Delaney just nodded. He'd dialed Kyra at work and was listening to the number ring through.
“Hello?” Her voice was bright, amplified, right there with him.
“It's me, honey.”
“What's wrong? Is it Jordan? Something's happened to Jordan?”
Delaney took a deep breath. Suddenly he felt hurt, put-upon, ready to let it all spill out of him. “I had an accident.”
Now it was her turn-the sharp insuck of breath, the voice gone dead in her throat. “Jordan's hurt, isn't he? Tell me, tell me the worst. Quick! I can't stand it!”
“Nobody's hurt, honey, everybody's okay. I haven't even gone to pick Jordan up yet.”
A numb silence, counters clicking, synapses flashing. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
“The Acura dealer. I'm getting the headlight fixed.” He glanced up, lowered his voice, Kenny Grissom nowhere in sight: “I hit a man.”
_“Hit__ a _man?”__ There was a flare of anger in her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“A Mexican. At least I think he was a Mexican. Out on the canyon road. I was on my way to the recycler.”
“My god. Did you call Jack?”
Jack was Jack Jardine, their friend, neighbor, adviser and lawyer, who also happened to be the president of the Arroyo Blanco Estates Property Owners' Association. “No”-Delaney sighed-“I just got here and I wanted to tell you, to let you know-”
“What are you thinking? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what one of these shyster personal-injury lawyers would do to get hold of something like this? You _hit__ a man? Was he hurt? Did you take him to the hospital? Did you call the insurance?”
Delaney tried to gather it all in. She was excitable, Kyra, explosive, her circuits so high-wired she was always on the verge of overload, even when she was asleep. There were no minor issues in her life. “No, listen, Kyra: the guy's okay. I mean, he was just… bruised, that was all. He's gone, he went away. I gave him twenty bucks.”
“Twenty-?”
And then, before the words could turn to ash in his mouth, it was out: “I told you-he was _Mexican.”__
2
HE'D HAD HEADACHES BEFORE-HIS WHOLE LIFE was a headache, his whole stinking worthless _pinche vida__-but never like this. It felt as if a bomb had gone off inside his head, one of those big atomic ones like they dropped on the Japanese, the black roiling clouds pushing and pressing at his skull, no place to go, no release, on and on and on. But that wasn't all-the throb was in his stomach too, and he had to go down on his hands and knees and vomit in the bushes before he'd even got halfway to the camp in the ravine. He felt his breakfast come up-two hard-cooked eggs, half a cup of that weak reheated piss that passed for coffee and a tortilla he'd involuntarily blackened on a stick held over the fire-all of it, every lump and fleck, and then he vomited again. His stomach heaved till he could taste the bile in the back of his throat, and yet he couldn't move, that uncontainable pressure fighting to punch through his ears, and he crouched there for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by a single strand of saliva that dangled endlessly from his lips.
When he got to his feet again, everything had shifted. The shadows had leapt the ravine, the sun was caught in the trees and the indefatigable vulture had been joined by two others. “Yes, sure, come and get me,” he muttered, spitting and wincing at the same time, “that's all I am-a worn-out carcass, a walking slab of meat.” But Christ in Heaven, how it hurt! He raised a hand to the side nevd a han†of his face and the flesh was stiff and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head. What had happened to him? He was crossing the road, coming back from the grocery after the labor exchange closed-the far grocery, the cheaper one, and what did it matter if it was on the other side of the road? The old man there at the checkout-a _paisano,__ he called himself, from Italy-he didn't look at you like you were dirt, like you were going to steal, like you couldn't keep your hands off all the shiny bright packages of this and that, beef jerky and _nachos__ and shampoo, little gray-and-black batteries in a plastic sleeve. He'd bought an orange soda, Nehi, and a package of _tortillas__ to go with the pinto beans burned into the bottom of the pot… and then what? Then he crossed the road.
Yes. And then that pink-faced _gabacho__ ran him down with his flaming _gabacho__ nose and the little lawyer glasses clenched over the bridge of it. All that steel, that glass, that chrome, that big hot iron engine-it was like a tank coming at him, and his only armor was a cotton shirt and pants and a pair of worn-out _huaraches.__ He stared stupidly round him-at the fine tracery of the brush, at the birds lighting in the branches and the treetops below him, at the vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky. America would help him when she got back, she'd brew some tea from manzanita berries to combat the pain, bathe his wounds, cluck her tongue and fuss over him. But he needed to go down the path now, and his hip was bothering him all of a sudden, and the left knee, there, where the trousers were torn.
It hurt. Every step of the way. But he thought of the penitents at Chalma, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh, and he went on. Twice he fell. The first time he caught himself with his good arm, but the second time he tasted dust and his eyes refused to focus, the whole hot blazing world gone cool and dark all of a sudden, as if he'd been transposed to the bottom of the ocean. He heard a mockingbird then, a whistle and trill in the void, and it was as if it had drowned in sunlight too, and then he was dreaming.
His dreams were real. He wasn't flying through the air or talking with the ghost of his mother or vanquishing his enemies-he was stalled in the garbage dump in Tijuana, stalled at the wire, and America was sick with the _gastro__ and he didn't have a cent in the world after the _cholos__ and the _coyotes__ had got done with him. Sticks and cardboard over his head. The stink of burning dogs in the air. Low man in the pecking order, even at the _dompe. Life is poor here,__ an old man-a garbage picker-had told him. Yes, he'd said, and he was saying it now, the words on his lips somewhere between the two worlds, _but at least you have garbage.__
America found him at the bottom of the path, bundled in the twilight like a heap of rags. She'd walked nearly eight miles already, down out of the canyon to the highway along the ocean where she could catch the bus to Venice for a sewing job that never materialized, and then back again, and she was like death on two feet. Two dollars and twenty cents down the drain and nothing to show for it. In the morning, at first light, she'd walked along the Coast Highway, and that made her feel good, made her feel like a girl again-the salt smell, people jogging on the beach, the amazing narrow-shouldered houses of the millionaires growing up like mushrooms out of the sand-but the address the Guatemalan woman had given her was worth nothing. All the way there, all, the way out in the alien world, a bad neighborhood, drunks in the street, and the building was boarded up, deserted, no back entrance, no sewing machines, no hard-faced boss to stand over her and watch her sw Th Qatch hereat at three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, no nothing. She checked the address twice, three times, and then she turned round to retrace her steps and found that the streets had shuffled themselves in the interim, and she knew she was lost.