Pacific Edge

8

In a camp in Virginia. Interned. Big mistake to antagonize that immigration officer. That a single official’s enmity can result in this! But it’s more than that, of course. A tidal wave of fear. Lawyer says private tests all negative, so this is just a ploy to hold me while they put together a case under the H-G Act. False positives. Meanwhile here in a kind of camp. Wooden dormitory barracks in rows, dead grass, dirt baseball diamonds, benches, fences. Barbed wire, yes. City of the dying. False positives, those bastards. Actually a lot of people here make the same claim. Some of them obviously wrong.

Summer in Virginia, hot, humid. Thunderstorms black with hail and lightning. The daily blitzkrieg of the news. War spilling into the Balkans like a bad summer re-run. TV apocalypse. Four planes blown up in transatlantic flights, and international flights soon to be severely curtailed. Pam will have to return by ship, if she can get home at all. World getting bigger as it falls apart. I can’t write any more.

As Tom had predicted, Alfredo was now forced to go public with his plans for Rattlesnake Hill. He and Matt took time on the town talk TV channel in the dinner hour before the Wednesday night council meeting, and they announced their proposal, walking around a large architect’s model of the hill after it had been built up according to their plans. The model was covered with little dark green trees, especially on top—the copse already there would be allowed to remain, at least in part. And the structures were low, built around the hilltop in a sort of crown, stepped in terracelike levels and in some places, apparently, built into the hillside. The buildings were of pale blond brick, and what was not building was lawn. It was a beautiful model, attractive as all miniatures are, ingenious, detailed, small.

Matt went through the town finances, comparing El Modena’s shares to those of the surrounding towns and discussing the downturn they had taken in the last ten years. He went over charts showing how the new complex would contribute to the town income, and then moved on to show briefly where Heartech and Avending would get the financing to build the complex. Timetables were presented, the whole program.

Finally Alfredo came back on. “In the end it’s your town, and it’s your land, so you all have to make the decision. All we can do is make the proposal and see what you think, and that’s what we’re doing. We think it would be a real contribution to El Modena, the restaurants and shops and promenades up there would really make the hill used, and of course the restaurants and shops down below would benefit as well. We’ve made proposals on the council concerning zoning and water resources that would make the project feasible on the infrastructural level. The environmental impact report has been made, and it says pretty much what we’re saying here, that the hill will be changed, sure, but not in a degrading way. Nearly a quarter of the town’s land is parkland just like the hill, immediately behind it—we could easily afford that hill, and use its prominence in Orange County’s geography to make a stronger profile for the town as a civic and financial unit.”

“Fuck,” Kevin said, watching his screen. “What babble!”

Tom laughed. “You’re catching on, boy.”

Alfredo and Matt ended by asking those watching to spread the word, because few townspeople would be watching, and to speak to their council members in favor of the proposal, if they were so inclined. More detailed messages and plans and updates and mailings were promised.

“Okay, it’s in the open,” Tom said. “Time to start asking the hard questions in the council. You can still stop the whole thing right in council if the zoning proposal doesn’t pass. If people want it then they’d have to elect a new council, and at least you’d have bought some time.”

“Yeah, but if people want it, the council will probably go for it.”

“Maybe. Depends on the council members—they don’t have to pay any attention to polls if they don’t want to, it’s representative government after all, at least in this part of things.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Kevin could barely talk about it. The truth was, since his talk with Ramona he just didn’t care very much, about the hill or anything. He was numb. No more new worlds of feeling; just withdrawn, in a shell, stunned. Numb.

One night Tom got a call from his old friend Emma. “Listen, Tom, we’ve caught a good lead in this Heartech case you’ve put us on. We haven’t followed it all the way yet, but it’s clear there’s a really strong relationship between your company and the American Association for Medical Technology.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, basically they’re an umbrella organization for all the old profit hospitals in the country, with a lot of connections in Hong Kong.”

“Ah ha!” Tom sat up. “Sounds promising.”

“Very. This AAMT has been implicated in a number of building programs back on the East Coast, and in essence what they’re up to is trying to take over as much of the medical industry as they can.”

“I see. Well—anything I can do?”

“No. I’ve passed it to Chris, and she’s going to be going after it as part of her federal investigations, so it’s coming along. But listen, I wanted to tell you—we broke cover to get the opening on this.”

“They know they’re being investigated?”

“Exactly. And if Hong Kong is part of it, that could be bad news. Some of those Hong Kong banks are rough.”

“Okay, I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“You do that. I’ll get back to you when I have more, and Chris may be contacting you directly.”

“Good. Thanks, Em.”

“My pleasure. Good to have you back on the map, Tom.”

Doris was angry. Mostly she was angry at herself. No, that wasn’t quite true. Mostly she was angry at Kevin. She watched his evident suffering in the affair with Ramona, and her heart filled with pity, anger, contempt. Stupid fool, to fall so hard for someone clearly in love with someone else! Kind of like Doris herself, in fact. Yes, she was angry at herself, for her own stupidity. Why care for an idiot?

Also she was angry at herself for being so rude to Oscar Baldarramma, that night in the hills. It had been a transference, and she knew it. He hadn’t deserved it.

That was the important part. If people deserved it, Doris felt no compunction about being rude to them. That was the way she was. Her mother Ann had brought her up otherwise, teaching politeness as a cardinal virtue—just as Ann’s mother had taught her, and her mother her, and so on and so forth back to the Nisei and Japan itself. But it hadn’t taken with Doris, it went against the grain of her nature. Doris was not patient, she was not kind; she was sharp-tongued, and hard on people slower than she was. She had been hard on Kevin, perhaps—she had needled him, and he never appeared to mind, but who knew? No doubt she had hurt him. Yes, her mother’s lessons still held, somewhere inside her—transformed to something like, People should not be subjected to anger they don’t deserve. She had blown that one many a time. And never so spectacularly as with Oscar, up in the hills.

Which was galling. That night… two sights stuck in her mind, afterimages from looking into the sun of her own emotions. One, Kevin and Ramona, embracing on a moonlit ridge, kissing—okay, enough of that, nothing she could do about it. The other, though: Oscar’s big round face, as she lashed out at him and ran. Shocked, baffled, hurt. She’d never seen him with an expression remotely like it. His face was usually a mask—over-solemn impassivity, grotesque mugging, all masks. What she had seen that night had been under the mask.

