The Tortilla Curtain

worst, the bleeding flesh and hammered bone, sure now that the man must have been trapped under the car. Stooping, palm flat, one knee in the dirt, he forced himself to look. Crescendo and then release: nothing there but dust and more dust.
    The license plate--PILGRIM--caught the sun as he rose and clapped the grit from his hands, and he looked to the bushes yet again. “Hello!” he cried suddenly over the noise of the cars flashing by in either direction. “Is anybody there? Are you okay?”
    He turned slowly round, once, twice, as if he'd forgotten something--a set of keys, his glasses, his wallet--then circled the car again. How could no one have seen what had happened? How could no one have stopped to help, bear witness, gape, jeer--anything? A hundred people must have passed by in the last five minutes and yet he might as well have been lost in the Great Painted Desert for all the good it did him. He looked off up the road to the bend by the lumberyard and the grocery beyond it, and saw the distant figure of a man climbing into a parked car, the hard hot light exploding round him. And then, fighting down the urge to run, to heave himself into the driver's seat and burn up the tires, to leave the idiot to his fate and deny everything--the date, the time, the place, his own identity and the sun in the sky--Detaney turned back to the bushes. “Hello?” he called again.
    Nothing. The cars tore past. The sun beat at his shouldng A his shoers, his neck, the back of his head.
    To the left, across the road, was a wall of rock; to the right, the canyon fell off to the rusty sandstone bed of Topanga Creek, hundreds of feet below. Delaney could see nothing but brush and treetops, but he knew now where his man was--down there, down in the scrub oak and manzanita. The high-resin-compound bumper of the Acura had launched that sad bundle of bone and gristle over the side of the canyon like a Ping-Pong ball shot out of a cannon, and what chance was there to survive that? He felt sick suddenly, his brain mobbed with images from the eyewitness news--shootings, stabbings, auto wrecks, the unending parade of victims served up afresh each day--and something hot and sour rose in his throat. Why him? Why did this have to happen to him?
    He was about to give it up and jog to the lumberyard for help, for the police, an ambulance--they'd know what to do--when a glint of light caught his eye through the scrim of brush. He staggered forward blindly, stupidly, like a fish to a lure--he wanted to do the right thing, wanted to help, he did. But almost as quickly, he caught himself. This glint wasn't what he'd expected--no coin or crucifix, no belt buckle, key chain, medal or steel-toed boot wrenched from the victim's foot--just a shopping cart, pocked with rust and concealed in the bushes beside a rough trail that plunged steeply down the hillside, vanishing round a right-angle bend no more than twenty feet away.
    Delaney called out again. Cupped his hands and shouted. And then he straightened up, wary suddenly, catlike and alert. At five-foot-nine and a hundred and sixty-five pounds, he was compact, heavy in the shoulders and with a natural hunch that made him look as if he were perpetually in danger of pitching forward on his face, but he was in good shape and ready for anything. What startled him to alertness was the sudden certainty that the whole thing had been staged--he'd read about this sort of operation in the Metro section, gangs faking accidents and then preying on the unsuspecting, law-abiding, compliant and fully insured motorist... But then where was the gang? Down the path? Huddled round the bend waiting for him to take that first fatal step off the shoulder and out of sight of the road?
    He might have gone on speculating for the rest of the afternoon, the vanishing victim a case for _Unsolved Mysteries__ or the Home Video Network, if he hadn't become aware of the faintest murmur from the clump of vegetation to his immediate right. But it was more than a murmur--it was a deep aching guttural moan that made something catch in his throat, an expression of the most primitive and elemental experience we know: pain. Delaney's gaze jumped from the shopping cart to the path and then to the bush at his right, and there he was, the man with the red-flecked eyes and graying mustache, the daredevil, the suicide, the jack-in-the-box who'd popped up in front of his bumper and ruined his afternoon. The man was on his back, limbs