THE AFTERNOON GREW HOTTER.
The houses on Pinch Canyon and Grass Canyon preheated like ovens, growing closer and closer to the temperature that would make them explode.
The air-conditioning in the tiny gatehouse failed. Alan Davey sat gasping for breath. He had to wear a uniform, because they liked uniforms on their help, these rich Pinch Canyon people; it made them feel pampered and special.
Alan Davey hated his job. He had meant to work in fine restaurants and become a television chef, but he’d failed. Failure was fine in California as long as it was a step to success. But Alan Davey was no chef. Short-order cook, maybe — fried eggs and pancakes — but not great food. The California dream had not come true for Alan Davey, and he was too tired and hostile to try again.
Being a residential guard should have been momentary, until he got on his feet again, but Alan Davey never found his feet again. Whereas everybody on Pinch — young, middle-aged, and old — had never been off their feet. He especially resented the teenagers, so casually sure of themselves, driving cars that cost more than Alan Davey would earn in years.
Beau. It might be pronounced Bo, but it was short for beautiful. That’s what lived on Pinch Canyon. The beautiful people. And Alan Davey’s life was so low now that he had to smile, and remember names, and leap to open the gates for a spoiled brat named Beautiful.
He wouldn’t mind at all if these people lost everything.
Not that it would happen to them. They would laugh — fine white teeth surrounded by perfect golden tans — and rebuild bigger and better in the exact same place, because nothing on earth did affect them in the end. The guard wanted something to affect them.
When the air-conditioning failed, he thought, That’s it. I quit. They’re on their own. Who needs this?
He got his car (hidden behind pines so its age and lack of style would not offend Pinch Canyon owners) and abandoned his post. As a final thumbing of the nose, he locked the gate. These people specialized in being helpless; they loved being rich enough to pay somebody to do absolutely everything for them.
So there. No little rectangle of plastic would open that gate now. Let them sit there and fume and be helpless for a while.
“HEY, POP,” SAID SWANN, “look over there.”
Her father had worried about driving in California. They were supposed to have these ten-lane highways where you had to fight the heaviest traffic in the world. But it turned out that the heaviest traffic in the world was also pretty much the slowest.
The Gormans had come for Disneyland, and also, of course, the Universal Studios tour and Beverly Hills High and the boardwalks at Venice Beach and Knott’s Berry Farm, if they had time. Frankly, they were a little annoyed. California weird was not coming through. People looked pretty darn normal. Mr. Gorman felt like he should get some money back.
And it wasn’t relaxing like it was supposed to be. Everybody was distracted by these stupid wildfires, and the air stank. The green lawns everybody watered were a sort of creepy emerald, like fake contact lenses, while everyplace else was as dry and crispy as potato chips. The stupid wind never stopped, and you could never get enough to drink; your throat was always dried out.
“Oh, wow!” cried Swann, waving and pointing across the road and up into the hills. “Fires! Aren’t they neat? Look at them all. I thought it would come in a sheet, but it’s more like pock-marks.”
“That one is a whole house,” said Swann’s mother eagerly. “Lookit, lookit, over there, it’s a television van! Reporters! Let’s follow them.”
“Yeah, Pop,” said Swann, “let’s watch stuff burn.”
Mr. Gorman followed the network van off the next exit and they began working their way in the direction of smoke and sirens. LA was dusty tan and rapidly turning gray in the smoke, but the fires were orange and scarlet and ruby. So bright!
There were two lines of traffic: the people running away from fire, loaded down by kids and pets and boxes, and then the people going toward the fires, to check them out and get some action, maybe see a house burn, maybe even with a person in it. Somebody was trying to direct traffic away from the fires instead of toward them, but the TV van ignored that, so the Gormans did, too.
They leaped out of their car only fifty feet away from a real house fire! This was what they’d flown all this way to see! This was great. Fire leaped out like bright-colored flowers. The houses had to be four or five times larger than any house back home. Every single house had at least a three-car garage.
