Flash Fire (3 page)

Down on Pinch Canyon Road, half hidden by the two-story green exclamation points of cypress trees, were Mexican yardmen waving, but not at Elony. They were hoping to get a ride with the Severyn boy, who usually obliged anybody fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Elony hurried, so as to be in the right place at the right time.

B
EAU SEVERYN WAS BORED
.

Everything about life and school bored him these days. He didn’t want to be bothered. His parents regarded boredom as failure: It meant you weren’t disciplined enough, or trying hard enough.

LaLa Land, they called this place. To Beau, “la la” meant frothy people who never stopped to think. Beau had never met anybody like that in Los Angeles. This was the thinking-est crowd on earth: how to get ahead, how to mold a better body, how to have a better relationship, how to score, earn, fight, win, get published, be a star.

Beau phoned his father at work, although Dad didn’t like him to do that. Dad was in charge of network news advertising. Companies didn’t like sponsoring disasters; they yanked their ads when the news was race riots or celebrity murder trials or baseball strikes or, in this case, fire. Dad was a wreck over the fires, but it wasn’t the fires wrecking him; it was advertisers whimpering their way out of contracts. Dad was losing millions and he was ulcerated and crazed. “Yes, Beau, what is it?” snapped his father, implying that it had better be good. His father had no use for people, especially sons, who were not the best.

“Dad, the television says the fires are getting a little closer.” It was not the fires that worried Beau and it was not the fires he wanted his father to talk about. But he and his father did not have intimate conversations, or even conversations, and he could only recite, as his father did, the news.

“What did I tell you last night, Beau? Pinch Mountain is a firebreak. That little brush fire last year burned every twig. The whole wilderness back there is naked as a baby. In any event, the fires are miles away.” His father’s voice was raspy and tense.

Beau knew his father wanted a cigarette. Giving up smoking was killing Dad. He’d be better off risking lung cancer than getting this frantic. But Beau didn’t say so. Mom acted as if the most important thing in the history of time was Dad quitting cigarettes. When Dad took a deep deep breath Beau could hear through the phone, it wasn’t Dad schooling himself to be patient with his son; it was a pretend lungful of friendly calming wonderful smoke.

“Dad,” said Beau, who had been up on that mountain with Halstead Press, fooling around, and knew that the result of last year’s minor fire was that the undergrowth this year was stronger and fuller than ever, “the mayor is ordering evacuations — ”

“Miles from you!” snapped his father. “What are you really asking me, David?”

David was his real name. Mom and Dad used it only in anger, never in love. It gave Beau the creeps, as if his real name were poisoned now and could never be used.

Beau avoided the topic of what he was really asking, just as the entire family had avoided it for so long. “If we had to evacuate the house,” he said finally, “what should we save? I mean — ”

He meant the box. The dumb stupid box on the mantelpiece that he thought about all the time now.

“Beau, your mother and I do not worry about earthquakes or fires. We take our chances. The odds are in our favor.” Beau’s parents did not approve of worry. If you had enough self-discipline and paid enough attention to the details, you could dispense with worry. Therefore it was against the rules for Beau to say that his life was evenly divided between boredom and worry.

“I know, Dad. I guess, just in case, I was trying to work out — ”

“If something goes wrong, Beau, I have faith in you. You’ll handle things. Now listen, I’m in a meeting.”

Beau hung up slowly and surveyed his house. Twelve thousand square feet, enough for a high school in some parts of the world. Each time the network paid his father more, his parents bought more house and more car to match. Beau loved the sheer size of it — room after room after room, each a great spread of cool tile floor the color of sliced cucumber. Glass walls illuminated the dusty olive California hills and the indigo sky, backlit with California sun.

Except now, of course, when it was backlit by distant fires.

Outside, oak and pine, oleander and cypress leaned against each other, their branches and scents interwoven. A reflecting pool filled the huge atrium, while the lap pool lined the highest part of the property like a canal.

There were not many houses on Pinch Canyon because there were not many building sites. The Severyns had the most beautiful spot of all, said his mother, and although Beau did not agree with his mother on much, he agreed with her on that.

Beau went outside to check garden hoses. If fire came, he didn’t care how much danger there was nor how foolhardy it might be: He was staying with the house. It made him feel wide-chested and great-hearted to make that resolution. He rather hoped he would have to defend his property, with a great blazing enemy to stave off.