So, vastly irritated with herself and the apparently genetic imperative to be polite, she got on her bike after work one evening and rode over to Oscar’s house. The front door was missing, as the whole southern exposure of the house was all torn up by Kevin’s renovation. She went around to the side door, which led through a laundry room to the kitchen, and knocked.

Oscar opened the door. When he saw her his eyebrows drew together. Otherwise his face remained blank. The mask.

She saw the other face, moonstruck, distraught.

“Listen, Oscar, I’m really sorry about that night in the hills,” she snapped. “I wasn’t myself—”

Oscar raised a hand, stopping her. “Come in,” he said. “I’m on the TV with my Armenian family.”

She followed him in. On his TV screen was a courtyard, lit by some bare light bulbs hanging in a tree. A white table was crowded with bottles and glasses, and around it sat a gang of moustachioed men and black-haired women, all staring at the screen. Suddenly self-conscious, Doris said, “It must be the middle of the night there.”

She heard her remarks spoken in the computer’s Armenian. The crowd at the table laughed, and one said something. Oscar’s TV then said, “In the summer we sleep in the day and live at night, to avoid the heat.”

Doris nodded.

Oscar said, “It’s been a pleasure as always, friends, but I should leave now. See you again next month.”

And all the grinning faces on the screen said, “Good-bye, Oscar!” and waved. Oscar turned down the sound.

“I like that crowd,” he said, moving off to the kitchen. “They’re always inviting me to visit in person. If I did I’d have to stay a year to be sure I stayed in everyone’s house.”

Doris nodded. “I’ve got some families like that myself. The good ones make it worth the ones who never even look at the screen.”

She decided to start again. “Listen, I’m really sorry about the other night—”

“I heard you the first time,” he said brusquely. “Apology accepted. Really there’s no need. I had a wonderful night, as it turned out.”

“Really? Can’t say I did. What happened to you?”

Oscar merely eyed her with his impassive stare. Ah ha, she thought. Maybe he is angry at me. Behind the mask.

She said, “Listen, can I take you out to dinner?”

“No.” He blinked. “Not tonight anyway. I was just about to leave for the races.”

“The races?”

“Yes. If you’d like to come along, perhaps afterwards we could get something. And there are hot dogs there.”

“Hot dogs.”

“Little beef sausages—”

“I know what hot dogs are,” she snapped.

“Then you know enough to decide.”

She didn’t, actually, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of appearing curious. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He insisted they take a car, so they wouldn’t be late. They tracked down to southern Irvine and parked at the edge of an almost full parking lot, next to a long stadium. Inside was a low rumbling.

“Sounds like a factory,” Doris said. “What kind of racing is that?”

“Drag racing.”

“Cars?”

“Exactly.”

“But are they using gas?”

Roars from inside smothered Oscar’s answer. Shit, Doris thought, he is mad at me. He’s brought me here because he knows I won’t like it. “Alcohol!” Oscar said in a sudden silence.

“Fueling cars or people?”

“Both.”

“But they aren’t even going anywhere!” Road races at least had destinations.

Oscar stared at her. “But they go nowhere so fast.”

All right, Doris said to herself. Calm down. Don’t let him get to you. If you walk away then he’ll just think you’re a stuffy moralistic bitch like he already does, and he’ll have won. To hell with that. He wasn’t going to win, not tonight.

Oscar bought tickets and they walked into the stadium. People were crammed into bleachers, shouting conversations and drinking beer from dumpies and paper cups. Peanuts were flying around. Lots of dirty blue jeans, and blue-jean vests or jackets. Black leather was popular. And a lot of people were fat. Or very solid. Maybe that’s why Oscar liked it.

They sat in the top bleachers, on numbered spots. Oscar got beers from a vendor. Suddenly he stood and bellowed, in a great rising baritone:

By the time he got to “In-ter-national,” the whole crowd was bellowing along. Some kind of anthem. People turned to yell at Oscar, and one said bluntly “Who’s that you got with you!” Oscar pointed down at Doris. “Dor-is Nak-ayama!” he roared, as if announcing a professional wrestler. “First timer!”

About thirty people yelled “Hi, Dor-is!”

She waved weakly.

Then cars rolled onto the long strip of blackened concrete below them. They were so loud that conversation was impossible. “Rail cars!” Oscar shouted in her ear. Immense thick back tires; long bodies, dominated by giant black and silver engines. Spindly rails extended forward to wheels that wouldn’t have been out of place on a bicycle. Drivers were tucked down into a little slot behind the engine. They were big cars, something Doris realized when she saw the drivers’ heads, little dot helmets. Even idling, the engines were loud, but when the drivers revved them they let out an explosive stutter of blasts, and almost clear flames burst from the big exhaust pipes on the sides. Bad vibrations in her stomach.

“Quarter miles,” Oscar shouted. “Get up to two hundred miles an hour! Tremendous acceleration!”

His bleacher friends leaned in to shout more bits of information at her. Doris nodded rapidly, trying to look studious.

The two cars practiced starts, sending back wheels into smoking, screeching rotation, swerving alarmingly from side to side as the wheels caught at the concrete. The stink of burnt rubber joined the smell of incompletely burned grain alcohol.

“Burning rubber!” Oscar’s friends shouted at her. “Heats the tires, and—” blattt blattt screech! “—traction!”

“Oscar’s bike tires do that when he brakes,” Doris shouted.

Laughter.

The two cars rumbled to the starting line, spitting fire. A pole with a vertical strip of lights separated them, and when the cars were set and roaring furiously, the lights lit in a quick sequence from top to bottom, and the cars leaped forward screeching, the crowd on its feet screaming, the cars flying over the blackened concrete toward the finish line in front of the grandstand. They flashed by and roared down the track, trailing little parachutes.

“They help them slow down,” Oscar said, pointing.

“No, really?” Doris shouted loudly.

Two more cars trundled toward the starting line.

So the evening passed: an earsplitting race, an interval in which Oscar and his friends explained things to Doris, who made her commentary. The raw power of the cars was impressive, but still. “This is really silly!” Doris said at one point. Oscar smiled his little smile.

“Oscar should be driving one of those!” she said at another point.

“They’d never fit him in.”

“Funny cars you could.”

“You’d just need a bigger car,” Doris said. “An Oscar-mobile.”

