Flash Fire, Page 3

  Bulldozer teams were hitting the west, seaward, flank of the fire, to keep it out of the adjoining urban areas.

  The only thing June’s crew could do was try to save houses and lives.

  “Great,” said June sarcastically. She was his captain. The first woman in this fire department, she’d gone through a lot. She was medium in every way: medium high, medium wide, medium looks — but first in guts. “I see four more jerks up on roofs with their garden hoses. What do you bet we get to that hydrant on top of the hill and there’s no water pressure? They’ve sucked it all up.”

  The newest trend — wet roofs. What did they think they were accomplishing? If they’d kept brush away from the house and had a tile roof instead of wood shingle, they’d have a prayer. But all they were now, these roof-wetters, were jerks.

  In fact, this neighborhood looked as if the Homeowners’ Association had said: “Be sure to collect logs, pieces of plywood you might need someday, bales of hay and, of course, full gasoline cans. That way when the fire comes, your house will really explode.”

  “Listen, buddy,” shouted Matt, “you need to get out of here.”

  “My house is my life,” shouted the man right back.

  “Life is life,” said Matt. “Houses are houses.”

  This sounded profound to Matt, but it sounded stupid to the homeowner, who made a rude gesture and went on wetting his house. Matt shrugged. The fire department could do a lot of things, but it could not rope adults like cows at a rodeo and remove them from their own personal rooftops.

  What he really could not understand were the crowds. Tourists from the neighborhood. Tourists from the other side of LA. Disneyland let’s-do-a-fire-instead tourists.

  He would have thought the heat would drive them away. It was ninety degrees by itself, and with the fire approaching it felt like a hundred and ten. Or even a hundred and fifty. But there they stood, bare armed, bare legged, dripping sweat, and the smoke collecting in their sweat so that they turned muddy, and they didn’t care. It was very windy. Combine Santa Ana winds with the fire’s own weather and you had a gale. People just laughed and took pictures of each other with the fire as backdrop. Whoever sold disposable cameras was having a great day.

  It was sort of like a party, with fire gossip instead of divorce gossip. “Laguna Beach has lost over three hundred homes,” said somebody, gloating because she didn’t live in Laguna Beach.

  “Altadena’s even worse,” said somebody, bragging because she did live in Altadena, but in a paved citified area where it was unlikely the fire would reach.

  June had been on the handy-talkie. Matt loved those; he loved all the equipment that went with firefighting. “Which houses you assigning us?” asked Matt.

  She shook her head, meaning it was up to her crew. “Choose winners,” said June. “Get houses you can defend and set up on ’em.”

  Choose winners.

  Matt Marsh’s parents certainly did not think they had raised a winner. They had brought him up to be a winner, all right: a corporate leader or a fine attorney who also played tennis and sailed. What was this firefighter crap? It made them crazy. They’d given him a Maserati for his birthday, to entice him back into the world of large incomes. As a firefighter, however, Matt couldn’t afford the kind of neighborhood where people drove hundred-thousand-dollar cars. He was in the kind of neighborhood where people ripped them off, and took the wallets and possibly the lives of their drivers. So the Maserati sat, a glittering high velocity reproach, in his parents’ garage on Pinch Canyon.

  Matt Marsh wanted to win. He wanted to make saves — a house or a garage, but preferably a life. He wanted to show his mother and father that he had worth. There was no greater act than to rescue another human being.

  Because of the hundred-and-fifty- to two-hundred-foot-high flames along some parts of this fire, Command expected significant civilian and firefighter injury. Nice word, “significant.” It meant “lots and lots.”

  A medical branch had been established: five paramedic units and ten ambulances. Available hospital beds had been inventoried.

  Matt thought of the danger, and hoped and hoped and hoped that he would be right there when it came.

  The Press House

  3:30 P.M.

  DANNA WAS THINKING ABOUT when she babysat for Geoffrey. She didn’t like it. He didn’t sit in your lap when you read a picture book to him, he wouldn’t answer when you chatted, and he didn’t kiss back when you kissed him good night.

