41

Bell followed Speke’s command. He had, really, no choice. There was something about Speke that made a man obey.

He ran toward the road, for help. But suspicion bit him, and kept biting. There was no fire. It was entirely in Speke’s imagination. Don’t leave Sarah with Speke. It was a non-fire, a figment, a phantom. He couldn’t smell any smoke. It was too hot to run, but he ran anyway. The drive was littered with acorns, brunette teeth so hard he nearly slipped on them.

Stay on the road, he warned himself. Don’t stray for even a few steps.

Bright Mr. Bell. You were so smart. He had dreamed of a stimulating project, and here he was. He would not, of course, be able to turn any of this into coherent chapters. He had discovered a new life, and it had nearly destroyed his talent. Speke was neither genius nor fake. He was something beyond human, wonderful and terrible at the same time. The next biography, Bell told himself, will be about someone long dead, someone who can do nothing but stare at me from photographs.

It was like a man reaching a tripwire, and barely catching himself. He stopped running.

I am a fool to leave her with him. Speke is dangerous.

Speke, he thought, must think me a total ass. Speke was going to kill Sarah. A ridiculous thought—and yet, there it was. His lips were chapped. Sounds were strangely crisp. The yellow white rye at his feet made a fine, high noise with the wind.

Stay here. Speke had gone mad. Bell put his hands on his hips beside the drive, in one of the deer paths that ran parallel to the road. His breath was heavy, but soon settled to its normal rate. He listened, and sniffed the air. He was sure of it—there was no fire.

So what now, he asked himself. What should I do?

There in the dust of the deer path was the single print of a very large cat. It was a big print, nearly as wide across as his hand. There were no other prints, simply the single kiss on the ground. It was exact, proud. It struck Bell how a thing can be only itself, and not any other creature.

Distinct, and deadly. The red branches of the mesquite looked different to him. The gray leaves, the writhing, copper branches hid another world. A world that deceived, that disclosed treasures and buried crimes. It was a world he would never understand.

What should I do?

As a youth Bell had promised himself that he would never be like his father. He wanted a big life, a life of color, of scope. His father had been a deliberate man, an accountant whose hobby was the sharpening of shears, knives, and mowers. It was a life of numbers and carbon steel. The whetstone was his father’s favorite tool. Now, his father dead just five years, Bell realized that he had inherited his father’s skills, his father’s temperament. He was a man who craved the fine edge, the sharp fact, the plain, tungsten truth.

He did not want greatness, and he did not want to capture life. Not any longer. He wanted to flee this place, and never return. That was what drove him now. He ran, hard. He ran until the cramp returned, that steel stitch in his side. He forced himself onward. He had one, simple need: escape. He was not seeking help. He was running away, defeated.

He clung to the gate; panting, his eyes closed.

This was the barrier that had blocked them earlier in the day, so long ago. Ham had not known about this chain. Bell had conveniently forgotten, but now here he was. There was no way over the gate. The words fell within him with masochistic solemnity: no way. There was a taste like iron on his tongue.

The black iron spears might have been greased. He could not find a grip. He kicked, fought, climbed, and slipped all the way back.

Again, he grunted his way halfway there. And slipped nearly all the way back, all the way to the dust.

He had one thought: leave this place. Run away. The place is too much for you. It has defeated you.

Just climb and escape, that’s all, and forget everything else. This place is magical, and you are not. Speke is a giant, and you are just another little man. He slipped, but battled upward. Until, elbows bruised, shins aching, he found himself at the top of the gate.

Go ahead.

But Sarah had been right. You couldn’t climb over this fence. The spear heads were sharp, and several times he nearly lanced his scrotum. He wanted to flee, but there was no way to escape. He was trapped at the top of a row of spears, and could not fall either way.

His own nature was revealed to him. He could not embrace life, after all. He need a telephone, a phone book. He needed a computer, a row of books. He needed a cross-reference on this. He couldn’t survive intellectually naked. Confusion was not his element. He felt the child in him return, baffled, even scared. His inner voice was a piping, immature reed, a boy imitating an adult. This doesn’t add up. What’s the agenda here? Just a little information. That’s all he needed.

