Fire and Rain

by Diane Chamberlain

  Jeff scooped up the cat up and lifted its lanky tail to peer underneath. “Him,” he said. “And I’m not going to name him. You name something and suddenly you’re responsible for it. I’ll just call him ‘the cat.’”

  “Well, he’ll have to be an indoor cat or the coyotes will get him.”

  He looked up at her sharply, then shook his head. “This is a bad idea,” he said. “I don’t want to have to worry about him. And I’ll be leaving here as soon as I get things rolling.”

  She suddenly felt guilty. “Maybe it was a bad idea,” she said. “Do you want me to take him back?”

  He lifted the cat and pressed the silky black fur against his cheek. The kitten purred audibly in response. “Nah,” he said. “I’ll hang onto him for a while. When I leave, though, I’ll probably need to give him to you.”

  “All right.” She would worry about that when the time came.

  “So.” He stretched out his legs in front of him and rested the kitten in his lap. “How did the pictures come out?”

  “Very well.” She took a big swallow of wine. “I’m trying to settle on an angle that catches the true emotions in your face.”

  He looked amused, swirling the wine in his glass. “Exactly what do you think my true emotions are? I don’t think I let much of anything show.”

  “I know that,” she said. “And you probably would be a mystery to someone who’s not accustomed to reading faces, but that’s something you learn to do when you’re an artist.”

  “Uh huh,” he said skeptically. “So, go ahead, I’m waiting. What do you think you see in my face?”

  “Well.” She rested her glass on the end table and sat forward, using her hands to help in her description. “The angles are rigid. You’re scared. I don’t know of what, but it’s your primary emotion. Fear.”

  He set his own glass on the floor next to him and frowned at her. “How can you possibly say you see fear? The only place you’ve seen me is in the warehouse, where I’ve been concentrating on my work.”

  “It underlies whatever else you’re feeling. It’s like throwing a slipcover over a raggedy old chair. You can hide it, but it’s still there, just below the surface.”

  He took in a long breath. “Uh huh. And what else do you think you see?”

  “Anger. I get the feeling there’s a deep, festering rage in you.”

  He laughed.

  “I do. I wouldn’t want to cross you. Also, there’s hurt. Grief. Sadness.”

  He attempted a smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

  “And when you smile, it doesn’t work as a smile because the rest of your face—your forehead, your jaw—is saying, ‘I’m not happy.’ It doesn’t matter what your mouth is doing. Or maybe it’s pain. Physical pain. Are you in pain anywhere?”

  “Mia.” He slumped lower against the couch and looked at her from under heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you know what projection is?”

  She frowned, not certain what he was getting at.

  “I think you’re projecting your own feelings onto other people. Maybe what you see in any given person at any given time is just a mirror of what’s inside yourself.”

  The tables were turning on her, and she stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re the one who’s scared,” he said. “What are you afraid of? What are you angry about?”

  She felt the color creep into her cheeks. “Nothing.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “It’s actually more intriguing to think that you’re expressing your own feelings through the faces of others. Or maybe it’s only that you’re drawn to models who suit your current mood.”

  She thought of how she had gravitated toward Henry and his smile at a time when she had felt carefree and loved.

  Jeff threw the foil ball across the floor, and the cat leaped after it.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve made you quiet if nothing else.”

  “Mmm.” She shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “The wine’s slowing me down.”

  He suddenly leaned toward her. “It’s only when you’re working that you feel completely at peace, isn’t it?” he asked. “It’s the one thing that’s wholly yours—your work. It’s the one thing no one can ever take from you.”

  His gaze seemed to burn into her as he waited for her reply. “Yes,” she said, and for another moment, she couldn’t turn away from his eyes.

  He stood up then, and the spell was broken. She knew he was telling her it was time to go. She stood too, and immediately felt the effect of the wine. She hadn’t had anything to drink in so long.

  “You all right?” he asked, opening the door, keeping the kitten inside with his foot.

  “Yes, but it’s definitely bedtime.” She stepped onto his porch. “Let me know if the cat becomes a problem.”

  “All right. And Mia?”

  She turned to look at him.

  “I understand how it feels to have only your work,” he said. “I understand that completely.”

  She nodded slowly, wondering if there were any limits at all to how easily he could see through her. “Good night,” she said.

  She walked across the ridge of the canyon to her cottage, knowing he was watching her from his doorway, but when she turned to wave, he did not lift his hand.

  14

  CHRIS TURNED OFF HIS cottage lights before carrying his guitar onto the porch. He liked the darkness, liked being able to feel the canyon more than see it. The air was thick with the smell of soot and eucalyptus. He turned his chair so that the lights from Mia’s cottage and the adobe were blocked from his view. Stretching out in front of him, the black canyon hummed softly with the sound of crickets, and as he began to sing, his voice seemed to travel for miles before losing itself in the abyss.

