The Tortilla Curtain

out up and down the block, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against the walls, so I said to Mike, 'We've got to do something,' and he got on the phone to Sid Wasserman and I don't know what Wasserman did but that streetcorner is deserted now, I mean deserted.”
    Delaney didn't know what to say. He was wrestling with his feelings, trying to reconcile the theoretical and the actual. Those people had every right to gather on that streetcorner--it was their inalienable right, guaranteed by the Constitution. But whose constitution--Mexico's? Did Mexico even have a constitution? But that was cynical too and he corrected himself: he was assuming they were illegals, but even illegals had rights under the Constitution, and what if they were legal, citizens of the U. S. A., what then?
    “I mean,” Kyra was saying, lifting a morsel of tofu and oyster mushroom to her lips, “I'm not proud of it or anything--and I know how you feel and I agree that everybody's got a right to work and have a decent standard of living, but there's just so many of them, they've overwhelmed us, the schools, welfare, the prisons and now the streets...” She chewed thoughtfully. Took a sip of water. “Oh, by the way, did I tell you Cynthia Sinclair got engaged? At the office?” She laughed, a little trill, and set her fork down. “I don't know what made me think of it--prisons?” She laughed again and Delaney couldn't ablñey couldnhelp joining in. “Sure. Prisons. That was it.”
    And then she began to fill him in on Cynthia Sinclair and her fiancé and all the small details of her education, work habits and aspirations, but Delaney wasn't listening. What she'd said about cleaning up the streetcorner had struck a chord, and it brought him back to the meeting he'd attended with Jack two nights ago. Or it wasn't a meeting actually, but a social gathering--“A few guys getting together for a drink,” as Jack put it.
    Jack had come in the door just after seven, in a pair of shorts--white, and perfectly pressed, of course--and an Izod shirt, and he and Delaney walked down the block and up two streets to Via Mariposa in the golden glow of evening. Jack hadn't told him where they were going--“Just over to a neighbor's house, a friend, a guy I've been wanting you to meet”--and as they strolled past the familiar sprawling Spanish-style homes, the walk took on the aspect of an adventure for Delaney. He and Jack were talking about everything under the sun--the Dodgers, lawn care, the situation in South Africa, the great horned owl that had taken a kitten off the Corbissons' roof--and yet Delaney couldn't help wondering what the whole thing was about. What friend? What neighbor? While he barely knew half the people-in the community, he was fairly confident he knew everybody in Jack's circle, the ones in Arroyo Blanco, anyway.
    But then they came to a house at the very end of Via Mariposa, where the road gave out and the hills rose in a wedge above the roof-line, and Delaney realized he had no idea who lived here. He'd been by the place a hundred times, walking the dog, taking the air, and had never really paid much attention to it one way or the other: it was just a house. Same model as his own place, only the garage was reversed, and instead of Rancho White with Navajo trim, the owner had reversed the colors too, going with the lighter shade for the trim and the darker for the stucco. The landscaping was unremarkable, no different from any of the other places on the block: two tongues of lawn on either side of a crushed stone path, shrubs that weren't as drought-tolerant as they should be, a flagpole draped with a limp flag and a single fat starling perched atop it like a clot of something wiped on a sleeve.
    “Whose place is this?” he asked Jack as they came up the walk.
    “Dominick Flood's.”
    Delaney shot him a glance. “Don't think I know him.”
    “You should,” Jack said over his shoulder, and that was all.
    A maid showed them in. She was small, neat, with an untraceable accent and a tight black uniform with white trim and a little white apron Delaney found excessive: who would dress a servant up like somebody's idea of a servant, like something out of a movie? What was the point? They followed her down a corridor of genuine hand-troweled plaster, spare and bright, past a pair of rooms furnished in a Southwestern motif, Navajo blankets on the walls, heavy bleached-pine furniture, big clay pots of cactus and succulents, floors of