The Tortilla Curtain (40 page)

“It’s hell, isn’t it?” Jack rumbled, and he might have been doing a trailer for the next disaster movie.

“Yeah,” Delaney said, his eyes focused on the advancing line of the fire and the furious roiling skeins of smoke. “And what worries me is they evacuated us—which they didn’t do last year—and that must mean they think this is worse. Or potentially worse.”

Jack didn’t have anything to say to this, but Delaney felt the touch of his hand, the hard hot neck of the bottle. “Glenfiddich,” Jack said. “Couldn’t let that burn.”

Delaney didn’t drink hard liquor, and the two beers he’d had at Dominick’s would have constituted his limit under normal circumstances, but he took the bottle, held it to his lips and let the manufactured fire burn its way down to the deepest part of him. It was then that he spotted the two men walking up the road out of the darkness, their faces obscured by the bills of their baseball caps. Something clicked in his head, even at this distance, something familiar in the spidery long stride of the one in front... and then he knew. This was the jerk with the “flies,” the wiseass, the camper. Amazing, he thought—and he didn’t try to correct himself, not now, not ever again—amazing how the scum comes to the surface.

“Fucking wetbacks,” Jack growled. “I lay you odds they started this thing, smoking pot down there, cooking their fucking beans out in the woods.”

And now Delaney recognized the second man too, the one with the coiled hair and the
serape.
He was dirty, covered in white dust from his sandaled feet to the dangling ends of his hair, and there were seedpods and burrs and slices of needlegrass clinging to his clothes. They were both dirty, Delaney saw now, as if they’d been rolling through the brush, and he imagined them trying to get up and around the roadblock in the chaparral and then finally having to give it up. He watched the two of them working their slow way up the road toward the flashing lights—no hurry, no worry, everything’s cool—and he felt as much pure hatred as he’d ever felt in his life. What the hell did they think they were doing here anyway, starting fires in a tinderbox? Didn’t they know what was at stake here, didn’t they know they weren’t in Mexico anymore?

“Come on, we can’t let these jokers get through,” Jack said, and he had his hand on Delaney’s arm, and then they were moving off in the direction of the roadblock to intercept them. “I mean, we’ve got to alert the cops at least.”

But the cops were alert already. When Delaney got there with Jack, one of the patrolmen—he looked Hispanic, dark-skinned, with a mustache—was questioning the two men in Spanish, his flashlight stabbing first at one face, then the other. Normally, Delaney would have stood off at a respectful distance, but he was anxious and irate and ready to lay the blame where it belonged, and he could feel the liquor burning in his veins.

“Officer,” he said, coming right up to them, joining the group, “I want to report that I’ve seen this man”—pointing now at the glowering twisted face—“in the lower canyon, camping, camping right down there where the fire started.” He was excited now, beyond caring—somebody had to pay for this—and so what if he hadn’t actually seen the man lying there drunk in his filthy sleeping bag, it was close enough, wasn’t it?

The policeman turned to him, lights flashing, the scream of a siren, bombs away, and he had the same face as the shorter man, the one in the blanket: black Aztecan eyes, iron cheekbones, the heavy mustache and white gleaming teeth. “I can handle this,” he said, and his voice went cold and he said something vicious and accusatory in rapid-fire Spanish to the two men.

It didn’t seem to have much effect. The tall one reached up lazily to twist his hat around so that the bill faced backwards and gave first the cop, and then Delaney, an impassive look. He said something extenuating—or at least that was what it sounded like. That was when Jack spoke up, his voice a magnificent trumpeting instrument that jerked the whole group to attention—the Mexicans, the cop, even Delaney. “Officer,” he boomed, “I’ve seen these men too, I’m sure of it, and I’d like to know what they were doing down there at the scene of a very suspicious fire. Those are our homes down there—that’s everything we have—and if arson was involved I damn well want to know about it.”

A crowd had begun to gather—Delaney and Jack hadn’t been the only ones to spot the Mexicans coming up the road. “That’s right,” a shrill voice called out at Delaney’s back, a female voice, and he turned round on a heavyset woman with muddy eyes and a silver hoop in her right nostril. She wore a shawl over a heavy brocade dress that trailed in the dirt and hid her shape. “And I want to know too,” she cried, stumbling over the last two syllables, and Delaney saw that she was drunk.