Oscar put his hands before him, drove pop-eyed, then cross-eyed.

“That’s it,” Doris said. “Most of those cars appear to need a bit more weight on the back wheels anyway, don’t they?”

Immediately several of them began to explain to her that this wasn’t necessarily true.

“It’s a tough sport,” Oscar said. “You have to change gears without using the clutch, and the timing of it has to be really fine. Then the cars tend to sideslip, so one has to concentrate on steering and changing gears at the same time.”

“Two things at once?” Doris said.

“Hey, drag racing is a very stripped-down sport. But that means they really get to concentrate on things. Purify them, so to speak.”

Then what looked like freeway cars appeared, lurching and spitting their way to the starting line. These were funny cars, fiberglass shells over huge engines. When two of them took off Doris finally got a good feeling for how fast these machines were. The two little blue things zipped by, moving four times as fast as she had ever seen a freeway car move. “My!”

They loved her for that little exclamation.

When the races were over the spectators stood and mingled, and Oscar became the center of a group. Doris was introduced to more names than she could remember. There was a ringing in her ears. Oscar joined a long discussion of various cars’ chances in the championships next month. Some of his friends kidded him about the Oscarmobile, and Doris spent some time with a pencil sketching the design on a scrap of paper: rail car with a ballooning egg-shape at the rear end, between two widely separated wheels.

“The three-balled Penismobile, you should call it.”

“That was my plan.”

“Oh, so you and Oscar know each other pretty good, eh?”

“Not that good!”

Laughter.

Ordinary clothes, “Americana” outfits, blue jeans and cowboy boots, automotive types in one-piece mechanics’ jumpers… Oscar’s recreations seemed to involve costuming pretty often, Doris thought. Masks of all kinds. In fact some of the spectators called him “Rhino,” so perhaps his worlds overlapped a bit. Professional wrestling, drag car racing—yes, it made sense. Stupid anachronistic nostalgia sports, basically. Oscar’s kind of thing! She had to laugh.

As they left the stadium and returned to their car they passed a group wearing black leather or intricately patched blue-jean vests, grease-blackened cowboy boots, and so on. The women wore chains. Doris watched the group approach the part of the parking lot filled with motorbikes. Many of the men were fatter than Oscar, and their long hair and beards fell in greasy strands. Their arms were marked with black tattoos, although she noticed that spilled beer seemed to have washed most of one armful of tattoos away. The apparent leader of the group, a giant man with a long ponytail, pulled back a standard motorbike and unlocked it from the metal stand. He sat on the bike, dwarfing it; he had to draw up his legs so that his knees stuck out to the sides. His girlfriend squeezed on behind him, and the little frame sank almost to the ground. The back tire was squashed flat. The leader nodded at his followers, shouted something, kicked his bike’s motor to life. The two-cylinder ten-horsepower engine sputtered, caught like a sewing machine. The whole gang started their bikes up, rn rn rnn, then puttered out of the parking lot together, riding down Sand Canyon Road at about five miles an hour.

“Who are they?” Doris asked.

“Hell’s Angels.”

“The Hell’s Angels?”

“Yes,” Oscar said, pursing his lips. “Current restrictions on motorcycle engine size have somewhat, uh…”

He snorted. Doris cracked up. Oscar tilted his head to the sky, laughed out loud. The two of them stood there and laughed themselves silly.

Tom and Nadezhda spent the days together, sometimes in El Modena talking to Tom’s old friends in town. They went out to look at Susan Mayer’s chicken ranch, and worked in the house’s groves with Rafael and Andrea and Donna, and lunched at the city hall restaurant with Fran and Yoshi and Bob and a whole crew of people doing their week’s work in the city offices. People seemed so pleased to see Tom, to talk with him. He understood that in isolating himself he had hurt their feelings, perhaps. Or damaged the fabric of the social world he had been part of, in the years before his withdrawal. Strange perception, to see yourself from the outside, as if you were just another person. The pleasure on Fran’s face: “Oh, Tom, it’s just so nice to be talking to you again!” Sounds of agreement from the others at that end of the table.

“And here I am trying to take him away,” Nadezhda said.

Embarrassed, Tom told them about her proposal that he join her. But that was not the same thing as holing up in his cabin, apparently. They thought it was a wonderful idea. “You should do it, Tom!”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

One day he and Nadezhda cycled around Orange County together, using little mountain bikes with high handlebars and super-low gears to help them up the hills. Tom showed her the various haunts of his youth, now completely transformed, so that he spoke like an archeologist. They went down to Newport Harbor and looked around the ship. It really was a beautiful thing. Up close it seemed very large. It did not have exactly the classical shape of the old clipper ships, as its bow was broad, and the whole shape of the hull bulky, built for a large crew and maximum cargo space. But modern materials made it possible to carry a lot more sail, so that it had a clipper’s speed. In many ways it looked very like paintings and photos of the sailing ships of the nineteenth century; then a gleam of titanium, or a computer console, or the airfoil shape of a spar, would transform the image, make it new and strange.

Again Nadezhda asked Tom to join them when they embarked, and he said “Show me more,” looking and feeling dubious. “I’d be useless as a sailor,” he said, looking up into the network of wire and xylon rigging.

“So am I, but that’s not what we’d be here for. We’d be teachers.” Ganesh was a campus of the University of Calcutta, offering degrees in marine biology, ecology, economics, and history. Most of the instructors were back in Calcutta, but there were several aboard in each discipline. Nadezhda was a Distinguished Guest Lecturer in the history department.

“I don’t know if I’d want to teach,” Tom said.

“Nonsense. You teach every day in El Modena.”

“I don’t know if I like that either.”

She sighed. Tom looked down and massaged his neck, feeling dizzy. The geriatric drugs had that effect sometimes, especially when over-used. He stared at the control board for the rigging. Power winches, automatic controls, computer to determine the most efficient settings. He nodded, listening to Nadezhda’s explanations, imagining small figures spidering out a spar to take in a reef in high seas. Sailing.

“Our captain can consistently beat the computer for speed.”

“At any given moment, or over the course of a voyage?”

“Both.”

“Good to hear about people like that. There are too few left.”

“Not at sea.”

