Delaney excused himself and drifted off toward the food, picking at a few things here and there-he never could resist a bite of _ahi__ tuna or a spicy scallop roll if it was good, and this was very good, the best-but pacing himself for the feast to come. He smiled at a stranger or two, murmured an apology when he jostled a woman over the carcass of the pig, exchanged sound bites about the weather and watched the bartender pour him a beer, but all the while he was fretting. He kept envisioning the turkey going up in flames, the potatoes congealing into something like wet concrete, Jordan sinking into boredom and distracting Orbalina with incessant demands for chocolate milk, pudding, Cup O' Noodles, a drink of juice. And their guests. He hadn't yet seen the Jardines or the Cherrystones (though he could hear Jack Cherrystone's booming basso profundo from somewhere out on the back lawn), but he was sure they'd fill up here and push their plates away at dinner. Delaney wasn't very good at enjoying himself, not in a situation like this, and he stood there in the middle of the crush for a moment, took a deep breath, let his shoulders go slack and swung his head from side to side to clear it.
He was feeling lost and edgy and maybe even a bit guilty to be imbibing so early in the afternoon, even on a day dedicated to self-indulgence like this one, when he felt a pressure at his elbow and turned to see Jack, Erna and Jack Jr. arrayed in smiling wonder behind him. “Delaney,” Jack sang out, holding on to the last syllable as if he couldn't let it go, “you look lost.”
Jack was dressed. Three-piece suit, crisp white button-down shirt, knotted tie. His wife, a catlike bosomy woman who always insisted on the two-cheek, continental style of greeting and would clutch your shoulders with tiny fists until she'd been accommodated, as she did now, was dressed. Delaney saw that she was wearing a shroudlike evening gown, black satin, and at least sixty percent of her jewelry collection. Even Jack Jr., with his hi-tops, earrings and ridiculous haircut, was dressed, in a sport coat that accented the new spread of his shoulders and a tie he must have inherited _from__ his father.
“I _am__ lost,” Delaney admitted. He hefted the beer and grinned. “It's too early in the afternoon for me to be drinking-you know me and alcohol, Jack-and I've got a six-course dinner to worry about. Which you're going to love, by the way. Old New England right here in California. Or old New York, anyway.”
“Relax, Delaney,” Erna purred, “it's Thanksgiving. Enjoy the party.”
Jack Jr. gave him a sick grin. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room. His voice cracked when he excused himself and drifted toward the suckling pig like some incubus of the food chain.
“I see from the letters this month you've been taking some heat on that coyote column,” Jack said, and a glass of wine seemed to materialize magically in his hand. Erna grinned at Delaney, waved at someone over his shoulder.
Leave it to Jack to bore right in. Delaney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. There've been something like thirty letters, most of them critical, but not all. But that's something. I must have pushed some buttons.”
Actually, the response had surprised him. He'd never generated-provoked? — more than half a dozen letters before, all from literal-minded biologists taking issue with his characterization of the dusky-footed wood rat or his use of the common name of some plant in preference to the scientific. The readers, die-hard preservationists to the last man, woman and child, had seemed to feel he was advocating some sort of control on coyote populations, and though he'd been upset over Osbert when he wrote the piece, he didn't see the column as being at all environmentally incorrect. After the tenth letter had come in, he'd sat down and reread the column. Twice. And there was nothing there. They just weren't getting it-they weren't reading it in the spirit it was intended. He wasn't pushing for population controls-controls were futile and the historical record proved it. As he'd indicated. He was just elucidating the problem, opening up the issue to debate. Certainly it wasn't the coyotes that were to blame, it was us-hadn't he made that clear?
Jack was grinning, his lips ever so slightly drawn back to reveal a strategic flash of enamel. Delaney recognized the expression. It was skeptical, faintly ironic, meant to convey to judges, jurors and district attorneys alike that the issue had yet to be decided. “So what is it, Delaney-should we bring back the traps and quotas or not? You've lost two dogs, and how many others here have lost pets too?” He made a sweeping gesture to take in the room, the house, the community at large.
“That's right,” Kyra said, slipping up behind Delaney and taking hold of his arm, “and that's where we had our falling-out over the wall-or actually, it was war, full-on, no-holds-barred.”
Jack laughed. Erna laughed. Delaney managed a rueful smile as greetings went round and the string quartet built to a frenzy in the _con fuoco.__ “But really,” Kyra said, unwilling to let it go, “don't you feel safer now, all of you-Jack, Erna, Delaney? Don't you?” she said, turning her face to him. “Admit it.”
Delaney reddened. Shrugged again. The beer glass in his hand was heavy as a cannonball. “I know when I'm licked,” he was saying, but Erna Jardine had already leapt in to answer for him. “Of course we do,” she said. “We all do. The wall's barely been completed and yet I'm breathing easier to know there'll never be another rattlesnake in my garage. Or another break-in.” She gave them a pious look. “Oh, I know that doesn't mean we can let our guard down, but still, it's one more barrier, isn't it?” she said, and then she leaned into Kyra and lowered her voice confidentially. “Did you hear about Shelly Schourek? It was a follow-home. Right down the hill in Calabasas.”
The party went on. Delaney fretted. Had a second beer. Jack Cherrystone joined them and gave a farcical synopsis of a movie he'd just done the trailer for, yet another apocalyptic futuro cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles in the twenty-first century. People gathered round when he shifted from the merely thunderous tones of his everyday voice to the mountain-toppling hysteria of the one he wielded professionally. “They brokered babies!” he roared, “ate their young, made love an irredeemable sin!” Jack's eyes bugged out. He shook his jowls and waved his hands as if he'd dipped them in oil. It was a real performance, all of that voice pouring out of so small a vessel, and Delaney found himself laughing, laughing till he felt something uncoil inside him, overcooked turkeys, mucilaginous potatoes and other culinary disasters notwithstanding. He finished the second beer and wondered if he should have a third.
That must have been about four in the afternoon-Delaney couldn't place the time exactly in the frantic sequence of events that followed, but he remembered looking at his watch about then and thinking he had to excuse himself soon if there was any hope of serving dinner by six. And then the sirens went off and the first of the helicopters sliced overhead and someone jumped up on one of the tables in the backyard and shouted, “Fire! Fire in the canyon!”
Kyra had been enjoying herself. Delaney might have looked constipated, wearing what she liked to think of as his night-before-the-exams face, sweating the little details of their dinner party-the firmness of the turkey, the condition of the silverware and god knew what else-but she was kicking back, not a care in the world. Everything's under control, she kept telling him, don't worry. She'd had everything organized for days, right down to the last detail-all it would take was to reheat a few things in the microwave and uncork the wines. She'd already finished her run for the day and swum forty laps too (in anticipation of taking on a few superfluous calories), the flowers were cut and arranged, the turkey was in the oven, and Orbalina was more than capable of handling any little emergency that might arise. And while she could have been out showing houses-holidays were always hot, even Thanksgiving, though among holidays it ranked next to last, just ahead of Christmas-she figured she deserved a break. When you worked ten and twelve hours a day, six days a week, and sat by the telephone on the seventh and hadn't taken a real vacation in five years, not even for your honeymoon, you had to give something back to your family-and yourself. Her mother was here, her sister was on the way. She was giving a dinner party. It was time to relax.