The Tortilla Curtain

at her, sought out her eyes and smiled. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, his hair long and frozen to his scalp with oil, pants neatly pressed, shirt buttoned up to the collar though it must have been ninety-five degrees or more. “You want work, Miss?” he said.
    “No,” she said, “no thank you,” and stepped around him.
    “Cheap,” he said at her back, and then he was right there again at her elbow, like something that had stuck to the fabric of her jacket. “Pleese,” he said. “I do anything.” And then he added, again, as she inserted the key in the door of the car, swung it open and escaped into the cool familiar embrace of the leather interior: “Cheap.”
    The Kaufmans were pleased, though she was a few minutes late, and the fence people knew exactly what they were doing. She pulled into her driveway and Al Lopez's truck was there, in Delaney's spot. She'd worked with Al before, through the office, hiring him to do everything from replacing cracked kitchen tiles to plumbing and electrical and patching stucco on the houses she had in escrow. Anytime there was a dispute, she could bring Al in and do a quick cosmetic job on whatever the buyers got hung up on. He'd seemed a natural for the fence, especially since she wouldn't consider going back to the idiot who'd put up the original fence and assured her that nothing could get over six feet of chain link.
    Since she still had time before her four o'clock, she took Osbert out on the leash for ten minutes and chatted with Al while his men poured concrete and set new eight-foot posts into the holes where the old posts had stood. He'd told her at the outset that he could simply extend the existing poles at half the price, but she didn't want anything tacky-looking, and above all, she told him, she wanted strength and impregnability. “I don't want anything getting in here ever again,” she'd said.
    Now, as she stood there with Osbert, making small talk about traffic, smog, the heat and the housing market, Al said casually, almost slyly, “Of course, there's not much you can do about snakes--”
    Snakes. An image rose up in her head, cold and primordial, the coil and shuffle, the wicked glittering reptilian eyes: she hated snakes. Worse than coyotes, worse than anything. She'd never given a thought to coyotes when they moved in--it was Delaney who'd insisted on the fence--but no one had to warn her about the snakes. Selda Cherrystone had discovered one coiled up in her dryer and its mate beneath the washing machine, and half the people on the block had found rattlesnakes in their garages at one time or another. “Can't you run something along the base of the fence?” she asked, thinking of a miniature trap or net or maybe a weak electric current.
    Al looked away, his eyes squinted into the globes of his cheeks. He was heavyset, in his fifties, with white hair and skin the color and texture of an old medicine ball. “We've got a product,” he said, still fixing his gaze on the distant tree-studded crotch of the canyon, and then he turned back to her. “Plastic strips, a real tight weave in the mesh of' the fence--we go about three feet and down under the ground maybe six inches. That takes care of your snakes.”
    “How much?” Kyra asked, gazing off into the distance herself now.
    “Two-fifty.”
    “Two hundred,” she said, and it was a reflex.
    “Two-twenty-five.”
    “I don't know, Al,” she said, “we've never had a snake here yet.”
    He bent strategically to stroke Osbert's ears. “Rattlers,” he sighed, “they get in under the fence, nothing to stop 'em really, and they bite a little dog like this. I've seen it happen. Up here especially.” He straightened up and forced out a deep moaning trail of breath with the effort. “I'll give it to you for two-ten, just say the word.”
    She nodded yes and he shouted something in Spanish to one of the men bent over the cement mixer, and that was when she noticed him for the first time, the man with the limp and the graying mustache, his face bruised and swollen like bad fruit. He went right by her on his way to the truck and she sucked in her breath as if she'd burned herself. This was the man, the very man--it had to be. She watched him slide the long plastic strips from the back of the truck and balance them on one shoulder, and she felt a space open up inside her, a great sad empty space that made her feel as if she'd given birth to something weak and unformed. And as he