The Tortilla Curtain

invisible. He might have been a shrunken bald-headed old man who's just been told his prescription can't be refilled.
    “Come on,” Delaney coaxed, “it's only a movie. Two hours. You can spare two hours, hon, can't you?”
    _“Please,”__ Jordan squealed.
    Kyra wouldn't hear of it. Her face was neutral, but Delaney could see that her mind was made up. “You know it's my second-busiest time of the year, all these buyers with children popping up out of nowhere to try and get in before school starts... You know it is. And Jordan, honey”--turning to her son--“you know how busy Mama is right now, don't you? Once the summer's over I'll take you to any movie you want--and you can bring a friend along too, anybody you want.”
    Delaney watched as she helped herself to the salad and squirted a little tube of no-fat dressing over her portion. “And we'll get treats too,” she was saying, “bonbons and Coke and any kind of candy you want to pick out.” And then, to Delaney: “What movie?”
    He was about to say that he hadn't really decided, but there were two foreign films in Santa Monica, one at eight-forty-five and one at nine-oh-five, but of course that would exclude Jordan, and he was wondering if they could get the Solomon girl in to babysit on such short notice, when he saw the transformation in Kyra's face. She was looking past him, out beyond the pool and the deep lush fescue lawn she'd insisted on, though Delaney thought it was wasteful, and her eyes suddenly locked. He saw surprise first, then recognition, shock, and finally horror. When he whipped round in his seat, he saw the coyote.
    It was inside the fence, pressed to the ground, a fearful calculation in its eyes as it stalked the grass to where Osbert lay sprawled in the shade of a potted palm, obliviously gnawing at the rawhide bone. Wings, he was thinking as he leapt from the chair with a shout, the damned thing must have wings to get over eight feet of chain link, and then, though he was in motion and though he wanted nothing more in the world than to prevent the sequel, he watched in absolute stupefaction as the animal swept across the grass in five quick strides, snatched the dog up by the back of the neck and hit the fence on the fly.
    He wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it. Despite his headlong rush, despite the quickness of his feet and the hard-honed sinewy strength of his legs, despite his rage and determination and the chorus of howls from his wife and son, he was impotent. The coyote scaled the fence, rung by rung, as if it were a ladder, and flew from the eight-foot bar at the top like a big dun wingless bird, and then it was gone, melted into the brush with its prey. And the fence? Delaney clung to it, just a heartbeat later--at the very spot--but he had to go all the way round the house and through, the side gate to get out.
    By then, of course--and no one had to explain this to Kyra, or even to Jordan--it was too late.

The Tortilla Curtain

4
    AND THEN HE GOT WORK FIVE DAYS IN A ROW. BRUSH clearance. Hard hot dirty work, breathing dust and little pale flecks of crushed weed till you choked, and the sun beating at the back of your neck like a scourge and the seeds of all those incorrigible desert plants like needles, like fisherman's hooks stabbing through your clothes and into your flesh every time you moved, and all you did was move. Three dollars and twenty-five cents an hour and he wasn't complaining. A _gabacho__ boss had pulled into the labor exchange lot in a truck with high wooden sides, picked Cándido and another man and pantomimed what he wanted. They got in the back of his truck, five mornings in a row, and he took them to a canyon with eight new houses in it and they cleared brush from the hillside and raked it up and loaded it into the truck. Each afternoon he paid them in cash and each morning he was there again, seven a. m., regular as clockwork. On the fifth day, when work was finished, he didn't show them any money, but with gestures and a few garbled Spanish phrases he let them know that he was short and would pay them when he came to pick them up in the morning. Cándido wondered about that, especially since they'd scraped the hillside bare, right down to the dirt, but then maybe there was another canyon and another hillside. There wasn't. At least not for Cándido. He never saw the man again.
    All right. He'd been cheated before--it wasn't the first time. He would survive it. But then he didn't get