By this point a second patrolman had joined the first, a ramrod CHP officer with a pale-blond crew cut bristling against the brim of his hat. He gave a quick glance round him to size up the situation, stared down the big woman with the nose ring, and then, ignoring the other cop, said something in Spanish to the two Mexicans, and now they jumped, all right. The next second they were both lying prone in the dirt, legs spread, arms scissored at the back of their heads, and the new cop was patting them down. Delaney felt a thrill of triumph and hate—he couldn’t suppress it—and then both cops were bending over the suspects to clamp the handcuffs round their wrists, and the tall Mexican, Delaney’s special friend, was protesting his innocence in two languages. The son of a bitch. The jerk. The arsonist. It was all Delaney could do to keep from wading in and kicking him in the ribs.

Somebody’s dog was barking, raging in primal fury, and the sirens tore at the air. There must have been thirty or forty people gathered now and more coming. They took a step back when the cops hauled the suspects to their feet, but Delaney was right there, right in the thick of it, Jack at his side. He saw the dirt and bits of weed on the front of the Mexicans’ shirts, saw the individual bristles of their unshaven throats and jowls. The tall one’s hat had been knocked askew so that the brim jutted out at a crazy angle. The handcuffs sparked in the repetitive light. No one moved. And then the big woman shouted a racial slur and the Hispanic cop’s head jerked around.

That was when Delaney felt the tall Mexican’s eyes on him. It was like that day out on the Cherrystones’ lawn, the same look of contempt and corrosive hate, but this time Delaney didn’t flinch, didn’t feel guilt or pity or even the slightest tug of common humanity. He threw the look back at the son of a bitch and put everything he had into it, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Then, just as the blond cop pulled at the man’s arm to swing him round and march him off toward the squad car, the Mexican spat and Delaney felt the wet on his face, saw it there spotting the lenses of his glasses, and he lost all control.

The next thing he knew he was on the guy, flailing with his fists even as the crowd surged forward and the Mexican kicked out at him and the cop wedged his way between them. “Motherfucker!” the Mexican screamed over his shoulder as the cop wrestled him away. “I kill you, I kill you, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!” Delaney roared, and Jack Cherrystone had to hold him back.

“Arsonist!” somebody shouted. “Spic!” And the crowd erupted in a cacophony of threats and name-calling. “Go back to Mexico!” shouted a man in a sport shirt like Delaney’s, while the woman beside him cried “Wetbacks!” over and over till her face was swollen with it.

The cops thrust their prisoners behind them and the blond one stepped forward, his hand on his holster. “You people back off or I’ll run you in, all of you,” he shouted, the cords standing out in his throat. “We’ve got a situation here, don’t you understand that, and you’re just making it worse. Now back off! I mean it!”

No one moved. The smoke lay on the air like poison, like doom. Delaney looked round at his neighbors, their faces drained and white, fists clenched, ready to go anywhere, do anything, seething with it, spoiling for it, a mob. They were out here in the night, outside the walls, forced out of their shells, and there was nothing to restrain them. He stood there a long moment, the gears turning inside him, and when Jack offered the bottle again, he took it.

 

 

 

Ultimately, it was the winds that decided the issue. The fire burned to within five hundred yards of Arroyo Blanco, swerving west and on up the wash in back of the development and over the ridge, where it was finally contained. Night choked down the Santa Ana winds and in the morning an onshore flow pumped moisture into the air, and by ten a.m., after sleeping in their cars, in motels, on the couches of friends, relatives, employees and casual acquaintances, the people of Arroyo Blanco were allowed to return to their homes.

