The Tortilla Curtain

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