Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 02 - Time Is of the Essence

by Catharine Bramkamp

  “I would never dream of making you do anything you don’t want to do, love,” Pat assured her.

  Pat tugged at Mike’s sweater. “We can’t leave either, not in a car, you saw the traffic.”

  “Okay,” Mike conceded. “Moot point. We’ll have to stay.” He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the foyer, but I could tell he was really thinking of what was beyond the foyer. “Do you have a hose?”

  “Many.” Grandma gestured to the general area of the back yard. “As many as you’d like.”

  We trooped out, our own defense team. The lights in the guesthouse were on. I looked up at the apartment above the barn. Those windows were dark.

  “Hey!” Mike turned and caught Raul as he was sneaking out towards the street. “Raul, come here and while you’re at it, get Brick.”

  I could see Raul sigh with his whole body. His blue silk robe made a nice contrast against the dark night. He slumped and marched back to the guesthouse to retrieve Brick.

  When the two presented themselves to Mike, Raul in his finery, Brick dressed in more practical shorts and a tee, Mike had already dragged two hoses to the back door, but he did not hand them off.

  “Go to the top of the roof and we’ll toss these up to you,” Pat directed. “The roof?” Brick balked.

  “The roof.” Pat repeated.

  Raul still carried his camera. “Very good vantage from the roof,” he explained, gesturing with the camera.

  Sirens wailed, then were silenced, then wailed on again as the fire engines tried to move up and against the street choked with stopped traffic.

  “You can stand on the widow’s walk, just go.”

  “There is time, I could just go down the street? A few blocks.” Raul started.

  “No,” Pat said sternly. “The roof.”

  Both Brick and Raul rolled their eyes, but they obeyed and disappeared inside the house. In a well choreographed scene, where there are many professionals involved, Pat, Mike and I would have smoothly tossed up the hose outside the house and Brick would have leaned out of the window and caught the hose with one hand and someone would have yelled – all clear turn it on.

  It did not happen that way. Fortunately CNN had not trained their cameras on our particular segment of Nevada County.

  After two attempts to toss the hoses up and over the back of the house (we really couldn’t even see the railing for the widow’s walk from the back yard) we gave up and Mike and I grabbed a garden hose each and dragged the hoses through the house, up both flights of stairs and into the waiting hands of Brick and Raul, who, now that they were up high enough to see what was going on, were disturbingly helpful.

  I raced down the stairs, sorely tempted to take the express route via the banister, but I didn’t want a disaster in the middle of a disaster. I emerged as Mike issued more orders to the roof crew, directions that may or may not prove helpful. But we never know those things until the crisis is over.

  I panted, “it’s okay, turn on the water.” I didn’t deliver the news with as much flair as I fantasized, but at least I hadn’t yet passed out with fear.

  Pat turned on both hoses, and fortunately Raul and Brick had a firm hold on their end.

  “Just soak the roof,” Mike called up.

  “For how long?” Brick whined.

  “For as long as it takes,” I yelled from where I stood. “I wouldn’t let you sleep through this anyway.”

  Prue shook her head. “You sound just like your grandfather.”

  “What about your home?” I turned to Pat.

  “Oh, we have Peter on the roof with the hose, he’ll stay up there as long as there’s water left.”

  I tried to picture that. Maybe Peter brought up a pitcher of cosmos to keep him company, soaking more than just the roof. But my imagination wasn’t working well because reality was far more bizarre than anything I could make up.

  My phone buzzed, I looked down at the number. Joan? I thought she had Norton well in hand, perhaps an offer? Really, options like that do run through my brain. On a good day. I was so distracted I answered it.

  “We found a place and he wants to make an offer. Now what do I do?” Joan sounded as breathless as I felt.

  “It’s midnight.” I said patiently, “and I believe we are in the same time zone so you have no excuse.”

  “I didn’t think you’d pick up, I was going to leave you a message.” Joan said patiently, completely unperturbed with my outburst.