“Wood shingle roofs,” said her father in disgust. “These people are nuts. Who would live in a place where every time you turn around you got fire and earthquake and riots and queers and all kindsa people don’t speak English.” He shook his head. “Just to get a tan,” he said. “People that dumb, they deserve to have their houses burn down.”
Wow, you could heat Campbell’s soup on the sidewalk, it was so hot.
Swann looked for the television van, because she was wearing a really nice pair of shorts.
On the wooden roof, a guy stood like he was standing on his patio, hosing down his roof, his bottle of beer in his other hand. “Man after my own heart,” said Mr. Gorman.
The guy’s hedge burst into flames, and the firefighters aimed their hose at it and the fire went out right away. Swann was kind of disappointed. She had hoped the guy’s house would catch fire while he was trapped up there. That would have been exciting. Of course, you never said that kind of thing out loud, even though you knew every other person here was hoping for it too, and so instead they applauded the firefighters.
“Hey,” said one firefighter, neon yellow jacket dripping with soot-blackened water. “Hey, don’t go past the trucks. You people go on home, huh? This isn’t a sideshow.”
“Whole city’s a sideshow,” said Swann’s father, and the fire tourists laughed.
HIDDEN BY SMOKE AS dense as wool blankets, the fire crossed a minor unnamed hill, and dipped into a minor unnamed gully. These were not worth naming on maps, but they were road enough for a fire. Down in the reaches and gullies was a carpet of sagebrush, sumac, and scrub oak. Every leaf crackled like a dead thing, and every blade of grass was brown and sere.
The fire had miles of uninhabited acres to play with, where it could leap across bare spots and jump feet first into the fuel. It didn’t need roads. It could make its own highway.
Ahead of the fire ran anything with legs: every wild and desperate creature trying to find sanctuary.
MR. AND MRS. ASZLING LOVED the word everyone. Everyone is writing a script, they were always saying. Everyone is trading up for a better house. Everyone is in mutual funds now.
Not everyone, thought Chiffon. Out of jealousy, she took Mrs. Aszling’s best sunglasses and some of Mr. Aszling’s spare dollars as well as the car keys.
Chiffon had lied about her age to get the job. She knew the Aszlings knew, and even so, they didn’t care. Geoffrey didn’t matter that much to them. Chiffon was not quite eighteen, having skipped her senior year in high school in order to become a star in Hollywood. You had to do something while you were waiting to be cast, but one day of waitressing proved to Chiffon that she was no waitress. In Chiffon’s opinion, people should get their own silverware. So she took up child care.
She and Geoffrey were a good fit. She didn’t pay any attention to him and he didn’t pay any attention to her. The Aszlings were never home. Chiffon didn’t think you could call it a home when you spent so little time there, but their absence had plusses. Whirlpool, sauna, media room, wet bar, and most of all, cars, might as well be hers.
As for the little girl from Peru or Belize or wherever, Elony was a silent, smoking presence, always listening to her dumb radio station and eating her smelly food. Elony had one plus. She was there and nobody could accuse Chiffon of leaving Geoffrey alone.
Chiffon had bailed out to go enjoy the fires. They weren’t going to get any action on Pinch Canyon, and Chiffon wanted to see stuff burning from up close. She didn’t like mountain roads. Who wanted a view of LA from high up? All you saw was this immense flat platter of housing — twenty million people, and not one cared what Chiffon did next. Well, she didn’t care what they did either, so there.
Chiffon whipped out Pinch, down Grass, and toward the Pacific Coast Highway. That was such a cool road. Pacific Ocean blue and glittering on your one side, and leaping high hills and houses skidding off them during mud slides on your other side. But there was too much traffic and no fire. She swung a U-ie and headed back up Grass Canyon, following smoke like a hunting dog.
