The Tortilla Curtain

after class and she told him why she never hiked alone, never, not ever again.
    Up until the year before she'd been pretty blithe about it. The streets might have been unsafe, particularly at night, but the chaparral, the woods, the trails no one knew? She had a passion for hiking, for solitary rambles, for getting close enough to feel the massive shifting heartbeat of the world. She spent two months on the Appalachian Trail after graduating from high school, and she'd been over most of the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mexican border to San Francisco. One afternoon in May she went out for a short hike up one of the feeder streams of the Big Tujunga Creek, in the San Gabriels. She'd worked past two, waitressing for the lunch crowd at a grill in Pasadena, but she thought she'd get two or maybe three hours in before dinner. Less than a mile up there was a pool she knew at the base of a cliff that rose to a thin spray of water--she'd never been beyond the pool and planned to climb round the cliff and follow the stream to its source.
    They were Mexicans, she thought. Or maybe Armenians. They spoke English. Young guys in baggy pants and shiny black boots. She surprised them at the pool, the light faded to gray, a faint chill in the air, their eyes glazed with the beer and the endless bullshit, stories about women and cars and drugs. There was an uncomfortable moment, all five of them drilling her with looks that automatically appraised the shape of her beneath the loose sweatshirt and jeans and calculated the distance to the road, how far a scream would carry. She was working her way around the cliff, unsteady on the loose rock, her back to them, when she felt the grip of the first hand, right there--she showed him--right there on her calf.
    Delaney held his breath. The voices had stopped abruptly, replaced by a brooding silence that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity before they started up again, lazy now, contented, the buzz of a pair of flies settling down on the sidewalk. And then, through some auditory quirk of the canyon walls, the voices suddenly crystallized and every word came to him true and distinct. It took him a moment, and then he understood: Spanish, they were talking Spanish.
    He was already angry with himself, angry even before he turned away and tried to slink out of the reeds like a voyeur, angry before the choice was made. The hike was over, the day ruined. There was no way he was just going to waltz out of the bushes and surprise these people, whoever they were, and the defile was too narrow to allow him to go round them undetected. He lifted one foot from the mud and then the other, parting the reeds with the delicacy of a man tucking a blanket under the chin of a sleeping child. The sound of the creek, which to this point had been a whisper, rose to a roar, and it seemed as if every bird in the canyon was suddenly screaming. He looked up into the face of a tall raw-boned Latino with eyes like sinkholes and a San Diego Padres cap reversed on his head.
    The man was perched on a boulder just behind and above Delaney, no more than twenty feet away, and how he'd got there or whether he'd been there all along, Delaney had no idea. He wore a pair of tight new blue jeans tucked into the tops of his scuffed workboots, and he sat hunched against his knees, prying a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket with exaggerated care. He attempted a smile, spreading his lips in a show of bravado, but Delaney could see that the man was flustered, as confounded by Delaney's sudden appearance as Delaney was by his. “Hey, _amigo,__ how's it going?” he said in a voice that didn't seem to fit him, a voice that was almost feminine but for the rasp of it. His English was flat and graceless.
    Delaney barely nodded. He didn't return the smile and he didn't reply. He would have moved on right then, marching back to his car without a word, but something tugged at his pack and he saw that one of the reeds had caught in his shoulder strap. He bent to release it, his heart pounding, and the man on the rock sprawled out his legs as if he were sinking into a sofa, folded the stick of gum into his mouth and casually flicked the wrapper into the stream. “Hiking, huh?” the man said, and he was smiling still, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Me,” he said, “I'm hiking too. Me and my friend.” He jerked his head to indicate the friend, who appeared behind Delaney now, just beyond the reeds.
    The friend regarded