The two maids and the two groundskeepers were leaving. The Mexicans paused, hoping Beau would drive them down to the bus stop. They didn’t want to walk in this heat. The bus would pick them up on Grass Canyon Road, and two miles down Grass the road would intersect with the Pacific Coast Highway. From there they would sit stolidly for however long it took to reach their Los Angeles neighborhood.

It would have been impossible to live the way Pinch Canyon did and not have household help. What with careers and shopping, luncheon dates and fashion decisions, body sculpting and aromatherapy and relationship discussion, who had time to cook or clean? Beau’s parents had no idea what a household chore was and certainly never expected their children to do one. They could not imagine washing their own car or doing their own laundry. Beau’s mother would no sooner contribute to a school bake sale than swim in a storm drain.

His parents were fond of their children, but on the side. Like a sauce they might not want once they tasted it.

Halstead and Danna Press referred to their parents as SuperMom and SuperDad. Beau privately referred to his as SemiDad and NeverMom. He liked them. If he, too, were a grown-up, he’d enjoy their company and be friends. But they were not actually parents in any sense. They were beautiful, rich people who maintained a beautiful house in which they kept children who had better be beautiful, too.

Poor Elisabeth did not meet the guidelines. Last week, Beau’s mother lamented to her women friends, “How could Aden and I, of all people, turn out a knock-kneed, nearsighted, overweight, boring little girl?”

“Mom, don’t talk like that about Elisabeth,” said Beau afterward. “Lighten up. She’s only eight. Give her time.”

“Beau, darling, these are my friends. They understand. I need understanding. You don’t know how difficult it is, a daughter like that. Let me describe to you what I had in mind.”

Elisabeth was never going to be what Mom had in mind.

“Would you like a ride to the bus stop?” Beau asked the help.

They nodded. There were never conversations with the help, just orders and nods.

“Wanna play tennis?” he asked his sister on the way to the garage. Tennis was an essential skill in their circle. He was always trying to tutor Elisabeth in the essentials.

“You’ll beat me.” Elisabeth invariably took that view: Why do anything; somebody will beat me. Mom of course hated having a daughter so lacking in drive and self-discipline.

“You need practice, Lizzie. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Beau took the Suburban. His parents had bought it on a whim, immediately hated it and never touched it again. Everybody else had bought English: Land Rover or Range Rover. Beau loved the Suburban. With room to ferry a small band and its equipment, or else half a sports team, it was high off the road, heavy but easy to maneuver, and the driver had a great view and tons of power.

He picked up two more yardmen trudging down Pinch, and honked as he approached the gate so he wouldn’t have to slow down. The guard was poky opening up, and Beau had to come to a full stop. He made sure to glare at the guy to let him know he’d better not cause this problem on Beau’s return.

M
ATT MARSH WAS THE
happiest, most excited twenty-two-year-old in the great state of California.

It was the big game. And he was on the team.

He was wearing a new helmet, since the old one had melted fighting yesterday’s Altadena fire, and he was using, of course, a new hose, since the one he had held to save his own life had also melted.

Matt referred to the fires in sports terms: The score, for example was: 100,000 acres burned, 240 houses destroyed, 44 casualties, no deaths.

In some weird way, Matt was cheering for the fire.

He was awed by it. Stunned by it. Fascinated by it. They were fighting it hard and relentlessly, and yet it was winning: Winning so brilliantly, he could only admire it. It was like getting beaten by the world champion: There was a certain valor even in defeat.

He was gleeful about his army’s numbers: 85 engines, 30 bulldozers, 31 water tenders, 8 aerial bombers, 7 helicopters.

And one huge awesome spectacular lethal fire.

And that was just Grass Canyon! There were another ten or so fires elsewhere. Matt, like most of the firefighters, was mutual aiding. Each town offered its services and equipment to the neighborhood that needed them most. Matt, however, knew this part of LA well: He’d grown up a few miles south of here, in Pinch Canyon.

Command knew that Grass would be tough to defend. Where there were houses, of course, people soaked lawns at night with sprinklers, and so the gardens and grass were green and lush and somewhat damp. But above the houses, Grass Canyon rose rather gently to three- and four-hundred-foot heights, covered by shrubby, weedy growth that was thick, sturdy, and very very dry. Previous fires had not touched it. Mud had not slid down it. Grass Canyon was just thousands of acres of tinder.

Therefore, the critical objective was to hold the fire north of the wide asphalt break of the road itself.

They did not have a hope of actually putting the approaching fire out. It was mammoth and many sided, driven by maddened wind. The fire was not neat. It zigged, it hopscotched, it doubled back. There were few places actually to set up lines of defense.

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.