The Tortilla Curtain

road. “That's right,” a shrill voice called out at Delaney's back, a female voice, and he turned round on a heavyset woman with muddy eyes and a silver hoop in her right nostril. She wore a shawl over a heavy brocade dress that trailed in the dirt and hid her shape. “And I want to know too,” she cried, stumbling over the last two syllables, and Delaney saw that she was drunk.
    By this point a second patrolman had joined the first, a ramrod CHP officer with a pale-blond crew cut bristling against the brim of his hat. He gave a quick glance round him to size up the situation, stared down the big woman with the nose ring, and then, ignoring the other cop, said something in Spanish to the two Mexicans, and now they jumped, all right. The next second they were both lying prone in the dirt, legs spread, arms scissored at the back of their heads, and the new cop was patting them down. Delaney felt a thrill of triumph and hate--he couldn't suppress it--and then both cops were bending over the suspects to clamp the handcuffs round their wrists, and the tall Mexican, Delaney's special friend, was protesting his innocence in two languages. The son of a bitch. The jerk. The arsonist. It was all Delaney could do to keep from wading in and kicking him in the ribs.
    Somebody's dog was barking, raging in primal fury, and the sirens tore at the air. There must have been thirty or forty people gathered now and more coming. They took a step back when the cops hauled the suspects to their feet, but Delaney was right there, right in the thick of it, Jack at his side. He saw the dirt and bits of weed on the front of the Mexicans' shirts, saw the individual bristles of their unshaven throats and jowls. The tall one's hat had been knocked askew so that the brim jutted out at a crazy angle. The handcuffs sparked in the repetitive light. No one moved. And then the big woman shouted a racial slur and the Hispanic cop's head jerked around.
    That was when Delaney felt the tall Mexican's eyes on him. It was like that day out on the Cherrystones' lawn, the same look of contempt and corrosive hate, but this time Delaney didn't flinch, didn't feel guilt or pity or even the slightest tug of common humanity. He threw the look back at the son of a bitch and put everything he had into it, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Then, just as the blond cop pulled at the man's arm to swing him round and march him off toward the squad car, the Mexican spat and Delaney felt the wet on his face, saw it there spotting the lenses of his glasses, and he lost all control.
    The next thing he knew he was on the guy, flailing with his fists even as the crowd surged forward and the Mexican kicked out at him and the cop wedged his way between them. “Motherfucker!” the Mexican screamed over his shoulder as the cop wrestled him away. “I kill you, I kill you, motherfucker!”
    “Fuck you!” Delaney roared, and Jack Cherrystone had to hold him back.
    “Arsonist!” somebody shouted. “Spic!” And the crowd erupted in a cacophony of threats and name-calling. “Go back to Mexico!” shouted a man in a sport shirt like Delaney's, while the woman beside him cried “Wetbacks!” over and over till her face was swollen with it.
    The cops thrust their prisoners behind them and the blond one stepped forward, his hand on his holster. “You people back off or I'll run you in, all of you,” he shouted, the cords standing out in his throat. “We've got a situation here, don't you understand that, and you're just making it worse. Now back off! I mean it!”
    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