The Tortilla Curtain

that. And what Jim didn't tell you--or hasn't told you yet--is what happened to Sunny DiMandia.”
    There was a portentousness to Jack's tone that put Delaney off--he was manipulating the room the way he manipulated a courtroom, and Delaney resented him for it. Was this what Jack had brought him for--to get him on his team? Jim Shirley, who seemed to be the official trader in horror stories, was about to lay bare the Sunny DiMandia episode in all its lurid detail, when Delaney heard his own voice plunging into the gap: “So what do you mean, Jack? Isn't the gate enough? Next thing you'll want to wall the whole place in like a medieval city or something--”
    Delaney had expected laughter, a murmur or two of assent, anything to confirm the absurdity of the proposition, but he was met by silence. Everyone was watching him. He felt uneasy suddenly, all the spirit of camaraderie dissolved in that instant. Wall the place in. That was exactly what they intended to do. That was what they were here for. That was the purpose of the gathering.
    “We're all praying for Sunny,” Jim Shirley said then, “and the latest prognosis is for a full and speedy recovery, but the man--or men, the police aren't sure yet--who got in there last week did a lot of damage, and I don't mean just physical damage, because I don't know if a woman ever really recovers from something like this...” He paused to heave a deep alveolar sigh. A hand went to his face, moist and doughy, and he pressed his drink to his brow like a wet cloth. “You all know Sunny, don't you?” he said finally, lifting his head to survey the room. “Fabulous woman, one of the best. Sixty-two years old and as active in this community as anybody.” Another sigh, a rigid compression of the jowls. “She left the back door open, that was her mistake. Thinking it was safe up here--what an irony, huh?”
    “It was our first violent crime,” Jack put in. “The first, and let's make damn sure it's the last.”
    “Amen,” Jim Shirley said, and then he went into the grisly details, step by step, moment by moment, sparing them nothing.
    Delaney filtered him out. He was watching his host, who was curled up now in the corner of a pastel couch, his bare legs propped on the coffee table, idly scratching his calf. As they'd sat together earlier at the bar, Jack had given him an abbreviated explanation of the device on Flood's ankle. He was a client of Jack's, a good guy, ambitious, and his bank--there'd been three local branches and he personally oversaw them all--had got entangled in some unwise investments, as Jack put it. The device was on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service house-arrest program, and he would be wearing it, night and day, for the next three years. Delaney had been stunned. “Three years?” he'd whispered, glancing in awe at the black plastic manacle on Flood's ankle. “You mean he can't leave this house for three years?” Jack had nodded curtly. “Better than prison, wouldn't you say?”
    Now, as Jim Shirley droned on, practically slavering over the nasty little details of the assault on Sunny DiMandia (who'd begun to take on a mythical dimension since Delaney didn't know her from Queen Ida or Hillary Clinton), Delaney couldn't hewasñ couldn'tlp studying Dominick Flood out of the corner of his eye. Three years without a walk in the woods, dinner out, even a stroll down the supermarket aisles: it was unthinkable. And yet there it was: if he left the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot radius they'd given him, a buzzer would go off and the police would come and lock him away in a place with a lot fewer amenities than this one. No wonder he liked to read about the great outdoors--he wasn't going to see anything beyond the backyard fence for a long time to come.
    The conversation had focused for a while on Sunny DiMandia--expressions of concern, outrage, fear and loathing--and now the maid reappeared with coffee and a tray of cakes and brioches. The distraction was welcome, and as the eleven men settled down to the quotidian tasks of stirring the hot liquid, measuring out sugar and Sweet'n Low, plying knife and fork, chewing, swallowing, belching softly to themselves, a peace fell over the room, dispelling the news of rapes and break-ins and the general decline and disintegration of the world around them. Someone mentioned baseball and the conversation chased off after the subject with a sense of genuine relief. From the hills behind the