The first fire she came upon, heading northeast on Grass Canyon Road, was small and cozy. It reminded Chiffon of camping: a cute little fire, all tucked into the stones, eager to toast a few marshmallows.
Cute guys, with their face masks off and their bandannas on, were shoveling at the edge of fires. You’d think they were making beds, they were so relaxed. They shoveled a little dirt, hacked at a few shrubs, laughed, sipped from canteens. The fire was around their knees and sometimes they’d even stick their shovels right into it, and not act like there was any danger at all. It was obvious that everybody was having a great time.
It must be a working requirement for firemen to be cute. Chiffon checked them out carefully. Of course, she was going to marry a producer, an agent, or a scriptwriter. But a fireman would be cute and muscular and for now, who cared about anything else?
This was a great spot. It was really busy here. Long trailer vans from the sheriff’s department, fire department, and hospitals were surrounded by smaller vehicles like ducklings around their mother. There seemed to be a hundred fire engines, from all kinds of towns. There were hundreds of evacuated residents and their cars, repair trucks from the utility companies and phone company, television crews interviewing anybody, and snack trucks trying to make a dollar selling tacos or hot dogs.
Chiffon bought a Coke through the car window and spotted a really cute one.
She annoyed all the Mercedes, Land Rovers, and Volvos by cutting through them and parking right there. In traffic. She was pretty sure the really cute fireman would ask her to move the Corvette. If she couldn’t get a date out of that, her name wasn’t Chiffon.
ELONY SIGHED AND TRUDGED back up the hill to be with the baby. You’ll get your reward in heaven, she told herself.
But who wanted rewards in heaven? Elony was already half Californian. She wanted her reward right now.
She managed to smile at that, had another cigarette, and then went in to check on Geoffrey. Both of them loved popcorn. Maybe she’d pop some corn and lie on the rug with him and see if she could coax him to change channels. He clung to the remote like a pacifier so as to remain in control of the television, at least.
The outside light was reflecting annoyingly on the TV screen when she joined Geoffrey. She yanked the drapes shut so they wouldn’t have to look at that spooky wine-glow sky, sat down beside him, and combed his hair for a while. Geoffrey loved to have his hair combed. Chiffon didn’t know that. His parents didn’t know. Only Elony knew.
Geoffrey refused to surrender the remote control and Elony didn’t wrestle with him, but drifted into a nap.
THE AIR SETTLED LIKE grease and Beau’s white shirt began to turn gray. He couldn’t find Elisabeth and he couldn’t settle down. He was having some weird primitive response to distant smoke. If he were in touch with nature, he would know what it was saying to him. But he knew nothing. He could only pace, and feel anxious, and avoid the living room with the box on the mantel.
Beau circled from one deck to another, peering toward the dead end of Pinch Canyon. Usually he liked how he sort of had his own personal continent here: his hills on three sides and his own road to the ocean. Today…
Where’s Elisabeth? he thought irritably. “Lizzie!” he shouted. His anxiety became a queasy pre-flu feeling in his gut.
In the last few months — since the box, as a matter of fact — Beau had become ridiculously protective of his little sister. What if Mom and Dad turned on Elisabeth, the way Dad had turned on Michael? After all, she wasn’t up to standard either.
Elisabeth and Beau’s father had been married before. Dad was much older than Mom. Mom was his trophy wife. Everybody laughed about this (except, presumably, the first wife). Beau wouldn’t know, because he had never met the first Mrs. Severyn. There had been a son by this marriage: Michael. Beau had had a half brother. They had never met either. Dad’s divorce had been so ugly that there was total separation between the first and second families.
Michael died.
AIDS.
Dad had been sent the box of ashes that had once been Michael. It was all that existed of Michael now. Literally. When Dad had found out that Michael was gay, years ago, he’d destroyed every photograph, every old report card, art project, and outgrown baseball uniform. He had never seen that son again.
Dad had set the box of his son’s ashes on the mantel, as if planning to do something momentarily, but it had been there for months. Dad could neither bury the box nor move it.
