He was hiking a deer path at the edge of the estate, as he did nearly daily to get away from the telephone and the fax machine and the burgeoning business of being a man with a big name. He loved it here among the hills. He had bought Live Oak several years ago because he had never felt so at home anywhere, and because he loved the land and its animals the way he loved his own life.
And now there was the pepper of smoke in the heat. It could not be mistaken. It was the scent of trouble, a wavering, unsure poison in the slack wind. It stopped him, just as the sound of a voice would have stopped him, a voice from the sky calling his name.
Then the smell was gone. He did not move. A faraway quail sang, a lilting laugh, and hawks or, more likely, vultures circled the golden hills of the horizon. The hills appeared bruised, on the seaward slopes and the declevities of canyons, by the live oaks and the madrone. He breathed deep, and held the air in his lungs, searching the sky.
There, he told himself, you see. He struggled to convince himself. Everything’s fine. There isn’t a fire after all.
He broke into a sweat. There could be no mistake. There was smoke, invisible but real. The wind huffed, died, and rose again.
Can’t be, he said as he began to run in the direction of the scent, his hands balled into fists.
The blaze spilled upward along the bank, and the smoke obscured whatever happened behind it, the figures of men vanishing, dissolving, and reappearing as the flames flagged and recovered.
The green county truck was angled up the slope, and behind the smoke figures strode, white wedges of dust flung into the smoke from behind the wrinkling mirage. In this drought, the rye weeds and the thistle all so much kindling, such a fire was death.
He tried to reassure himself. He was thankful—the presence of the county firefighters meant that everything was under control. Speke knew that every crisis could be met and won, and he hurried forward to help, glad to be there, eager to join the fight.
And then he fully understood what was happening.
He had to move quickly.
A black map of instant char spread beneath the truck, and a tire burst, a low bang and the long hiss of air. The flames had the truck, fire danced within the cab, the underhood streaming white and then, just as quickly, foul black.
Speke leaped into the bed of the truck and found a spade. He sprang from the truck, and plunged into the flames. He had always been quick to anger. He slashed at the fire as he strode through it, killing it, and he had the strangest feeling of battle joy, of challenge met.
And fear at the same time, searing fear. The soles of his feet felt hot as he stomped flames. He called to the men, their figures obscured by smoke that was everywhere, scalding each breath. Then the smoke was gone, lifted clean, the sunlight bright, blown clear by a sudden wind.
He turned back when a new hot breath ruffled the clothing around his body. The explosion blossomed downward, the truck lifted sideways by the blast, and then the fireball broke, a wriggling pond of gasoline spreading, carrying the flames.
Speke had broken a path through the ring of fire, but no one moved to escape. He called to them, but the fire was too loud. The firefighters were dazed, tight-jawed but still fighting. They were surrounded by flames, shoveling without panic but sweating heavily beneath their yellow hardhats. The fire was closing in.
Sparks had drifted behind the fighters, and the strengthening breeze had folded the flames back. The men were trapped in an oblong that tightened, men backing into each other. He called to them again. There were only four men, and they were young, their shocked eyes finding him.
They looked to him, without thinking, for leadership. He lifted his spade. “Come on,” he cried.
He waved them to the smoldering break he had beaten in the flames. Smoke-tears wet his cheeks, and he could not draw a breath. The heat was so great he felt lifted into the air by the thermal, bouyant and sky-bound.
It was like running in a dream—a bad dream, when the psyche remembers what it is like to be powerless. Speke and the men around him could make no progress through the heat. Feet churned dust and ash, and seemed to go nowhere. The men ran, and time was meaningless, their bodies powerless.
And then they were free, the truck a box of golden heat, the doors flung open, the green paint peeling, replaced by iridescent blue steel.
They were outside the noose of fire. The men did what they were trained to do, cutting an even wider circle around it, working hard, but loose-limbed, now, the tightness gone, the battle only work, now, and not a fight for life.
