There were two women behind the counter, both Asian, both young. They smiled at Kyra when she came in the door, kept smiling as she went back to the cooler, selected her Diet Coke and made her way back to the counter. They smiled as she selected her gum. “Find everything?” the shorter of the two asked.
“Yes,” Kyra said. “Thank you.” And this gave her her opening. “There seem to be a lot of men out there on the sidewalk-more than usual, no?”
The shorter girl-she seemed to be in charge-shrugged. “No more, no less.”
“Bad for business, no?” Kyra said, falling into the rhythm of the girl's fractured English.
Another shrug. “Not bad, not good.”
Kyra thanked her and stepped back out into the heat. She was about to slip into the air-conditioned envelope of the car and be on her way, when she suddenly swung round and crossed the lot to where the men were gathered. Now the looks were different-all the men stared at her, some boldly, some furtively. If this were Tijuana they'd be grabbing for her, making lewd comments, jeering and whistling, but here they didn't dare, here they wanted to be conspicuous only to the right people, the people who needed cheap labor for the day, the afternoon, the hour. She imagined them trading apocryphal stories of the beautiful gringa who selected the best-built man for a special kind of work, and tried to keep a neutral look on her face.
She passed by the first group, and then turned onto the sidewalk, her gaze fixed on the row of cheap apartments that backed up onto the commercial strip of the boulevard and faced out on the dense growth of pepper trees that screened the freeway from view. The apartments were seedy and getting seedier, she could see that from here-open doors, dark men identical to those crowding the sidewalk peering out at her, the antediluvian swimming pool gone dry, paint blistered and pissed over with graffiti. She stopped in the middle of the block, overwhelmed with anger and disgust and a kind of sinking despair. She didn't see things the way Delaney did-he was from the East Coast, he didn't understand, he hadn't lived with it all his life. Somebody had to do something about these people-they were ubiquitous, prolific as rabbits, and they were death for business.
She was on her way back to the car, thinking she'd drive Mike Bender by here tomorrow and see if he couldn't exert some pressure in the right places, call the INS out here, get the police to crack down, something, anything. In an ironic way, the invasion from the South had been good for business to this point because it had driven the entire white middle class out of Los Angeles proper and into the areas she specialized in: Calabasas, Topanga, Arroyo Blanco. She still sold houses in Woodland Hills-that's where the offices were, after all, and it was still considered a very desirable upper-middle-class neighborhood-but all the smart buyers had already retreated beyond the city limits. Schools, that's what it was all about. They didn't bus in the county, only in the city.
Still, this congregation was disturbing. There had to be a limit, a boundary, a cap, or they'd be in Calabasas next and then Thousand Oaks and on and on up the coast till there was no real estate left. That's what she was thinking, not in any heartless or calculating way-everybody had a right to live-but in terms of simple business sense, when she became aware that one of the men hadn't stepped aside as she crossed back into the parking lot. There was a lamppost on her left, a car parked to the right, and she had to pull up short to avoid walking right into him.
He looked up at her, sought out her eyes and smiled. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, his hair long and frozen to his scalp with oil, pants neatly pressed, shirt buttoned up to the collar though it must have been ninety-five degrees or more. “You want work, Miss?” he said.
“No,” she said, “no thank you,” and stepped around him.
“Cheap,” he said at her back, and then he was right there again at her elbow, like something that had stuck to the fabric of her jacket. “Pleese,” he said. “I do anything.” And then he added, again, as she inserted the key in the door of the car, swung it open and escaped into the cool familiar embrace of the leather interior: “Cheap.”
The Kaufmans were pleased, though she was a few minutes late, and the fence people knew exactly what they were doing. She pulled into her driveway and Al Lopez's truck was there, in Delaney's spot. She'd worked with Al before, through the office, hiring him to do everything from replacing cracked kitchen tiles to plumbing and electrical and patching stucco on the houses she had in escrow. Anytime there was a dispute, she could bring Al in and do a quick cosmetic job on whatever the buyers got hung up on. He'd seemed a natural for the fence, especially since she wouldn't consider going back to the idiot who'd put up the original fence and assured her that nothing could get over six feet of chain link.
Since she still had time before her four o'clock, she took Osbert out on the leash for ten minutes and chatted with Al while his men poured concrete and set new eight-foot posts into the holes where the old posts had stood. He'd told her at the outset that he could simply extend the existing poles at half the price, but she didn't want anything tacky-looking, and above all, she told him, she wanted strength and impregnability. “I don't want anything getting in here ever again,” she'd said.
Now, as she stood there with Osbert, making small talk about traffic, smog, the heat and the housing market, Al said casually, almost slyly, “Of course, there's not much you can do about snakes-”
Snakes. An image rose up in her head, cold and primordial, the coil and shuffle, the wicked glittering reptilian eyes: she hated snakes. Worse than coyotes, worse than anything. She'd never given a thought to coyotes when they moved in-it was Delaney who'd insisted on the fence-but no one had to warn her about the snakes. Selda Cherrystone had discovered one coiled up in her dryer and its mate beneath the washing machine, and half the people on the block had found rattlesnakes in their garages at one time or another. “Can't you run something along the base of the fence?” she asked, thinking of a miniature trap or net or maybe a weak electric current.
Al looked away, his eyes squinted into the globes of his cheeks. He was heavyset, in his fifties, with white hair and skin the color and texture of an old medicine ball. “We've got a product,” he said, still fixing his gaze on the distant tree-studded crotch of the canyon, and then he turned back to her. “Plastic strips, a real tight weave in the mesh of' the fence-we go about three feet and down under the ground maybe six inches. That takes care of your snakes.”
“How much?” Kyra asked, gazing off into the distance herself now.
“Two-fifty.”
“Two hundred,” she said, and it was a reflex.
“Two-twenty-five.”
“I don't know, Al,” she said, “we've never had a snake here yet.”
He bent strategically to stroke Osbert's ears. “Rattlers,” he sighed, “they get in under the fence, nothing to stop 'em really, and they bite a little dog like this. I've seen it happen. Up here especially.” He straightened up and forced out a deep moaning trail of breath with the effort. “I'll give it to you for two-ten, just say the word.”
She nodded yes and he shouted something in Spanish to one of the men bent over the cement mixer, and that was when she noticed him for the first time, the man with the limp and the graying mustache, his face bruised and swollen like bad fruit. He went right by her on his way to the truck and she sucked in her breath as if she'd burned herself. This was the man, the very man-it had to be. She watched him slide the long plastic strips from the back of the truck and balance them on one shoulder, and she felt a space open up inside her, a great sad empty space that made her feel as if she'd given birth to something weak and unformed. And as he passed by her again, jaunty on his bad leg, the space opened so wide it could have sucked in the whole universe. He was whistling, whistling under his breath.