Mom said nothing about it, and as for Michael’s mother, Beau did not even know her name, nor why she hadn’t kept the ashes herself, or even if she was alive.
Throughout his teens, Beau had been aware of his father watching for “signs” that this son, too, might be gay. Beau knew perfectly well he was not, and yet to tell his father this, to give him peace of mind on the subject, would in some way betray Michael.
Sometimes Beau conversed with this dead brother he knew only by box. So Michael, were you a nice guy or what? Would you have spoken to me if your mom and our dad hadn’t hated each other? Would you and I have been real brothers, maybe even friends, if my mom hadn’t ruined your mom’s marriage?
“Elisabeth!” called Beau one more time.
The sky changed dramatically. One minute it had been wine red, with layers of pink and gold and yellow, and now it was blackening. Wow, thought Beau. That’s great. We’re going to have rain. That’ll help the fires.
He coughed. The air was so hot. It was burning his throat to breathe. He ought to stay in the air-conditioning. But when he was in a mood like this, Beau hated to be alone in the house with those ashes. Those betrayed, unloved, unwanted parts of Michael.
Beau knew a cheerleader who lived the opposite side of this story. Katie was the first-time-around child, and her father never so much as remembered her birthday. But the two little babies of his second marriage, he loved lavishly, spending time and money and energy and adoration on his second family.
Beau didn’t think there were explanations for men who did that. If Beau cornered him and said, Dad, are you going to abandon us some day too?, Dad would be astonished. Dad would say, What are you talking about? Beau would say, Michael, I’m talking about Michael. And Dad would glare at him for mentioning the forbidden name and shout, What does he have to do with anything?
What does he have to do with anything? thought Beau. Get a grip on yourself.
His parents despised people who lacked self-discipline. So the thing was to discipline Michael out of his thoughts.
The thundercloud gathered itself strangely behind the bulk of Pinch Mountain. It looked as if a prairie tornado was snaking around back there, half hidden by the hills. Do we have tornadoes in California? thought Beau. We have everything else.
IN HER HIDEY HOLE, Elisabeth thought about the ghost.
Ghosts belonged in East Coast sea captains’ houses, where spirits of murdered brides could not rest. A ghost in the bright laughing sun of southern California? Dumb casting.
But Los Angeles had a ghost. Not on Pinch Canyon, for which she was very thankful. But pretty close. Next door to the riding stable she went to.
It hadn’t been that bad a fire, only eight houses, and they saved the barn. The man had gotten safely out of his house. He was not burned. He was not overcome by smoke. He was among fire trucks and firefighters, protected by fat hoses spraying blessed water.
And then he ran back into the burning house, shouting that he had to get something.
He never came out.
He had lived alone, that man. There were no people inside who needed to be rescued. He had no pets. No cocker spaniel, no beloved cats to save. So what had he needed so much? What could it have been? Photographs? Silver? A souvenir from some old vacation?
Nobody ever knew.
They knew only that it was more important than life. That man had chosen to die in the most awful way there was. He had not died by breathing in the smoke first. He had died by burning up.
Some well-to-do couple purchased the property without a shudder and rebuilt the house, making it finer, wider, and broader. Elisabeth knew he was in there still, that ghost. Cold and shadowy, still reaching for whatever it was he could not live without. She half-saw him every time she went riding at the stable, his fingers burning black before they could rescue the sacred object.
There was nothing in Elisabeth’s house she could not live without. Tucked under the deep glossy leaves, crouched in hot shadow, Elisabeth let her real worry form.
What would her parents rescue, if their house burned? Would they put Elisabeth first? They never had.
Elisabeth saw little of her mother or father even when they weren’t at work. They were both very concerned with their bodies, and belonged to an important and prestigious health club. Their fitness regimes took a great deal of time, and Mom’s class where she worked on her inner child could never be skipped.
