He could hear the fire now, fierce applause.
Brothers’ toolshed would not open, either. Bell had slammed the door, it seemed, so hard the wood was jammed. Speke pulled so hard that implements in the interior clanked softly, shifted by his effort. He wrenched, and with a shriek the door tore open. In the half-dark of the shed he found a shovel. He called to Sarah, but, to his surprise, she was just behind him.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said. “You can run up the road—”
Her fingers touched his lips.
He found himself holding her in his arms, surrounded by the shafts and dimly gleaming blades of the only weapons they had. It was always going to be this way, he knew. He had reached a chapter he had read long ago, but then deliberately forgotten. She had always been intended to fight at his side.
Outside, the fire came on. The two of them slashed at the sun-bleached foxtails, the drought-stiffened stalks of thistle. A grasshopper flicked through the air, rattling in its flight.
The heat rumpled the air. Distant branches writhed in the spidered sky. The two of them worked without speaking, the shovels making bell-like thuds against the hard clay. Their shadows were muted, blurred and erased by the shadow of the smoke.
She chopped a milkweed, clearing a path, a firebreak of dust and severed wildflowers. The dust floured her arms, and she worked in a fog of chalk.
They were not fighting to save Live Oak. They were fighting chaos itself, the void that waits to thaw and flood, the black fire that consumes every human hope.
42
They cleared a long strip at the edge of the woods, a long rip of raw earth. The fire was creeping closer. He could hear it, now, snapping, tinder bursting.
Heat. The sun was a hole filled with it. Every breath was choked with powdered bleach. His tongue was a dry, dead, dust-saturated leaf. He was using, he realized, the same shovel he had used to bury Asquith.
His weapon, his still nameless blade. This battle was prehistoric, a struggle that had always gone on, long before his own life, and would continue long afterward. He used this tool to cut a firepath around the cottages, and when he looked up Sarah had a long scythe, like a mower in a classical etching, and she sliced the brush with a high, ringing sound. The brush shuddered for an instant, and the blurred shapes of small animals burst passed them. They were rabbits, abandoning the woods, he knew, but they might have been sprites or demigods, driven to the point of frenzy.
For some reason the fire was holding off, simmering beyond sight. It was like a deliberate enemy, stealthy, the soul of malice. Speke had the uneasy sensation that it was creeping just below the surface of the land, roiling under their feet. Still, he could see no flames, only the powerful countryside of smoke, billowing into the air.
The work made it hard to think, and hard to remember. Work, he told himself. Fight. The enemy was still only a rumble, a distant avalanche, and the singed flavor of the air. The quaking air around them swept upward, now, hauled toward the sun by the rising heat.
He needed Sarah. He had been stupid to pretend otherwise. How could a man be stupid for fifteen years? Stupid was the only word for it. Stupid and oblivious to the truth. But that was all in the past. He could not think about the past.
The dust rose about them, earth rising upward to become a part of the sky. Speke took her arm, interrupting her mowing. A last spring of sliced oats sang from the curved blade, and rained to earth. “There’s nothing more we can do,” he said.
If the firebreaks they had torn so quickly did not stop the fire … He leaned on the shovel. The thought was too ugly to complete.
“It’ll be all right, Ham,” she said. She was gray with dust, and her eyes were gleaming. She bore the scythe like the spirit of life.
It will be all right. That was her refrain, her repeated promise. He had always disliked easy optimism. The giddy faith many people had that good times were just around the corner had always struck him as childish, or even stupid. Some promises, Speke knew, are false, and to believe in them is dangerous. Part of him wanted to laugh. How could it be all right? We’re going to die here! But her faith was steady, cool, honest. She seemed to believe, as Speke did, that the fight was everything, the refusal to surrender all that mattered.
“You’ll see.” Her voice had always been like soothing medicine to him. The sound of her strengthened him again.
