Budding Prospects (35 page)

At this juncture, Phil appeared in the doorway. He was shirtless, his sneakers were steaming and his head looked like a scorched onion. In one hand he held an intermittently spurting garden hose, in the other a dripping mop. Though his eyes gave away his terror—the sockets could barely contain them, the wild ducking eyes of horses trapped in a burning barn—he trained the hose on the heart of the blaze and began swabbing the heaps of burning refuse like a frenetic scrubwoman. Encouraged, I edged forward and lifted the nearest mattress, itself aflame now, and
slammed it down again, momentarily damping the fire so that I could tear through the room to the cans of gasoline.

I tore. Through Stygian gloom and Tartarean fire, through a smoldering clutter that would have given a fire marshall nightmares, kicking aside paint cans and leaping mounds of fuming rags and discarded clothes. When I reached the far side of the room I couldn’t see Phil or the open doorway. The jerrycans were hot to the touch. I crouched over them, bending low to snatch a quick breath beneath the loops of smoke raveling down from the ceiling, thinking
What next?
Was I really going to sprint through that inferno with a pair of ten-gallon cans of gasoline tucked under my arm? Twice, no less? I saw smoke, flames like teeth. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Insidious, the image of a Buddhist monk, his charred frame the center in a whirling jacket of fire, came to me. So this is heroism, I thought, feeling like the buck private who flings himself on the hand grenade to save his buddies in the foxhole, the platoon, the general and his chiefs of staff, and by extension the whole of the United States and the American way of life. I.e., foolish.

Protean, the flames licked at the walls, roared beneath the elevated floorboards, tendrils and creepers of some spontaneous, irreversible growth. I was coughing, my lungs turned inside out like a pair of rubber gloves. The jerrycans weren’t getting any cooler. As from a great distance I heard Phil shouting my name, but I’d begun to feel dizzy, sleepy somehow. Smoke inhalation, I thought numbly, and inhaled more smoke, pinching my eyes shut against the acid haze. In another moment I’d be too groggy to stand, let alone heft eighty-pound cans of gasoline.

It was then—the pyre awaiting me, my throat constricting, inertia pinning me to the spot—that I became aware of an almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, a flow of cooler air, the soft incongruous touch of a breeze on the back of my neck. I jerked round to discover the rents Marlon had torn in the back wall—jagged, night-black, rents the size of jerrycans. The fire talked to me, harsh and sibilant, but I didn’t listen. One, two, three, four, the cans were gone, tumbled in the grass, and I was ducking across the room like a deserter in no-man’s-land. Phil gave me a wild desperate look as I flung myself past him and
out into the open, where I fell to my knees and coughed till I thought I was about to give birth.

Twenty minutes later we were still at it. Stripped to the waist like stokers, soot-blackened and viscid with sweat, we plied shovels, hauled buckets of dirt, stamped out a grassfire on one side of the shed while flinging burning rubbish out of the door on the other. It was impossible, maddening, a losing proposition: one minute we’d think we finally had things under control, and the next flames would be spitting in our faces. We might have escaped the holocaust—the single scorching gasoline-fed blast that would have decided the issue once and for all—but the steady incremental force of the fire was beginning to take its toll. Phil was hurting, his chest and shoulders scoriated with whiplash burns, his right forearm slick with pus. He looked tired, scared, worn, looked as if he were about to throw down his shovel and bolt for the car. I didn’t feel much better. Though we’d worked like automatons, oblivious to heat, thirst, pain, worked without remit and in perfect accord, grunting instructions to each other, rushing from one threat to the next in feverish concentration—though we plumbed the depths of our physical and spiritual resources, reached down deep inside ourselves for that something extra and got it—we were barely running even. And we weren’t getting any stronger.

If we’d had water pressure it might have been different. But the hose, drawing on the spring-fed tank that supplied the house, could deliver no more than a trickle. (The water table was low, the tank small—a class of thirsty kindergartners could have come in off the playground and drained the entire thing without blinking. In better times—that is, when our lives weren’t imminently threatened by an advancing inferno—this was merely an annoyance; now it was critical.) Within minutes Phil’s mop had gone up like a pitch-pine torch, and we began to recognize the futility of attempting to fight a three-alarm blaze with teacups of water. We turned to the mattresses as a stopgap. Flung at the core of the conflagration, they would smother the flames for a minute or two while we frantically scattered burning debris and parried fiery thrusts with our shovels. Of course, this procedure had its drawbacks. Unlike more conventional fire-fighting agents—
water, sand, CO
₂
foam—bed ticking and cotton batting are themselves flammable, and periodically the mattresses had to be dragged out into the grass and beaten. Soon the grass was ablaze, and we were fighting fires on two fronts.