One of the firefighters leaned against a tree, pant leg peeled back. His calf was blistered, and he grimaced as disinfectant was sprayed on the burn. Another firefighter was on the ground, eyes blinking as he inhaled oxygen through a mask.
A truck rocked up the fire road, its orange emergency light spinning. A yellow hose was unspooled, and water tore at the dry ground, battering the fire.
“Mr. Speke saved our lives,” said one of the young firefighters, tossing it out to his companions lightly, as something delightful and even funny. It was uttered as a kind of joke because it was true. They passed around an aluminum canteen of Gatorade, and shook his hand, one by one.
Fire had killed before, on this land, not ten years ago, before Speke had purchased Live Oak. A rancher had vanished, driving up to a ridge to overlook the smoke beyond, and when they found him days later he was a “charred grinning puppet.” This was the description of Mr. Brothers’, Speke’s gardener, and a man not given to exaggeration.
“You got to sign my hardhat, Mr. Speke,” said one, and Speke was handed a black marker and a helmet, and for a moment nearly signed the dirty white plastic strap or the underside of the bill before the encouraging voice said, “Sign it on top. Sign it all over.”
He signed, his name deformed by the ridges radiating from the peak of the plastic helmet, his name awkward and bold, the handwriting, a graphologist had told him, after he had signed a cocktail napkin once years ago, of a man both optimistic and happy, a man who believed in life and was never afraid.
And Speke had laughed, flattered and at the same time amused. Because while he was optimistic, and while he believed in life, he was also very much afraid of certain things.
Perhaps it didn’t show up in his scrawl, especially as it made its way across one after another of the plastic helmets, the big black name like the name of a saint, the name that would defend the wearer against any blow, no matter how savage it might be.
He was gratified at their insistence, and touched, but he did not find their request ridiculous. He knew the power of a name. “Sign my lunch bag, Mr. Speke,” said one, and then the man added, in a way that touched him, “Sign it ‘To Ellen.’”
Speke wrote the words, standing on the charred, brittle grass which still fumed, white feathers of smoke drifting upward in the heat. He was used to the deferential smiles of strangers. He was a big man, and had, he knew, the looks and carriage of someone who was uncommon. And with his smile on the cover of magazines nearly every month he knew that he looked like life itself to these men—these brave men.
Waking that night he found Maria beside him, and let his hand fall upon her hip. She stirred, slightly, easing back into him, half-waking, inquiring after lovemaking or simply reassuring him, knowing that he had nightmares. She knew him well, he felt, and yet to him she remained part stranger, a woman he loved without yet knowing her past, even after months of marriage. This was good in a way, though. There was that promise of further discovery. He would travel gradually into her life, a man learning a new dialect.
But the memory of the fire kept him awake. He had wanted a perfect world, a world he could protect against the erosion of civilization. Perhaps, he chided himself, he had wanted to build a world that could not die.
“Celebrity playwright Hamilton Speke single-handedly saved the lives of a fire crew today in what proved to be—” He had heard that much on the evening news before he could snap off the television.<
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And now the heroic Speke was lying awake, amused at his own anxiety. Some hero he was, he thought, lying here thinking: how awful it would be if I lost all this.
If I lost this place, if I lost Maria—I don’t think I could bear it.
But it’s all right, he reminded himself. The fire is out.
Isn’t it?
3
It was the morning after the fire.
He left Maria in bed. He kissed the faintest down on the lobe of her ear. She stirred, and smiled without waking. She liked to sleep more than anyone he had ever known. He had thought that sleeping too much was a sign of depression, classic melancholy. But Maria did not seem depressed as much as withdrawn from the dailiness around her. He found her all the more alluring because of this delicious mystery, this feline capacity for slumber.
