What would happen to her? How would he find her? If they'd caught her already-at the labor exchange, walking along the road-she could be on a bus even now. And worse: if they hadn't caught her and she came back here, back to nothing, what then? She'd think he'd deserted her, run off from his responsibilities like a cock on the loose, and what love could survive that? They should have made a contingency plan, figured out a place to meet in Tijuana, a signal of some kind… but they hadn't. He listened to the voices and gritted his teeth.
“Hey, dude, check this out-”
“What?”
“Look at this shit.”
But wait a minute-these weren't the voices of INS agents, of the police, of grown men… no, there was something in the timbre, something harsh and callow in the way the words seemed to claw for air as if they were choking on them, something adolescent… Cándido stealthily pushed himself to a sitting position, pulled up his trousers and crept forward on hands and knees to a place where he could peer between the rocks without being detected. What he saw got him breathing again. Two figures, no uniforms. Baggy shorts, hi-top sneakers, big black billowing T-shirts, legs and arms pale in the slashing sun as they bent to his things, lifted them above their heads and flung them, one by one, into the creek. First the blanket, then the grill he'd salvaged from an abandoned refrigerator, then his rucksack with his comb and toothbrush and a change of clothes inside, and then América's things.
“Shit, man, one of them's a girl,” the bigger one said, holding up América's everyday dress, blue cotton washed so many times it was almost white. In that moment Cándido confirmed what his ears had suspected: these weren't men; they were boys, overgrown boys. The one holding the dress out before him was six feet at least, towering, all limbs and feet and with a head shaved to the ears and _gabacho-__colored hair gone long on top-_redheads,__ did they all have to be redheads?
“Fucking Beaners. Rip it up, man. Destroy it.”
The other one was shorter, big in the shoulders and chest, and with the clear glassy cat's eyes so many of the _gringos__ inherited from their mothers, the _gringas__ from Sweden and Holland and places like that. He had a mean pinched face, the face of an insect under the magnifying glass-bland at a distance, lethal up close. The bigger one tore the dress in two, balled the halves and flung them at the other one, and they hooted and capered up and down the streambed like apes that had dropped from the trees. Before they were done they even bent to the rocks of the fireplace Cándido had built and heaved them into the stream too.
Cándido waited a long while before emerging. They'd been gone half an hour at least, their shrieks and obscenities riding on up the walls of the canyon till finally they blended with the distant hum of the traffic and faded away. His stomach heaved on him again, and he had to crouch down with the pain of it, but the spasm passed. After a moment he got up and waded into the stream to try to recover his things, and it was then that he noticed their parting gift, a message emblazoned on the rocks in paint that dripped like blood. The letters were crude and the words in English, but there was no mistaking the meaning: ***
BEANERS DIE
5
DELANEY COULDN'T FEEL BAD FOR LONG, NOT UP here where the night hung close round him and the crickets thundered and the air off the Pacific crept up the hills to drive back the lingering heat of the day. There were even stars, a cluster here and there fighting through the wash of light pollution that turned the eastern and southern borders of the night yellow, as if a whole part of the world had gone rancid. To the north and east lay the San Fernando Valley, a single endless plane of parallel boulevards, houses, mini-malls and streetlights, and to the south lay the rest of Los Angeles, ad infinitum. There were no streetlights in Arroyo Blanco-that was one of the attractions, the rural feel, the sense that you were somehow separated from the city and wedded to the mountains-and Delaney never felt the lack of them. He didn't carry a flashlight either. He enjoyed making his way through the dark streets, his eyes adjusting to the shapes and shadows of the world as it really was, reveling in the way the night defined itself in the absence of artificial light and the ubiquitous blast of urban noise.
Though the walk had calmed him, he couldn't suppress a sudden pounding in his chest as he passed the Dagolian place-heedless people, slobs-and turned up Piñon Drive, conscious once again of the burden in the pocket of his windbreaker. His house sat at the end of Piñon, in a cul-de-sac that marked the last frontier of urban development, and the chirring of the crickets seemed louder here, the darkness more complete. As if to prove the point, a great horned owl began to hoot softly from the trees behind him. Someone's sprinklers went on with a hiss. High overhead, a jet climbing out of LAX cut a tear in the sky. Delaney had just begun to relax again when a car suddenly turned into the street from Robles Drive, high beams obliterating the night. He glanced over his shoulder, squinted into the light and kept on walking.
The car was moving, but barely. Its exhaust rumbled menacingly, all that horsepower held in check, and from behind the rolled-up windows came the bottom-heavy thump of rap music-no words, no instrument, no melody discernible, just a thump. Delaney kept walking, annoyed all over again. Why couldn't they pass by already and let the night close back over him? Why couldn't he have a minute's peace even in his own neighborhood?
The car pulled slowly alongside him, and he could see that it was some sort of American car, older, a big boat of a thing with mag wheels and an elaborate metal-flake paint job. The windows were smoked and he couldn't see inside. What did they want-directions? No face was visible. No one asked. He cursed under his breath, then picked up his pace, but the car seemed to hover there beside him, the speakers sucking up all available sound and then pumping it back out again, _ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.__ The car stayed even with him for what seemed an eternity, then it gradually accelerated, made the end of the street, wheeled round and rolled slowly back down the block again-_ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump-__and this time the lights, still on bright, glared directly into Delaney's eyes. He kept going and the car crept past him again and finally faded to a pair of taillights swinging back onto Robles. It wasn't till Delaney was inside, and the door locked behind him, that he thought to be afraid.
Who would be up here at this hour in a car like that? He thought of the solemn fat man at the meeting and his litany of woes, the bringer of bad tidings, the Cassandra of Arroyo Blanco. Was it burglars, then? Muggers? Gangbangers? Is that what they were? As he crossed the kitchen and surreptitiously slipped Sacheverell's foreleg into the freezer beneath a bag of frozen peas-he'd bury it tomorrow, after Kyra went off to work-he couldn't help thinking about the gate. If there was a gate that car wouldn't have been there, and who knew what he'd just escaped-a beating, robbery, murder? He poured himself a glass of orange juice, took a bite of the macaroni and cheese Jordan had left on his plate at dinner. And then he saw the light in the bedroom: Kyra was waiting up for him.
He felt a stirring in his groin. It was nearly eleven, and normally she was in bed by nine-thirty. That meant one thing: she was propped up against the pillows in one of the sheer silk teddies he'd bought her at Christmas for just such an occasion as this, reading Anaïs Nin's erotica or paging through one of the illustrated sex manuals she kept in a box under the bed-waiting, and eager. There was something about the little tragedies of life, the opening of the floodgates of emotion, that seemed to unleash her libido. For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs-and who was Delaney to argue? She'd been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gallbladder operation, and he could remember never wanting to leave the motel room they'd rented across the street from the hospital-it was the next best thing to a second honeymoon. Smaller sorrows aroused her too-having a neighbor list her house with a rival company, discovering a dent in the door of her Lexus, seeing Jordan laid low with the flu or swollen up with the stigmata of poison oak. Delaney could only imagine what the death of a dog would do to her.