by John Shannon
Running for his life, Jack Liffey became lightheaded, and in the steady rhythm of his run and the muddle of his thoughts, he began to stew on Gloria’s sullen rejections, and to wonder why so many of his relationships with women ended so badly. He had an overwhelming urge to lie down and let his thoughts swirl over the problem, nap on it.
Was it him, he wondered, some perfectionism he carried or some way he pushed women into dissatisfaction? Was it the types of women he chose? Wounded birds, as Maeve had said? Or was it just, after all, a matter of luck? Or maybe all his life he’d been trying to reproduce some relationship from his childhood, as a psychologist he detested had once suggested, and get it right this time.
He really thought he was doing his damnedest with Gloria, trying as hard as he could to make her feel loved, but it just wasn’t working out for her. His own feelings aside, he didn’t want his failure to disappoint Maeve once again. How many potential stepmoms had bailed out on him? His thoughts piled one on another in the chaos of stumbling and running, all accreting into the urgent rhythm of nightmare. He did his best not to let the danger take him that last measure over into panic.
He was running now on some automatic impulse that had carried him beyond the point of exhaustion, his legs turning rubbery with fatigue. Even stranger musings began to clutter his mind, as if he were drifting toward a kind of running sleep. Indignities made him wince, faces he didn’t know sniggered. A sudden sense came over him, that there had always been something beckoning him from just beyond the bedroom window, and he had never opened the window, never climbed out there. A flash of clarity: Perhaps it was simple, after all—he had clung too hard to women who offered him comfort, who soothed something in him, who made love cheerfully.
Smoke made him retch then and drove away the clarity. It was those early years after Viet Nam, the first ones with Kathy when he had lost the instinct to raise hell. Had he forsaken some energizing principle then so that all women—like wolves—ended up sensing his weakness?
As he ran, he worked his way through every breakup, working forward through hazy images of their faces, seeking primal causes: Kathy, his Kathy, née Fitzgerald, so scornful about his lost employment, his retreat into drink, his outrageous and unacceptable new profession as some kind of character out of a pulp novel. The image of her scowl made him wince even now.
Eleanor Ong, fastidious, anxious, the emotionally simmering ex-nun—he remembered she had offered an epitaph for him as she gave him up and planned her retreat from the world, back to the convent: “I don’t think you’re going to make it, Jack.” Could she have been right?
Lori Bright, the once-and-nevermore movie star who died in the Burbank quake but only after seducing him with her mercurial sexuality, a kind of effervescent and constant role-playing. And there had been his own complicity in some deep iniquity of the spirit—the corrupting power that her celebrity had worked on him.
Marlena Cruz, stolid, sentimental and ordinary, resourceful, insanely jealous, drawn like a moth to gimcrack religion and finally to a sympathetic co-believer, a big male doofus that she could count on.
Rebecca Plumkill—a bit like Kathy, he realized now—career headmistress too prim and conventional in the end to put up with what he did for a living, tarring his fingers in the world’s back alleys. And now Gloria Ramirez … Gloria Ramirez, a Native American orphan, studying him with eyes as hard as black diamonds, cynical as any cop, her life pitched like a tepee over the vent of some volcano that was gradually coming to life, steaming and rumbling. He wanted to know what it was all about. Why me? Why so many kinds of failure? But his mind was as weary as his legs, jumping from image to image, never staying.
Trevor Pennycooke stumbled and fell forward with a cry, toppling heavily with the girl over his back, and Jack Liffey hurried forward to help. The fire still raced along behind and beside them, running forward on its bright fingers, a deadly race to some finish tape. “Shoulder-to-shoulder,” he insisted. “We’re the three musketeers. All for one, or all for one.” He was so woozy, he didn’t know what he was saying.
“I glomm it,” Trevor Pennycooke said as they hoisted the girl to her feet.
