Flash Fire (2 page)

A small troop of firefighters used long-handled Pulaskis, a sort of combination hoe and axe, to rip up the spiky brown underbrush, chain saws to take down trees, and shovels to turn dirt on top of this tinder and take away its oxygen. Everybody was a little bored, because the really neat fires were elsewhere, and they were stuck on shovel duty.

They paused now and then to sip water from canteens or Cokes from cans.

At this particular minute, they thought they were in charge.

The fire knew otherwise.

H
ALL WASN’T SWIMMING, JUST
floating. From the air, their pool wasn’t turquoise like everybody else’s, but dark and secret because the tile that lined the Press pool was deep green. They’d bought the house by helicopter, flying over to make sure of the neighborhood, so Hall knew exactly what it looked like from the sky.

There was a lot of air traffic today. Silver-and-red tanker planes skimmed Pinch Mountain, headed for distant fires to dump their gooey loads of red fire retardant on endangered hillsides. Bucket-fitted helicopters flew to the Pacific, filled up with salt water, and rotored loudly back to pour water on roofs or yards. The copters were white with yellow tails and red-and-white-striped propellers, giving them the look of children’s toys that actually flew.

It was a good day to float on your back and check out the sky.

Of course, the air was a little tough to breathe. Hall might as well have asthma. Every now and then, he had to go vertical, treading water and coughing.

Halstead Press loved the interval in his day that came after school and before dinner. This was when he felt most like a Californian: hot and tanned and timeless. No minutes. No hours. Just the moment.

Above the Press property, the immense Luu deck launched itself toward the Pacific Ocean. The last mud slide had taken away a good deal of the Luu property. Where once there had been a steep hillside, there was now a vertical drop. Mr. and Mrs. Luu had covered the bare dirt with huge blue plastic tarps, so if it rained again, the dirt wouldn’t get wet and slide out from under the entire house. The tarp was weighted down with sandbags so it couldn’t blow away, and the sandbags themselves were linked by heavy ropes, so they couldn’t fall to the bottom of Pinch Canyon. It was a long way, and would be a very unpleasant fall, even for a sandbag.

Hall loved to swing himself up onto their deck (when they weren’t home to know about it) by the sandbag ropes.

It was stunt man stuff and Danna filmed him every time. They planned to show the films to their parents in ten or twenty years when they were too old for their parents to punish them.

There were no gentle meadows around Pinch Canyon. You couldn’t run up these hills. You had to crawl, or go sideways, and hang onto things. Naturally Hall crawled up the hills all the time, and slipped, and dislodged dead roots, and ruined his clothes. Once Hall asked Mr. Luu if he was worried about the mud or the fires.

“Halstead, my man,” said Mr. Luu, who loved Hall’s name, and said it was destined for a bronze plaque on a very important door, “what’s to worry? If there’s a fire, we rebuild. If there’s a mud slide, we sandbag. And if we have to start over, then we do.”

“Besides,” said Mrs. Luu, “I want to redecorate anyway.”

Above the Luu house were the Aszlings. Where the Luus had wedged in a stable and paddock, and the Presses had decided on tennis courts, the Aszlings had chosen garages. Their land was so steep that even the garages were terraced. The driveway split like fingers, so each of the four cars had its own smaller, steeper driveway. They had of course remote control for the garage doors, and their Jaguars slipped in and out, black and sleek and secretive as the jungle animal.

Mr. Aszling was in aerospace and Mrs. Aszling was in computers. They gave parties all the time and skied at their mountain place and traveled to the Far East and now and then even remembered Geoffrey.

Mr. and Mrs. Aszling had never had children but apparently always wanted them, and a year ago adopted a little boy from a Bucharest orphanage. It was all very exciting, but the little boy proved difficult. Perhaps nobody had hugged him enough in Romania, or even hugged him at all. Perhaps nobody had spoken to him, or let him be with other children, or eat a meal at a table. Geoffrey was just a silent little animal. He didn’t improve much. He was not rewarding. The fun had gone out of the adoption, and if you could un-adopt, the Aszlings would have done it.

Hall loved Geoffrey Aszling.

There was something proud and brave in this solemn little boy that Hall respected so much. Inside Geoffrey were tortures and terrors. If you could see his soul, you would see a hillside ravaged and bare like the mountain, as if the color of Geoffrey’s babyhood were sun-baked mud.

