The Tortilla Curtain (43 page)

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.”

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 bring herself to go any closer—what was the point? Did she really want to see the crystal chandeliers melted into a dirty gob of silica or discover a fragment of statuary pinned beneath a half-charred beam? She turned away—let the insurance adjusters work it out, let them deal with it—and started the long walk down the driveway without looking back.

Her other listing up here, a contemporary Mediterranean on two and a half acres with a corral and horse barn, hadn’t been touched, not a shingle out of place. And why couldn’t that have gone up instead? It was a choice property, on a private road and with terrific views, but it was nothing special, nothing unique or one of a kind, like the Da Ros place. What a waste, she thought, kicking angrily through the ash, bitter, enraged, fed up with the whole business. It was the Mexicans who’d done this. Illegals. Goons with their hats turned backwards on their heads. Sneaking across the border, ruining the schools, gutting property values and freeloading on welfare, and as if that wasn’t enough, now they were burning everybody else out too. They were like the barbarians outside the gates of Rome, only they were already inside, polluting the creek and crapping in the woods, threatening people and spraying graffiti all over everything, and where was it going to end?

They’d held the two Mexicans for the fire—the same two who’d sprayed that hateful filth across the walls of the house—but they’d let them go for lack of evidence. And what a joke that was. They couldn’t even be deported because the police and the INS weren’t allowed to compare notes. But they’d done it, she knew they had, just as surely as if they’d piled up the brush, doused it with gasoline and set fire to the house itself. It was incredible. Beyond belief. She was in such a state by the time she reached the car her hand trembled as she punched in the office on her phone. “Hello, Darlene?” she said.

Darlene’s voice was right there, a smooth professional chirp: “Mike Bender Realty.”

“It’s me, Kyra.”

“Oh. Hi. Everything all right?”

Kyra gazed out the windshield on the wasteland around her, real estate gone bad, gone terminally bad, and she was still trembling with anger, the sort of anger the relaxation tapes couldn’t begin to put a dent in, and she took it out on the receptionist. “No, Darlene,” she said, “everything’s not all right. If you really want to know, everything sucks.”

 

 

 

Delaney dropped Kit at the airport on Sunday afternoon, and it was past four by the time he and Jordan got back. He was surprised to see Kyra’s car in the driveway—Sunday was open house day and she rarely got home before dark this time of year. He found her in the TV room, the sound muted on an old black-and-white movie, the multiple-listings book facedown in her lap. She looked tired. Jordan thundered in and out of the room, a glancing “Hi, Mom!” trailing behind him. “Tough day?” Delaney asked.

She turned her face to him and he saw in the light of the lamp that she was agitated, her eyes hot, nose red, the petulant crease stamped into her brow. “The Da Ros place is gone,” she said. “I was up there this afternoon—they finally opened the road.”

His first impulse was to congratulate her—no more nighttime treks to close the place up, one less worry in their lives—but he saw that it would be a mistake. She was wearing the look that had come across her face the day the stranger had locked the dog in the car out back of the Indian restaurant, and in the absence of the stranger, all her firepower would come to bear on him and him alone. “But you knew that, didn’t you? I mean, didn’t Sally Lieberman call and say she’d seen the house on the news?”

“She wasn’t sure.” Kyra’s voice had grown quiet. “I was hoping, you know? That house reaily—I don’t know, I loved that house. I know it wasn’t for you, but if I could have had my choice of any house in all of Los Angeles County, that would have been it. And then, after all the work I put into it, to see it like that—I just don’t know.”

What could he say? Delaney wasn’t very good at consolation—he felt the loss, any loss, too much himself. He crossed the room and sat beside her on the couch, but he sensed he shouldn’t put his arm around her yet—there was something else coming.

“I can’t believe they just let them go like that,” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Who do you think? The Mexicans. The ones that burned down my house.”

Delaney couldn’t believe it either. He’d even called Jack about it and Jack had used the occasion to shoot holes in what was left of the sinking raft of his liberal-humanist ideals. What did you expect? Jack had demanded. You give all these people the full protection of our laws the minute they cross the border and you expect them to incriminate themselves? Where’s the evidence? Yes, all right, they determined the thing was started by an illegal campfire in the lower canyon, and these two men were seen walking up the canyon road, fleeing the fire just like everybody else—where’s the proof they started it? You think they’re going to admit it, just like that?