Biking through the Irvine Hills, past the university and inland. Sun hot on his back, a breath of the Santa Ana wind again. Tom listed the reasons he couldn’t leave, Nadezhda rebutted them. Kevin could tend the bees. The fight for Rattlesnake Hill was a screen fight for him, it could be done from the ship. The feeling he should stay was a kind of fear. They pedaled into a traffic circle and Tom said “Be careful, these circles are dangerous, a guy was killed in this one last month.”

Nadezhda ignored him. “I want to have you along with me on this voyage.”

“Well, I’d love to have you stay here, too.”

She grimaced, and he laughed at her.

At the inland edge of Irvine he stopped, leaned the bike against the curb. “One time my wife and I flew in to visit my parents, and the freeways were jammed, so my dad drove us home by back roads, which at that time meant right through this area. I think he meant it to be a scenic drive, or else he wanted to tell me something. Because it just so happened that at that time this area was the interface between city and country. It had been orange groves and strawberry fields, broken up by eucalyptus windbreaks—now all that was being torn out and replaced by the worst kind of cheap-shot crackerjack condominiums. Everywhere we looked there were giant projects being thrown up, bulldozers in the streets, earth-movers, cranes, fields of raw dirt. Whole streets were closed down, we kept having to make detours. I remember feeling sick. I knew for certain that Orange County was doomed.”

He laughed.

She said, “I guess we never know anything for certain.”

“No.”

They biked on, between industrial parks filled with long buildings covered in glass tinted blue, copper, bronze, gold, green, crystal. Topiary figures stood clustered on the grass around them.

“It looks like Disneyland,” Nadezhda said.

He led her through residential neighborhoods where neat houses were painted in pastels and earth tones. “Irvine’s neighborhood associations make the rules for how the individual homes look. To make it pretty. Like a museum exhibit or an architect’s model, or like Disneyland, yes.”

“You don’t like it.”

“No. It’s nostalgia, denial, pretentiousness, I’m not sure which. Live in a bubble and pretend it’s 1960!”

“I think you’d better board the Ganesh and get away from these irritating things.”

He growled.

Further north the sky was filled with kites and tethered hot air balloons, straining seaward in the freshening Santa Ana wind. “Here’s the antidote,” Tom said, cheering up. “El Toro is a village of tree lovers. When the Santa Ana blows their kites fly right over Irvine.”

They pedaled into a grove of immense genetically engineered sycamores. Tom stopped under one of these overarching trees and stared up through branches at the catwalks and small wooden rooms perched among them. “Hey, Hyung! Are you home?”

For answer a basket elevator controlled by big black iron counterweights descended. They climbed in and were lifted sixty feet into the air, to a landing where Hyung Nguyen greeted them. Hyung was around Nadezhda’s age, and it turned out that they had once met at a conference in Ho Chi Minh City, some thirty-five years before. “Small world,” Tom said happily. “I swear it’s getting so everyone’s met everyone.”

Hyung nodded. “They say you know everyone alive through a linkage of five people or less.”

They sat in the open air on Hyung’s terrace, swaying ever so slightly with the massive branch supporting them, drinking green tea and talking. Hyung was El Toro’s mayor, and had been instrumental in its city planning, and he loved to describe it: several thousand people, living in sycamores like squirrels and running a thriving gene tech complex. Nadezhda laughed to see it. “But it’s Disneyland again, yes? The Swiss Family treehouse.”

“Sure,” Hyung said easily. “I grew up in Little Saigon, over in Garden Grove, and when we went to Disneyland it was the best day of the year for me. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child. And the treehouse was always my favorite.” He sang the simple accordion ditty that had been played over and over again in the park’s concrete and plastic banyan tree, and Tom joined in. “I always wanted to hide one night when they closed the park, and spend the night in the treehouse.”

“Me too!” Tom cried.

“And now I sleep in it every night. And all my neighbors too.” Hyung grinned.

Nadezhda asked how it had come about, and Hyung explained the evolution: orange groves, Marine air base, government botanical research site, genetic engineering station—finally deeded over to El Toro, with part of the grove already in place. A group of people led by Hyung convinced the town to let them build in the trees, and this quickly became the town’s mark. “The trees are our philosophy, our mode of being.” Now there were imitations all over the country, even a worldwide association of tree towns.

“If you can do that here,” Nadezhda said, “surely you can save one small hill in El Modena.”

They explained the situation to Hyung, and he agreed: “Oh, hell yes, hell yes. It’s not a matter of legal battles, it’s simply a matter of winning the opinion of the town.”

“I know,” Tom said, “but there’s the rub. Our mayor is proposing this thing, and he’s popular. It might be he can get the majority in favor of it.”

Hyung shrugged. “Then you’re out of luck. But that’s where the crux will lie. Not in the council or in the courts, but in the homes.” He grinned. “Democracy is great when you’re in the majority, eh?”

“But there are laws protecting the rights of the minority, there have to be. The minority, the land, animals—”

“Sure. But will they apply to an issue like this?”

Tom sucked air through his teeth, uncertain.

“You ought to start a big publicity campaign. Make the debate as public as possible, I think that always works best.”

“Hmm.”

Another grin. “Unless it backfires on you.”

A phone rang and Hyung stepped down free-standing stairs to the window-filled room straddling the big branch below. Tom and Nadezhda looked around, feeling the breeze rock them. High above the ground, light scattering through green leaves, big trees filling the view in every direction, some in groves, others freestanding—wide open spaces for gardens and paths: a sensory delight. A childlike appeal, Nadezhda said. Surface ingenuity, structural clarity, intricate beauty.

“It’s our genes,” Tom replied. “For millions of years trees were our home, our refuge on savannahs filled with danger. So this love has been hardwired into our thinking by the growth of our brains themselves, it’s in our deep structure and we can never lose it, never forget, no matter these eyeblinks in the city’s grimy boxes. Maybe it’s here we should move.”

“Maybe.”

Hyung hurried upstairs, looking worried. “Fire in the hills, Tom—east of here, moving fast. From the description it sounded near your place.”

And in fact they could see white smoke, off over the hills, blown toward them in the Santa Ana wind.

Tom leaped to his feet. “We’d better go.”

“I know. Here, take a car and come back for your bikes later. I called and they’ll have one for you at the station.” He punched a button on the elevator control panel, and great black weights swung into the sky.