If he sat quietly with Geoffrey, and waited longer than Hall could wait for anything else on earth, Geoffrey would approach him. It was like feeding a wild bird. If every day you extended your palm with the sunflower seeds, eventually it would sit on your finger to eat out of your hand.

He’d been reading up on childhood emotional disorders and gotten interested in autism. Geoffrey did not have this dreadful syndrome, but there was a similarity. Hall cared intensely about Geoffrey’s inability to love and to be loved.

Hall’s family was very huggy. Whenever anybody went anywhere, they hugged. Not just a passing touch, but a bear hug. Dad still kissed him good night. Mom liked to stand behind him and massage his shoulder blades and kiss the back of his neck. Hall knew that he and Danna had the original prototype Super Parents, and he couldn’t stand it that twice now Geoffrey had lost the parent lottery.

Hall knew, through Geoffrey, that he wanted to work with damaged little kids. Kids who had been hit, or hurt, or endured war or slaughter or abandonment.

He also knew that it wouldn’t pay anything, and his parents would have little use for a career that paid nothing. Secrets were funny things. With some guys, the secrets they kept from their parents were drugs, or drinking, or being gay. Hall’s secret was how much he wanted to help the Geoffreys of the world.

Yesterday, he’d leaned on the Aszlings’ bell until the maid answered. (He never knew these maids; they were never the same woman; perhaps they sent their cousins to work when they were sick of housecleaning; or perhaps the Aszling household was regarded as an entrée for all illegals of a particular South American town, and everybody took turns scrubbing the Aszlings’ bathrooms or pruning their bushes.) Anyway, Hall ran in yelling “So, Geoffrey, my man, how was your day?” and Geoffrey, who liked to speak a single word alternate months, yelled back, “Hall, my man!”

Hall felt like a million dollars. He returned home triumphant, yearning to share this huge victory with somebody, but his parents thought Geoffrey was creepy, and they didn’t like their fifteen-year-old son hanging out with a four-year-old, even though at the same time they were mad at the Aszlings for giving up and proud of Hall for bothering.

Intellectually, Halstead Press knew that fire raged in twelve different places around Los Angeles, but Hall was a person who thought about people, not events. He floated on his back, staring at a sky that was normally blue, shading his eyes to keep the ash out, and planning Geoffrey’s progress.

F
IRE CREATES ITS OWN WEATHER
.

Around the firefighters up Grass Canyon, the wind became an invisible vortex, getting hotter and hotter, swifter and swifter. It had just become a tornado that nobody could see.

Without warning — or at least any warning the firefighters saw — the heat sucked the flames skyward, into a sudden horrific wall of flame.

It’s one thing to fight a fire around your ankles.

It’s quite another to fight a fire a hundred feet tall.

The rules and the hope changed in half a minute.

They stopped trying to fight it.

They practiced staying alive until it moved on.

O
F COURSE ELONY WASN’T
allowed to smoke in the house. Mr. and Mrs. Aszling regarded cigarettes like an invasion of gangs bent on murder. Let her light up a cigarette and they’d be in there shrieking and fanning the air and shooing her outside.

Elony loved smoking.

You couldn’t tell her it wasn’t fun. It felt good, it gave you energy, it was your own private pleasure, and if she had to give up Spanish, she sure wasn’t giving up cigarettes.

She stepped outside to have a cigarette. Elony flinched at the heat. She could hardly believe it was this hot. She felt a creepy prickle on her skin, as if she were freezing in the heat. These fires. It was awful, what was happening to this beautiful beautiful city.

Elony loved LA. It was so full of itself. She loved being part of the huge event that was LA: the huge event of everybody doing better. Elony was going to do better, too. She was going to get rich and drive a car and buy beautiful clothing that fit.

The key, she had decided, was reading. The big gap between her and the Anglos wasn’t skin and wasn’t green cards and wasn’t height and wasn’t even language.

The big gap was that they could read and she could not.

Elony was fighting her way toward reading, without the slightest idea how. There had been no school in her lifetime in her village. She had come to the conclusion that she had to get English inside her mind, not just on her lips. Today she would start thinking in English. All other thoughts she would push out of her mind.

