“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 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 acquaintances, the people of Arroyo Blanco were allowed to return to their homes.
Delaney was hungover and contrite. He'd all but started a riot, and the thought frightened him. He remembered the time he'd participated in an antinuke demonstration with his first wife, Louise, and how it seemed as if the whole world was against them-or worse, when they went up the steps of the abortion clinic in White Plains and the hard-line crazies had yabbered at them like dogs, faces twisted with rage and hate till they were barely human. Delaney had thrown it right back at them, defiant and outraged-the issue was personal, deeply personal, and he and Louise had agonized over their decision, they weren't ready yet, that was all, and why bring a child into a world already teeming with its starving billions? — but the protesters wouldn't let them be, didn't even see them as individuals. Well, he was one of them now. He was the hater, he was the redneck, the racist, the abuser. There was no evidence that those men had a thing to do with the fire-they could have been fleeing on foot, thumbing a ride, walking up the road to take in the sights, _hiking.__ As sober as he was, as ashamed and repentant, he couldn't suppress a flare of outrage at the thought-_hiking,__ the son of a bitch-but then, he asked himself, would he have felt the same way if the men walking up the road had been white?
They had to show the address on their licenses to get back through the police cordon-the road was open to residents only, as a means of discouraging looters-and Delaney, with Jordan beside him, followed Kyra and her mother down the road, through the as-yet-unmanned gate and into the development. Delaney rolled down his window and the lingering odor of charred brush and timber filled the car with a smell that reminded him of the incinerator at his grandmother's apartment all those years ago, or the dump, the Croton dump, smoldering under an umbrella of seagulls, but the development was untouched, pristine in the morning light. His neighbors were pulling into their driveways, unloading their cars, striding across deep-watered lawns to check the gates, the pool, the toolshed, all of them wearing the faint vacant half-smiles of the reprieved. Disaster had been averted. It was the morning after.