The Tortilla Curtain

neck like a collar; little blue numbers or letters, she couldn't tell which. “Apiece.”
    Cándido said nothing.
    “It's my aunt's place,” the man said, something nasal creeping into his voice, and America could hear the appeal there. “It's real clean. Fifteen bucks for the two of you.” There was a pause. Traffic crawled by. The air was heavy and brown, thick as smoke. “Hey,” he said, _“compadre,__ what's the problem? You need a place to stay, right? You can't let this pretty little thing sleep on the street. It's dangerous. It's no good. You need a place. I'll give you two nights for twenty bucks--I mean, it's no big deal. It's just around the corner.”
    America watched Cándido's face. She didn't dare enter into the negotiations, no matter how tired and fed up she was. That wasn't right. This was between the two men. They were feeling each other out, that was all, bargaining the way you bargained at the market. The baby moved then, a sharp kick deep inside her. She felt nauseated. She closed her eyes.
    When she opened them Cándido was on his feet. So was the other man. Their eyes told her nothing. “You wait here,” Cándido. said, and she watched him limp up the street with the stranger in the hairnet and baggy trousers, one block, two, the stranger a head taller, his stride quick and anxious. Then they turned the corner and they were gone.

The Tortilla Curtain

5
    PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK
    _As I sit here today at the close of summer, at the hour when the very earth crackles for the breath of moisture denied it through all these long months of preordained drought, I gaze round my study at the artifacts I've collected during my diurnal wanderings--the tail feathers of the Cooper's hawk, the trilobite preserved in stone since the time the ground beneath my feet was the bed of an ancient sea, the owl pellets, skeletons of mouse and kangaroo rat, the sloughed skin of the gopher snake--and my eye comes to rest finally on the specimen jar of coyote scat. There it is, on the shelf over my desk, wedged between the Mexican red-kneed tarantula and the pallid bat pickled in formalin, an innocuous jar of desiccated ropes of hair the casual observer might take for shed fur rather than the leavings of our cleverest and most resourceful large predator, the creature the Indians apotheosized as the Trickster. And why today do my eyes linger here and not on some more spectacular manifestation of nature's plethora of wonders? Suffice it to say that lately the coyote has been much on my mind.__
    _Here is an animal ideally suited to its environment, able to go without water for stretches at a time, deriving the lion's share of its moisture from its prey, and yet equally happy to take advantage of urban swimming pools and sprinkler systems. One coyote, who makes his living on the fringes of my community high in the hills above Topanga Creek and the San Fernando Valley, has learned to simply chew his way through the plastic irrigation pipes whenever he wants a drink. Once a week, sometimes even more frequently, the hapless maintenance man will be confronted by a geyser of water spewing out of the xerophytic ground cover the community has planted as a firebreak. When he comes to me bewildered with three gnawed lengths of PVC pipe, I loan him a pair of Bausch & Lomb 9x35 field glasses and instruct him to keep watch at dusk along the rear perimeter of the development. Sure enough, within the week he's caught the culprit in the act, and at my suggestion, he paints the entire length of the irrigation system with a noxious paste made of ground serrano chilies. And it works. At least until the unforgiving blast of the sun defuses the chilies' potency. And then, no doubt to the very day, the coyote will be back.__
    _Of course, a simpler solution (the one most homeowners resort to when one of these “brush wolves” invades the sanctum sanctorum of their fenced-in yard) is to call in the Los Angeles County Animal Control Department, which traps and euthanizes about 100 coyotes a year. This solution, to one who wishes fervently to live in harmony with the natural world, has always been anathema (after all, the coyote roamed these hills long before Homo sapiens made his first shaggy appearance on this continent), and yet, increasingly, this author has begun to feel that some sort of control must be applied if we continue to insist on encroaching on the coyote's territory with our relentless urban and suburban development. If