He found himself smiling, his face a mask, he knew, of grime, soot, clay. Just like hers. As he worked he uncovered lost secrets, an old shotgun shell, a weathered husk with a black copper tip. Two old shells, forty-five caliber he judged without giving them a second glance, tossed, ancient and spent, from the shovel. He overturned a dry divot and a centipede writhed for a instant before it vanished, and at one point the translucent pod of a rattlesnake’s rattle, long abandoned by the snake itself, spun to a stop at his feet.
The shovel dropped with a clatter, and her scythe fell. He put his arms around her. He never wanted to leave this place. But the place he wanted was not the land. It was Sarah. It was this moment, this inner landscape.
A surreal flock tossed in the branches. But these were not birds.
The fire had come.
Other flames flung across the firebreak, as easily as tossed coins. Smoke boiled under their feet, and the fire danced before them, around them.
They beat it down with their tools, stamped the errant fires that sputtered on the lawn, but then with a rush a crowd of flames forced them staggering backwards, eyebrows singed.
She shouted something, warning or encouragement, he could not tell.
The Outer Office was hidden behind a leaping tangle of flames. Maria’s body, and Asquith’s—the fire had them both. The knowledge was a blow to the stomach, to the soul. The bodies were burning.
“I’m going to climb the roof,” he cried.
She leaned forward, eager, hungry for his words, straining to hear like someone in a blizzard. He directed her to one of the garden wells, far away from the rumble of the fire. “And then you run,” he cried. “Take one of the deer paths. Run away! Save your life!”
His old friend had won. But he had not won entirely. There was still a little fragment of Hamilton Speke left. He used a ladder from the shed, propped over the door to Sarah’s office. The roof was even hotter than the ground, and heat waves fluttered off it, making the chimney seem to dance. He slipped, and nearly fell, but caught the peak.
The hose snaked away from his outstretched hand. He could not reach it. The thing was trying to escape. The nozzle bounced along, down the shingled slope.
He plunged after it, nearly rolling from the eave. And caught it.
“Turn on the water,” he called, his voice lost in the wind.
The hose rasped and twitched. There was a gurgle, but no water. The sky dirtied. Ashes circled downward. The air tasted foul. In the amount of time it took to inhale, the world grew dark.
A long drape, like fine, dark silk stretched across the sky. It extended over his head, far to the north. The sun tightened into a hard, red coin.
Ashes rained on the roof, fine white dust that covered the hairs of his arms. A larger ash spun to his feet, smoldering. Another spat and sizzled, until his foot killed it. An ash licked his eye, blinding him for a moment.
“There isn’t any water coming out of the hose,” he called.
Her voice responded, a cry far below that he couldn’t make out.
“No water!” he called.
A long ribbon of gold worked the hillside to the west, beyond Sarah’s cottage. It ran like a liquid thing, unpeeling perfect blackness. The black streamed white smoke. Wind gathered in the trees, as though the plants were breathing, taking long, deep breaths and letting them go.
Wind! His jaw clenched. The wind is rising. It was driving the fire closer, whipping it forward.
“Water!” he cried, the wind snuffing his voice.
It was in there, far within the estate, a secret lake, an aquifer buried and ripe with promise, a slice
d melon of cool far beneath the heat. He uttered the word again, for the sound of it, for its magic: water.
The hose choked, and then gushed a fountain of warm water which was, almost at once, cool. Good well water, Speke said to himself. Of course Sarah would know how to get water from the land—that was exactly the sort of miracle she had mastered long ago. Water from the inside world. He wanted to talk to it, call to it, scream to the water to come on and help them, water god, long-ignored though he had been. They needed him now.
Surely Bell would have alerted a fire crew by now. Surely help was on its way.
Sarah leaped to the roof from the top of the ladder. He tried to wave her away. “Run!” he called. “Don’t stay here.” The house will be surrounded soon, and then what will you do? Save yourself while you can.
