Fire and Rain (12 page)

It had been a freak set of circumstances, the fire chief had told him, that set off this newest fire and allowed it to jump the wall of the canyon to the pocket of five homes nestled together on the other side.

“First, you had the extremely high temperature,” the fire chief had said, as he stood on Chris’s cottage porch that morning. Behind him, the sun had been rising, filling the air with the terrible red glow of a recent, too-close fire. Puffs of ash had floated in the air around the fire chief’s shoulders and littered Chris’s cottage porch, and the chief’s face had been black with soot and grime. “Then you had the low humidity,” he’d continued, “and the gusty winds.” He’d described how the wind had carried embers from fires miles away, how once the chaparral around the houses was ignited, the wild blasts of wind fanned the flames into an inferno. “An electrical fire knocked out the pumping station around midnight,” he’d added, “so the hydrants were dry. We just had to let the houses burn. It was a miracle no one was killed.”

Chris tried to listen, tried to nod at the appropriate places in the fire chief’s monologue, but he was thinking only of getting out to the little valley and seeing for himself what had become of his childhood home.

The house in which he’d grown up was the one closest to where he now stood. His father had built it, and Chris had always thought of the small ranch-style house—of this entire little tract of homes—as a tribute to Augie Garrett’s pioneering spirit. Both of Chris’s parents had grown up in the Midwest. When they married—very young—they headed for California, egging each other on with fantasies of adventure. They found San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even San Diego, too cosmopolitan for their tastes, however, and headed into the more rural areas until they reached Valle Rosa, where they encountered a network of similarly disillusioned city-dwellers. Augie came up with the idea of creating their own community outside the town. He found this little valley, and he and four other families worked together to build the small, functional houses that had rested there for forty-five years. The original families were long gone. As a matter of fact, Chris and Sam Braga were the only people from the neighborhood still living in Valle Rosa.

Beyond the remains of the houses, Chris could see the horse pasture. From where he stood, it looked as though the fire hadn’t touched it, although it was gray with a coating of ash. Why it was called the horse pasture, Chris didn’t know. He had never seen a horse in it, and when he looked at that stretch of ash-covered earth, all he could see was himself out there as a boy, Augie coaching him in his pitching.

Frail little Sam Braga had practiced with them for a while. By the time Chris was eleven years old, though, his fast ball was so dangerous that Mrs. Braga forbade her son to play with him any longer. Sam’s own father was a writer, erudite and serious and not much fun for a growing boy. Even at that age, Chris knew Sam was jealous of the relationship he had with Augie.

Mrs. Braga had many complaints about Chris and Augie. “A son should not call his father by his first name,” she’d tell Augie in her attempts to reform him. “Chris should study more. Baseball is not the only thing in life. He’s turning into a wild boy in a household without a woman’s touch.”

It
had
been a household without a woman’s touch. Chris’s parents had been married only three years when his mother died, and she hadn’t had the chance to leave a lasting mark on the house. It became a male haven. Not dirty—Augie had too much pride in the house he’d built to let it go to seed—but he and Chris ate whatever they felt like eating whenever they felt like eating it, and they talked baseball day and night, Augie grilling his son on statistics the way other parents grilled their children on the times tables. Sometimes Augie would let Chris skip school so they could practice out in the horse pasture, and in the spring he’d pull him completely out of his classes for a week so they could go to Arizona to watch the Padres at training camp.

As Chris got older, he began to make his own rules for when he should skip school, and he was in trouble with his teachers more often than not.

“You come by your wildness naturally,” Augie once told him. “Even your mother was a crazy lady. We were both drunk off our asses the night of the accident. At least I can tell myself she felt no pain.”

Augie had been pitching in the minor leagues at the time of the accident, and his leg was destroyed, shattered, leaving him with a permanent limp. He’d been a promising pitcher, and he rued his missed opportunities. He tried to make up for them through his son, doing everything he could to build Chris’s confidence in himself as a ball player. When he’d stop in Chris’s bedroom at night, he’d tell him, “You’re going to be the best there is, son,” and out in the horse pasture, he’d jump up and down and whistle and yell every time Chris pitched something so fast and so smooth that Augie couldn’t even see it whisk past him.

