The friend regarded Delaney out of an expressionless face. His hair hung in coils to his shoulders and a thin wisp of beard trailed away from the base of his chin. He was wearing some sort of poncho or _serape,__ jagged diamonds of color that leapt out against the quiet greens of the streambed. He had nothing to add to the first man's description. They were hiking, and that was it.
Delaney looked from the first man to his companion and back again. He wasn't alarmed, not exactly-he was too angry for that. All he could think of was the sheriff and getting these people and their garbage heap out of here, of hustling them right back to wherever they'd come from, slums, _favelas, barrios,__ whatever they called them. They didn't belong here, that was for sure. He jerked the reed out of the ground and flung it away from him, adjusted his pack and began picking his way back down the streambed.
“Hey, _amigo”__-the man's voice came at him in a wild high whinny-“you have a nice day, huh?”
The walk to the road was nothing-it barely stretched his muscles. The anticipation had gone sour in his throat, and it rankled him-it wasn't even noon yet and the day was shot. He cursed as he passed by the sleeping bags again, and then he took the bank in five strides and he was out in the glare of the canyon road. He had a sudden impulse to continue on down the stream, under the bridge and around the bend, but dismissed it: this was where the creek fanned out into its floodplain before running into the ocean, and any idiot who could park a car and clamber down a three-foot embankment could roam it at will, as the successive layers of garbage spread out over the rocks gave testimony. There was no adventure here, no privacy, no experience of nature. It would be about as exciting as pulling into the McDonald's lot and counting the starlings.
He turned and walked back up the road, past the line of cars restrained by a man in a yellow hard hat with a portable sign that read STOP on one side and SLOW on the reverse. The trucks and bulldozers were quiet now-it was lunchtime, the workers sprawled in the shade of the big rippled tires with their sandwiches and _burritos,__ the dust settling, birds bickering in the scrub, chamise and toyon blooming gracefully alongside the road with no help from anyone. Delaney felt the sun on his face, stepped over the ridges of detritus pushed into the shoulder by the blades of the earthmovers and let the long muscles of his legs work against the slope of the road. In one of his first “Pilgrim” columns he'd observed that the bulldozer served the same function here as the snowplow back East, though it was dirt rather than snow that had to be cleared from the streets. The canyon road had become a virtual streambed during the rainy season and Caltrans had been hard-pressed to keep it open, and now, in early summer, with no rain in sight for the next five months, they were just getting round to clearing out the residual rubble.
That was fine with Delaney, though he wished they'd chosen another day for it. Who wanted to hear the roar of engines and breathe diesel fuel down here-and on a day like this? He was actually muttering to himself as he passed the last of the big machines, his mood growing progressively blacker, and yet all the defeats and frustrations of the morning were nothing compared to what awaited him. For it was at that moment, just as he cleared the last of the Caltrans vehicles and cast a quick glance up the road, that he felt himself go numb: the car was gone.
Gone. Vanished.
But no, that wasn't where he'd parked it, against the guardrail there, was it? It must be around the next bend, sure it was, and he was moving more quickly now, almost jogging, the line of cars across the road from him creeping down toward the bridge and a second man in hard hat and bright orange vest flagging his SLOW sign. Every eye was on Delaney. He was the amusement, the sideshow, stiff-legging it up the road with the sweat stinging his eyes and slicking the frames of his glasses. And then he made the bend and saw the tight shoulderless curve beyond it and all the naked space of the canyon spread out to the horizon, and knew he was in trouble.
Dumbstruck, he swung reluctantly round on his heels and waded back down the road like a zombie, tramping back and forth over the spot where he'd parked the car and finally even going down on one knee in the dirt to trace the tire tracks with his unbelieving fingertips. His car was gone, all right. It was incontrovertible. He'd parked here half an hour ago, right on this spot, and now there was nothing here, no steel, no chrome, no radial tires or personalized license plates. No registration. No _Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.__
The first thing that came into his head was the police. They'd towed it. Of course. That was it. There was probably some obscure regulation about parking within two hundred feet of a road crew or something-or they'd posted a sign he'd missed. He rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the faces in the cars across from him, and approached a group of men lounging in the shade of the nearest bulldozer. “Did anybody see what happened to my car?” he asked, conscious of the barely restrained note of hysteria in his voice. “Did they tow it or what?”
They looked up at him blankly. Six Hispanic men, in khaki shirts and baseball caps, arrested in the act of eating, sandwiches poised at their lips, thermoses tipped, the cans of soft drink sweating between their fingers. No one said a word.
“I parked right there.” Delaney was pointing now and the six heads dutifully swiveled to regard the vacant shoulder and the scalloped rim of the guardrail set against the treetops and the greater vacancy of the canyon beyond it. “A half hour ago? It was an Acura-white, with aluminum wheels?”
The men seemed to stir. They looked uneasily from one to the other. Finally, the man on the end, who seemed by virtue of his white mustache to be the senior member of the group, set his sandwich carefully down on a scrap of waxed paper and rose to his feet. He regarded Delaney for a moment out of a pair of inexpressibly sad eyes. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later Delaney was having his hike after all, though it wasn't exactly what he'd envisioned. After questioning the boss of the road crew-_We haven't towed nothin' here, not to my knowledge__-he started back up the canyon road on foot. It was three miles or so to the near grocery and the telephones out front, but it was all uphill and the road wasn't designed for pedestrians. Horns blared, tires screeched, some jerk threw a beer can at him. For fear of his life he had to hop the guardrail and plow through the brush, but it was slow going and the burrs and seedheads caught in his socks and tore at his naked legs, and all the while his head was pounding and his throat gone dry over the essential question of the day: what had happened to the car?
He called the police from the pay phone and they gave him the number of the towing service and he called the towing service and they told him they didn't have his car-and no, there was no mistake: they didn't have it. Then he called Kyra. He got her secretary and had to sit on the curb in front of the pay phone in a litter of Doritos bags and candy wrappers for ten agonizing minutes till she rang him back. “Hello?” she demanded. “Delaney?”
He was bewildered, immobilized. People pulled into the lot and climbed casually out of their cars. Doors slammed. Engines revved. “Yes, it's me.”