  What sitting for Geoffrey really was, was heartbreaking. You kept thinking that this hug would change him. This tickle would make him giggle and this kiss would make him beam at you. But affection didn’t make a dent in Geoffrey.

  You couldn’t even accuse Mr. and Mrs. Aszling of neglecting him, although they did. Geoffrey neglected right back. He didn’t have a personality, and after a while you didn’t think of him as a little boy, just a breathing thing up there in the house.

  She glanced at her watch, and sure enough, the 3:30 where-are-the-children-and-are-they-using-their-time-well phone call came through.

  “Hey, sweetie,” said Daddy. “How was school? You have a good day? Started your homework yet?”

  “It was okay. We had fire drills. Boring. I’m hanging around doing vocabulary. Don’t you think there should be legislation against vocabulary?”

  Her father laughed. “What’s Hall doing?”

  “I think he’s swimming laps.”

  “Tell him to do his chemistry.”

  “Daddy, he knows to do his chemistry. At some point, you have to let us decide when to do what.”

  “Tell your mother,” he said, and they both laughed, and air-kissed and hung up. Danna forgot her father completely and instantly.

  If there’s a fire, thought Danna, Hall would save Geoffrey.

  She loved the image of her older brother saving a life. Hall was a funny combination of jock (hill climbing, off road biking) and dreamer. It was nice to have a brother only a year older, to pave the way and make clear what mistakes, teachers, and people to avoid.

  Hall saves Geoffrey, she decided, and I save the kittens and I’d better also save Egypt and Spice.

  Egypt and Spice were the Luus’ horses. Every day Danna saved her school cafeteria apple, walking on up to the paddock to give Egypt one half and Spice the other.

  She got an apple ready, and a laundry basket for the kittens, and paused briefly to take in the news.

  News never seemed possible to Danna, especially LA news. No matter how awful LA was made to look on network news, for people like Danna, who actually lived here, LA remained flawless. Killings, gangs, fires, riots, unemployment — they weren’t her LA. Her LA was sunny comfort, hot colors, and cool drinks.

  Danna had been to New York City a couple of times and could not believe people lived like that. Dirty and cold and grim. Crowded and mean under a gray sky and without flowers. And they were so superior about it, too. As if LA were nothing but a herd of automobiles and airheads gone amuck.

  Indeed, on television, the Pacific Coast Highway was crowded with fire-fleeing automobiles — overflowing with possessions and people, even horses tied to bumpers, which Danna would certainly never do with any horse. The cars themselves were jousting with official rescue vehicles (and winning, because the trucks were following the rules and the cars weren’t) — indeed, LA was nothing this afternoon but automobiles gone amuck. Danna switched the nonsense off. Okay, now what about stuff? she said to herself. Everything in my bedroom?

  Should she rescue her Nancy Drew books? (Of course she was much too old to read them now, but went on buying them to complete her collection.) Her mother’s girlhood collection of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse books? (Danna had never read them, since the mere thought of hanging around sick people made her sick, too; Mom said that Cherry Ames hardly ever spent any time with sick people either, since she was far too busy solving mysteries and meeting handsome men.) Her pink sneaker collection? (Mom had bought Danna pink sneake
rs since size newborn, and Danna had saved them all. She had dozens.)

  Then it occurred to Danna that she and Hall had no car. Mom had hers, Dad had his, and the garage was empty. So the matter of pink sneakers and nurse novels was solved.

  We’d ride Egypt and Spice out, she thought. She envisioned herself with kittens in her arms, holding the reins, while Geoffrey sat in Hall’s lap and they galloped over fire and flame.

  What a film.

  She would have to remember the camcorder. It would be great footage.

  The Brushfire

  3:35 P.M.

  A LITTLE BITTY FIRE, like a campfire you built in the wrong place, you just buried with dirt, killing the oxygen. For a bigger fire — a dead tree burning — you needed a chain saw to cut the tree down and then the shovel to dig up some dirt and bury your tree in a pit. A fire that was above you, moving from treetop to treetop, gave you time to make your moves and calculate what to do next.