By the time Chris was seventeen, though, Augie Garrett had changed his tune. Chris was playing baseball both in high school and in a local league, and he told Augie he no longer felt nervous before a game, that he knew he was the best there was.

“There’s such a thing as being too confident,” Augie warned him, but by that time nothing could hurt Chris’s image of himself.

The press picked up on it later, painting him not as conceited exactly, but as very sure of himself. “The fans relax whenever Garrett takes to the mound,” one sportscaster said of him. “He is simply nerveless out there.” The fans loved being able to depend on him. They loved
him
. The problem was, the more they loved a ballplayer, the more they invested in him, the more bitter their disappointment when he let them down.

Did anyone remember him as confident? He had forgotten the feeling himself. It had been replaced by guilt. He’d failed the people in his life. Not only his fans, but Carmen and his father and his son. And now he was the scapegoat for all that was wrong with Valle Rosa. Somehow, that didn’t seem unreasonable. It felt like a perfectly logical role for him to play these days.

Chris had been standing on the rim of the canyon for several minutes before he realized that someone was down there, digging in the rubble of the house farthest from him. It was a woman, her dark hair and black shorts and sooty T-shirt blending into the charred remains of the house. Only the white mask over her nose and mouth had caught his eye.

He walked toward her through the burned chaparral.

“Hello!” he called when he reached what would have been the outside wall of the house. It seemed rude to step inside without an invitation.

She was kneeling near the center of the house, a cardboard box at her side, and she turned to look at him. “Do I know you?” she asked, her voice muffled by the mask.

“No.” He stepped over the burned wall into what had once been the kitchen, skirting the blackened refrigerator that lay on its side in front of him. “I was up on the ridge there and spotted you. Can you use some help?”

She laughed a low bitter laugh. “I need more help than you can give me.” She wore blackened gardening gloves, and she dug carefully through a pile of ashes. In the box, he could see sooty, knobby disks of some sort. He bent down and ran his fingers over one of them to discover a cut glass plate.

“Fostoria,” she said. “They’ve been in my family a long time—belonged to my grandparents—and I’ve found exactly three unbroken plates so far out of a set of sixteen.”

“Let me help.” He tightened the handkerchief over his face and knelt next to her.

“There are cups and bowls and saucers, too.” She held up a charred glass cup and sighed. “Gary’s in the hospital for smoke inhalation, and my husband broke his collarbone trying to help the fire fighters. We don’t have insurance, and now we don’t have a house, either.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And I’m not the sort of person who cares a lot about material things, you know? But these dishes…” She shook her head. “They were always really special to me. They were all I had of my grandparents.”

They worked together quietly, Chris’s bare hands blackening quickly with soot. “I lived in one of these houses when I was a boy,” he said after a while.

She wasn’t impressed. “Back when there was water, right? Back when Valle Rosa wasn’t hell on earth.” She shook her head again, a flurry of ash falling from her hair. “We’re going to move away from here as soon as my boy’s out of the hospital. I used to love this place. I came here when I was sixteen and I thought it was paradise. But now I’m going to get as far from Valle Rosa as I can.” Tears glistened in her dark eyes.

“Maybe things will get better here,” he suggested.

“Yeah, right, with that turkey of a mayor we’ve got.”

Chris grimaced beneath the mask. “Well, there’ll be an election in November,” he said. Sam Braga’s most recent op-ed piece in the Journal had suggested that Valle Rosa’s experience with Chris underscored the need to take the upcoming mayoral election very seriously. Chris couldn’t agree more.

“November’s not soon enough.” The woman pulled a broken chunk of a plate from the ashes and slipped it into her box.

Chris was quiet again, glad of the anonymity the handkerchief across his face afforded him. After a few minutes, his fingers caught on something, and he carefully pulled it from beneath a pile of charred wood. It was a Fostoria platter, huge and heavy and perfect, except for the soot. “Look!” He held it out to her, and she caught her breath. He watched her eyes tear up again.