Delaney had been outraged. The fire had given him a real scare, and though he knew it was regenerative, a natural and essential part of the chaparral environment and all that, this was no theoretical model—this was his canyon, his house, his life. It made him seethe to think of the ruined holiday, the panic of packing up and running, the loss of wildlife and habitat, and all because some jerk with a match got careless—or malicious. It made him seethe and it made him hate. So much so it frightened him. He was afraid of what he might do or say, and there was still a part of him that was deeply ashamed of what had happened at that roadblock Thursday night. “The whole thing is crazy,” he said finally. “Just crazy. But listen, it could have been a lot worse. We’re okay, we made it. Let’s just try and forget about it.”

“Look at the Da Roses, look what they lost,” Kyra said, lifting the book wearily from her lap, as if the weight of all those properties were bearing her down, and set it on the coffee table. “How can you say ‘forget about it’? The same thing’s going to happen in these canyons next year and the year after that.”

“I thought you said he killed himself.”

“That’s not the point. His wife’s alive. And their children. And all of that artwork, all those antiques—they were priceless, irreplaceable.”

There was a silence. They both stared numbly at the screen, where a couple Delaney didn’t recognize—B stars of the forties—embraced passionately against a shifting backdrop of two-lane highways and hotel lobbies rife with palms. Finally Delaney said, “How about a walk before dinner? We could look for Dame Edith—”

For a moment he was afraid he’d said the wrong thing—the cat had been missing for three days now and that was another sore point—but Kyra gave him half a smile, reached out to squeeze his hand, and then got to her feet.

Outside, it was overcast and cool, with a breeze that smelled of rain coming in off the ocean. And why couldn’t it have come four days earlier? But that was always the way: after the fires, the rains, and the rains brought their own set of complications. Still, the stink of burning embers was dissipating and the Cherrystones’ jasmine was in bloom, giving off a rich sweet nutty scent that candied the air, and things were flowering up and down the block, beds of impatiens and begonias, plumbago and oleander and Euryops daisies in huge golden masses. The windborne ash had been swept up, hosed into lawns and off the leaves of the trees, and the development looked untouched and pristine, right down to the freshly waxed cars in the driveways. Fire? What fire?

They were walking hand in hand, Kyra in her Stanford windbreaker, Delaney in a lightweight Gore-Tex backcountry jacket he’d got through the Sierra Club, calling out “Kitty, Kitty,” in harmony, when Jack Jardine’s classic 1953 MG TD rounded the corner, Jack at the wheel. The car was a long humped shiver of metal and the engine sounded like two French horns locked on a single note that rose or fell in volume according to what gear Jack happened to be in at the moment. He swung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb beside them, killing the engine. “Out for a stroll?” he said, leaning his head out the window.

“Sure,” Delaney said. “It’s about time the weather changed. Feels good.”

“Hi, Jack.” Kyra gave him an official smile. “All settled back in? How’s Erna?”

“Everything’s fine,” Jack said, and his eyes dodged away from them and came back again. “Listen, actually—well, there’s something I just discovered I thought you might want to take a look at, no big deal, but if you’ve got a minute—?”

He swung open the passenger door and Delaney and Kyra squeezed in—and it was a tight squeeze, a very tight squeeze, the floor space like the narrow end of a coffin, the head space claustrophobic at best. The car smelled of oil, leather, gasoline. “I feel like I’m in high school again,” Delaney said.

“It’ll only be a minute.” Jack turned the key and pushed a button on the dash and the engine stuttered to life. The car was one of his hobbies. He liked to play with it on weekends, but he reserved the Range Rover for the freeway wars, five days a week, down the canyon road to the PCH and up the Santa Monica and 405 freeways to Sunset and his office in Century City.

They were silent a moment, the thrum of the car all-encompassing, every bump and dip instantly communicated to their thighs and backsides, and then Delaney said, “So did Dom Flood ever turn up?”

Jack gave him a quick look and turned his eyes back to the road. He was uncomfortable with the subject, Delaney could see that, and it was a revelation—he’d never seen Jack uncomfortable before. “I only represented him in the, uh, the financial matter, the banking case—he has other attorneys now.”

“So what are you saying—he ran?”

Jack seemed even less comfortable with this formulation and he shifted unnecessarily to give him an extra moment to cover himself. “I wouldn’t call it running, not exactly—”

It was Kyra’s turn now. “But he is a fugitive, right? And what he did to my mother, that was inexcusable. She couldn’t be charged as an accessory or anything, could she?”