The Tortilla Curtain

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 Tortilla Curtain

3
    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.
    “It's hell, isn't it?” Jack rumbled, and he might have been doing a