He'd wanted to shout out an indictment-“That's him! That's the one!”-but something held him back. What, exactly, he didn't know. Misplaced sympathy? Guilt? Pity? It was a wasted opportunity because Jack was there to see for himself how blameless Delaney was-the man was a nuisance, a bum, a panhandler. If anything, Delaney was the victim, his twenty dollars separated from him through a kind of extortion, an emotional sleight of hand that preyed on his good nature and fellow feeling. He'd read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn't this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in front of a car for the thin hope of twenty bucks?
Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he'd turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty. Jordan wasn't hungry. Kyra was dreamy and distant. Osbert mourned his lost sibling, crouching behind the sofa for the better part of the evening, and even the cat lapped halfheartedly at a can of Tuna & Liver Flavor Complete Feline Dinner. A gloom seemed to hang over the household, and they turned in early.
But now it was another day and the house was quiet and Delaney had nothing to occupy him but nature and the words to contain it, yet there he sat, staring into the screen. After several false starts, he poked halfheartedly through his natural-history collection and discovered that the starlings he saw in the McDonald's lot were descendants of a flock released in Central Park a hundred years ago by an amateur ornithologist and Shakespeare buff who felt that all the birds mentioned in the Bard's works should roost in North America, and that the snails ravaging his garden and flowerbeds were imported by a French chef who'd envisioned them roasting in their own shells with a sauce of garlic and butter. It was rich material, fascinating in its way-how could people be so blind? — and he could feel the germ of it growing in him, but ultimately he was too unsettled to work. Though it was barely half-past ten, he shut down the computer and went out early for his afternoon hike.
There was a year-round stream he'd been meaning to explore up off the main canyon, a sharp brushy ascent cut into the face of the rock, and the extra two and a half hours would enable him to do it. It would require parking along the canyon road, in an area of heavy morning and afternoon traffic and narrow shoulders, hiking down into the main canyon and following the creekbed until he hit the smaller, unnamed canyon, and finally making his way up it. The prospect invigorated him. He pulled on his shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots, and he added two cream-cheese-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches to the _bota__ bag of water, snakebite kit, sunblock, map, compass, windbreaker and binoculars he always kept in his blue nylon daypack and unfailingly carried with him, no matter how short the hike. He didn't leave a note. He figured he'd be back in plenty of time to pick up Jordan from the summer activities program at the elementary school, after which he'd fix the boy a snack, and then when Kyra got home they'd go out to Emilio's. He just didn't feel like cooking. Not after last night.
It was clear and dry, the last day of June, the coastal fog that had lingered through the spring giving way to the high arching skies of summer. Delaney enjoyed the drive. The traffic was minimal at this hour and the Acura clung effortlessly to the road as he looped through the canyon, cutting cleanly through one curve only to accelerate into the next. He passed Gitello's, the lumberyard, the place where he'd hit the Mexican, and he didn't think twice about it-he was free of his desk and heading out into the wild and he felt blessed and unconquerable. He rolled down the window to catch the breeze in his face.
From here he could see where the previous year's firestorm had cut the canyon in two, the naked bones of the trees and bushes painted in black against the hillside, but even that cheered him. The canyon had already recovered, and he noted with satisfaction that the pyromaniac who'd set the blaze couldn't have conceived of the abundance of vegetation that would succeed it. Fertilized by ash, the grasses and wildflowers had put out a bumper crop, and the hills stood waist-deep in stiff golden grass, all part of the cycle, as undeniable as the swing of the earth over its axis.
After a while he began slowing to look for a safe place to pull over, but there were several cars behind him, including one of those pickups that sit about six feet off the ground and are invariably driven by some tailgating troglodyte-as this one was-and he had to go all the way down to the bottom of the canyon before swinging round in a gas station on the Coast Highway and starting back up. The ocean was there momentarily, filling the horizon, and then it was in his rearview mirror, reduced to a nine-by-three-inch strip. The first curve erased it.
There was a road crew up ahead on the right, just beyond the bridge where the road crossed the creek at the lower mouth of the canyon. He'd been slowed by them on his way down, and now, impulsively, he swung off the road just beyond the line of big yellow earthmovers. Why not start out here, he was thinking, where the banks were only twenty or thirty feet above the streambed? He'd have to work his way all the farther upstream, but he would save himself the long hike down from above. Of course, he didn't really like leaving the car at the side of the road, but there wasn't much choice. At least the road crew would slow traffic down some and hopefully keep the drunks and sideswipers at bay. He shouldered the pack, took a last admiring look at the car and the way its sleek white lines were set off against the chaparral, as if in one of those back-to-nature car commercials, then turned to plunge down the gravelly slope and into the cool dapple of the streambed.
The first thing he saw, within sixty seconds of reaching the stream and before he'd had a chance to admire the light in the sycamores or the water uncoiling over the rocks like an endless rope, was a pair of dirty sleeping bags laid out on the high sandy bank opposite. Sleeping bags. He was amazed. Not two hundred feet from the road, and here they were, brazen, thoughtless, camping under the very nose of the authorities. He climbed atop a rock for a better look and saw a blackened ring of stones to the immediate right of the sleeping bags and a moth-eaten khaki satchel hanging from the low branch of a tree. And refuse. Refuse everywhere. Cans, bottles, the shucked wrappers of ready-made sandwiches and _burritos,__ toilet paper, magazines-all of it scattered across the ground as if dropped there by a dying wind. Delaney sucked in his breath. The first thing he felt wasn't surprise or even anger-it was embarrassment, as if he'd broken into some stranger's bedroom and gone snooping through the drawers. Invisible eyes locked on him. He looked over his shoulder, darted a quick glance up and down the streambed and then peered up into the branches of the trees.