It was pretty easy to skip the real children, however.
Elisabeth ate both cupcakes. She wanted to belong to a family where they had purple and yellow and aqua colored sugar cereal around. When she grew up, fresh fruit would never cross her threshold, and as for foreign vegetables, she would pay the supermarket not to carry them. She would eat Twinkies and Sno Balls and lots and lots of salty greasy potato chips.
Overweight made Mom tremble. She liked best the people who stopped eating after one bite of dessert and sat quietly through the rest of the conversation without ever touching that chocolate again. These people had discipline.
Elisabeth didn’t want discipline. She wanted a pet. Specifically, one of Danna Press’s kittens. She’d asked her mother, but as far as Elisabeth’s mother was concerned, pets were just hair on your couch and fleas on your ankles.
Elisabeth Severyn slid into a nightmare where her parents rescued the things that count, and she was not one.
A deer joined her in the thicket and woke her from the dream.
It was scary and spooky and perfect.
The deer was small and blond. Its eyes were immense. Its flanks heaved. Elisabeth sat entirely still. She could not believe her good fortune.
Perhaps my real skill will be with wild animals, she thought. Perhaps I’ll make great films in Africa, or soothe gentle beasts, or learn how dolphins talk.
The deer saw her and was not afraid.
Ohhhhhh, thought Elisabeth, loving the deer.
It did not occur to Elisabeth that the deer had far greater things to be afraid of.
HALL PADDLED OCCASIONALLY, GETTING new angles on Pinch Mountain. Its fuzzy watercolory look never changed. Hall never saw an animal on the mountainside. He always looked, thinking that surely a deer or coyote must appear. But they never did. Of course, maybe from here, what, a half mile away, or something, they blended invisibly.
Today was different.
Somebody had thrown a basketball up there. Or something orange. Hall couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. Or from where.
The swimming pool was practically boiling. Plus he was turning pruny from being in the water for so long. If he had to run from a fire right now, he’d be so waterlogged it wouldn’t even singe his eyebrows. This was not turning out to be a restful afternoon. The whole world was hotting up. California was letting him down.
Letting him down. He was always hearing that phrase. Just the other night, Dad had used it about Matt Marsh.
Matt Marsh had been one of the spectaculars: good in sports and school, popular with kids and parents, clever at technology and music, and, of course, handsome and cool. And what happened? After a few semesters in college, Matt dropped out for a job in one of the more boring suburbs down in the Valley — a flat omelette of a place where people with personality didn’t go, and if they went, after a few months they had no personality left.
Matt Marsh not only moved to this pathetic part of LA, he became a firefighter, washing his little truck, folding his little hose, memorizing his little manual. Once you were a firefighter, that was what you were: a firefighter. You couldn’t rise like a meteor to splendid success on another level, become a vice president or a producer.
It was okay to do clerical work before the casting session that would make you a star. It was okay to bus dishes between auditions. But it was not okay to choose something forever that went no place.
Matt Marsh, of all people. Nobody even talked about him anymore. He might as well have been dead, and his parents were embarrassed.
“They gave that kid everything,” Hall’s father had said sadly just the other night, “and look at how he turned out.”
It was scary, hearing about guys that let their fathers down. Hall was desperately afraid of not pleasing his father. How was he supposed to tell Dad he wanted to help little guys like Geoffrey turn into people? “Maybe Matt’ll save lives,” Hall had pointed out.
“If you or Danna did something like that, I’d be frantic,” said Mom bluntly. “I expect great things of you.”
So it was not just Dad. It was Mom, too, expecting great things of Hall.
Hall swam one slow-motion lap, floated on his back, and in rolling over caught a glimpse of the rusty orange basketball again.
It was larger.
More orange.
BEAU AND ELISABETH’S MOTHER was on the treadmill. Her two best friends were on treadmills on either side of her, Joy listening to a motivational tape and Suze telling how her ex-husband number two was now ending his marriage number three and should Suze begin dating him again?
