T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

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.”

She was concerned about her properties. As far as anybody knew to this point, the only homes lost had been eight redwood cabins just to the south of Arroyo Blanco in a little enclave of people living alternative lifestyles-hippies, bikers, palm readers, New Age enthusiasts and the like-but she was worried about a couple of far-flung listings, the Da Ros place in particular. She'd been on the verge of hysteria the previous afternoon when they'd had to leave the cat behind to what seemed a horrible and inescapable fate, but now that the fire had passed them by, Delaney could see that she'd automatically shifted her focus to her listings. The cat would be all right, she knew that. It was probably hiding under a bed somewhere, terrorized by the sirens. Or it was out back stalking all those dislocated mice. It would turn up.

“They didn't,” Kyra said into the mouthpiece. The juice went untasted from her hand to the counter, a clear orange tube of light. “Are you sure it was the Da Roses'?” And then, to Delaney: “Quick, flick on the TV, will you?” and they were heading in lockstep for the living room. “Channel Seven,” she breathed, and spoke into the phone again: “Thanks, Sally. Yes, yes, I'm watching it now.”

Full-color scenes of destruction blew by on the screen. The flattened remains of the redwood cabins held center stage a moment, burned-out cars and vans and toppling chimneys raising their skeletal fragments to the treeless horizon, and then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing people outside Gitello's Market.