There was no way over the gate, and it was just as well. He let himself fall inside the gate and panted, sweating, determined to run back to the house and save Sarah’s life. At the same time, he felt the injustice of his position. Too much was happening that made no sense. He was confused. Some people lived quiet lives. They made coffee and read the newspaper. Some writers hired researchers, and did all their work from a desk overlooking San Francisco Bay. He was a field man, and didn’t mind work. But he needed to double-check his facts, and that’s exactly what he couldn’t do now.

He would run back and save Sarah. He worked to convince himself. Lying here in the dust was an act of cowardice. It was probably too late—she was probably already dead. And he knew that whatever the battle to be fought, he was lost.

And then he smelled it.

The smell was dark, the scent of earth turned to poison, the smell of life turned to heat and light.

Bell clawed, wrestled, humped his way to the top of the gate. The sky was flawed in the distance, against the horizon. A fabric stretched into the sky, soiling the blue.

Wind stroked his hair, and hissed through the dry grass, and he could smell fire as he balanced on the row of black spears, took a breath, sweating, unable to tear himself away from the heads of the spears. Clothing tore, the crotch of his pants or the seam along one leg. A spear head was cold against the flesh of his thigh. He teetered, wanting to fall, trying to keep from falling.

Can’t make it, a voice nagged him from within. You can’t make it—don’t try.

Until he fell at last. Earth met him with a clap, and he rolled. As a cub he had followed the Oakland Fire Department, and he knew how to drop from a roof onto bare concrete. My breath, he found himself thinking, is knocked out. I’ll be able to breathe again soon.

But he couldn’t sit up, and he couldn’t crawl. He kicked at the dirt, and could go nowhere. Hurt, came the electric thought. I’m hurt.

I can’t move.

Speke ran up the slope and Sarah followed. The shadow in the air was closing around the two of them, as though the air were becoming not gas but a solid, coalescing from gray dust to dark, impervious stone.

The air around them shook, trembled, and then began the perceptible shift, dragged inward toward the woods. He had always awaited this enemy. Now it was here at last. Speke felt the strangest glee. Fighting a fire like this would be a war against death. A war against the army Asquith had scattered in the woods like the teeth of a dragon. He could only partly understand the fierce pleasure he felt. He was awake again. There was something to fight for, he sang in his heart. A reason to battle. And a great, iron joke. Asquith isn’t defeated at all, not even a little bit. He is alive in the fire.

There was no sight of the flames yet. There was only the tumult, as of a riot, an army gibbering and insane, wrenching and wrestling the oaks.

The garage door would not open. The old wood door creaked, the nail heads groaning beneath their bright, ever fresh paint. The hinges complained. The handle pulled loose. Speke felt the strength of his arms, his legs, his back, the power of his life.

He could hear the fire now, fierce applause.

Brothers’ toolshed would not open, either. Bell had slammed the door, it seemed, so hard the wood was jammed. Speke pulled so hard that implements in the interior clanked softly, shifted by his effort. He wrenched, and with a shriek the door tore open. In the half-dark of the shed he found a shovel. He called to Sarah, but, to his surprise, she was just behind him.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said. “You can run up the road—”

Her fingers touched his lips.

He found himself holding her in his arms, surrounded by the shafts and dimly gleaming blades of the only weapons they had. It was always going to be this way, he knew. He had reached a chapter he had read long ago, but then deliberately forgotten. She had always been intended to fight at his side.

Outside, the fire came on. The two of them slashed at the sun-bleached foxtails, the drought-stiffened stalks of thistle. A grasshopper flicked through the air, rattling in its flight.

The heat rumpled the air. Distant branches writhed in the spidered sky. The two of them worked without speaking, the shovels making bell-like thuds against the hard clay. Their shadows were muted, blurred and erased by the shadow of the smoke.

She chopped a milkweed, clearing a path, a firebreak of dust and severed wildflowers. The dust floured her arms, and she worked in a fog of chalk.

They were not fighting to save Live Oak. They were fighting chaos itself, the void that waits to thaw and flood, the black fire that consumes every human hope.