The Tortilla Curtain
elbows and surveyed the little shack, his new home, his refuge, his hideout. There was a pile of peels and rinds in the comer, seeds and pulp chewed for the moisture and spat out again, a huge pile, and then he looked at América, asleep, her lips chapped and her chin stained with the juice.
This was no good. She'd wind up with diarrhea if she didn't have it already. She was nursing, for Christ's sake--she needed meat, milk, eggs, cheese. But how could he get it? He didn't dare show his face at the store, and even if he did, all his money but for sixteen dollars was down there in the blackened canyon, cooling off beneath a blackened rock. Meat, they needed meat for a stew--and at the thought of it, of stew, he felt his salivary glands tighten.
It was at that moment, as if it were preordained, that the cat reappeared, delicate, demanding, one gray foot arrested at the doorframe. “Meow,” the cat said.
“Kitty, kitty,” Cándido said. “Here, kitty.”
The Tortilla Curtain
5
IT DIDN'T LOOK GOOD. BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD were blackened, the chaparral gone, the trees scorched. Kyra drove out of the normal world and into the dead zone, where the underbrush had been so completely eradicated she would have thought it had been bulldozed if it weren't for the crablike clumps of charred sticks here and there and the pale-gray ash that inundated everything and still, two days later, gave off heat. The trees that had survived--oaks, mostiy--were scarred all the way up to their denuded crowns and the ones out on the margins of the fire's path were charred on one side and still green on the other. She held her breath as she came round the last turn and caught a glimpse of the skewed remains of the Da Ros gate.
She was wearing jeans and sneakers and she'd thought to bring along a pair of work gloves, and she stopped the car now and got out to see if she could move the gate back manually. It wouldn't budge, what was left of it. She could see that the fire had swept right up the drive, scouring the earth and leveling the trees, and that the gate, with its ornamental grillwork and iron spikes, hadn't been able to hold it back. The gate had been bent and flattened, the paint vaporized and the wheels seized in their track. There was no way to drive into the property: she would have to walk.
More than anything--more than the acid stink of the air or the sight of all that mature landscaping reduced to ash--it was the silence that struck her. She was the only thing moving beneath the sun, each step leaving a print as if she were walking in snow, and she could hear the faint creak of her soles as they bent under her feet. No lizard or squirrel darted across the path, no bird broke the silence. She steeled herself for what was coming.
It wasn't her house, not really, she kept telling herself, and she wasn't the one who was going to have to absorb the loss. She would call Patricia Da Ros late tonight, when it would be morning in Italy, and let her know what had happened. If the place had been miraculously spared--and these things happened, the wildfires as unpredictable as the winds that drove them, torching one house and leaving the place next door untouched--it was going to be a hard sell. She'd already had three buyers call up to wriggle out of done deals on houses in the hills, and she knew that nobody would want to even look up here till spring at least--they had short memories, yes, but for the next six months it would be like pulling teeth to move anything anywhere near here, even a horse trailer. But if the house wasn't too bad, she'd have to get the Da Roses' insurer to re-landscape ASAP, and maybe she could use the fire as a selling point--it wouldn't burn here again in this lifetime, and that was a kind of insurance in itself...
And then she came over the hill and into the nook where the garage used to be and saw the tall chimneys of the house standing naked against the stark mountains and the crater of the sea: the rest was gone. The leather-bound books, the period furniture, the paintings, the rugs, the marble and the Jacuzzi and the eight and a half bathrooms--gone, all gone. Even the stone walls had crumbled under the weight of the cascading roof, the rubble scattered so far out you would have thought the place had been dynamited.
She'd been prepared for this--she'd seen it before--but still, it was a shock. All that beauty, all that perfection, all that exquisite taste, and what was it worth now? She couldn't
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