  “And the message?” Sometimes we like to have the recipient hang up so we can just leave the message instead of engaging in a long drawn out conversation. I’ve even asked friends to hang up so I can leave a message. But I may as well distract myself with Joan’s troubles. My only job was to deliver the hoses. I had no further assignments except to panic.

  “We found a place. We just decided ten minutes ago, thus, the message.”

  “Joan! You found a place? You’ve only been on the job for a week, I had no idea Norton could move that fast.”

  Joan remained silent. I paused.

  “Did you say we?”

  “Well, I’m just renting and my two year lease is almost up and we can get so much more if we combine our incomes and FICA scores.”

  “We,” I repeated dumbly.

  Joan launched into her explanation. Brick and Raul soaked the back roof. Wet spray tumbled off the shingles. I moved out of watering range. Prue, Mike and Pat watched the roof soaking efforts with managerial airs. It was like Cal Trans, three people supervising two workers.

  “I know Norton isn’t perfect,” Joan continued. “But he’s really lovely if you get to know him and well, you know I’ve been working with him as your assistant.”

  “Did you tell him you weren’t really a Feng Shui expert?” That was part of her assistant duties for me. She posed as a Feng Shui expert to convince Norton to annihilate the yellow, pink and lime green painted home with a overwhelming and complete application of Navaho White.

  “He thought it was funny. He thinks you are hysterical, he smiles every time he talks about you.”

  “Well that’s more than I can say for Ben.”

  “Just give him a chance.” Joan switched from her love life to mine in lightening speed.

  I wonder if lightening started the fire. No, lightning didn’t strike around here very often. No storms, not even in Tahoe. What did start the fire?

  “We’ve only been dating,” I said the term with quotation marks around it, “for about three weeks. So really, we don’t need relationship counseling quite yet.”

  “Your words say no, but you’re voice is very stressed. What’s wrong?”

  “The mountain is on fire. Turn on CNN.”

  From the bottom of Marsh Avenue. I could hear the sirens, on, off, as they tried again to move

  up the packed street. I could feel their frustration just by the sound of the engines and the beeping of the horn.

  I walked out to the street, giving the house and roof water a wide berth.

  “I’m sorry Joan, I have to go. Oh, go to the office and have Inez fill out a purchase agreement, she’ll sign it and we’ll figure it out later.”

  “You can’t come back down?”

  I looked up the road. Cars jockeyed for position and room to moved down the hill. Every few minutes, someone managed to squeeze past by driving on the side of the road, but even without a sidewalk, there wasn’t much room. In the time I stood on the sidewalk, two cars moved to the right, listing into the ditch made some good progress, about three car lengths, and then found they were unable to get back on the road. The cars they had passed were not allowing them back in.

  The police appeared, working their way up the street on foot. Flares and cones appeared to clear the north bound lane. I could see maybe half a mile up the road before it turned and disappeared up into the mountains. Not a single car moved. Not even an inch.

  “No, I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere in quite a while.”

  “Are you safe? Good
heavens, have you seen the TV? The whole mountain looks like it’s on fire.”

  “I told you I was busy.”

  I looked out, across the back yard. The hills right above us glowed red and gold. Was the fire higher and traveling up or lower and traveling down?

  “Listen, take care of yourself, we’ll talk later, oh, and call me and tell me how you’re doing.”

  Joan obligingly hung up, or the phone went dead. I prefer to think it was the former. I pocketed it and checked on the watering. Brick sprayed the tree tops. Raul danced around trying to focus his camera thorough those very same tree tops. The roof dripped water.

  We are fine. The fire is uphill and fire travels uphill. I remember that from a Smokey the Bear pamphlet I received during an assembly in the fourth grade. It used to be so easy. Don’t play with matches. Don’t throw lit cigarettes into the underbrush. Douse the campfire. We grew up with those admonishments, so who forgot and set the forest alight?

  A screech and crash jerked my attention back to the street.