At some point we’d decided to abandon the mattresses in favor of dirt, and I found myself standing in a knee-deep trench just off the edge of the porch, shoveling like some crazed and fever-racked desperado atop a chest of doubloons. My hands were raw, the fire in the shed spoke with a steady implacable hiss, the mattresses leaked flames into the grass before me. I shoveled. Two scoops on the porch, one in the red-flaming grass. Phil stood above me on the porch, a cutout, flat against the glare, pitching the dirt through the open doorway. This was the shovel brigade. Dig, heave, dig: there was no other rhythm in the world.

I was in the act of lifting my six- or seven-hundredth shovel-load when I was arrested by a new sound from the shed—a fruity, nut-cracking sound, fibers yielding, tree limbs snapping in a gale—and turned to see that a section of the floor had caved in, spewing sparks and glowing cinders into the scrub behind the house. Unleashed, flames shot up through the gap, beating like wings, swelling and shape-shifting till they reached the ceiling. Phil staggered back from the doorway and dropped his shovel just as a can of something volatile—paint thinner?—went up with a percussive wallop. I stopped, too. For the first time since Phil had cried out and I’d started up out of the darkened kitchen, I hesitated. It was overwhelming, hopeless. The shed was engulfed in flame from beneath, the brushfire at my feet was spreading faster than I could cover it, and now the scrub out back was going up, too. I stood there transfixed, my hand clenched round the haft of the useless shovel, the familiar chalky taste of surrender creeping up my throat.

That was when Gesh appeared.

At the stroke of that moment—the paint thinner flaring in triumph, the hole in the floor feeding oxygen to the flames like an outsized bellows, Phil stunned and tired and hurt, my will wavering and the quitter’s taint rising in me like an infection—that was when Gesh emerged from the darkness like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. He came out of the night in white chinos and sandals, his hair slicked down, beard trimmed and
aloha shirt pressed, trailing a scent of aftershave. He was running. Head down, shoulders hunched forward, the big man held in reserve for the crucial confrontation, for single combat, the goal-line stand. No time for questions, strategies, appraisals: he slammed through the grassfire, took the porch in a bound, snatched up Phil’s shovel and plunged into the burning shed.

The effect was almost immediate: flames that had leapt to the ceiling were suddenly hobbled, the brilliant dilating light diminished as if Gesh’s bulk alone could displace the flames, as if he were a true believer cast into the burning fiery furnace, a Joe Magarac able to cool molten steel with a touch of his hand. I heard the scrape of his shovel, the snarl of the flames, and then I watched as a steady swirling arc of fire disengaged itself from the conflagration and struck the surface of the porch in an ignifluous rush: a smoldering rug materialized, the charred headboard of a forgotten bed, smoke-spewing cans, scraps of lumber, blazing boxes of rags and newspapers. Shovel flailing, shirt aflap, Gesh stood rooted in the heart of the inferno, a shadow closing over the jagged sheet of flame, choking it, defusing it, stealing its fire. Revitalized, Phil danced round each heap of combustion as it shot through the doorway, poking and stamping like a bushman with an effigy. I came alive too. Suddenly the shovel was light in my hands, a toy, a stick, and I was dumping dirt on the brushfire like a backhoe in high gear.

This was teamwork. With Gesh hacking away in the shed like a hook and ladder company on the eve of a three-week vacation and Phil dredging up some final deep-buried reserve of grit and energy, I was inspired, a shoveling genius. Though the flames snaked through the grass and rose up to hiss in my face, though bushes exploded in a rush of streaming sparks and the ground went hot beneath my feet, I drove myself like a long-distance runner coming into the home stretch, my will undeniable, inexorable, victory in sight. The shovel rose and fell with a mechanical insistence until the last pocket of fire closed on a fist of darkness. Then I turned back to the shed.