He knew that she had nightmares, just as he did, although he did not know their nature. Sometimes he soothed her in the early hours, telling her that everything was fine. She struggled in her sleep, running as people do in their dreams, in quick starts. She spoke in her sleep, as well, warnings, anxious questions, from the tone. He could never quite make out what she was saying, and he felt guilty for trying to piece together the terrors and philippics of her dream life.
Sarah stood in the doorway of her cottage, drying her hair with a white towel. He waved to her, and she returned his greeting, the sunlight bright in her smile.
The early air was still brisk, and the morning overcast was just beginning to thin. He walked the deer path until he reached the acrid, burned-toast tang in the air, the scent of fresh burn gone dead.
There were the tracks of the county trucks, and the footsteps of the firefighters. And here, where the charred grass was matted silver, was the place where he had stood, autographing the helmets.
There, he told himself—the fire is out. What had made him uneasy, tossing on his clothes in such haste? True, sometimes a brushfire came to life again after a few hours. But this was so much perfect carbon, black skeletons which had been milkweed and thistle, madrone and chinquapin.
On the way back he paused at the mouse hole, slipped a saltine from his shirt pocket and knelt, breaking the cracker in his fist. Tomorrow, he knew, the cracker would be gone, and while Brothers, the gardener, would have laughed at him, he walked way from the mouse refuge feeling that he had done something infinitesimally minor and at the same time good, even necessary.
He felt serene sitting at his desk. He stared at the blank screen of his computer, and the serenity began to crumble.
How long would he continue to be unable to write this play? It had been eight months or more since he had sat under the hot television lights, gazing out at the cavernous television studio, mouthing the good news about his work-in-progress. “It’s about Mexico, and the jungle, and discovering something no one is supposed to know about. It’s about discovering a secret.” He had gathered optimism about him, and continued, ignoring the hard red light on the camera, “and it’s about two young men who fight over what to do with their discovery.”
“What’s the name of this play?” said the host, his smile a Chiclet-gleam, the very lips that had used the word “masterpiece.”
“The Black Cat of La Guadaña.” Speke had grinned back, not mentioning the truth: that the play stood exactly where it was now—nowhere.
He had even furthered the lie, the perfume of his own deodorant rising about him. “Maybe a year or two away,” he had heard himself say, with the happy, bright tone of a schoolchild.
A year or two, he now groaned silently to himself. He had not written even a single stage direction. To be fair to himself, yesterday he had written the same line over and over again, erasing it each time. This was a typical day’s work on this play.
There was a letter from a producer at his elbow, butter yellow rag paper and elegant letterhead made all the more potent by the cab driver prose of the executive. “Send us something. An act or two. Anything. Foreplay can’t go on for years. We can start casting yesterday.” Here was another letter, from his L.A. agent, paper so exquisite it didn’t even crackle: they were already rejecting offers by actors to dub the Japanese version.
There was a story in him, and it was a story he couldn’t begin to tell. The dialogue was dead in him, the characters gone but ever present. He ran his hands through his hair. He closed his eyes and would have prayed if that power, too, had not long ago evaporated.
He turned gladly at Sarah’s step and was delighted at the armload she carried, the CD reissue of Stripsearch, the play cut down in length and in the cutting improved, he had to admit, although the cast could not be improved. The best male voice, the one with all the most energetic counterarguments, had died just weeks before of what the family would not admit was AIDS. The other voices, too, had gone on to other triumphs, other losses. Speke had agreed to sign dozens of these for an auction to benefit a local hospice.
There was a postage stamp size picture of himself beside the sizzling red gorilla type of his name—or at least it seemed so big, this grand shout of HAMILTON SPEKE beside a tiny, more youthful likeness of his face. A good picture, though, he said nearly aloud, and he looked up to see if Sarah knew what he was thinking.
She was the best personal manager in the business, a woman born to command battalions or run an industry. Steady Sarah. Ever calm. He could not manage a single day without her. And this morning she was, as always, professional to the point of anticipating what he needed, handing him the black indelible marker, cap off, the ink spilling a strange grim odor into the air.