A summer brushfire in the California foothills is a frightening sight. It is not just that all the hillside vegetation is tinder dry, but that so much of it is even more actively flammable than that, as the plants are filled with oils and resins to help enable them to survive the long dry seasons. When fire strikes, mesquite, manzanita, scrub oak, sage, and many other plants do not so much catch fire as explode. This is especially true when the wind is blowing; wind fans the flames with a rich dose of oxygen, and then throws the fire into new brush, which is often heated nearly to the point of combustion, and needs only a spark to burst violently into flame. In a strong wind it looks as if the hillsides have been drenched with gasoline.

Nadezhda and Tom rounded the last turn in the trail to Tom’s place, following several people and a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle piled with equipment. They caught sight of the fire. “Ach,” Nadezhda said. The ravine-scored hillside east of Tom’s cottage was black, and lightly smoking, and the irregular line that separated this new black from the ordinary olive gray hillside was an oily orange flickering, ranging from solid red to a transparent shimmering. White smoke poured up from this line of fire, obscuring the sun and filling the air downwind, filtering the light in an odd, ominous way. Occasionally fire leaped out of the burn line and jumped up the hill toward Tom’s place, licks of flame rolling like tumbleweed, trees and shrubs going off suddenly, bang, bang, bang, like hundreds of individual cases of spontaneous combustion. It was loud, the noise an insistent, crackling roar.

Tom stood rigidly on the trail before Nadezhda, staring through the strange muted light, assessing the danger. “Damn,” he said. Then: “The bees.”

Hank ran by with some others. “Come on,” he said, “can’t fight a fire from a distance.”

Kevin appeared shovel in hand, his face and arms streaked with black ash and brown dirt. “We got the beehives onto a cart and out of here. I don’t know how many were smoked inside. Got the chickens out too. We’ve been watering your roof and they’re cutting a break down this ridge, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it or not, this wind is so fucked. You’d better get what you want out—” and he was off. Tom jogged up the trail to the cabin, and Nadezhda followed. The air was hot, thick with smoke and ash. It smelled of oils and burnt sage. Unburnt twigs and even branches blew by overhead. Just east of the cabin a big crowd of people worked with picks, shovels, axes, and wheelbarrows, widening an ancient overgrown firebreak. The cabin stood in a wide spot in this old break, and so theoretically it was well-placed, but the ridge was narrow, the terrain on both sides steep and rough, and Nadezhda saw immediately that the workers were having a hard time of it. A higher ridge immediately to the west offered a better chance, and in fact there were people up there too, and pick-up trucks.

Overhead a chopping sound blanketed the insistent whoosh and crackle of the fire, and four helicopters swept over the skyline onto them. Gabriela was shouting into a walkie-talkie, apparently directing the pilots. They clattered by in slow, low runs, dropping great trailing quantities of a white powder. One dropped water. Billows of smoke coursed up and out, were shredded in the wind. The helicopters hovered, turned, made another run. They disappeared over the skyline and the roar of the fire filled their ears again. In the ravine below them the fire appeared subdued, but on their side of the ravine shrubs and trees were still exploding, whooshing torchlike into flame as if part of a magician’s act, adding deep booms to the roar.

On the break line almost everyone Nadezhda had met in El Modena was hacking away at the brush, dragging it down the ridge to the west. Axe blades flashed in the eerie light, looking dangerous. Two women aimed hoses, but there was little water pressure, and they couldn’t spray far. They cast white fans of water over everything within reach, firefighters, the new dirt of the break, the brush being pulled away. Down below the house Kevin was at work with a pick, hacking at the base of a sage bush with great chopping swings, working right next to Alfredo, who was doing the same; they fell into a rhythm as if they had been a team for years, and struck as if burying the picks in each other’s hearts. The sage bush rolled away, they ran to another one and began again.

Nadezhda shook herself, followed Tom to the cabin. Ramona was inside with all the other Sanchezes, her arms filled with clothing. “Tom, hey, get what you want right now!” It was stifling, and out the kitchen window Nadezhda saw a burning ember float by. Solar panels beyond the emptied beehives were buckling and drooping.

“Forget the clothes!” Tom said, and then shouted: “Photo albums!” He ran into a small room beside the bedroom.

“Get out of there!” someone outside the house shouted, voice amplified. “Time’s up!” The megaphone made it a voice out of a dream, metallic and slow. “Everyone get out of the house and off the break! NOW!”

They had to pull Tom from the house, and he was yelling at them. A huge airy rumble filled the air, punctuated by innumerable small explosions. The whole hillside between ravine and ridge was catching fire. Hills in the distance appeared to float and then drop, tumbling in the superheated air. People streamed down the firebreak they had just made, and those who had been in the house joined them. Tom stumbled along looking at the ground, a photo album clutched to his chest. Alfredo and Kevin argued over a map, Kevin stabbing at it with a bloody finger, “That’s a real firebreak right up there,” pointing to the west. “It’s the only thing this side of Peter’s Canyon that’ll do! Let’s get everyone there and widen it, clear the backside, get the choppers to drop in front. We should be able to make a stand!”

“Maybe,” Alfredo said, and shrugged. “Okay, let’s do it.” He shouted instructions as they hurried down the trail, and Gabriela stopped to talk into her walkie-talkie. White smoke diffused through the air made it hard to breathe, and the light was dim, colors filtered and grayish.

At the gouged trail’s first drop-off there was a crush of people. They looked back, saw Tom’s cabin sitting among flames, looking untouched and impervious; but the solar panels beyond had melted like syrup, and were oozing dense black smoke. All the weeds in the yard were aflame, and the grandfather clocks burned like men at the stake. As they watched the shingles on one corner of the roof caught fire, all at once as if a magician had snapped his fingers. Poof! One whole wall gone up like newspaper in the fireplace. Nadezhda held Tom by the arm, but he shrugged her off, staring back at the sight, clutching the album still. His wrinkled face was smeared with ash, his eyes red-rimmed with the smoke, his fringe of hair flying wildly, singed to curls in one spot by a passing ember. His mouth was in a tight disdainful knot. “It’s only things,” he said to Nadezhda hoarsely, angrily. “Only things.” But then they passed a small knot of smoked bees lying on the dirt, and he hissed, looking anguished.