Inside, the heat was dizzying, the smoke a noose round the throat. The atmosphere seemed denser now, blacker, and I remember wondering vaguely if this was a good sign or bad. As I inched my way in I thought I could make out Gesh’s form
through the haze, but the fumes stabbed at my eyes and tore at my lungs until I found myself backing out the door like a crab. How could he stand it? He’d been in there five minutes, ten minutes, he’d been in there long enough to suffocate and collapse. I suddenly pictured him gasping for breath, going lightheaded, losing his bearings and tumbling into the flames like a man of straw, and then I was back in the shed, shouting his name as Phil had shouted mine over the simmering jerrycans. “Gesh!” I called, the vacuum of my throat torn by the smoke that rushed to fill it. At first I saw nothing, heard only the steady flap of the flames. I called out again. Then, out of a confusion of vacillating shapes, Gesh suddenly appeared, naked to the waist, wielding his shovel like a trident. I plunged forward. Took hold of his arm. Shouted in his face with all the frantic urgency of the rescuer lowered into the fuming pit. “This way!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

The aloha shirt trailed from him in spangled tatters, his face was rigid with fury, his eyes like open sores. “Get out!” he roared, snatching his arm away and turning to fling a bucket of earth at the fiery column rising through the gap in the staved-in floor. I glanced round. He’d managed to clear the floor, prop up the ceiling with a fallen beam and hammer out a section of the wall I’d last seen burning like a Yule log. I tried to pitch in, but quarters were close and he inadvertently slammed into me as he bent, cursing, for a second bucket of earth. Amazed, I watched as he hurtled round the room like a man trapped in a runaway locomotive, damping the main blaze in a chiaroscuro of furious movement, scattering debris, levitating buckets of dirt. The heat was cooking my skin, the smoke curing my lungs. I got out.

If Gesh was getting a grip on the fire in the shed, the blaze out back was the most concentrated threat now. Not only was it feeding the conflagration under the shed, but it was leapfrogging toward the drought-withered trees of the ravine and creeping along the base of the house as well. I turned to it like an outflanked cavalry officer, galloping round the corner of the shed with my spade held out before me like a lance; unfortunately I bowled into Phil, who was hunched feebly over his own digging implement and coughing into his fist like a tubercular orphan.
"You all right?” I screamed, staggering past him, everything a shout, the whole world a roar. And then I was bellowing instructions at him and we were shoveling yet again, steel biting earth, earth flying. Together we were able to clear a corridor to the base of the shed, and we began pitching dirt at the flames blossoming beneath the floorboards as Gesh fought them from above. Smoke ran for the sky, the shovel tore at my blistered hands. Flames coughed, sputtered, flared up again with an insidious cackle. We moved dirt, truckloads of it, and eventually we began to prevail; the fire under the shed cringed, shrank, backed off to devour itself in frustration. There was a single astonishing moment when the light suddenly died and I looked up at the shed in stupefaction: it was no longer burning. Gutted, charred, smoking, a sagging depthless web of lines lit only by the sickly glow of the fire at my back, the shed was no longer burning.

The rest was anticlimax. There was Gesh hurtling along the edge of the ravine with a splitting axe, clearing brush, taking down thorn and manzanita as if he were picking flowers, forcing the fire away from the trees and back toward the ground it had already blackened. There was Phil protecting the back wall of the house as if it were Buckingham Palace or the Louvre, Gesh and I cutting swaths through the single fire, dividing it once, twice, and then dividing it again, the heat attenuating, the light fading. We watched, shovels flicking like tongues, as the isolated fires burned themselves out, watched as the coals glowed hot on the charred ground and then faded into the enveloping night. Half an hour after Gesh had emerged from nowhere to snatch up Phil’s shovel and fight his way into the shed, the threat was over.

The night had suddenly grown dark again. In the garish glow of the embers, Phil’s face looked like some Polish Christ’s, gaunt and long-nosed, suffused with suffering. Gesh’s hair stood straight out from his head, his face was blackened, the yellow strips of the aloha shirt trailed from him as if he were peeling. I was trying to catch my breath, experience relief, savor the first few moments of life without frenzy, when Gesh turned to me, the lines of his face underscored with soot and locked in the grid of rage he wore into battle. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he
growled. “Can’t you see Phil’s got to be taken to the hospital?”