This was far more interesting than the problem Wendy Severyn had: her daughter. Thinking about Beau was delightful. Thinking about Elisabeth was depressing.
You were supposed to accept your children as they were, but when the child was Elisabeth, hiding out in thickets or reading at the back of closets instead of giggling with other little girls…oh, why couldn’t Elisabeth have a real life? Wendy Severyn resolved to invite a new child over every day, one after another, no matter how much her daughter or the guest whined about it. There had to be someone who’d want to be friends with Elisabeth.
“The fires are spreading,” said Joy suddenly.
“You’re listening to the radio?” said Wendy. “I thought you had a tape on.”
“The fires fascinate me. I can’t get enough of them. The power of nature is still here, no matter how we try to put a lid on it. The awesome strength,” said Joy reverently, “of untamed nature.”
Wendy Severyn hated nature. Nature meant bodies that got old, and Wendy intended to beat nature and keep her body young.
“Wendy,” said Joy, “it just hit Grass Canyon.”
Grass Canyon was a very long road. The fire was not necessarily anyplace near Pinch Canyon. Anyway, Aden had said not to worry. Wendy had enough to worry about, what with turning Elisabeth into a child she could be proud of.
Suze acted as if the fire was already in Pinch Canyon, for heaven’s sake. “Your driveway is awfully narrow, Wendy,” said Suze. “And those switchbacks? You couldn’t even use a regular moving van, remember? I doubt if firetrucks can make the corners either.”
The treadmill kept moving. You could not stop your pace because the ground beneath you did not stop its pace. So Wendy went on running and running and running. “Beau is a sensible boy,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll know what to do. If only Elisabeth were a sensible girl.”
“Poor you,” Suze commiserated. Suze’s two daughters were lovely little copies of Suze, which was so unfair. By rights, Elisabeth should have been a copy of Wendy.
Wendy turned the dial to make the treadmill go faster. If she were really running, she wouldn’t be able to think about anything at all, and wasn’t that what meditation was all about? Emptying your mind?
Wendy Severyn did not know that even Beau, who loved his mother, believed she had a head-start on an empty mind.
FOR FIRES, THERE IS a verb that you use differently.
Flower.
A little fire can “flower” like a rose-opening to the sun. It spreads, and its petals cover the ground. It tosses bouquets to the bottom canyon layer of sumac and brush, and that “flowers,” too, and all around, more places “flower” until you are in a garden of wildfire, instead of a garden of wildflowers.
Some fires not only flower, they throw. They pick up burning logs and toss them ahead. These are fire whirls, giant smoke rings with a down-draft of deadly gases. Their center temperature can actually reach two thousand degrees.
In the dips and gullies and hills beyond Pinch Mountain, the fire played all its games. Here it slowed, and there it died. Here it leaped a huge space and there it pivoted and went back where it had been.
The wind blew into the fire’s waiting mouth. The hotter the fire, the more oxygen it ate, the quicker the wind refilled the supply, and the hotter the fire became.
Behind Pinch Mountain was a narrow crevasse. Not a canyon, really, because it didn’t open onto anything, just a slot in the earth. The fire fell down into it and the crevasse “blew” — a bomb exploding behind Pinch.
HALL AND DANNA’S MOTHER and father worked in the same studio. The studio was its own world, with deadlines and demands, absolutes and restrictions, hopes and fears. Like a hospital ward, it completely enclosed its people from other worlds. They forgot everything, swamped in the task at hand.
Oddly, here in a world utterly ruled by television, no television was on.
Mrs. Press had a watch that did everything but write the scripts for her. Its alarm went off at regular intervals so she could be in touch with the children. Otherwise she’d forget them. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting to call — she literally forgot they existed.
Sometimes when she was really immersed in a script, the people who lived on the page canceled out the people who lived in her house, and she would actually find herself wondering who Hall was, or who Danna was, and why. She believed that her children did not know this.
