T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

Still, Delaney found himself edging back through the crowd-“Sorry, excuse me please, sorry”-until he found Kyra and took hold of her arm. “Honey, we better go-I mean, just in case,” he said, and already you could smell the smoke, metallic and bitter, and her eyes widened and she breathed a single word: “Jordan.”

They'd just got in the car when the wind shifted and the muscular black column of smoke stood up straight in the sky and closed a fist over the sun. Kit was in the backseat, miffed, dismayed and thoroughly ruffled, the Menaker groove etched deeply into the flesh between her eyebrows. Delaney had actually had to pry her hand away from the crook of Dominick Flood's arm. “I can't really see what all the fuss is about,” she said petulantly. “We have brushfires all the time in the Bay Area and they just come in with those planes and snuff them right out.” As if on cue, the first of the bombers roared overhead and dropped its pink cloud of flame retardant into the cauldron below. Delaney said nothing. They'd almost been evacuated last fall, were right on the verge of it, but the main arm of the firestorm had passed two or three miles behind them, on the far side of the ridge, and the secondary fire had burned its way up the canyon on a collision course with Arroyo Blanco until the winds shifted and it fell back into the wasteland it had just created. Eighteen thousand acres had burned and three hundred and fifty homes were lost. Three people died.

By the time Delaney reached the driveway, the sun was gone. He backed the car in and left it there, ready for a quick escape if it came to that. The turkey smell hit him as he entered the house, but all the nostalgia it had dredged up earlier was gone now, and he told himself to stay calm, it was probably nothing, as Jordan came wheeling down the hall hollering, “Mommy, Delaney, there's a fire!” and Orbalina appeared from the kitchen to give them all a quick anxious look. Kyra bent to hug her son while her own mother looked on bewildered, as if she'd just washed her hands and couldn't find a towel to dry them. No one seemed to know what to do. Was the party on or off? Was the fire just a little thing, a minor inconvenience that would add piquancy to the day and provide a few after-dinner jokes, or were their lives in danger, their home, everything they owned? Kyra lifted her eyes to Delaney and he was aware in that moment that they were all watching him, his wife, her mother, the maid and Jordan, looking for signals, waiting for him to act, seize the moment, take the bull by the horns. That was when he crossed the room and flicked on the TV, and there it was, the fire, roiling in bright orange beauty, mesmerizing, seductive, the smoke unraveling round the edges as if whole empires were aflame.

They all stood there in silence while the camera pulled back to show the bombers diving on the flames and the helicopters hovering with a tinny televised clatter that mocked the booming vibrations overhead, and a voice that couldn't suppress a secret thrill said, “Driven by Santa Ana winds, the blaze, which officials now think began along the bed of Topanga Creek just below Fernwood less than an hour ago, was at first headed toward the Pacific Coast Highway, and all residents of the lower canyon are being evacuated. But as you can see from our dramatic helicopter footage, the winds have just now shifted and the main body of the fire seems to be climbing toward the populated areas around Topanga Village…”

That was all Kyra needed to hear. “Load up the cars!” she cried, and though she was still standing in place her movements were frantic, as if she were a conductor urging the full orchestra to a crescendo. “I want the photo albums, if nothing else-and Jordan, you pack clothes, hear me, clothes first, and then you can take video games.”

“All right,” Delaney heard himself say, and his voice was a desperate gulp for air, “and what should I take? The electronics, I guess. The computer. My books.”

Kit sank heavily into the armchair, her gaze fixed on the TV and the glorious billowing orange-red seduction of the flames. She glanced up at Delaney, at Kyra, at the grim uncomprehending face of the maid. She was dressed in a champagne suit with a frilly mauve blouse and matching heels, her hair perfectly coiffed, makeup flawless. “Is it really that serious?”

No one had moved. Not yet, not yet. They all turned back to the TV, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that they'd been watching old footage, color-enhanced pictures of the Dresden bombing, anything but the real and actual. But there it was, the fire, in living color, and there the familiar studio set and the anchorpersons so familiar they might have been family. The anchorpersons were clucking and grieving and admonishing, straining their prototypic features to hear the dramatic eyewitness testimony of a reporter standing on the canyon road with his windblown hair and handheld mike: oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, this was the real thing, oh, yes, indeed.

Kyra looked as if she were about to lift off and shoot through the ceiling. Orbalina, whose English was limited to a response to the six or seven most common scullery commands, stared at the screen in disbelief, no doubt thinking about her apartment in Pacoima and how she was going to get there if the buses weren't running-and this meant the buses wouldn't be running, didn't it? Jordan clung to his mother's leg. He was staring fascinated at the televised flames, his mother's admonition to pack already forgotten. And Kit, though she sank ever more deeply into the folds of the chair, still didn't seem to understand. “But they haven't told us to evacuate,” she protested weakly. “I mean, no one said a word about the upper canyon. Did they?”

“We better shut off the turkey,” Delaney said, and that seemed to lift the spell. “Just in case.”

SO SHE SAT THERE, AS MISERABLE AS SHE'D EVER been in her life, and closed her mind down till the world went from a movie screen to a peephole, and still she wanted to close the peephole too. She was going mad, dancing round the edges of the abyss, and she didn't care. The baby grew and it pressed on her organs and made her skin flush with a stipple of red like a rash. Cándido gave her food and she ate it. But she wouldn't sleep with him. Wouldn't talk to him. It was all his fault, everything, from the stale air in the bus on the ride from Cuernavaca to Tijuana and the smell of the dump to this place, this vacancy of leaves and insects and hot naked air where men did dirty things to her and made her pee burn like fire. She looked through her peephole at the gray leaves of the gray trees and thought of Soledad Ordóñez, the stooped old shapeless woman from the San Miguel barrio who didn't speak to her husband for twenty-two years because he sold their pig in San Andrés and was drunk for a week on the proceeds. He was dying, stretched out on his deathbed with the priest and their three sons and four daughters there and all their seventeen grandchildren and his brother too, and he could barely croak out the words, “Soledad, talk to me,” and her face was stone and the priest and the brother and all the grandchildren held their breath, and she said one word, “Drunkard,” and he died.

America missed her mother with a pain of longing so intense it was as if some part of her body had been removed. She missed her sisters and her bed in the comer of the back room with the posters of rock stars and las reinas del cine above it and Gloria Iglesias and Remedios Esparza and the other girls she used to go around with. She missed human voices, laughter, the smells of the street and marketplace, the radio, TV, dances and shops and restaurants. And who had deprived her of all this? Cándido. And she hated him for it. She couldn't help herself.