He insisted on helping at the firebreak to the west, and Nadezhda went along, packed into the back of a pick-up truck with a crowd of smoky, sweaty Modeños. She got the feeling they would have been joking and cursing with great vitality if it weren’t for Tom among them. At the firebreak they leaped out and joined a big crowd already working there. This firebreak was on a long, level, broad ridge, and it had been recently cleared. They worked like madmen widening it, and all the while the line of rising smoke with the terrible orange base approached. The black behind the line seemed to extend all the way to the horizon, as if all the world had been burnt. Voices were cracked, hoarse, furious. Hills, ravines, canyons, all disappeared in the smoke. No colors but gray and brown and black left, except for that line of whitish orange.

Helicopters poured overhead in a regular parade, first civilian craft, then immense Marine and Coast Guard machines. When these arrived everyone cheered. Popping over the horizon like dragons out of a nightmare, fast as jets and only meters off the treetops, they bombed the fire relentlessly, great sheets of white powder trailing behind them. The powder must be heavy, Nadezhda thought at one point, not to be lofted like the ash and embers. She had a burn on her cheek, she didn’t know where it had come from. She ran a wheelbarrow from workers to pick-up trucks, feeling a strange, stark happiness, pushing herself till she choked on the gritty air. Once she was drenched by the spray from a helicopter’s water drop. Little bulldozers arrived, looking like Moscow snowplows. They widened the firebreak quickly, until it was an angry reddish strip nearly thirty meters wide, extending along the ridge for a few kilometers. It looked good, but with the wind gusting it was hard to tell if it would hold the fire or not. Everything depended on the wind. If it slacked they would be okay. If it grew stronger, Peter’s Canyon was in trouble. If it stayed constant… they couldn’t be sure. They could only work harder. An hour or two passed as they tore frantically at the vegetation, and watched the fire’s inexorable final approach, and cheered or at least nodded in approval at every pass of the helicopters.

At one point Kevin stopped beside Nadezhda. “I think the choppers might do it,” he said. “You should get some gloves on.”

Nadezhda looked down the line of the break. Gabriela was driving a dozer, shouting happily at a patch of mesquite she was demolishing. Ramona and Hank were hosing down the newly cleared section of firebreak, following a water truck. Alfredo was hacking away at a scrub oak with an axe. Stacey and Jody were running brush to a pick-up, as Nadezhda had been until just a moment before. Many others she had not met were among them performing similar tasks; there must have been a hundred people up there working at this break, maybe two. Several had been injured and were being tended at an ambulance truck. She walked over to look for Tom. “Is this your volunteer fire department?” she asked a medic there.

“Our what? Oh. Well, no. This is our town. Whoever heard about it, you know.”

She nodded.

The firebreak held.

Hank walked up to Tom and held his arm. “House burns, save the nails.”

Just before sunset Hank and Kevin joined Alice Abresh, head of El Modena’s little volunteer fire department, and they drove one of the pick-up trucks back around Black Star Canyon Road, to search for the origins of the fire. In a wind like theirs such a search was relatively simple; find the burnt ground farthest east, and have a look around.

This point turned out to be near the top of a small knoll, in the broken canyony terrain east of Tom’s place. From this hilltop scorched black trees extended in a fan shape to the west, off to the distant firebreak. They could see the whole extent of the burn. “Some plants actually need that fire as part of their cycle,” Hank said.

“In the Sierra,” Alice replied absently, looking around at the ground. She picked up some dirt, crumbled it between her fingers, smelled it. Put some in plastic bags. “Here they mostly just survive it. But they do that real well.”

“Must be several hundred acres at least,” Kevin said.

“You think so?”

“Smell this,” Alice said to them. They smelled the clod of dirt. “This is right where the thing had to start, and it smells to me like kerosene.”

They stared at each other.

“Maybe someone’s campfire got away from them,” Kevin said.

“Certainly a bad luck place for a fire as far as Tom’s concerned,” Hank said. “Right upwind of him.”

Kevin shook his head. “I can’t believe anyone would… do that.”

“Probably not.”

Alice shook her head. “Maybe it was an accident. We’ll have to tell the cops about this, though.”

That night Tom stayed at the house under Rattlesnake Hill, using a guest room just down from Nadezhda’s. When they had seen that the second firebreak would hold, they had led him down to the house, but after a meal and a shower he had taken off again, and was gone all evening, no one knew where. People came by the house with food and clothes, but he wasn’t there. The house residents thanked them.

Nadezhda glanced through the photo album he had saved. Many of the big pages were empty. Others had pictures of kids, Tom looking much younger, his wife. Not very many pictures had been left in the album.

Much later he returned, looking tired. He sat in a chair by the atrium pool. Nadezhda finished washing dishes and went out to sit by him.

The photo album was on the deck beside him. He gestured at it. “I took a lot out and tacked them to the walls, a long time ago. Never put them back in.” He stared at it.

Nadezhda said, “I lost four shoeboxes of pictures once, I don’t even know how or when. One time I went looking for them and they weren’t there.”

She got up and got a bottle of Scotch and two glasses from the kitchen. “Have a drink.”

“Thanks, I will.” He sighed. “What a day.”

“It all happened so fast. I mean, this morning we were biking around and everything was normal.”

“Yeah.” He took a drink. “That’s life.”

They sat. He kicked the photo album. “Just things.”

“Do you want to show them to me?”

“I guess so. You want to see them?”

“Yes.”

He explained them to her one by one. The circumstances for most of them he remembered exactly. A few he was unsure about. “That’s in the apartment, either in San Diego or Santa Cruz, they looked alike.” A few times he stopped talking, just looked, then flipped the big pages over, the clear sheets that covered the photos flapping. Fairly quickly he was through to the last page, which was empty. He stared at it.

“Just things.”

“Not exactly,” Nadezhda said. “But close enough.”

They clicked glasses, drank. Overhead stars came out. Somehow they still smelled of smoke. Slowly they finished the glasses, poured another round.

Tom roused himself. He drained his glass, looked over at her, smiled crookedly. “So when does this ship leave?”

It was strange, Kevin thought, that you could fight a fire, running around slashing brush with an axe until the air burned in your lungs like the fire itself, and yet never feel a thing. To not care, to watch your grandfather’s house ignite, and note how much more smokily plastic burns than pine….

Numb.

