The Tortilla Curtain

aing saidhere would be discussion, and then a vote, and for the rest of his days he'd have to feel like a criminal driving into his own community, excusing himself to some jerk in a crypto-fascist uniform, making special arrangements every time a friend visited or a package needed to be delivered. He thought of the development he'd grown up in, the fenceless expanse of lawns, the shared space, the deep lush marshy woods where he'd first discovered ferns, frogs, garter snakes, the whole shining envelope of creation. There was nothing like that anymore. Now there were fences. Now there were gates.
    “The chair recognizes Doris Obst,” Jack Jardine said, his voice riding out over the currents of the room as if he were singing, as if everyone else spoke prose and he alone spoke poetry.
    The woman who rose from a seat in the left-front of the auditorium was of indeterminate age. Her movements were brisk and the dress clung to the shape of her as if it had been painted on, yet her hair was gray and her skin the dead bleached merciless white of the bond paper Delaney used for business letters. Delaney had never laid eyes on her before, and the realization, coupled with the fact that he didn't seem to recognize any of the people he was standing among, produced a faint uneasy stirring of guilt. He should be more rigorous about attending these meetings, he told himself, he really should.
    “... the cost factor,” Doris Obst was saying in a brooding, almost masculine tenor, “because I'm sure there isn't a person in this room that doesn't feel our fees are already astronomical, and I'm just wondering if the board's cost analysis is accurate, or if we're going to be hit with special assessments down the line...”
    “Jim Shirley,” Jack sang, and Doris Obst sank into her seat even as a man rose in the rear, as if they were keys of the same instrument. To his consternation, Delaney didn't recognize this man either.
    “What about the break-ins?” Jim Shirley demanded, an angry tug to his voice. There was an answering murmur from the crowd, cries of umbrage and assent. Jim Shirley stood tall, a big bearded man in his fifties who looked as if he'd been inflated with a bicycle pump. “Right on my block--Via Dichosa?--there've been two houses hit in the last month alone. The Caseys lost something like fifty thousand dollars' worth of Oriental rugs while they were away in Europe, and their home entertainment center too--not to mention their brand-new Nissan pickup. I don't know how many of you sitting here tonight are familiar with the modus operandi, but what the thieves do is typically they pry open the garage door--there's always a little give in these automatic openers--then they take their sweet time, load your valuables into your own car and then drive off as if they were entitled to it. At the Caseys' they even had the gall to broil half a dozen lobster tails from the freezer and wash them down with a couple bottles of Perrier-Jouet.”
    A buzz went through the crowd, thick with ferment and anger. Even Delaney felt himself momentarily distracted from the bloody evidence in his pocket. Crime? Up here? Wasn't that what they'd come here to escape? Wasn't that the point of the place? All of a sudden, the gate didn't sound like such a bad idea.
    Delaney was startled when the man beside him--the athlete--thrust up his arm and began to speak even before Jack Jardine had a chance to officially recognize him. “I can't believe what I'm hearing,” the man said, and his long-legged wife nuzzled closer to him, her eyes shining with pride and moral authority. “If we'd wanted a gated community we would have moved to Hidden Hills or Westlake, but we didn't. We wanted an open community, freedom to come and go--and not just for those of us privileged enough to be able to live het a a to livere, but for anyone--any citizen--rich or poor. I don't know, but I cut my teeth on the sixties, and it goes against my grain to live in a community that closes its streets to somebody just because they don't have as fancy a car as mine or as big a house. I mean, what's next--wrist bracelets for I. D.? Metal detectors?”
    Jack Cherrystone made an impatient gesture at the president's elbow, and Jack recognized him with a nod. “Who are we kidding here?” he demanded in a voice that thundered through the speakers like the voice of God on High. Jack Cherrystone was a little man, barely five and a half feet tall, but he had the world's biggest