“I want to know what you think you're doing here,” Delaney demanded, eyeing the satchel and imagining the Cherrystones' silverware in there, their VCR, Selda's jewelry. “This is private property. You don't belong here.”
The man looked right through him. He was bored. Delaney was nothing, a minor annoyance, a gnat buzzing round his face.
“I'm talking to you,” Delaney said, and before he could think, he had hold of the man's forearm, just above the wrist.
The tan eyes looked down at Delaney's hand, then up into his face. There was nothing in those eyes but contempt. With a sudden violent jerk, the man whipped his arm free, gathered himself up and spat scornfully between Delaney's feet. “I got these flies,” he said, and he was almost shouting it.
Delaney was riding the crest of the moment, trembling, angry, ready for anything. The man was a thief, a liar, the stinking occupant of a stinking sleeping bag in the state forest, a trespasser, a polluter, a Mexican. “Don't give me that shit!” Delaney roared. “I'm calling the police. I know what you're doing up here, I know who you are, you're not fooling anybody.” Delaney looked round him for support, for a car, a child on a bike, Todd Sweet, anyone, but the street was deserted.
The Mexican's expression had changed. The mocking grin was gone now, replaced by something harder, infinitely harder. He's got a knife, Delaney thought, a gun, and he went cold all over when the man reached into the satchel, so keyed up he was ready to spring at him, tackle him, fight to the death… but then he was staring into a flat white sheet of Xerox paper crawling with print. “Flies,” the man spat at him. “I deliver these flies.”
Delaney took a step back, so devastated he couldn't speak-what was happening to him, what was he becoming? — and the man shoved the flier into his hand and stalked away across the lawn. He watched, stupefied, as the Mexican headed up the street, carrying his shoulders with rage and indignation, watched as he strode up to Delaney's own house and inserted a flier in the slit between the screen door and the white wooden doorframe. Then, finally, Delaney looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand. A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE ARROYO BLANCO ESTATES PROPERTY OWNERS' ASSOCIATION, it read in block letters across the top. And then, beneath it: “I urge all of you to attend Wednesday's meeting on an issue vital to the security and well-being of us all…”
7
THE FIRST FIFTEEN MINUTES WERE NOTHING. AMéRICA never asked herself what she was doing sitting on that concrete wall out front of the post office building in Canoga Park, never gave it a thought. She was exhausted, her feet ached, she felt hot and sleepy and a little nauseous, and she just sat there in a kind of trance and let the rich stew of the city simmer around her. It was amazing, all this life. The sidewalks weren't crowded, not in the way she'd expected, not like in the market in Cuernavaca or even Tepoztlán, but there was a steady flow of people going about their business as if it were the most natural thing in the world to live here. People were walking dogs, riding bicycles, pushing babies in strollers, carrying groceries in big paper sacks cradled to their chests; they were smoking, chatting, laughing, tilting back their heads to drink from red-white-and-blue cans of Pepsi that said “Uh-huh!” on the label.
As tired as she was, as tentative and unsettled, she couldn't help being fascinated by the spectacle-and by the women especially. She watched them covertly, women her own age and maybe a little older, dressed like _gringas__ in high heels and stockings, watched to see what they were wearing and how they did their hair and makeup. There were older women too, in _rebozos__ and colorless dresses, _niños__ hurtling by on skateboards, workingmen ambling past in groups of three or four, their eyes fixed on some distant unattainable vision way out ahead of them in the haze of the endless boulevard. And the traffic-it wasn't like the traffic on the canyon road at all. Here it moved in a stately slow procession from light to light, every kind of car imaginable, from low-riders to Jaguars to battered old Fords and Chevies and VW buses and tiny silver cars that flashed by like fishes schooling in the sea. After all those weeks of deprivation, those weeks when she had nothing to look at but le stby lio Javes and more leaves, the city was like a movie playing before her eyes.
The second fifteen minutes were no problem either, though there was more of an edge to them, a hard hot little prick of anxiety that underscored the passing of each separate sixty-second interval. _Where is Cándido?__ was a thought that began to intrude on her consciousness, and its variant, _What's keeping him?__ Still, she was glad to be there sitting on that wall, glad to be out of that nightmare of leaves, and she was content, or nearly content. The people were amusing. The cars were brilliant. If she wasn't feeling nauseous and if her feet weren't blistered and if she knew where she was going to sleep tonight and if she had something to chew on-anything, a slice of bread, a cold _tortilla__-this waiting would be nothing, nothing at all.
There was a clock in the window of the appliance-repair shop across the way, and as the big illuminated pointer began to intrude on the third quarter of the hour, she realized that her nausea had begun to feature the brief powerful constrictions of hunger. She looked down at her feet and saw that they were swollen against the straps of her sandals (which she'd loosened twice already), and suddenly she felt so tired she wanted to lie back on the hard concrete wall and close her eyes, just for a minute. But she couldn't do that, of course-that's what bums did, street people, _vagos, mendigos.__ Still, the thought of it, of lying back for just a minute, made her see the bed then, the promissory bed at the _chicano's__ aunt's house, and that made her think of Cándido, and where was he?
During the final quarter hour a man in stained clothes appeared out of nowhere and sat beside her on the wall. He was old, with a goat's beard and eyes that jumped out at her from behind a pair of glasses held together with a piece of frayed black tape. She smelled him before she turned round and saw him there, not twelve inches from her. She'd been watching two girls in jeans and heels, with black lingerie tops and hair starched up high with spray, and suddenly the wind shifted and she thought she was back in the dump at Tijuana. The old man reeked of urine, vomit, his own shit, and his clothes-three or four shirts and a long coat and what looked to be at least two pairs of pants-were as saturated in natural oils as a plantain in a frying pan. He didn't look at her, didn't speak to her, though he was holding a conversation with someone only he could see, his voice falling. away to nothing and then cresting like a wave, his Spanish so twisted and his dialect so odd she could only pick up snatches of a phrase here and there. He seemed to be talking to his mother-to the memory of his mother, the ghost, the faint outline of her pressed into the eidetic plate of his brain-and there was a real urgency in the garbled message he had for her. His voice went on and on. América edged away. By the time the illuminated pointer touched the hour, he was gone.
Then it was the second hour and she was lost and abandoned. The sun was setting, the sky streaked with dying light, the storefronts trembling with a watery silver glow like puddles stood on end all up and down the street. There were fewer people on the sidewalks now, and America no longer found them amusing or even interesting. She wanted Cándido to come back, that was all, and what if he'd had an accident? What if he was hurt? What if _La Migra__ had snatched him? For the first time since she'd sat herself down on that wall, the reality of her situation hit her: she had no money, knew no one, couldn't even find her way back to that miserable pile of sticks in the canyon. What if Cándido never came back, what if he'd died of a heart attack or got hit by another car? What then?