Delaney was hungover and contrite. He’d all but started a riot, and the thought frightened him. He remembered the time he’d participated in an antinuke demonstration with his first wife, Louise, and how it seemed as if the whole world was against them—or worse, when they went up the steps of the abortion clinic in White Plains and the hard-line crazies had yabbered at them like dogs, faces twisted with rage and hate till they were barely human. Delaney had thrown it right back at them, defiant and outraged—the issue was personal, deeply personal, and he and Louise had agonized over their decision, they weren’t ready yet, that was all, and why bring a child into a world already teeming with its starving billions?—but the protesters wouldn’t let them be, didn’t even see them as individuals. Well, he was one of them now. He was the hater, he was the redneck, the racist, the abuser. There was no evidence that those men had a thing to do with the fire—they could have been fleeing on foot, thumbing a ride, walking up the road to take in the sights,
hiking.
As sober as he was, as ashamed and repentant, he couldn’t suppress a flare of outrage at the thought—
hiking,
the son of a bitch—but then, he asked himself, would he have felt the same way if the men walking up the road had been white?

They had to show the address on their licenses to get back through the police cordon—the road was open to residents only, as a means of discouraging looters—and Delaney, with Jordan beside him, followed Kyra and her mother down the road, through the as-yet-unmanned gate and into the development. Delaney rolled down his window and the lingering odor of charred brush and timber filled the car with a smell that reminded him of the incinerator at his grandmother’s apartment all those years ago, or the dump, the Croton dump, smoldering under an umbrella of seagulls, but the development was untouched, pristine in the morning light. His neighbors were pulling into their driveways, unloading their cars, striding across deep-watered lawns to check the gates, the pool, the toolshed, all of them wearing the faint vacant half-smiles of the reprieved. Disaster had been averted. It was the morning after.

As they swung into Piñon, Jordan began to lean forward in his seat, dangling like a gymnast from his shoulder strap. He was dirty, dressed in the grass-stained shorts, T-shirt and Dodgers cap he’d been wearing when the alarm sounded, and he was wide-eyed from lack of sleep (it had been past midnight when they’d finally decided to get a room at the Holiday Inn in Woodland Hills, the last room available). All he’d been able to talk about was Dame Edith, the cat, who’d managed to vanish just as they were loading the cars yesterday afternoon. “You think she’ll be all right, Delaney?” he said now for what must have been the hundredth time.

“Of course she will,” he responded automatically, and it had become a kind of mantra, “—she can take care of herself.” But even as he said it, he caught sight of the place where yesterday a grove of lemon-scented gum had stood arching and white against the flank of the hill and saw nothing there but a vacancy of ash.

Jordan bounded out of the car before it came to a stop, shouting, “Here, kitty, here, Dame Edith, here, kitty,” while Delaney sat there a moment to get his bearings. He’d been prepared for the worst, for blackened beams, melted plastic and twisted metal, for bathtubs hanging in the air and filing cabinets scorched like cookpans. These fires burned as hot as eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and they would sometimes suck up all the available oxygen in an area, superheating it far beyond the point of combustion until a breeze came up and the whole thing exploded as if a bomb had been dropped. Houses would burn from the inside out, even before the flames reached them, so intense were the temperatures. He’d expected annihilation, and here were the house, the yard, the neighborhood, and not a blade of grass disturbed.

Kyra had pulled in just ahead of him, and now her mother climbed out of the passenger’s-side door, looking dazed. She’d spent the night on a cot at the foot of their bed in the Holiday Inn, and since they’d been up early to return to the roadblock and wait for the all-clear she hadn’t had time to do her hair and make herself up with her usual attention to detail. She was showing her age, the tragedy of the night etched under her eyes and dug in deep round the corners of her mouth. Kyra, in contrast, had tied her hair back and forgone makeup, and even in her party dress she looked streamlined, girded for battle. Before Delaney could get out of the car she was in the house, striding from room to room like a field marshal, calling out the cat’s name while punching numbers into the portable phone. Delaney, cradling a brown paper bag full of indispensable notebooks and essential nature guides, joined her a moment later.

He set the books down on the kitchen table and went to the oven, which still gave off a faint if unappetizing whiff of turkey. And there, inside, was the turkey itself, as tough and desiccated as a piece of camel hide. It had been a hell of a Thanksgiving, Delaney was thinking, the worst he’d ever had, when Kyra strode into the room, gave him a sour look, and reached into the refrigerator for the carton of orange juice. She pinched the phone between chin and shoulder while pouring herself a glass. “Uh, huh,” she said, speaking into the mouthpiece. “Uh, huh, yes. Uh, huh.”