“You look the same,” she said. She had a remarkable voice, low and calming, and yet it was also the voice of command.
“How can you tell, looking at a teeny microchip-size picture like this?”
“I know the face,” she said.
“Do you think I should put a message on it when I sign? Some sort of greeting?”
“You always say you like the plays to do the talking.”
He caught himself nearly confessing, telling her abruptly “I can’t do it.”
I can’t even think of what to write above my signature. I’ve signed thousands of autographs, in restaurants, airports, on the Appian Way and at the top of the Eiffel Tower, cramped, freezing and nearly suffocating against a rail. I have never hesitated for an instant, but now every word is an embarrassment.
“I can’t possibly greet people I’ll never know,” he heard himself say, hoping she would agree.
But Sarah was happy to disagree, when he was wrong. “You’re good at that. You do it all the time. I couldn’t begin to do it, but then, I couldn’t write a play, either.”
“Are you sure ink like this will write on this plastic?”
“It’s the kind we always use.”
“Once or twice it hasn’t worked, and the ink just sort of beads. It looks like you tried to write in squid ink.”
“It’ll work.” She turned back at the door. “Try it.”
He began to write, and found himself printing, surprisingly neatly, the phrase of one of the characters in the play, the one who threw the bottle. It was a phrase he had picked up from a biography of Hemingway, something the boy Papa had said to impress his elders or himself. “Afraid of nothing.”
That looked good, he thought. The printing was strangely like his father’s draftsmanlike hand. He had considered this before—as I grow older I will become more and more like him. He glanced up at Sarah, but she couldn’t possibly tell what he had written, not from the door.
“The Hemingway line?” she asked.
He smiled.
He signed his name.
He was just finishing the last of his signatures when Sarah’s voice spoke from the intercom. “I’ve got the strangest phone call,” she said.
He started to say, offhandedly, his usual, “Take a message.”
But Sarah would never mention a “strange” phone call. He found himself gazing into the tiny intercom speaker, caught by something in her tone. �
��Who is it?”
She seemed to have anticipated his hesitation and said, her voice ascending in the tone of a question, “He says he’s an old friend.”
When she said his name he fell back, unable to make a sound. It couldn’t be true. It was impossible. He thought: surely I misunderstood her. Surely she got the name wrong.
His hand crept to the telephone and stayed there. He could not command it to lift the receiver. He could only stare at it, his own hand, the intercom speaker, and the letters on the desk, as though he could not remember where he was.
Sarah was asking him what to do, and he could not move his tongue to respond.
Surely not.
He gazed at his hand like a man waking and unable to piece together what he saw. What he felt was beyond any emotion, but if there was any feeling at all through the shock and doubt it was joy.
But at once his disbelief took over. It’s a hoax, he thought—it’s a bitter joke.
Someone can’t come back from the dead.
4
Even when he heard the familiar voice on the phone, sounding exactly right, precisely the way Asquith would sound, Speke thought: it can’t be him.
He felt that tug of disbelief he felt so often when someone showed him a photograph of a UFO, or Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster. He felt convinced, and yet he felt that there was something wrong, something he could not name.
It must be a trick. But in that case, he wondered, who would be the trickster, the magician? The voice was dry, ironic. This was how the dead might indeed sound if they decided to call people on the telephone and extend greetings from that other country. This is how the living Asquith, the man himself, would sound. “Of course I’m alive,” said the voice in response to Speke’s amazement.
“You vanished,” said Speke, his voice breaking, strained, unable to carry the weight of his disbelief and the beginnings of his delight.
“I’ve been busy.”
It certainly must be Asquith. Nobody else could sound like that. “Busy,” echoed Speke in wonderment, trying to divine the meaning in such a simple, everyday word. Whatever Asquith had been doing with his time, he did not imagine that “busy” would be the most apt description. “I tried to find you.” Laughing, he added, “Of course, I know you’re a genius at vanishing.”
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