He did not say this. A sound silenced him before he could utter the words. There was an explosion as a tree, a stately blue gum, flashed into flame. They both watched as the fire poured to another eucalyptus, and wrapped it. The speed was amazing, even beautiful. The tree was a spiral of flame. There was a report like a shot as the heart of the tree split.
This is how I die, then, he thought. Fighting for my house. He would fight well. If only Sarah would run, while there was still a chance. The fire had chosen a tough man to seek out and destroy. This is going to be hard for you, fire, because I don’t fear a thing.
As he thought it, he laughed. It was true. Death meant nothing to him. How could it? He grinned into the smoke and sprayed the smoldering ashes as they fell. Death was attacking, and he was killing it wherever it fell.
Let it come.
Sarah folded her arms and gazed into the wind that drove the fire. She wanted to be nowhere but exactly where she was. She blinked her eyes against the smoke. If this was the way Hamilton Speke was to die, she would go with him. She had been a stranger to herself for too long.
The fire surrounded the house, and began to close upon them.
43
There was no time to lie there, he chided himself wryly, blinking up at the sky, thinking how hurt he was.
Bell dragged himself to his feet. He took one step, and then another. The ankle was not sprained, and his ribs were probably not broken, either. They only felt that way. But this was no time to stand, feeling his shirtfront like a smoker who has misplaced his lighter.
He limped to the center of the road. The surface of the two lane reflected the sun. The asphalt absorbed much of the light itself, but gave off so much heat that the double yellow line withered and floated in mirage only a few paces ahead of him.
A car had to roll along this road eventually. He began to run. The first few steps were awkward, but then he found his stride. A car would be here soon, he told himself. He could smell the smoke with every breath now. They would burn to death. The thought choked him. Surely any moment there would be a car, and he would flag it to a stop.
The mirage ahead of him did not look anything like water. It looked like gulls made of aluminum foil, flames made of shivering ice. With every step this silent ice escaped ahead of him. So much depended on a sole, running man, sprinting down the center of a highway, over rabbit skins with wire-thin bones, over ancient roadkill identifiable only by a stain on the road, a pinch of hair or a glittering scrap of reptile skin. He had, he gradually realized, no plan. He did not know where the nearest ranch might lie. He knew only that the road was empty. There was not a single car.
Another pancaked mummy passed beneath his feet. He had never realized what a desolate place a highway could be. He stopped, panting, sweating on the crown of the road, when his cramp bit him once again. He forced himself to run. There was no time to stand still.
Burn to death—the thought made the air whistle in his throat. Surely a car was coming. Any minute now. Someone had to use this road.
Bell shouldered through the heat as though it were a thickening gel. Each step was a loud thwack on the gray surface of the road.
His thoughts were fragments. Surely soon. A car. Any time.
The road was empty.
Speke shot down the sparks as soon as they danced on the roof. The hard stream of water blasted them away. It was all burning. The Outer Office was gone, with the two bodies. Sarah’s cottage was fuming, ropes of smoke writhing from the peak of its roof. Anguish made him tighten his grip on the hose, forcing the water into a hard, white rod that played and broke on the curls of smoke.
He looked back at Sarah watching it all, straddling the divide of the roof. She caught his eye.
Her glance said: Don’t worry. We’ll survive.
She watched with the kind of serenity she had before now only imagined. She descended the ladder briefly to pluck the shovel from the lawn, then carried the shovel up the ladder and used it to flick sputtering ashes when they fell out of Speke’s reach. She sent them spinning into the range of his water, or off the roof, then returned to her post at the peak.
As a girl she had been fascinated by the life of Joan of Arc. Perhaps the reason for this was quite simple. Joan was a young woman who fought like a warrior, with fighting men behind her. Her father, she must have imagined, would prize her all the more if he could see her leading men to battle. This fascination alone had brought her to consider, as a teenager, a Catholic conversion. Joan of Arc’s last word had to Sarah always been something of a mystery. Surrounded by the flames, lapped by the fire, clothes and flesh licked clean, her last word, as the flames possessed her, was the single name: Jesus. Sarah had always wondered how this last name sounded through the crackling prison. Like a shriek? Like a prayer, offered up in absolute faith? Like a call for someone, something, certainly her own champion, to come at last?