Over and over, Mrs. Press told herself that the kids were fourteen and fifteen now, they were responsible, they were good, they knew the rules…but today she worried. It was unusual for Jill Press to worry. She had brought up these children solidly; they did not wander from the yard and they did not wander from her rules.
This afternoon, there was a nag at the bottom of her heart, a constant low-level anxiety that she was doing something wrong. But her husband had just called. It was absurd to be calling again.
Absurd or not, Jill Press took her cellular phone and went to another room to call. (Danna got very cross if her parents talked to her in front of people, although Hall never noticed these things.)
She wished she could be home, teasing the kids, going horseback riding with them, peeling Hall away from that creepy little Aszling kid.
She thought of dinner, which once again the four Presses were not going to have together. Danna would have Frosted Flakes followed by several ice cream sandwiches. Hall, so mature in most ways, was a toddler for food: He’d mix Sugar Smacks, BerryBerry Kix, and Cocoa Krispies. Mrs. Press had met families who claimed the children loved sprout sandwiches and tofu casseroles but her children, personally, were into sugar.
Once out of the conference room, she felt foolish. Fourteen and fifteen was not four and five. She couldn’t have better kids. What was her problem here? Did she think they were going to go out and get hooked on cocaine this afternoon? She was just itchy from too many meetings. It was affecting her like a rash, that and the fires and the Santa Ana winds.
She went back into the meeting and was relieved that she hadn’t bothered the children only minutes after the last check-in.
ELISABETH AND BEAU’S FATHER also sat in a meeting. There were seven men and four women at this meeting and he was annoyed at every one of them. Why must they talk so much? In the case of some of these people, why talk at all?
There were people in this world who should not have been provided with mouths.
He was sitting between two of them.
The talk was of the fires, but only what the fires were doing to network advertising income. Fire raged in a dozen places: Glendale and Laguna Beach and Pasadena and Ventura. Nobody knew how any fire had started: lightning, cigarettes, arson, sparks from dragging broken mufflers of passing cars. Now, in the high wind, with the land and the scrub preheated, fire seemed to be starting itself.
In this group, nobody cared how the fires started. They had bigger things to worry about. Car dealers, for example, didn’t like to advertise during broadcasts of fires that were consuming their customers.
Mr. Severyn glanced at his watch. This meeting could last until six or even seven. He was not a homebody. Getting home in time for dinner was not something that normally ran through his mind, but these fires were getting on everybody’s nerves. They’d gone on too long and there were too many of them.
Pinch Canyon was safe. The neighborhood association paid a security guard and if something happened…
But he felt a queer pounding in his chest. A sort of primitive awareness. It was not like Beau to phone him at work. Beau knew that was reserved for emergencies.
In the complete lack of privacy at this hostile meeting, Aden Severyn allowed himself some very private thoughts. He was angry at himself for the whole nonsense over Michael’s ashes. He did not believe in a life after death, and he certainly did not believe that Michael inhabited those ashes sitting in that cardboard box on the mantel.
He’d seen Beau’s eyes flicker toward the box every time he went through the room, seen his son flinch just thinking about them.
He’d seen Elisabeth design a detour for herself so she didn’t have to pass the fireplace. The whole family had moved its activities to the far side of the house, as if they really did intend to bury Michael up there, and would always skirt the graveyard.
He had to talk to Beau. And for that matter, to Michael himself. It was strange how death had brought Michael into his mind as life never had.
Mr. Severyn’s chest actually hurt. The possibilities were: heart attack (in the advertising industry, people had heart attacks quite regularly); indigestion (considering what he had had for lunch, this was very possible); and panic.
Those fires are miles away from the house, he told himself.
He heard his own thought: not miles away from the children, but miles away from the house.
A creepy damp wash, like a muggy day, slid up his entire body, enveloping him in what was either a stroke or a warning of one. He said, “I can’t sit here. The fires worry me. I’m going home to be there with the kids.” He liked that sentence.
