The Tortilla Curtain Read Free Page A

tightly bound bundles of paper from the car to the nearest pile, when a shrill truncated whistle cut through the din of machinery, idling engines, slamming doors and trunks. Delaney looked up. A forklift had wheeled up beside him and the man driving it, his features inscrutable beneath the brim of his yellow hard hat, was gesturing to him. The man said something Delaney couldn’t quite catch. “What?” he called out over the noise of the place:
    A hot wind surged through the warehouse doors, flinging dust. Ads and supplements shot into the air, Parade, Holiday, Ten Great Escapes for the Weekend. Engines idled, men shouted, forklifts beeped and stuttered. The man looked down on him from his perch, the bright work-polished arms of the vehicle sagging beneath its load of newsprint, as if it were inadequate to the task, as if even sheet metal and steel couldn’t help but buckle under the weight of all that news.
    “Ponlos allá,” he said, pointing to the far corner of the building.
    Delaney stared up at him, his arms burdened with paper. “What?” he repeated.
    For a long moment, the man simply sat there, returning his gaze. Another car pulled in. A pigeon dove from the rafters and Delaney saw that there were dozens of them there, caught against the high open two-story drift of the roof. The man in the hard hat bent forward and spat carefully on the pavement. And then suddenly, without warning, the forklift lurched back, swung round, and vanished in the drifts of printed waste.
     
     
     
    “So what’d you hit—a deer? Coyote?”
    Delaney was in the showroom of the Acura dealership, a great ugly crenellated box of a building he’d always hated—it didn’t blend with the surrounding hills, didn’t begin to, not at all—but somehow, today, he felt strangely comforted by it. Driving up with his cracked lens and disarranged signal housing, he’d seen it as a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets. There were desks, telephones, the air was cool, the floors buffed to brilliance. And the cars themselves, hard and unassailable, so new they smelled of wax, rubber and plastic only, were healing presences arranged like heavy furniture throughout the cavern of the room. He was sitting on the edge of Kenny Grissom’s desk, and Kenny Grissom, the enthusiastic moon-faced thirty-five-year-old boy who’d sold him the car, was trying to look concerned.
    Delaney shrugged, already reaching for the phone. “A dog, I think it was. Might have been a coyote, but kind of big for a coyote. Must have been a dog. Sure it was. Yeah. A dog.”
    Why was he lying? Why did he keep thinking of shadowy black-and-white movies, men in creased hats leaning forward to light cigarettes, the hit-and-run driver tracked down over a few chips of paint—or a cracked headlight? Because he was covering himself, that’s why. Because he’d just left the poor son of a bitch there alongside the road, abandoned him, and because he’d been glad of it, relieved to buy him off with his twenty dollars’ blood money. And how did that square with his liberal-humanist ideals?
    “I hit a dog once,” Kenny Grissom offered, “when I was living out in Arizona? It was this big gray shaggy thing, a sheepdog, I guess it was. I was driving a pickup at the time, Ford half-ton with a four-sixty in it, and my girlfriend was with me. I never even seen the thing—one minute I’m cruising, and the next minute my girlfriend’s all in tears and there’s this thing that looks like an old rug in the middle of the road in back of me. I don’t know. So I back up and the dog like lurches to his feet, but he’s only got three legs and I thought like holy shit I blew his leg right off, but then Kim gets out and we kind of look and there’s no blood or anything, just a stump.”
    Kenny’s face was working, as if there were something trapped under