“I never even dreamed that would still be in one piece,” she said. She took the platter from him, reverently, then looked him directly in the eye. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve made my day.”

CARMEN SAT AT HER
kitchen table over half a grapefruit and an English muffin, sifting through the stack of bills next to her coffee cup. She had avoided looking at them for weeks. Nothing extravagant: insurance, telephone, and, of course, water. And yet she would barely be able to pay them. Cosmetic surgery was completely out of the question. She had thought about asking for a raise, but now that she knew they were keeping her around merely out of charity, she didn’t dare make waves. If, God forbid,
News Nine
let her go, she would have to put Sugarbush on the market. She would have no choice. The thought made her panicky. Sugarbush was all she had.

There was absolutely nothing of substance to report on the news tonight. No new tidbits to pass on about Jeff Cabrio, nothing she could use to further build an air of mystery around him. She had wanted to do a story on the undocumented workers living in the canyon, focusing on how they were affected by the drought, but Dennis Ketchum had vetoed the idea. “There’s no sympathy for them right now,” he’d said. “People have their own problems to worry about.”

Carmen still left the hose attached to her outside tap, as she had for years, knowing that at night the workers would steal into her yard for a shower and a few buckets of water to take back to their camp. Every once in a while she would find a few coins left behind in payment, but she never touched their money. There had been a time when she knew the workers by name, knew each of their stories and the hardships they’d endured. She’d give them work in her yard and food from her kitchen. It could have been her, she’d thought; it could have been someone in her own family. There were too many of them now for her to learn their names, and far too many stories to hear, but she let them have her water. It was all she could offer right now.

So covering the workers in the canyon wasn’t an option, and she had no other brilliant ideas for stories. She would have to go out to the newest fires, see what she could dredge up there. “The Carmen Perez Fire Report.” The words made her cringe.

After breakfast, she dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt and was on her way out the door when Jeff appeared around the side of the house.

He stopped short when he saw her, standing a few yards away as though she might bite if he got closer. “There’s a screen missing from one of the windows in the living room,” he said. “Do you have a spare?”

“Can it wait until tonight?”

He nodded. “I’m on my way to the warehouse, so no rush.”

They walked toward their cars, that space still between them. “So, Jeff,” she said, “how about an interview?”

“No thanks.”

“I hear you’re quite a fascinating guy.”

He looked out toward the canyon. “People think what they want to think.”

“And they believe what they want to believe. It seems like I’m the only one who thinks you’re a charlatan.”

“You’d be an idiot to think anything else at this point.”

“Are you dangerous?”

He glanced sideways at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do I need to be afraid of you? Because I’m going to do everything in my power to expose you.”

“Well, then, I guess I’m the one who should be afraid.”

“Where did you work last?”

He smiled. “Do you honestly expect me to answer that?”

“Who did you con last? Was it an individual or another town full of desperate people? Was it rain you promised them, or oil, or a successful harvest, or homes for the homeless and jobs for the unemployed?”

“Carmen,” he said, “I wouldn’t dare tell you for fear of spoiling your fun.”

She looked at his car. “Your license plate is from Ohio,” she said. “Is that where you’re from?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, so you’re from Ohio. Are you married? Do you have kids?”

He opened his car door and looked directly at her for the first time, his eyes a dark blue. “Give it up, Carmen,” he said. “I don’t like your line of work. I don’t like the way you shove your way into people’s private lives.”

“Chris says you’re an environmental engineer. Where did you get your degree?”

“I’d like to have that screen by tonight, please.” He got into the car, but Carmen caught the door.

“Look. Just tell me where you were born. That can’t be asking too much.”

He sighed, looking back toward his cottage. “Springfield,” he said. “May I go now?”

For a moment, she was stunned into silence that he had given her an answer; albeit one that was fairly useless. “Springfield where?” she asked. “There’s a Springfield in practically every state.”