It was watching him even now, he knew it, watching him out of slit wary eyes as he jerked back and forth, frantically scanning the mute clutter of leaf, branch and thorn, and the thought infuriated him. He shouted again, hoping to flush it out. But the coyote was too smart for him. Ears pinned back, jaws and forepaws stifling its prey, it could lie there, absolutely motionless, for hours. “Osbert!” he called out suddenly, and his voice trailed off into a hopeless bleat. “Sacheverell!”
The poor dog. It couldn't have defended itself from a rabbit. Delaney stood on his toes, strained his neck, poked angrily through the nearest bush. Long low shafts of sunlight fired the leaves in an indifferent display, as they did every morning, and he looked into the illuminated depths of that bush and felt desolate suddenly, empty, cored out with loss and helplessness.
“Osbert!” The sound seemed to erupt from him, as if he couldn't control his vocal cords. “Here, boy! Come!” Then he shouted Sacheverell's name, over and over, but there was no answer except for a distant cry from Kyra, who seemed to be way off to his left now.
All at once he wanted to smash something, tear the bushes out of the ground by their roots. This didn't have to happen. It didn't. If it wasn't for those idiots leaving food out for the coyotes as if they were nothing more than sheep with bushy tails and eyeteeth… and he'd warned them, time and again. You can't be heedless of your environment. You can't. Just last week he'd found half a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken out back of the Dagolian place-waxy red-and-white-striped cardboard with a portrait of the grinning chicken-killer himself smiling large-and he'd stood up at the bimonthly meeting of the property owners' association to say something about it. They wouldn't even listen. Coyotes, gophers, yellow jackets, rattlesnakes even-they were a pain in the ass, sure, but nature was the least of their problems. It was humans they were worried about. The Salvadorans, the Mexicans, the blacks, the gangbangers and taggers and carjackers they read about in the Metro section over their bran toast and coffee. That's why they'd abandoned the flatlands of the Valley and the hills of the Westside to live up here, outside the city limits, in the midst of all this scenic splendor.
Coyotes? Coyotes were quaint. Little demi-dogs out there howling at the sunset, another amenity like the oaks, the chaparral and the views. No, all Delaney's neighbors could talk about, back and forth and on and on as if it were the key to all existence, was gates. A gate, specifically. To be erected at the main entrance and manned by a twenty-four-hour guard to keep out those very gangbangers, taggers and carjackers they'd come here to escape. Sure. And now poor Osbert-or Sacheverell-was nothing more than breakfast.
The fools. The idiots.
Delaney picked up a stick and began to beat methodically at the bushes.
The Arroyo Blanco Community Center was located on a knoll overlooking Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the private road, Arroyo Blanco Drive, that snaked off it and wound its way through the oaks and into the grid of streets that comprised the subdivision. It was a single-story white stucco building with an, orange tile roof, in the Spanish Mission style, and it featured a kitchen, wet bar, stage, P. A. system and seating for two hundred. Thre, ahundred. e hall was full-standing room only-by the time Delaney arrived. He'd been delayed because Kyra had been late getting home from work, and since it was the maid's day off, there'd been no one to watch Jordan.
Kyra was in a state. She'd come in the door looking like a refugee, her eyes reddened and a tissue pinned to the tip of her reddened nose, grieving for Sacheverell (Sacheverell it was: she'd been able to identify the surviving dog as Osbert by means of an indisputable mole clinging to his underlip). For an hour or more that morning she'd helped Delaney beat the bushes, frantic, tearful, her breath coming in ragged gasps-she'd had those dogs forever, long before she'd met Delaney, before Jordan was born even-but finally, reluctantly, she'd given it up and gone off to work, where she was already late for her ten o'clock. She'd changed her clothes, reapplied her makeup, comforted Jordan as best she could and dropped him off at school, leaving Delaney with the injunction to find the dog at all cost. Every half hour throughout the day she called him for news, and though he had news by noon-grim, definitive news, news wrapped up in half a dozen paper towels and sequestered even now in the pocket of his windbreaker-he kept it from her, figuring she'd had enough of a jolt for one day. When she came home he held her for a long moment, murmuring the soft consolatory things she needed to hear, and then she went in to Jordan, who'd been sent home early from school with chills and a fever. It was a sad scene. Just before he left for the meeting, Delaney looked in on them, mother and son, huddled in Jordan's narrow bed with Osbert and Dame Edith, the cat, looking like survivors of a shipwreck adrift on a raft.
Delaney edged in at the rear of the auditorium beside a couple he didn't recognize. The man was in his forties, but he had the hips and shoulders of a college athlete and looked as if he'd just come back from doing something heroic. The woman, six feet tall at least, was around Kyra's age-mid-thirties, he guessed-and she was dressed in black Lycra shorts and a USC jersey. She leaned into her husband like a sapling leaning into a rock ledge. Delaney couldn't help noticing the way the shorts cradled the woman's buttocks in a flawless illustration of form and function, but then he recalled the thing in his pocket and looked up into a sea of heads and the harsh white rinse of the fluorescent lights.
Jack Jardine was up on the dais, along with Jack Cherrystone, the association's secretary, and Linda Portis, the treasurer. The regularly scheduled meeting, the one at which Delaney had stood to warn his neighbors of the dangers of feeding the local fauna, had adjourned past twelve after prolonged debate on the gate issue, and Jack had convened tonight's special session to put it to a vote. Under normal circumstances, Delaney would have stayed home and lost himself in John Muir or Edwin Way Teale, but these were not normal circumstances. Not that he was indifferent to the issue-the gate was an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even, and he'd spoken against it privately-but to his mind it was a fait accompli. His neighbors were overwhelmingly for it, whipped into a reactionary frenzy by the newspapers and the eyewitness news, and he didn't relish being one of the few dissenting voices, a crank like Rudy Hernandez, who liked to hear himself talk and would argue any side of any issue till everyone in the room was ready to rise up and throttle him. The gate was going up and there was nothing Delaney could do about it. But he was here. Uncomfortably here. Here because tonight he had a private agendum, an agendum that lay hard against his hip in the lower pocket of his windbreaker, and his throat went dry at the thought of it.
Someone spoke to the question, but Delaney was so wound up in his thoughts he didn't register what was being said. T wh aing saidhere would be discussion, and then a vote, and for the rest of his days he'd have to feel like a criminal driving into his own community, excusing himself to some jerk in a crypto-fascist uniform, making special arrangements every time a friend visited or a package needed to be delivered. He thought of the development he'd grown up in, the fenceless expanse of lawns, the shared space, the deep lush marshy woods where he'd first discovered ferns, frogs, garter snakes, the whole shining envelope of creation. There was nothing like that anymore. Now there were fences. Now there were gates.