She drove on the shoulder to get around an accident between two mini-vans in which whole families seemed to be arguing right there in the lane. The traffic was lighter than she expected going north on Pacific Coast Highway through Santa Monica, past the bulk of the Jonathan Club and the rows of beach houses, past the cliff where the Pacific Palisades began, and past the big wall of railroad ties and steel they’d erected against landslides, a near permanent condition along the highway. It was amazing they hadn’t blockaded the road yet. The fire department and all species of cops hated lookie-loos.
They could see two water-dropping helicopters dangling buckets far ahead as they shuttled to and from a hot zone. A massive plume of gray smoke was billowing off the land and far out to sea, not rising much until it hit some wall of cooler air out there.
“I never been here,” Thumb said. He was staring across her at the ocean, at the three-foot swells that were rolling up the narrow beach.
“It’s just a short drive from Boyle.”
“I never seen the ocean.”
She was flabbergasted. She couldn’t imagine growing up in a coastal city without having seen the ocean. She wondered what else he and his friends had never seen. Then, she wondered how many Anglo kids had seen Boyle Heights or City Terrace or the wonderful Latino murals on Estrada Courts and Ramona Gardens, all things she had only seen since her dad moved to East Los with Gloria.
“Have you seen the Watts Towers?”
He shrugged.
“Have you been to the snow?”
“I got no car, Miss … can I call you Maeve?”
“Of course you can. I don’t have some cool nickname.”
“Maybe we find you one.”
“You can think about it, but I don’t want it to have anything to do with my shit-bag.”
“I’m really and truly sorry I did that.”
“I know you are. I’ll get over it, Thumb.”
They passed under the pedestrian bridge in the Palisades beside the arcaded hulk of what had once been Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe. She knew it had been a popular restaurant in the forties, when PCH had been known as Roosevelt Highway. Her dad had told her some Catholic TV company used it now to make upbeat films for teens—exorcising the ghost of one of L.A.’s most notorious murders of the 1930s.
“It’ll be easy to get over,” she said lightly. “Like you get over anything. Time passes, and then you’re somebody else, and the stuff you were so worried about is in the past.”
He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Don’t change. I think you pretty good the way you are.”
“Don’t go there, mister.”
His gravity rushed back, like an inner nature asserting itself. “Have you been so tough all your life?”
She almost smiled. “Not yet.”
The front of the wind-forced fire had finally turned on its flank and pressed them down into the gully to escape, but it was still pacing them implacably up above. The ravine gave them partial relief from the Santa Ana-driven smoke and ash, but only partial. It was still hard to see, hard to breathe, with the fiercer gusts shoving them into stumbles as they took turns supporting the girl. Trevor Pennycooke no longer had the strength to carry her over his shoulder. Judging by the terrible crunching sound just above them, the forward edge of the brushfire was running just behind them but staying at the top edge of the gully. Unless there was a drastic shift of wind, fire didn’t usually spill downhill. At least that’s what Jack Liffey told himself.
“Mon, there someting bad luck hyer.” As if the Jamaican had sensed his thoughts.
“We’re alive. We’re not burned. That’s good luck.”
“All men are hostages to fortune,” Luisa said in a daffy earnest voice, and he wondered where she had read that.
“What dat?”
“Don’t even think about lu
ck,” Jack Liffey insisted. “It’s nothing to do with this. We’re getting out of here for sure.” He knew if they kept going downhill, and if they could stay ahead of the flames, they would have to hit PCH and the ocean eventually.
He nearly shouted when he felt something squirm underfoot and his spine tingled. A jackrabbit, a little singed on its long ears, did a contorted little leap sideways from his oafish foot and then took off downhill, rapidly outdistancing them.
“My ankle is killing,” Luisa complained.
“We know.”
“No, it hurts!”
She had her arms over both of their shoulders now, and she barely touched down as long as they could move in coordination. But the bottom of the arroyo was so uneven that they kept breaking apart and then she’d have to take her weight unexpectedly on the bad foot. He could sense her gasps, though the howl of the fire itself outbid just about every sound but shouting.