  But a fire that belongs to the wind, or makes the wind — that fire moves as fast as the wind, because it is the wind.

  Your ax, your chain saw, your shovel — they don’t stop a fire whirl any more than a teaspoon empties a swimming pool.

  The firefighters east of Grass Canyon stood where the fire no longer was. Orange flames left them behind at an incredible rate of speed. The earth under their feet after-smoked, the way when an earthquake is over, it after-shocks.

  The fire did not burn toward Grass Canyon Road, where there were crews and equipment waiting for it, but into the wildness that lay so astonishingly close to such a huge metropolis.

  The crew stumbled toward their truck to get on a radio and let Command know what had just happened: An ordinary fire had just become lethal.

  But everybody in Los Angeles was on a frequency at that moment. Fire engines and ambulances from fifty towns, either under threat themselves, or volunteering to help their neighbors, sheriffs and the Red Cross and volunteers and commuters in their thousands and thousands of cars, highway patrol and paramedics, news stations and auxiliaries and command posts…radios, pagers, cellular, and hard-wired telephones were overloaded. This transmission did not go through.

  The Severyn House

  3:38 P.M.

  WHEN BEAU DROVE OFF, Elisabeth ran down the switchbacks of their steep driveway to hide from him.

  Elisabeth, unlike Beau, could not care less about their house. It was a great big sterile place. You could houseclean inside with a garden hose; it was no different from the pools and the atrium. What Elisabeth loved was the bottom of the driveway.

  There, where the oaks curled up in huge dark fists and the ferns grew as high as her waist, fallen rocks from some ancient mudslide formed a triangular hidey hole. It was too dark to read there, and Elisabeth was a reader, books by the armload, so she didn’t stay long when she visited, but it was hers, and she went there most days for a minute or two. In the hidey hole she was safe.

  Safe from her parents’ disapproval.

  Safe from remembering that she was never going to have flaxen hair and blue eyes and a winning smile.

  Her mother did not know what to think of Elisabeth’s reading. When Mom caught Elisabeth with a book, she said Elisabeth had no life; she was substituting books for a real life. Mom might even say that Elisabeth had no friends and was trying to turn paper and print into a friend. Elisabeth did not have friends, and it was terrible, and the only thing more terrible was her own mother accusing her of it.

  If Beau was home, it would be okay, because Mom adored Beau, who was well named. Beau would distract Mom, and Elisabeth could slip away. But when Elisabeth was alone with Beau, it was bad in another way. Beau had decided that he was his sister’s Only Hope. He would tutor and train and teach and coax and bribe until she was up to standard.

  Some other time, Beau, she thought, ducking into the ferns.

  The air was awful. She hated these dumb brushfires; it hurt to breathe. It turned the sky ugly and left a litter of ash on the swimming pool surface.

  She had a pack of Sno Balls, her favorite junk food: cupcakes whose thick rubbery pink icing could be peeled off in one piece and stand on its own, like an igloo, while Elisabeth ate the inside.

  Beau didn’t know about the hidey hole. He was not the type who crept around hiding in woodsy thickets. He was the type who sought, or who was given, limelight. What did limelight mean, anyway? Why not lemonlight, or orangelight?

  It was very dark in Elisabeth’s hidey hole. And even though she was annoyed with the fires for giving her a cough, she was not thinking about fires. Brushfire sounded to an eight-year-old like something you would brush away, something on the floor you’d sweep up with a broom. Who would be afraid of that?

  If the world did turn orange and lemon, Elisabeth Severyn would not know until it was too late.

  The Brushfire

  3:38 P.M.

  THE FIRE SUCKED IN oxygen. It turned into a white and yellow avalanche, shrieking both up and down the sides of hills, eating not just grass and not just brush, but anything living or lifeless in its path: eating paint off cars and melting handles off doors and burning antlers off deer.

