44

“Are you all right?”

It was a man’s voice. Strong hands brushed Bell’s hair back from his eyes, and touched him gently, knowingly.

“I’m fine,” said Bell doubtfully. He shifted his legs as he lay on his back, staring at the head that eclipsed the sky in his vision. It was a grim test: arms worked. Legs worked again. Let’s lift the head a little.

The pickup had braked so successfully that the hood had brushed him to one side, virtually all the momentum spent. Still, he had been flung backwards, an impromptu lesson in physics and comparative weight. There was a smell of rubber sulphur in the air. The road beneath his body was gritty. Bell ached to stand and walk around, but at the same time he was partly stunned and he knew his body, and his mind, were not working quite properly.

And then he remembered the fire. He fought to stand, to speak. “Speke … Sarah …”

“There’s a fire,” said the man, and it was then that Bell realized he was talking to Brothers, the gardener. “I saw the smoke. Called the county.”

Brothers helped Bell to his feet. From far away, sounding strangely metropolitan and out of place in the hills, came the sound of a siren. There were several sirens, the urgent rise-and-fall sounding thin and distant. Bell had always believed in the powers that solved emergencies, the police, fire departments, surgeons, airline pilots. He had always admired the men shoveling sand into sandbags against the flood. Perhaps that was one of the reasons journalism had attracted him. It had been a chance to interview rookie cops after a shooting, a chance to interview actors with greasepaint still caking their wrinkles. It had been a chance to be a part of what he had always thought of as Life.

But now his only thought was: too late. It’s all too late. His fundamental faith in hope, and in human accomplishment, withered in him. Life had run through his fingers once again.

Sarah was lost, and so was that man he would never know, that lively enigma, that amazing human being, Hamilton Speke.

Bell drawled something about the fire sending a “plume you can see from Soledad to Tamales,” but he thought only: too late.

The ashes fell. It was a rain of the fine, spent residue of life, and it coated the wet shingles of the roof.

Speke had grown up with minor fires, as though his childhood had been a preparation for this day. His father had not been absentminded. There had been fires in the garage where he worked; his father had never explained why he took so little notice of the fire department’s suggestions, and why the fire extinguisher was always lost in a pile of flower presses, or hanging on the hook with a mysterious puncture in the base, the sort of wound only a bullet or a spike could cause.

Perhaps his father had been fatalistic, nearly desperately so. Perhaps that last flight through the thermals over San Bernardino had been more than just a little suicidal. Perhaps windsheer is an adjunct to human failure. Perhaps a beloved dead wife calls to a man of reason in a way he cannot understand, and causes him to seek death in ways he admits to no one, especially to himself.

She must have been beautiful, this mother he could not remember. He had always pictured her smiling, looking down at him and smiling, as though in each memory of her he was still an infant. To remember my mother, he came to realize, I have to forget my own manhood. There are many ways to be beautiful, and she must have had them all, this absent woman, this half of his childhood he would never know. Often he found himself wondering, what would she think of me? And what, if we met in some plane out of time and space, would I think of her? Would we disappoint each other?

But I am not like my father, Speke had always reassured himself. I embrace life with both arms. I am not secluded with my number three pencils and my designs for improved valves for pressurized deodorant. And yet, standing there, seeing that his house was about to burn, surrounded by fire on all but one side, he understood that he had deliberately chosen such a place. Its fragility, the fact that it could vanish in smoke, surrounded by drought-prone brush, had made it all the more precious. Perhaps, Speke thought, we value most that paradise we can lose.

The trucks, when they arrived, broke through the line of fire and tumbling smoke.

First Brothers and Bell careened to a stop on the lawn, then a stream of green county trucks. Men with orange hardhats spilled from the vehicles, and there was a clatter of spades and a surprising lack of speech.

Speke leaped, and half-fell, down the ladder to direct them. Ordinary time was stripped away, leaving a sequence of heat and smoke. The men worked, shoveling a naked firebreak across the smoldering lawn.

“The house,” Speke called, or perhaps he didn’t call it at all. Perhaps he thought it so desperately that everyone heard him.

Save the house!

At one point during the afternoon, airplanes, graceful shapes like sharks, dived at the fire, disgorging gouts of orange. The orange plumes started as precise, well-defined spouts that slowly fattened and dispersed. Men ran, orange with powder.

Through it all, he came to believe that the house was lost. It was logical, it was even just. He had done harm in the world, great harm. This was being taken away from him, exacted from him by the mindless twitch of the flames.

The wind continued to shower Speke with fine ash the size and color of eyelashes. They collected in the hairs of his arms, clinging to his sweat. Now and then one blinded him for an instant. The men stooped, and shoveled dust, surrounded by a rain of burned fur. Speke shouted encouragement, his voice a rag, and at one point Brothers stopped him with a crowbar nearly as tall as a man, and thick, a great, iron lever.