“You can’t get there from here,” said the woman who should have been born without a mouth. “The highway is closed.”
The highway was closed? What was she talking about?
“People are being evacuated,” she said, “and the traffic has blocked the highways. You can’t get home.”
You can’t get home. It had certainly been true for Michael.
Aden Severyn wanted no parallels, no lessons. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” He was shouting, planning the woman’s strangulation.
“You never want to hear anything I have to say,” she said triumphantly.
HALL WAS OUT OF the pool, wandering mindlessly, postponing the homework. The orange basketball expanded.
Below it, five cyclists in neon bright lycra suits appeared on the narrow path that wound around Pinch Mountain. A few years ago there had been no such path, but dirt bikers loved Pinch, and had worn a path into the sides. When there were mud slides the path had to be restarted, but that was just a fun new challenge.
Hall was startled to realize how large the orange basketball was. Now that the cyclists were there for comparison, he saw that it was as big as a car. It was hanging over the bikes like a boulder soon to roll down. He could only suppose they didn’t see it; that the levels of the mountain blocked their view. They stopped pedaling, and looked around, confused. They had goals. Plans. An itinerary, probably. Hall expected that they had backpacks, water bottles, sandwiches. They didn’t see anything, but perhaps they heard something, or felt something.
Was it fire? But there weren’t any flames. It had to be fire, and yet it had none of the traditional fire-type look. A huge coal, maybe? Where could it have come from? There was no bigger fire here. Had somebody started it? Had some arsonist crept up there with a match? But Hall had been out there, and checked the mountain as always, and as always it had been bare.
He stood in his bathing suit dripping on the tiles.
The orange mass widened.
The wind picked up. It was a hotter wind than usual, and because it was laden with grease and ash, he could see the wind. Watch the turbulence. The wind tied itself in knots and changed its mind about where to go.
Beyond the wind, the sky was a sunset on the wrong side of the world. The sky turned magenta and gold and lemon and hot hot pink and vermilion.
“Dannie!” he shouted. “Danna, get the camcorder! We’ve got to film this. This is absolutely incredible footage. Dannie, come out here and look at this!”
Over the barren mountainside, above the bikers, came a herd of deer. They leaped over rocks and each other, crossing the path just below the cyclists, and rushing on down a mountainside too steep even for deer. They stumbled and fell on each other, scrambling desperately.
A huge solid black silhouette suddenly filled the sky. It was a smoke mountain. Or the top of an explosion.
Hall was awestruck. He could think of nothing else, look at nothing else. His sister joined him, holding the camera. It was palm-sized, light and easy to use, but she wasn’t using it. She was as hypnotized as her brother.
It was fire, they knew that, but the fire itself wasn’t there yet. This was its teaser. Its advance advertising.
Awesome, thought Halstead Press.
The smoke advanced past the mountain, as if the shadow of the mountain were going first instead of after. The smoke moved over the sphinx head that was Pinch and down the rocky gravelly side that became Pinch Canyon. The smoke was so much more colorful than Hall expected smoke to be: It was like an old bruise — black and gray and olive green. It had sound. It roared, a jet engine inside the mountain, a volcano bursting rock.
Like the deer, the bikers stumbled and fell on each other. Three whirled and pedaled wildly back the way they had come. The other two surged on.
Then, chasing its own smoke, came the fire.
Over the heads of the bicycle riders appeared a huge stretch of fire. It was brighter orange than the fruit. It was embroidered with splotches of crimson and gold, and its smoke was a universe of black before it and after it and in it.
For a few moments the fire was vertical, a sheet billowing on a giant’s clothesline.
Neither Danna nor Hall could make a sound. They were stunned by the size of the sudden fire, the power of it, the absolute utter proof that it was fire, and not a joke.
The fire bent over like a predator and went after the bicycles.