  It was traveling at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour. Unless stopped, slowed, or blown backward, the safety zone between the inferno and Pinch Canyon would last only fifteen minutes.

  ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING

  The Gatehouse

  3:38 P.M.

  THE AFTERNOON GREW HOTTER.

  The houses on Pinch Canyon and Grass Canyon preheated like ovens, growing closer and closer to the temperature that would make them explode.

  The air-conditioning in the tiny gatehouse failed. Alan Davey sat gasping for breath. He had to wear a uniform, because they liked uniforms on their help, these rich Pinch Canyon people; it made them feel pampered and special.

  Alan Davey hated his job. He had meant to work in fine restaurants and become a television chef, but he’d failed. Failure was fine in California as long as it was a step to success. But Alan Davey was no chef. Short-order cook, maybe — fried eggs and pancakes — but not great food. The California dream had not come true for Alan Davey, and he was too tired and hostile to try again.

  Being a residential guard should have been momentary, until he got on his feet again, but Alan Davey never found his feet again. Whereas everybody on Pinch — young, middle-aged, and old — had never been off their feet. He especially resented the teenagers, so casually sure of themselves, driving cars that cost more than Alan Davey would earn in years.

  Beau. It might be pronounced Bo, but it was short for beautiful. That’s what lived on Pinch Canyon. The beautiful people. And Alan Davey’s life was so low now that he had to smile, and remember names, and leap to open the gates for a spoiled brat named Beautiful.

  He wouldn’t mind at all if these people lost everything.

  Not that it would happen to them. They would laugh — fine white teeth surrounded by perfect golden tans — and rebuild bigger and better in the exact same place, because nothing on earth did affect them in the end. The guard wanted something to affect them.

  When the air-conditioning failed, he thought, That’s it. I quit. They’re on their own. Who needs this?

  He got his car (hidden behind pines so its age and lack of style would not offend Pinch Canyon owners) and abandoned his post. As a final thumbing of the nose, he locked the gate. These people specialized in being helpless; they loved being rich enough to pay somebody to do absolutely everything for them.

  So there. No little rectangle of plastic would open that gate now. Let them sit there and fume and be helpless for a while.

  Pacific Coast Highway

  3:38 P.M.

  “HEY, POP,” SAID SWANN, “look over there.”

  Her father had worried about driving in California. They were supposed to have these ten-lane highways where you had to fight the heaviest traffic in the world. But it turned out that the heaviest traffic in the world was also pretty much the slowest.
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  The Gormans had come for Disneyland, and also, of course, the Universal Studios tour and Beverly Hills High and the boardwalks at Venice Beach and Knott’s Berry Farm, if they had time. Frankly, they were a little annoyed. California weird was not coming through. People looked pretty darn normal. Mr. Gorman felt like he should get some money back.

  And it wasn’t relaxing like it was supposed to be. Everybody was distracted by these stupid wildfires, and the air stank. The green lawns everybody watered were a sort of creepy emerald, like fake contact lenses, while everyplace else was as dry and crispy as potato chips. The stupid wind never stopped, and you could never get enough to drink; your throat was always dried out.

  “Oh, wow!” cried Swann, waving and pointing across the road and up into the hills. “Fires! Aren’t they neat? Look at them all. I thought it would come in a sheet, but it’s more like pock-marks.”

  “That one is a whole house,” said Swann’s mother eagerly. “Lookit, lookit, over there, it’s a television van! Reporters! Let’s follow them.”

  “Yeah, Pop,” said Swann, “let’s watch stuff burn.”

  Mr. Gorman followed the network van off the next exit and they began working their way in the direction of smoke and sirens. LA was dusty tan and rapidly turning gray in the smoke, but the fires were orange and scarlet and ruby. So bright!

  There were two lines of traffic: the people running away from fire, loaded down by kids and pets and boxes, and then the people going toward the fires, to check them out and get some action, maybe see a house burn, maybe even with a person in it. Somebody was trying to direct traffic away from the fires instead of toward them, but the TV van ignored that, so the Gormans did, too.