He spent a lot of time at work. Setting tile in Oscar’s kitchen around the house computer terminal. Grout all over his hands. Getting into the detail work, the finishing, the touch-ups. You could lose yourself forever in that stuff, bearing down toward perfection far beyond what the eye would ever notice standing in the door. Or lost in the way it was all coming together. Oscar’s house had been an ordinary tract house before, but now with the south rooms all made one, and clerestory windows installed at the top of their walls, they formed a long plant-filled light-charged chamber, against which the living rooms rested, behind walls that did not reach the ceiling. Thus the living rooms—kitchen, family room, reading room—were lit from behind with a warm green light, and had, Kevin thought, an appealing spaciousness. Some floors had been re-leveled, and the pool under the central skylight was surrounded by big ficus trees alternating with black water-filled pillars, giving the house a handsome central area, and the feeling Kevin always strove for, that one was somehow both outdoors and yet protected from the elements. He spent several hours walking through the house, doing touch-up, or sitting and trying to get a feel for how the rooms would look when finished and furnished. It was his usual habit near the end of a project, and comforting. Another job done, another space created and shaped….

He never saw Ramona any more, except at their games. She always greeted him with a smile both bright and wan at once, a smile that told him nothing, except perhaps that she was worried about him. So he didn’t look. He avoided warming up with her so they wouldn’t get into another session of Bullet. Once they were in a four-way warm-up, and lobbed it to each other carefully. She didn’t talk to him as she used to, she spoke in stilted sentences even when cheering him on from the bench. Deliberate, self-conscious, completely unlike her. Oh well.

His perfect hitting continued, like a curse he could never escape. Solid line drives these days, slashed and sprayed all over the field. He didn’t care any more, that was the key. There’s no pressure when you don’t care.

Once he ran into her at Fran’s bakery and she jumped as if frightened. God, he thought, spare me. To hell with her if she felt guilty about deserting him, and yet didn’t act to change it.

If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. One of Hank’s favorite sayings, the text for countless incoherent sermons. If the saying were true, and if Ramona was not acting, then… Oh well.

Work was the best thing. Get the breakfast room under the old carport as sunny and tree-filled as possible. Put the skylights in place, boxes into the roofing, bubbles of cloudgel onto the boxes, get the seal right, make it all so clean and perfect that someday when roofers came up here to repair something they’d see it and say, here was a carpenter. Wire in the homeostatic stuff, the nervous system of this rough beast. More kitchen tiles, a mosaic of sorts, the craft of the beautiful. Sawing wood, banging nails in the rhythm of six or seven hits, each a touch harder, the carpenter’s unconscious percussion, the rhythm of his dreams, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP. Rebuilding the northside roof and the porch extending out from it, in a flash he imagined falling off and his elbow hurt. Gabriela wore an elbow sleeve for tendonitis, carpenter’s elbow, and she was the young one. They were all getting old. The master bedroom would be cool no matter what.

One day after work Hank pulled a six-pack from his bike box and plunked it down in front of Kevin, who was taking off his work boots. “Let’s down this.”

They had downed a couple of dumpies when Hank said, “So Ramona has gone back to Alfredo, they say.”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad.”

Kevin nodded. Hank slurped sympathetically at the beer. Kevin couldn’t help declaring that Ramona was now living a lie, that she and Alfredo couldn’t be happy together, not really.

“Maybe so.” Hank squinted. “Hard to tell. You never really can tell from the outside, can you.”

“Guess not.” Kevin studied his dumpie, which was empty. They opened two more.

“But ain’t none of it cut in stone,” Hank said. “Maybe it won’t last between them, and could be you might pick up where you left off, after they figure it out. Partly it depends on how you act now, you know? I mean if you’re friends you don’t go around trying to make her feel bad. She’s just trying to do what’s right for her after all.”

“Urgh.”

“I mean if it’s what you want, then you’re gonna hafta work for it.”

“I don’t want to play an act, Hank.”

“It ain’t an act. Just working at it. That’s what we all gotta do. If you really want to get what you want. It’s scary because you might not get it, you’re hanging your ass out there, sure, and in a way it’s easier not to try at all. Safer. But if you really want it…”

“If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling,” Kevin said heavily, mocking him.

“Exactly, man! That’s just what I say.”

“Uh huh.” And thus Alfredo had gone down to San Diego.

“Hey man, life’s toof. I don’t know if you’d ever noticed. Not only that, but it goes on like that for years and years. I mean even if you’re right about them, it still might be years before they figure it out.”

“Jeez, man, cheer me up why doncha.”

“I am!”

“God, Hank. Just don’t try to bum me out someday, okay? I’m not sure I could handle it.”

Years and years. Years and years and years and years. Of his one and only life. God.

“Endure,” Hank would say, standing on the roof and tapping himself in the head with his hammer. “En-doourrr.”

Pound nails, set tile, paint trim, scrape windows, lay carpet, program thermostating, dawn to dusk, dawn to dusk. Swim four thousand yards every evening, music in the headphones drowning thought.

He didn’t know how much he depended on work to kill time until it came his turn to watch the neighborhood kids for the day. This was a chore that came up every month or so, depending on work schedules and the like. Watching all the adults leave as he made breakfast, herding all the tykes over to the McDows’ house, starting up the improvised games that usually came to him so easily… it was too slow to believe. There were six kids today, all between three and six. Wild child. Too much time to think. Around ten he rounded them up and they made a game out of walking down the paths to Oscar’s house. It was empty—with Kevin gone, the others were off to start a new project in Villa Park. So he got the kids to carry tiles from the stacks in the drive back to the hoist. Fine, that made a good game. So did scraping putty off windows in the greenhouses. And so on. Surprising how easily it could be made into a child’s game. He snorted. “I do kindergarten work.”

Onshore clouds massed against the hills, darkened, and it started to rain. Rain! First a sprinkle, then the real thing. The kids shrieked and ran around in a panic of glee. It took a lot of herding to get them back home; Kevin wished he had a sheepdog. By the time they got there everyone around was out getting the raincatchers set, big reversed umbrellas popping up over every rainbarrel and cistern and pool and pond and reservoir. Some were automatic but most had to be cinched out. “All sails spread!” the kids cried. “All sails spread!” They got in the way trying to turn the cranks, until Kevin got out a long wide strip of rainbow plastic and unrolled it along a stretch of grass bordering the path. The rain spotted it with a million drops, each a perfect half sphere; shrieking louder than ever the kids ran down the little rise between houses and jumped onto the plastic and slid across it, on backs, bellies, knees, feet, whatever. Adults joined in when the raincatchers were set, or went inside to break out some dumpies, singing “Water.” The usual rain party. Water falling free from the sky, a miracle on this desert shore.