  “You idiot!” A woman tumbled out of the passenger seat, clearly not hurt. Three cars honked at the hapless car – a Mercedes.

  “Now what are we going to do!” She yelled.

  “Ma’am get out of the roadway.” An officer called out. Could that be Tom Marten? Now was not the time to ask, but if it WAS Tom Marten, he had aged better than Danny and Jimmy.

  “Look what he did!” The woman continued to shriek.

  The car had smashed into about three feet of fence across the street. The house used to be the Smith’s place, but I didn’t know who owns it now. No one from the house yelled, the woman was yelling loudly enough for to take care of all the surrounding neighbors.

  “I should have never, never left Concord. But NO you wanted to live in the fucking mountains and now look!”

  She reached inside the back seat and began pulling out photo albums and a large square jewelry box. She staggered under the weight, but kept yelling.

  “I’m leaving you, not just right now, but forever. Don’t bother getting out of the car, stay there and burn for all I care.”

  She struggled down the center of the street, only stepping to one side after three more cars honked at her and two drivers yelled at her to get to the side of the street. The police officer approached her, and she finally grumbled and walked in the dust at the side of the road.

  But there was very little side to be walked along.

  I felt sorry for her. But I felt more badly for the guy still sitting in his car.

  More pedestrians appeared from the mountain. Some of them looked hot and exhausted as they struggled down the hill. They trudged past our house edging along what was left of the sidewalk. People walked in the middle of the street, between the stopped cars, whenever they could. The first fire truck finally moved up the street at a snail’s pace. Cars need to edge back two inches, then forward two inches, then back so the large truck to slowly make its way – like a game where you move the squares around to make a pattern but couldn’t move anything out of the frame. The abandon cars created another immovable wall on either side of the road making it doubly difficult for the remaining drivers to move forward. The cars closed around the cautious path created by the fire truck. The traffic now spread five vehicles across a two lane road.

  A woman staggering under the weight of heavy scrapbooks covered in bright fabric lurched past our front gate. I didn’t make eye contact and neither did she. Words and despair drifted towards me on the hot wind.

  “What about the wedding albums?”

  “What about the computers?”

  “What about that vase your mother gave us?”

  “What about the dog?”

  And where are they going? I tried to remember if there was some kind of hall or place for a large group of displaced people to go. The school? Perhaps, the grammar school was close to town, the high school was around the corner, at the base of Miner’s Hill, a good three-mile walk. The asphalt playground or parking lots could act as firebreaks if it came to that.

  Red Cross volunteers will have their hands full tonight.

  I shrank back into the doorway. The whole scene looked like previews for Night of the Living Dead. I leaned my head out and squinted into the blue night. The sky glowed with an orange scarier than Halloween candy pumpkins.

  “Okay, Allison,” Raul called down. “The roof is very soaked, can we come down now?”

  I nodded, and realized he couldn’t see me on the lawn. “Yes,” I called.

  “You will tell Mike you approved?” Raul hedged.

  “I’ll tell Mike. Hold on, we’ll turn off the water first.”

  Borate bombers began to whine overhead.

  Prue, Mike, Pat and I stood outside in the back yard and strained to see the bombers. The fat belly airplanes no longer carry Borate, but that’s what the local still call them, and the “T” is silent, it sounds like we’re saying borade. Does it matter? The planes drop tons of fire retardant, getting ahead of the fire, saving homes and wildlife and all that. We don’t care what they’re called. Helicopters chucked and growled overhead. Some were flying in to help air lift victims and some, we knew, were media.

  I felt the air planes roar overhead.

  “Come on,” Pat gestured to the house. “Let’s see what CNN says, that had to be one of their helicopters.”

  We obediently followed him into the cool house.

  The TV is perched on the back of the parlor grand piano. Tiny armless chairs in various colors and states of restoration are grouped around the piano like pre-school children during story time. Raul and Brick, both wearing fresh dry clothes, joined us.

