The Tortilla Curtain

dusty clump of manzanita.
    Inside, they were voting. The windows cut holes in the fabric of the night, bright rectilinear slashes against the black backdrop of the mountains. He heard a murmur of voices, the odd scrape and shuffle of hominid activity. He was just about to push himself up and go home when he became aware of a figure hovering at the edge of the steps. “Who is it?” he said.
    “It's me, Mr. Mossbacher,” came the voice from the shadows, and then the figure moved into the light cast by the windows and Delaney saw that it was Jack Jardine's son, Jack Jr.
    Jack Jr. swayed like a eucalyptus in the wind, a marvel of tensile strength and newly acquired height, long-limbed, big-footed, with hands the size of baseball mitts. He was eighteen, with mud-brown eyes that gave no definition to the pupils, and he didn't look anything like his father. His hair was red, for one thing--not the pale wispy carrot-top Delaney had inherited from his Scots-Irish mother, but the deep shifting auburn you saw on the flanks of horses in an uncertain light. He wore it long on top in a frenzy of curls, and shaved to the bone from the crest of his ears down. “Hello, Jack,” Delaney said, and he could hear the weariness in his own voice.
    “They got one of your dogs, huh?”
    “Afraid so.” Delaney sighed. “That's what I was trying to tell them in there--you can't feed wild animals, that's about the long and short of it. But nobody wants to listen.”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt with the toe of one of his big leather hi-tops. In this light, the shoes seemed to grow out of the ground and meld with his body, trunks to anchor the length of him. There was a pause during which Delaney again contemplated pushing himself up and heading home, but he hesitated. Here was a sympathetic ear, an impressionable mind.
    “What they don't realize,” Delaney began, but before he could finish the thought, Jack Jr. cut him off.
    “By the way--the other night? When you came to see my father about the Mexican?”
    _The Mexican.__ Suddenly the man's face floateing aface flod up again to press at the edges of Delaney's consciousness, fill him up like some pregnant ghost with images of rotten teeth and stained mustaches. The Mexican. What with Sacheverell, he'd forgotten all about him. Now he remembered. The boy had been stretched out on the sofa like a recumbent monarch when Delaney had gone over to Jack's to confer with him about the accident, and Delaney had thought it odd that Jack didn't offer to take him into another room or out on the patio where they could talk in private. Jack took no notice of his son--he might just as well have been part of the furniture. He put an arm round Delaney's shoulder, made him a drink, listened to his story and assured him that he had nothing to worry about, nothing at all--if the man was legal, why would he refuse aid? And if he was illegal, what were the chances he'd find an attorney to represent him--and on what grounds? “But Jack,” Delaney had protested, “I didn't report the accident.” Jack had turned to him, calm and complicitous. “What accident?” he said, and he was the most reasonable man in the world, judge, jury and advocate all rolled into one. “You stopped and offered to help--the man refused assistance. What more could you do?”
    Indeed. But now Jack Jr. wanted to know, and the thought of it made Delaney's stomach sink. There were five people in the world who knew what had happened out on that road, and by luck of the draw Jack Jr. was one of them. “Yeah?” he said. “What of it?”
    “Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where it happened--you said they were camping and all.”
    “Out on the canyon road. Why?”
    “Oh, I don't know.” Jack Jr. kicked at something in the dirt. “I was just wondering. I see an awful lot of them down there lately. You said it was down below the lumberyard, right? Where that trail cuts off into the ravine?”
    For the life of him Delaney couldn't grasp what the boy was getting at--what was it to him? But he answered the question almost reflexively--he had nothing to hide. “Right,” he said. And then he got to his feet, murmured, “Well, I've got to be going,” and strode off into the darkness fingering the sorry lump of flesh in his jacket pocket.
    He made a mental note to put it in the freezer when he got home. It would begin to stink before long.

The Tortilla Curtain

4
    THE MORNING