The Tortilla Curtain

Monica Mountains that didn't have its crushed beer cans, its carpet of glass, its candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and it was people like this Mexican or whatever he was who were responsible, thoughtless people, stupid people, people who wanted to turn the whole world into a garbage dump, a little Tijuana...
    Delaney was seething, ready to write his congressman, call the sheriff, anything--but then he checked himself. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Who knew who this man was or what he was doing? Just because he spoke Spanish didn't make him a criminal. Maybe he was a picnicker, a bird-watcher, a fisherman; maybe he was some naturalist from South of the Border studying the gnatcatcher or the canyon wren...
    Yeah, sure. And Delaney was the King of Siam.
    When he came back to himself, he saw that he'd managed to reenter the car, drive past the glass and aluminum receptacles and into the enormous littered warehouse with its mountains of cardboard and paper and the dark intense men scrabbling through the drifts of yesterday's news--men, he saw with a shock of recognition, who were exactly like the jack-in-the-box on the canyon road, right down to the twin pits of their eyes and the harsh black strokes of their mustaches. They were even wearing the same khaki workshirts and sacklike trousers. He'd been in Los Angeles nearly two years now, and he'd never really thought about it before, but they were everywhere, these men, ubiquitous, silently going about their business, whether it be mopping up the floors at McDonald's, inverting trash cans in the alley out back of Emilio's or moving purposively behind the rakes and blowers that combed the pristine lawns of Arroyo Blanco Estates twice a week. Where had they all come from? What did they want? And why did they have to throw themselves under the wheels' of his car?
    He had the back door open and was shifting his tightly bound bundles of paper from the car to the nearest pile, when a shrill truncated whistle cut through the din of machinery, idling engines, slamming doors and trunks. Delaney looked up. A forklift had wheeled up beside him and the man driving it, his features inscrutable beneath the brim of his yellow hard hat, was gesturing to him. The man said something Delaney couldn't quite catch. “What?” he called out over the noise of the place: A hot wind surged through the warehouse doors, flinging dust. Ads and supplements shot into the air, _Parade, Holiday, Ten Great Escapes for the Weekend.__ Engines idled, men shouted, forklifts beeped and stuttered. The man looked down on him from his perch, the bright work-polished arms of the vehicle sagging beneath its load of newsprint, as if it were inadequate to the task, as if even sheet metal and steel couldn't help but buckle under the weight of all that news.
    _“Ponlos allá,”__ he said, pointing to the far corner of the building.
    Delaney stared up at him, his arms burdened with paper. “What?” he repeated.
    For a long moment, the man simply sat there, returning his gaze. Another car pulled in. A pigeon dove from the rafters and Delaney saw that there were dozens of them there, caught against the high open two-story drift of the roof. The man in the hard hat bent forward and spat carefully on the pavement. And then suddenly, without warning, the forklift lurched back, swung round, and vanished in the drifts of printed waste.
    “So what'd you hit--a deer? Coyote?”
    Delaney was in the showroom of the Acura dealership, a great ugly crenellated box of a building he'd always hated--it didn't blend with the surrounding hills, didn't begin to, not at all--but somehow, today, he felt strangely comforted by it. Driving up with his cracked lens and disarranged signal housing, he'd seen it as a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets. There were desks, telephones, the air was cool, the floors buffed to brilliance. And the cars themselves, hard and unassailable, so new they smelled of wax, rubber and plastic only, were healing presences arranged like heavy furniture throughout the cavern of the room. He was sitting on the edge of Kenny Grissom's desk, and Kenny Grissom, the enthusiastic moon-faced thirty-five-year-old boy who'd sold him the car, was trying to look concerned.
    Delaney shrugged, already reaching for the phone. “A dog, I think it was. Might have been a coyote, but