school, leaving Delaney with the injunction to find the dog at all cost. Every half hour throughout the day she called him for news, and though he had news by noon--grim, definitive news, news wrapped up in half a dozen paper towels and sequestered even now in the pocket of his windbreaker--he kept it from her, figuring she'd had enough of a jolt for one day. When she came home he held her for a long moment, murmuring the soft consolatory things she needed to hear, and then she went in to Jordan, who'd been sent home early from school with chills and a fever. It was a sad scene. Just before he left for the meeting, Delaney looked in on them, mother and son, huddled in Jordan's narrow bed with Osbert and Dame Edith, the cat, looking like survivors of a shipwreck adrift on a raft.
    Delaney edged in at the rear of the auditorium beside a couple he didn't recognize. The man was in his forties, but he had the hips and shoulders of a college athlete and looked as if he'd just come back from doing something heroic. The woman, six feet tall at least, was around Kyra's age--mid-thirties, he guessed--and she was dressed in black Lycra shorts and a USC jersey. She leaned into her husband like a sapling leaning into a rock ledge. Delaney couldn't help noticing the way the shorts cradled the woman's buttocks in a flawless illustration of form and function, but then he recalled the thing in his pocket and looked up into a sea of heads and the harsh white rinse of the fluorescent lights.
    Jack Jardine was up on the dais, along with Jack Cherrystone, the association's secretary, and Linda Portis, the treasurer. The regularly scheduled meeting, the one at which Delaney had stood to warn his neighbors of the dangers of feeding the local fauna, had adjourned past twelve after prolonged debate on the gate issue, and Jack had convened tonight's special session to put it to a vote. Under normal circumstances, Delaney would have stayed home and lost himself in John Muir or Edwin Way Teale, but these were not normal circumstances. Not that he was indifferent to the issue--the gate was an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even, and he'd spoken against it privately--but to his mind it was a fait accompli. His neighbors were overwhelmingly for it, whipped into a reactionary frenzy by the newspapers and the eyewitness news, and he didn't relish being one of the few dissenting voices, a crank like Rudy Hernandez, who liked to hear himself talk and would argue any side of any issue till everyone in the room was ready to rise up and throttle him. The gate was going up and there was nothing Delaney could do about it. But he was here. Uncomfortably here. Here because tonight he had a private agendum, an agendum that lay hard against his hip in the lower pocket of his windbreaker, and his throat went dry at the thought of it.
    Someone spoke to the question, but Delaney was so wound up in his thoughts he didn't register what was being said. T wh