The Tortilla Curtain: Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The narration shifts to Delaney’s perspective. It is a mid-August evening and Delaney is preparing dinner outside for his family. Delaney is feeling grateful for the fact that “life [has] settled back onto an easy even keel.” Over dinner Kyra announces to Delaney that she has collaborated with her coworker, Mike Bender, to “[clean] up Shoup,” the street corner where she saw men waiting for work. Delaney remains quiet, “trying to reconcile the theoretical and the actual.” He thinks that “those people” have the constitutional right to gather at the exchange, but finds himself wondering: “Whose constitution—Mexico’s? Did Mexico even have a constitution?” Kyra insists that she’s “not proud of it or anything […] but there’s just so many of them, they’ve overwhelmed us.”

Kyra’s announcement makes Delaney remember an evening he spent with Jack Jardine two nights prior. Jack Jardine took Delaney to the house of Dominick Flood, a legal client of Jack’s who “got entangled in some unwise investments” and is now on house arrest for the next three years. Jim Shirley and Jack Cherrystone were also present at the get-together. Delaney soon realized that the point of the gathering was for the men to discuss building a wall around Arroyo Blanco Estates. The men had a long discussion during which Delaney’s emotions vacillated wildly; at one point, he “looked through his reflection to the shadowy lawn out back, half-expecting to see criminals disguised as gardeners tiptoeing past […]. Was nobody safe—anywhere, ever?” The evening ended with Dominick Flood announcing his intention to have the labor exchange shut down.

The narration returns to the dinner scene, with Delaney reflecting on the fact that “Kyra had cleaned up the corner of Shoup and Ventura, and Dominick Flood had cleaned up the labor exchange.” Delaney feels unsettled and slightly remorseful, wondering about where all the immigrants hoping to find work will go now, but he reassures himself by thinking: “Why dwell on the negative, the paranoiac, the wall-builders and excluders? He was part of it now, complicit by his very presence here, and he might as well enjoy it.”

Delaney suggests that he, Kyra, and Jordan go see a movie. The family is discussing the logistics of this when a coyote appears on the lawn and drags off Osbert, scaling the newly-heightened fence with ease. Delaney tries to follow the coyote over the fence but is unable to; by the time he runs around the house and out through the side gate, the coyote is gone.