T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

The wind had shifted yet again and that meant the flames were climbing back toward them, relentless, implacable, eating up the canyon despite all that the _gringos__ and their airplanes could do. It was hard to breathe and he could smell nothing but smoke and cinders and the burning stench of destruction-worse, far worse, than anything the Tijuana dump could offer. Even the smell of the dead burning flesh of the dogs was preferable to this, because this was his smell, his creation, and it was out of control. He kept going, faster now, patting furiously at the wall, the copper taste of panic rising in his throat. And what was behind the wall? Houses, he guessed. The houses of the rich. Or maybe a ranch-one of those big squared-off places with a single house set squarely in the middle of it. He wasn't sure exactly where he was-the flight up the canyon and across the road had disoriented him-but they wouldn't have built a wall around nothing. He had to get inside, had to find out.

And then the shed was there, announced by a sharp pain in his knee and the dull booming reverberation of aluminum. He felt his way around it to the back and the door that opened on the black hole of the interior. It was hot inside, baked by the sun all day till it was like one of the sweat lodges the reservation Indians used in their rituals, and the aluminum ceiling was low. There was a sharp smell of chlorine and of grass clippings, gasoline and manure-even before he let his hands interpret the place for him, Cándido knew what it was. He felt around the walls like a blind man-he _was__ a blind man, but a blind man in a hurry, a rush, life and death-and the tools were all there, the shovels and the shears and the weed whippers. His hands darted over the lawn mower, one of those ones you sit in, like a little tractor, the plastic buckets of chlorine and muriatic acid and all the rest of it. And then he found the shelves and felt over the boxes of seed and gopher pellets until, _milagro de milagros,__ his fingers closed round the throat of a kerosene lantern. Half a minute and it was lit, and the shed was a place of depth and color. He stepped outside with the lantern and there, tucked in against the wall right at his feet, was a faucet and a green hose coiled up against the plastic pipe of the irrigation system.

He found a cup in the shed and drank off three cups of water before filling it for America, and then he went off to get her, the lantern puddling light at his feet and throwing a dim halo into the bushes before him. He followed the wall back to where he'd jammed a stick in the ground to guide him and went off at a right angle from that, calling out to her as he went. The dirt was pale, the bushes paler. Smoke rolled over the hill like a deadly fog. “Here,” she called. “Over here!”

It was hot. It smelled bad. She was scared. She couldn't believe she was having her baby in a place like this, with the whole world on fire and nobody to help her, no midwife, no doctor, not even a _curandera.__ And the pain. Everything was so tight down there, squeezing in, always in, when it should be pushing out. She was in a shed, floating in a sea of rustling plastic sacks of grass seed, the sweat shining all over her like cooking oil and Cándido fussing around with his knife-sharpening it now on a whetstone-as if he could be of any use at all. The pains came regularly now, every minute or so, and they took away her breath. She wanted to cry out, wanted to cry out for her mother, for Tepoztlán, for everything she'd left behind, but she held it all in, everything in, always in and why not out, and then again and again.

She was dreaming, awake and dreaming, but the dreams were full of teeth and claws and the howls of animals. Outside, beyond the thin skin of the shed, the inferno rushed toward them and the winds rattled the walls with a pulse like a drumbeat and Cándido's face was a glowing ball of sweat and worry. She knew what he was thinking: should they run and how could they run with the baby coming now and why did it have to come now of all times and who had elected him the sole target of all the world's calamities? But she couldn't help him. She could barely move and the pains were gripping her and then releasing again till she felt like a hard rubber ball slammed against a wall over and over. And then, in the middle of it all, with the terrible clenching pains coming one after the other, the animals suddenly stopped howling and the wind ceased its incessant drumming at the walls. America heard the fire then, a crackling hiss like the TV turned up full volume in the middle of the night and nothing on, and then a thin mewling whine that was no howl or screech but the tentative interrogatory meow of a cat, a pretty little Siamese with transparent ears that stepped through the open door and came right up to her as if it knew her. She held out her hand, and then clenched her fist with the pain of a contraction, and the cat stayed with her. “_Gatita__,” she whispered to the arching back and the blue luminous eyes, “you're the one. You're the saint. You. You will be my midwife.”

THE NIGHT CAME DOWN LIKE A HAMMER: NO GENTLY fading light, no play of colors on the horizon, no flights of swallows or choruses of crickets. Delaney watched it from behind the police barrier at the top of Topanga Canyon, his wife, stepson and mother-in-law at his side. Their friends and neighbors were gathered there with them, refugees in Land-Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes and Jeep Cherokees that were packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry. Bombers pounded overhead while fire trucks, sirens whining, shot down the road. Emergency lights flashed, strobing endlessly across the panorama of massed and anxious faces, and police stood tall against the strips of yellow plastic that held back the crowd. It was war, and no mistaking it.

Kyra leaned into Delaney, gripping his arm with both hands, her head on his shoulder. She was still dressed for the party. They gazed out on the distant flames and smelled the smoke and felt the wind in their faces while dogs yapped and hastily trailered horses whinnied and the radios from a hundred cars blared out the catastrophic news. “I guess this means we can forget the turkey,” Delaney said. “It'll be like jerky by now.”

“Turkey?” Kyra lifted her face to fix him with an acid look. “What about the oven, the kitchen, the roof? What about all our furniture, our clothes? Where are we going to live?”

Delaney felt a stab of irritation. “I was just being, I don't know, ironic.”

She turned away from him, her eyes on the creeping molten fingers of the fire. “It's no joke, Delaney. Two of my listings went up in the Malibu fire last year, and believe me, there was nothing left, nothing but smoldering ash and metal twisted up out of the ground where the plumbing used to be, and if you think that's funny you must have a pretty sick sense of humor. That's our house down there. That's everything we own.”

“What in christ's name are you talking about? You think I think this is funny? It's not-it's terrifying. It scares the shit out of me. We never had anything like this in New York, maybe as and anv w hurricane or something every ten years or so, a couple of trees knocked down, but this-”

She detached herself from him then and shouted out to Jordan, who'd been darting in and out of the knots of people with one of his friends, to stay close. Then she turned back to Delaney. “Maybe you should have stayed there, then,” she said, her voice harsh with anger, and she went off in the direction of her mother and Dom Flood.

Delaney watched her go. She was throwing it all on his shoulders, making him the scapegoat, and he felt put-upon and misunderstood, felt angry, pissed off, rubbed raw. He'd done his best. He'd managed to get his word processor and discs into the car in the ten minutes the police had given them between the first and final warnings-a pair of cruisers crawling up and down the street with their loudspeakers blaring-but that was about all. Ten minutes. What could you do in ten minutes? He was frozen with grief and anxiety-how could she doubt that? He hadn't meant anything about the turkey-it was gallows humor, that was all, an attempt to break the tension. What did a turkey matter? A thousand turkeys? He was standing there in the garish light, the wind in his face and his entire cranial cavity filled with smoke, angry at the world-What next? he was thinking, what more could they do to him? — when Jack Cherrystone appeared at his side with a bottle of liquor in his hand.