“We got a problem,” said Brothers. He waited for a moment, as though counting his syllables.

He looked down at the ground, and smoothed a spent ash with his shoe.

Oh, for a man of words, Speke nearly said.

“Someone had a chain on the gate,” Brothers said. “We had to crash through. Damn near wrecked one of the county trucks.”

Speke spat an ash from his lips.

“That’s not the only problem,” said Brothers, hesitating.

Speke waited.

“I think,” said Brothers, lowering his voice, “that we have a death.” He jerked his head in the direction of the Outer Office. Then he looked back and studied Speke with a gaze of worry and curiosity. Brothers could not add: tell me I’m wrong. His glance said: tell me its not true. “Is anyone missing?”

Speke grabbed a pick from the smudged green of the lawn and gave what he hoped was a manly nod. Understood, he tried to say. We’ll deal with it later.

“There’s a body,” Brothers said. “You can—you can smell it in the smoke.”

It’s nothing but a deer, Speke wanted to say. It’s nothing but a trick.

Brothers stepped before him, and asked, “Where’s Maria?”

Speke tried to talk, couldn’t, and then tried yet again.

But something in Brothers’ character, or Speke’s look, prevented further questions. Brothers hurried off to wrest at things with his lever, wellheads, Speke imagined, or flaming timbers.

Perhaps it was only his imagination, but there did seem to be a number of men using dashboard radios. Several men stopped work to gaze off in the direction of the Outer Office.

Speke endured. He was still fighting. He would not quit. But the faith, the power of belief, was waning. There was nowhere else to retreat. It was afternoon, but dark. The engine of another dive bomber surged overhead. The darkness streamed above them.

Sarah stood on the gables, watering the roof.

The Outer Office had completely burned, showing scarlet, blazing ribs. The building, however, seemed fueled from within. The roof fluttered fire, and the blazing lumber fell inward. The fire finished its work quickly, and then it did not die. Their bodies were caverns of flame—he tried not to think this, but he could not escape the knowledge. Asquith was about to step into his life again, as a presence that would have to be explained, an absence that had weight and charred form.

The men battled everywhere he looked, but the wind was strong.

Speke bounded up the ladder. He used his most commanding voice, the voice that never failed to win respect from man, woman, and beast. “You have to leave, Sarah. I’m sending you away.” His voice was strong, but he wanted to beg her: please. Please go.

Her eyes were bright, and she did not answer.

His voice shook. “I’m not going to lose you, too. I won’t let it happen.”

“I’m staying here.” Her voice was crisp and definite, like a wire of gold.

“If I lose you … I can’t bear it.…”

She cast the hose aside, and the writhing thing cast water in one direction, and then another. She held him, and then kissed him, her lips on him with the fervor of someone resuscitating the dying.

He let her hair stroke his lips. He whispered her name like a word he had struggled to recall for years.

Sarah, he thought—after all this time.

“I don’t think we can save the house,” he said at last. “What do you want us to try to save from inside?”

She touched his face. Her hand was pale against the grime of his skin, and her touch was strange, strong and calm. He had never felt a touch like this, like a hand out of another world.

Manuscripts, she wanted to say. All your manuscripts. The art.

Everything. Save everything.

“It’s time,” he said, through tears, whether caused by grief or the smoke she could not tell. “I’ll get anything. Anything you want. Just tell me what it is, and I’ll go in and get it.”

Still, she could not respond.

“Tell me what you want from in there, Sarah!”

“The house is saved,” she said.

“No,” he groaned. Reading her expression, he said, “I don’t believe that any more. This is stupid optimism, Sarah. The house is going to go, and when it starts it won’t take any time at all. Think of all the art. Think of—” Words failed him. He made a wild gesture. “Think—”

But he stopped himself. He had her. That was all that he wanted, and all that he could rescue. The rest of his life was gone, finished.

Sarah understood. The house should be saved. But, she knew, if the house were lost, what did that really matter? Ham was what counted.

“There is one thing you can save,” she said. “Not that I’m giving up hope …”

He was too eager, shaking her. “What? Tell me!”

“It’s a symbol.”

He leaned forward eagerly.

“Go in,” she said, “and use the white net beside the aquarium.”

He did not have to say: yes?

“Use one of the smaller bowls in the cupboard.”

He blinked in the smoke.

“Save the piranha.”

Speke studied her for a moment, and then he laughed. He laughed so hard that one of the men on the lawn adjusted his hardhat so he could gaze up at them.

After a while there were shadows again, and late afternoon sun made the shadows long. The earth was a mat of black, and white streams bled from a hundred places.

Long before sunset men from the sheriffs department came, and men from the county coroner gathered around the dark, spent place that had been the Outer Office.

Speke’s eyes stung, his contact lenses fogged with smoke. There was time, fifteen minutes he supposed, before the house itself began to burn. There was time to step into the house and to see it again, to inhabit it once more, however briefly.