Then they were all bowled forward at once by a tremendous force, as if a linebacker had blindsided them from behind. Jack Liffey scrambled to pick himself up, overwhelmed by a musky smell, and something sharp hit him in the forehead and knocked him back down again. There was a shrill bleat just as he was getting himself oriented again and found himself lying in a pile of arms and legs.
“You two okay?”
Hoofbeats hammered away down the ravine, and he glanced in time to see the rump.
“Evil badness, mon! Dese fire spirits is bona fide.” Pennycooke was up on all fours, shaking his head. He was bleeding from the arm where a hoof must have grazed him.
“It was a panicked mule deer. We’re on a game trail.”
“Praise Jah, hyer be no rhinos.”
Jack Liffey laughed once, liking Pennycooke a lot better for the spunk. Luisa sat rubbing her ankle where the Ace was coming undone.
“Up, up. No time, folks,” Jack Liffey mother-henned.
As they helped one another to their feet a fat possum waddled rapidly past, pausing just long enough to hiss at them. It was like being trapped in a children’s book, he thought—next we meet Mister Tortoise—but without the children’s book guarantee that it would all turn out well in the end.
For just an instant’s lull in the gusting of fire and wind—was it imagination?—he thought he heard mariachi music. He hoped it wasn’t some strange presage-of-death phenomenon peculiar to Southern California. The smoke grew whiter for some reason, and then, with a new chill on his spine, he heard a crackling directly behind them. The wildfire had made the leap to the bottom of the arroyo. All he felt for an instant was a tremendous desire to live, to abandon any assistance to the others and run—his entire moral universe succumbing to fear.
Terror Pennycooke lifted the girl over his shoulder again, huffing a little with the effort. A gopher or some other fat rodent thumped past quickly, as if the humans didn’t exist, his flank singed pitifully into dark curls.
“Let’s step. Truss wi’ me, mon. Good knowin you.” He held out a hand and Jack Liffey gave him an ordinary handshake, no banging or twists or Masonic embellishments.
“We’re getting out of this. Don’t doubt it.”
“Good on you.”
Jack Liffey took the lead, holding the tail of his shirt across his mouth and nose to filter a little of the smoke. He pressed small boughs aside and tried not to let them whiplash back on the others. He was the lead now, and his heart missed a beat when he realized that the bottom of the arroyo took a hard turn to the right, directly into the worst of the crackling roar where the fire had got well ahead of them. He saw how steep the bank was but he didn’t even hesitate.
“Up the hill, folks. Sorry. Fire to the right.”
He leaned into the angle of the hill, and a few yards up he caught at a tough-seeming shrub with one hand, reaching back with the other. Pennycooke made a face and caught at his hand, nearly pulling the arm out of its socket as he lunged uphill with the extra weight of the girl. They picked their way up, using rocks and clumps of low weed as footholds. Jack Liffey let them go ahead and slipped in behind to push on Pennycooke’s rump like a helper engine on a heavy train. Luisa’s head dangled as if she were unconscious.
“Tanks for de boost-up, mon.”
The fire hissed and crackled directly below them, very near, as they crested out of the ravine. It was like something gaining on you in a nightmare. It was a nightmare. The hot smoke was much worse now, blanketing and blinding them, and fear caught him up once again, nearing panic. He didn’t even know which way to run. The panic was oddly voluptuous, almost sexual, and it was all he could do not to abandon them and run on alone. The howling of the fire was so close that he expected it to reach out and tap him on the shoulder.
She could see three big black-and-white CHP cruisers parked crisscross, completely blocking the highway. The cops had set up just beyond the turnoff for Rambla Pacifico, and she followed a big Ford Expedition up Rambla along with most of the traffic, largely sports cars and SUVs that all seemed to want to U-turn right away on the wider spots of the road, making a tangle of vehicles at every angle. They were backing out of driveways, making three-point U-turns, just trying to get around so they could drop back down to PCH and return toward Santa Monica. It took her a while to get past the jam, honking away to still the cars, like threading a convention of first-time drivers.
Thumb had her Thomas Bros. open on his knees. “This will get us there,” he said.