So Kevin kept an eye on his kids, and organized a sliding contest, and took off on a few slides himself, and got a malfunctioning raincatcher to work, and caught a dumpie from Hank as Hank pedaled past in a wing of white spray, throwing beer and ice cream like bombs; and he sang “Water” like a prayer that he never had to think about. And all of that without the slightest flicker of feeling. It was raining! and here he was going through the motions, sliding down the plastic strip in a great spray, frictionless as in a dream, heading towards an invisible home plate after a slide that would have had to begin well behind third base, he’s… safe! and feeling nothing at all. He sat on the grass soaked, in the rain, hollow as a gourd.

But that night, after an aimless walk on the hill, he came home and found the message light blinking on the TV. He flipped it on and there was Jill’s face. “Hey!”

He turned it on, sat before it. “—having trouble getting hold of me, but I’ve been in Atgaon and up to Darjeeling. Anyway, I just got into Dakka tonight, and I can’t sleep.” Strange mix of expressions, between laughing and crying. “I umped a game this afternoon back in Atgaon, I have to tell you about it.” Flushed cheeks, small glass of amber liquid on the table beside her. She stood suddenly and began to pace. “They have this women’s softball league I told you about, and their diamond is back of the clinic. It’s a funny one, there are trees in left field, and right in the middle of right center field there’s a bench, and spectators sit there during the games.” Laughter, brother and sister together, a world and several hours apart. “The infield is kind of muddy most of the time, and they have a permanent home plate, but it’s usually so muddy there that you have to set a regular base about four feet in front of the home plate, and play with that as home. And that’s what we did today.”

She took a sip from the glass, blinked rapidly. “It was a big game—the local team, sponsored by the Rajhasan Landless Coop, was taking on a champion team from Saidpur, which is a big town. Landowners from Saidpur used to control all the local khas land, which is supposed to belong to the government. There’s some resentment here still, so it’s kind of a rivalry.

“The champions arrived, and they were big women, and they had uniforms. You know how unie teams always look like they really know how to play. I saw some of the local team looking at them and getting worried, and all in all it was a classic underdog-overdog situation.

“The locals were actually pretty good—they looked ragged, but they could play. And the unies could play too, they weren’t just show. They had a big fat catcher who was what I would call neurotic, she would yell at the pitcher for anything. But even she could play ball.

“So they played the first few innings, and it was clear the unies had a lot of firepower. But the local team turned some great defensive plays. Their third baseman nabbed a couple of shots down the line, and she had a good arm, although she was so pumped up she kept almost throwing them away. But they got the outs. Their defense was keeping them in the game. They gave up a few runs, sure, but they got some, too—their center fielder came up with two women on base, and powdered a line drive that shot under the bench in right center, it scattered the spectators like a bomb!” She laughed. “Home run.”

Another slug from the glass. “So that made it four to three in favor of the unies. A tight game, and it stayed that way right to the end. You know how it gets tense at the end of a close game. The crowd was going wild, and both teams were pumped up.

“So.” She paused to take another sip. “Scotch,” she said, shivering. “So it got to the bottom of the ninth, and the locals had their last chance. The first batter flew out, the second batter grounded out. And up to bat came that third baseman. Everyone was yelling at her, and I could see the whites of her eyes all the way around. But she stepped into the box and got set, and the pitcher threw a strike and that third baseman clobbered it! She hit a drive over the left fielder’s head and out into the trees, it was beautiful. Everyone was screaming, and the third baseman rounded the bases as fast as she could, but the unies’ left fielder ran around out there in the forest and located the ball faster than I would have thought possible, and threw between trees to the shortstop, who turned and fired a bullet over the catcher’s head into the backstop, just as the third basemen crossed the plate!”

She stared into the screen, rolled her eyes. “However! In her excitement, the third baseman had run across the old home plate, the permanent one! Everyone there saw it, and as she ran toward her teammates they all rushed out at her, waving their arms and screaming no, wrong base, go back, and the crowd was screaming too, and it was so loud that she couldn’t hear what they were saying, I guess—she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. Saidpur’s big boss catcher was running around the backstop chasing down the ball, and when the third baseman saw that she knew the play was still going, so she just flew through the air back toward the plate, and slid on her face right back onto the old home plate again. And that big old catcher snatched up the ball and fell right on her.”

Jill took a deep breath, had a drink of Scotch.

“So I called her out. I mean I had to, right? She never touched the home base we were playing with!

“So her whole team ran out and started yelling at me, and the crowd was yelling too, and I was pretty upset myself, but what could I do? All I could do was wander around shouting ‘She’s out! She didn’t touch the God-damned home plate that we’re playing with! Game’s over! She’s out! It’s not my fault!’ And they were all crying and screaming, and the poor coach was pleading with me, an old guy who used to live in Oakland who had taught them everything, ‘It was a home run and you know it was a home run, ump, you saw it, those home plates are the same,’ and so on and so forth, and all I could do was say nope, she’s out, those are the rules, there’s only one home base on the diamond and she didn’t touch it, I’m sorry! We must have argued for twenty minutes, you can see I’m still hoarse. And all that time the unies were running around congratulating themselves as if they had really won the game, it was enough to make you sick. They really were sickening. But there was nothing I could do.

“Finally it was just me and the coach, standing out there near the pitcher’s mound. I felt horrible, but what could I do? His team was sitting on the bench, crying. And that third baseman was long gone, she was nowhere to be seen. The coach shook his head and said that broke her heart. That broke her heart—”

And Kevin snapped off the TV and rushed out of the house into the night, shaking hard, crying and feeling stupid about it—but that drunken look of anguish on his sister’s face! That third baseman! He was a third baseman too. That broke her heart. To step in the box under that kind of pressure, and make that kind of hit, something you could be proud of always, and then to have it change like that—Night, the rustle of eucalyptus leaves. When our accomplishments rebound on us, when the good and the bad are so tightly bound together—It wasn’t fair, who could help but feel it? That broke her heart. That broke her heart.

And Kevin felt it.