People who heard her last cry were shaken, changed for the rest of their lives. Just after her death the faggots were tumbled aside so the crowd could see the partially consumed corpse and see that their champion was dead. At this moment, Speke battling the rain of hot ash, Sarah hammering a red spark dead with the flat of the shovel, she was stung by yet another spinning ember that fell from the sky. Only one small burn, she told herself. Nothing more than that.
The spark left a black smudge on her arm, and it seemed to Sarah now that Joan’s cry was just another human cry out of agony to a sky which responds to nothing.
Speke turned. “There’s still time.”
She stood at the very ridge of the roof line, where it fell away to either side. She did not answer.
“For you to run,” Speke added. His tone said: I know you’ve made up your mind, but I have to say this anyway, for my own conscience.
She smiled. Sometimes, she saw, it doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters that you act as though the faith were real. Heaven takes you in its loving arms, or it doesn’t.
She climbed downward toward another plume of smoke.
It was a pickup, and it was coming fast. Bell flung himself into its path. The driver did not see him waving his arms, dancing, crying out for the vehicle, for time itself, to stop. The truck came on, hard.
At the last moment the driver hit the brakes so hard that blue smoke billowed from the tires, and the truck swung from side to side.
Then it hit him.
44
“Are you all right?”
It was a man’s voice. Strong hands brushed Bell’s hair back from his eyes, and touched him gently, knowingly.
“I’m fine,” said Bell doubtfully. He shifted his legs as he lay on his back, staring at the head that eclipsed the sky in his vision. It was a grim test: arms worked. Legs worked again. Let’s lift the head a little.
The pickup had braked so successfully that the hood had brushed him to one side, virtually all the momentum spent. Still, he had been flung backwards, an impromptu lesson in physics and comparative weight. There was a smell of rubber sulphur in the air. The road beneath his body was gritty. Bell ached to stand and walk around, but at the same time he was partly stunned and he knew his body, and his mind, were not working quite properly.
And then he remembered the fire. He fought to stand, to speak. “Speke … Sarah …”
“There’s a fire,” said the man, and it was then that Bell realized he was talking to Brothers, the gardener. “I saw the smoke. Called the county.”
Brothers helped Bell to his feet. From far away, sounding strangely metropolitan and out of place in the hills, came the sound of a siren. There were several sirens, the urgent rise-and-fall sounding thin and distant. Bell had always believed in the powers that solved emergencies, the police, fire departments, surgeons, airline pilots. He had always admired the men shoveling sand into sandbags against the flood. Perhaps that was one of the reasons journalism had attracted him. It had been a chance to interview rookie cops after a shooting, a chance to interview actors with greasepaint still caking their wrinkles. It had been a chance to be a part of what he had always thought of as Life.
But now his only thought was: too late. It’s all too late. His fundamental faith in hope, and in human accomplishment, withered in him. Life had run through his fingers once again.
Sarah was lost, and so was that man he would never know, that lively enigma, that amazing human being, Hamilton Speke.
Bell drawled something about the fire sending a “plume you can see from Soledad to Tamales,” but he thought only: too late.
The ashes fell. It was a rain of the fine, spent residue of life, and it coated the wet shingles of the roof.
Speke had grown up with minor fires, as though his childhood had been a preparation for this day. His father had not been absentminded. There had been fires in the garage where he worked; his father had never explained why he took so little notice of the fire department’s suggestions, and why the fire extinguisher was always lost in a pile of flower presses, or hanging on the hook with a mysterious puncture in the base, the sort of wound only a bullet or a spike could cause.
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