It was killing her.

It made her blink and flinch and frown and twitch. Strangers must think she was getting a disease.

I am, she thought. English.

One entire side of the vast Aszling house was glass doors. A door cracked, enough for a head to poke out, but not enough to let the air-conditioning out. Elony had just washed every single one of those immense panes of glass, inside and out. She let smoke slowly leave her lungs as Chiffon’s sneaky little eyes checked her over. Chiffon was Baby Geoffrey’s nurse, not that Chiffon had ever once made the slightest effort to do a single thing with Geoffrey other than be sure he didn’t drown in the pool.

“I’m going out for a while, Elony,” called the Anglo girl, car keys in her hand. Chiffon was pretty in the borderline way that meant she thought more of her looks than other people did. She was probably going to have her nails done, or her hair. She was always taking a key to the best car the Aszlings had not driven that day, and going off on errands. Hers, not the Aszlings.

Elony tapped her watch. “Bus,” she shouted at Chiffon. “You stay. I go.” Elony had a two-hour bus ride down Grass Canyon, down the Pacific Coast Highway, and finally into LA. Sometimes the bus’s air-conditioning worked and sometimes it didn’t. Elony had exactly two more minutes left in her work day, and then she had to hustle down Pinch Canyon Road to get the bus at Grass Canyon.

“You can stay late, Elony,” explained Chiffon, since Elony’s life and plans didn’t matter. “I
have
to do this stuff, it’s important. I’ll be back in an hour or two.” Chiffon waved, as if a flick of the wrist made everything okay, and darted off.

“No, you stay!” shouted Elony. She raced back into the house after Chiffon, chasing her through the huge rooms and up the occasional wide flat step that divided one space from another. Elony hated how she didn’t have enough English to go around for situations like this.

But Chiffon had had too much of a head start. Giggling triumphantly, Chiffon waved and drove off.

I hate you! thought Elony.

No cigarette would make her feel better about missing the bus. What was she supposed to do now? Leave the little boy alone in the house? The maddening thing was that Mr. or Mrs. Aszling would care only if somebody found out. They just wanted to
look
like good parents.

Nobody would pay her overtime for staying with Geoffrey. She had found out that Mrs. Aszling was breaking laws by paying her so little. She also knew if she mentioned it, Mrs. Aszling would fire her. If Elony missed the bus, one of them would have to drive her home. She knew from experience that instead of thanking her for staying with Geoffrey, they’d just be mad about the long drive.

Mr. and Mrs. Aszling had not bothered to learn how to pronounce her name. They never talked to her. Never asked any questions. Never said, “How did you get to the States, Elony?”

So she’d never told them about the civil war she had survived, the brutal hike over mountains, the fording of a river full of disease and corpses. How she had paid for that border crossing in a stinking airless truck: with her body. They never even asked how old she was.

Seventeen.

Here in America, seventeen-year-olds were still children. Not Elony. Elony scrubbed toilets, mopped floors, polished furniture, and ironed more clothing every week than her entire village had possessed.

The baby is not my responsibility, thought Elony, furiously stubbing out the cigarette. He’s Chiffon’s.

Elony didn’t look in on Geoffrey. He would be exactly where Chiffon had left him, curled on floor pillows, sucking his thumb, watching for the zillionth time a tape of
Cops.
Geoffrey loved
Cops
as long as he was safely wrapped in his blankie.

The blankie drove Mr. and Mrs. Aszling wild.

It was three yards of velour, a gaudy vivid fuschia purple, from which Elony had meant to sew a bathrobe for herself, until Geoffrey adopted it. Geoffrey didn’t like to meet strangers without his velour. Mr. and Mrs. Aszling never suggested repaying Elony for the cloth.

Geoffrey never moves anyway, she told herself. He’ll be fine. He’ll just lie there in his blankie.

Elony got her purse, an immense black carrier in which she kept her entire life, and left the house. At the top of the four-fingered Aszling driveway, in the shade of the thick pines, she lit another cigarette. In this appalling heat, shade made no difference whatsoever. Hurrying down the steep switchbacks, she passed the paddock behind the Luu house, where the two horses always frightened her, and then the Press house. It hurt her ankles to go downhill because it was so steep.