“If it’s not blocked, too.” When they crested the higher spots of the road, they could see a curious mix of dark and light smoke, a whole cloud bank of it, peeling away from the hillside perhaps a mile farther on. She pulled carefully around an abandoned ladder truck on the side of the road, the front tire flat, and dozens of storage doors on its side standing open, as if insatiably ravenous children had descended on a candy truck. They passed a small development of homes that all looked abandoned, two of them with lawn sprinklers spinning slowly on the roofs. There was a turn onto Piuma Road, heading west, the way they wanted to go but it was blocked by what looked like an Eagle Scout standing beside a light green pickup truck. He turned out to be a very young Forest Ranger and Maeve handed him one of the business cards she’d had printed—one of the last few her father hadn’t found and destroyed. It said Liffey & Liffey, Investigations.
“Insurance investigation,” she said without hesitation “There’s evidence of arson up here.”
“You can’t go up yet.”
“Captain Watson in the arson bureau called and told me the fire was knocked down enough up on top to have a look.” She’d heard firefighters use the term “knocked down” on the radio before and had always found it weird, as if you put out a fire with boxing gloves.
The young man seemed unsure of himself.
“Come on, we’re in a hurry,” she insisted
At last, he stepped aside. She waved a thank-you and drove around the truck. Thumb was awestruck.
“¡Hijole! You’re loca.”
“I’ve seen my dad work. He always says a clipboard and a sense of entitlement will get you anywhere.”
Thumb watched out the rear window, just in case the man gave chase. “Man, that was like Obiwan Kanobe—that trick you did on Mr. Smokey the Bear.”
“You know, the forest service insists he’s called Smokey Bear. Isn’t that’s nuts? Everybody says Smokey the Bear. Names are what people think they are.”
“Sobres.” He smiled. “Ain’t no Zor the O.”
She smiled. The roadside was empty for a mile or so, but she started seeing pumpers pulled half off the pavement, linked from one to the next by fat hose with water runnels darkening the asphalt at the joints. When the map showed they were only about a half mile from Cold Canyon Road, they passed abruptly into fire country. Here the land was burned black and still smoldering in spots on both sides of the road. Then their path was blocked by fire trucks parked side by side. The fire fighters all seemed to be off somewhere. She backed a ways and pulled well off the road onto a gravel patch t
hat didn’t look hot.
“We can walk it from here.”
Maeve noticed him retrieve the pistol and stick it in his waist but didn’t object. They could always dump it if they had to. She grabbed an old pair of binoculars her father had given her and slung them around her neck. Stepping up onto the berm at the edge of the road, she could see that the hills were charred all around, smelling that tingly fire smell, with small trees and bushes reduced to upright black sticks and hardly reacting to the gusty wind which whisked ash eddies up off the ground. A few spots fumed like volcanic vents, but the active fire was far below them, an almost continuous arc of red flame flickering and surging at the base of the smoke column.
Not far off the road, down a lonely gravel drive bordered by a little surviving iceplant, there was a sooted-up slab foundation with a rock chimney and a few blackened studs sticking up, all of it still smoking angrily in the wind. It was painful to look at, it was so definitively destroyed. She examined the hills nearby with the binoculars but reminded herself that the house they had seen on the TV, the one with her father’s car, must be higher up near the origin of the fire, probably out of sight. Thumb found an address painted on the curb at the driveway, which wasn’t far off the one they had worked out from the Thomas’s.
They waited on the berm for a time, watching a helicopter with a water bucket on a cable and a fat old two-engine propellor plane dropping chemicals on the fire.
“There’s no point trying to get up to that house,” she said. “If Dad was up there, they’ll have got him out already.” Dead or alive, she thought, but superstitiously she didn’t say it aloud. “If he’s … okay, he’ll probably be down there, ahead of the fire. Let’s go.”
“What if they see us?”
“They’ve got other stuff to worry about. The fire’s not going to turn back on us.”
“How are you going to be?” he asked, still hesitant, pointing to the ostomy bag under her loose blouse.
“If I have to, I’ll empty it. I hope it won’t upset your stomach.”
