The Tortilla Curtain

house came the distant breathless barking yelp of a coyote, answered almost immediately by another, somewhere off to the north.
    “The natives are getting restless,” Jack Cherrystone rumbled, and everyone laughed.
    “You think they want to come in and join us?” Bill Vogel said. He was a tall, wraithlike man bowed under the weight of a sickle nose. “ They probably get a little tired of raw rat or whatever they're eating out there--if! I was a coyote I'll bet a bit of this cheesecake would really hit the spot.”
    Jack Cherrystone, diminutive, his head too big for his frame, his eyes too big for his head, turned to Delaney. “I don't think Delaney would approve, Bill,” he said, his voice carving canyons beneath their feet. “Would you, Delaney?”
    Delaney reddened. How many of these men had been present at the meeting the night he'd made such an ass of himself? “No,” he said, and he tried to smile, “no, I'm afraid I wouldn't.”
    “What about that labor-exchange business, Dom?” Jack Jardine said out of nowhere, and the grinning faces turned from Delaney to him, and then to their host.
    Flood was standing now, dipping his chin delicately to take a sip of coffee from the cup he held over the saucer in his hand. He gave Jack a wink, moved across the floor to lay an arm over his shoulder, and addressed the room in general. “That little matter's been taken care of. And it was no big deal, believe me--just a matter of a few phone calls to the right people. Joe Nardone of the Topanga Homeowners' Association told me the people down there were good and sick of the whole business anyway--it was an experiment that didn't work.”
    “Good.” Jack Cherrystone was perched on a barstool, his legs barely reaching the bottom rung. “I mean, I'm as sympathetic as the next guy and I feel bad about it--and I can see where the Topanga property owners really wanted to do something for these people, but the whole thing was wrongheaded from the start.”
    “I'll say,” Bill Vogel put in with real vehemence, “the more you give them the more they want, and the more of them there are,” but the professional boom of Jack Cherrystone's voice absorbed and flattened his words, and Jack went on without missing a beat.
    “Why should we be providing jobs for these people when we're looking at a ten percent unemployment rate right here in California--and that's for _citizens.__ Furthermore, I'm willing to bet you'll see a big reduction in the crime rate once the thing anñce the th's closed down. And if that isn't enough of a reason, I'm sorry, but quite frankly I resent having to wade through them all every time I go to the post office. No offense, but it's beginning to look like fucking Guadalajara or something down there.”
    Dominick Flood was beaming. He was the host, the man of the house, the man of the hour. He shrugged his shoulders in deprecation--what he'd done was nothing, the least thing, a little favor, that was all, and they should all rest easy. “By this time next week,” he announced, “the labor exchange is history.”
    Delaney was thinking about that as Kyra came to the end of her dissertation on Cynthia Sinclair: Kyra had cleaned up the corner of Shoup and Ventura, and Dominick Flood had cleaned up the labor exchange. All right. But where were these people supposed to go? Back to Mexico? Delaney doubted it, knowing what he did about migratory animal species and how one population responded to being displaced by another. It made for war, for violence and killing, until one group had decimated the other and reestablished its claim to the prime hunting, breeding or grazing grounds. It was a sad fact, but true.
    He tried to shrug it off--the evening was perfect, his life on track again, his hikes as stimulating as ever and his powers of observation and description growing sharper as he relaxed into the environment. Why dwell on the negative, the paranoiac, the wall-builders and excluders? He was part of it now, complicit by his very presence here, and he might as well enjoy it. Looking up from his food, he said: “Want to take in a movie tonight?”
    “Yes!” Jordan shouted, raising his clenched fists in triumph. “Can we?”
    Kyra carefully set down her glass. “Paperwork,” she said. “I couldn't dream of it. Really, I couldn't.”
    Jordan emitted little batlike squeals of disappointment and protest. His features flattened, his eyebrows sank into his head. His hair was so light it was almost