  It’s a hellishly uncomfortable way to watch TV, so much so that, I gave up watching TV at my grandmother’s years ago, but tonight was different. We all obediently sat on our little antique chairs and Pat flipped on the tube.

  The stock report was first. I dashed to the kitchen to grab my computer. I thought I’d track the news better this way, but the connection was bad. The fire was making things difficult. I flipped off the computer and returned to the rest of the group.

  We were top of the news. Imagine, little Claim Jump on CNN.

  “Officials say that because Johnson Pass is closed, they are having difficultly getting to the fire and the homes further up on the hill.” The beautiful reporter intoned.

  I remember the overgrown dirt trail. No, it didn’t seem very passable at all. I wondered how many people were stuck because they tried.

  The newscast displayed a bird’s eye views of upper Red Dog Road. Abandoned, charred cars lined the edges of the road, all of them tipped to the left or right, leaving very little room for passage of any kind of vehicle. The scene was remarkably similar to photos from a misbegotten war. Pick an unpopular one; it looked like that.

  “That’s just a mile north,” Prue breathed.

  Another plane scuttled overhead. She listened then shook her head. “No, I think it will be all right, they’ll get it. And look, it’s just the bottom of the hill, where the new homes will be, we still have that land that Lucky is trying to annex, that’s empty and its between us and the fire.” She concentrated on the aerial photos CNN was happily supplying.

  “What about the local news?” I asked.

  “Their van is probably sitting at the bottom of the hill and they can’t get up close to the action,” Pat said.

  Another helicopter rattled overhead.

  “Officials say they cannot comment on any fatalities at this time, but we will keep you informed.”

  Jimmy and Danny lived north of the potential development. They were not official, they wouldn’t make the reports. My heart twisted at the thought. But there was nothing I could learn.

  The sound of choppers roared overhead. “There they are now,” Mike said.

  We stepped outside to look. The sky glowed along the bottom edges, the horizon, up high following the contours of the top of the ridges and hills. It looked like a Japanese bloc
k print. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so close.

  “Don’t worry,” Pat slipped his arm around me. I hadn’t realized that I was shivering. “We’ll be okay.”

  “Should we make Prue move?”

  “Where would we go?”

  I nodded. He was right, where would we go? His house? Those few extra blocks probably didn’t make that much difference. Once the fire came this far, all these homes would burn in seconds. The termites would stop holding hands and abandoned their posts. It would all fall down.

  “It always looks worse on TV,” Pat squeezed my arm.

  The electricity still held, although I imagined that would soon – the lights flickered and popped off – go off. Now the darkness was complete and the light from the fire was even more eerie.

  No more CNN for us. We all turned as one and regarded the black, quiet house. But the outside was alive with chopper and bomber noise. People were shouting at one another as they abandoned more cars and headed down the hill by foot and across town to the creek, a sensible choice.

  “We could go to the creek.” I suggested.

  “No need,” Pat pointed out something in the yellow horizon. “See that? Black smoke. They’re making headway. We’ll be fine.”

  “Come on inside,” Prue encouraged. “We’ll use up the ice before it melts.”

  The solution to everything. People used to take a spoonful or two of Miss Lydian’s Pink tonic, now that kind of magical tonic is distributed in it’s more pure form; pink martinis.

  Mike picked up the princess phone, the only thing that worked in the house. “I’ll tell Peter to come up.”

  Prue handed everyone flashlights and I put mine to good use by scanning the library and pulling out my favorite childhood book.

  Most of us have comfort food on hand, but mine is ice cream and it was currently melting in the freezer, so I searched for the next best thing - a comfort book.

  I pulled out Eloise from my grandmother’s bookcase. I have the words on the page memorized. I know every line of the Hillary Knight illustrations. I ran my hand over the pink and white pages. It was the first book I pulled out of the bookshelves when I came to visit, and the last book I read, as a farewell to another excellent summer at Grandma’s. I could buy a copy for my own collection, But Grandma has the original 1950’s version and the newer version of the book changed some of the text.