  He sang ballads, too tired for anything more energetic. He’d spent the evening in the adobe, removing the wallpaper from the room they had used as the nursery. Years ago, he had emptied that room of its furniture, but he doubted Carmen had set foot in there since the day Dustin left the house. Chris had worked quickly tonight, blocking from his mind the memory of the few joyous days they’d had with their seemingly healthy son, as well as the memory of that long, frightening night, when it was apparent that Dusty was desperately ill. Chris pulled and scraped and tore at the wallpaper, as if trying to destroy all the pain embedded in its yellow-and-blue flowered print.

  He’d had another reason to be angry as he worked on the room. A new fire had cropped up today. It had been small and fairly easily controlled, but he considered it particularly abhorrent. This one had been set intentionally by someone who wanted to drive the undocumented workers from the canyon. The fire had started early that morning, and by noon all that was left of that particular camp on the north side were the charred sheets of corrugated metal that had served as roofs for their plywood and cardboard shelters. No one had been hurt; no one had even been seen. The workers had simply disappeared, no doubt slipping deeper into the canyon to start over. If anyone running for mayor came up with a plan to provide the undocumented workers with decent housing, they would get his vote. He stopped singing “The Water Is Wide” in the middle of a verse and began singing “De Colores,” on the whimsical chance that the workers had moved to a section of the canyon from which they could hear him.

  Sam Braga had run a piece on the mayoral election in yesterday’s Gazette. It seemed that the two contenders, Joyce DeLuis and John Burrows, were in agreement on absolutely nothing, except that Chris Garrett’s hiring of the “alleged rainmaker” had been irresponsible at best. “On that,” Braga wrote, “the two candidates are in complete accord.”

  Chris heard a sound from behind him and stilled his hands on the guitar as the beam of a flashlight played over the porch.

  “Don’t stop.” Jeff turned off his light and sat down on the step.

  Chris started to play again, but he was thinking that it was nearly eleven, and Jeff was only now getting home. Jeff had worked simi
lar hours every day since arriving in Valle Rosa. He had to be exhausted.

  “Bravo,” Jeff said quietly when Chris had finished the song.

  Chris couldn’t easily see Jeff’s face in the darkness, but he heard the smile in his voice. “Thanks,” he said.

  Jeff sighed, stretching his legs out on the porch. “Once I was at this coffee house in Philadelphia with a group of people,” he said, “and you showed up.”

  “The Rising Sun,” Chris said, surprised not so much that Jeff had seen him at a club, but that he was talking about it, offering a morsel of information about himself. He wanted to ask Jeff if he’d lived in Philadelphia, but thought better of it.

  “You sang that song,” Jeff said. “Your trademark song.”

  “’Center Field.’”

  “Right. I remember thinking how strange it was. The crowd was very hot on the Phillies and very down on the Padres, but the second you walked in, they turned non-partisan.”

  Chris strummed the guitar, softly. “Well, that type of place was pretty safe to go,” he said. “People were there for the music. The receptions I got were usually good.”

  “You still sound good. I could hear you all the way from the driveway. Do you perform anywhere these days?”

  “Hell, no.” Chris laughed, but he felt an involuntary shudder at the thdught of climbing onto a stage in front of an audience. “That’d take guts I don’t have anymore. Once you’ve been pulverized by the fans that supposedly loved you, it’s hard to risk going back for more.” He could still remember the agony of being booed at his last game for the Padres. Other players had been regular recipients of the crowd’s disdain, but not Chris. It had stung him badly, and he’d been glad of the isolation of the mound, glad no one was near enough to him to read the pain in his face. “Getting everyone’s wrath as mayor is enough for now. I’m not the most popular guy in town, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “It’s hard to miss.” Jeff stretched his arms above his head, yawning.

  “You must be wiped out,” Chris said. “Please take some time off when you need it.”

  “The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can leave.” Jeff shifted his position on the porch step to face Chris more directly. “You know, it’s been two weeks and you haven’t asked me a thing about how my work’s going.”

  Chris laughed. “Well, I figure when you hire someone to perform a miracle it’s a little banal to ask him how it’s coming along.”

  “It’s going all right,” Jeff volunteered, “but it’s difficult, since I don’t have any of my data with me. I’m starting from scratch with everything.”

  “Where is the data? Can you send for it?”

  “It doesn’t exist any more, except in here.” He touched his fingertips to his temple.

  Chris could see only Jeff’s eyes, and they were wide and riveted on his own.

  “But it’s coming back to me pretty easily,” Jeff continued. “I’ve crammed what took me five years to figure out into the past two weeks. Two or three more and we’ll be ready for a small- scale experiment. Then I’ll know if I’m headed in the right direction. I need a few more things, though.” He sounded apologetic.

  “You name it.”

  “First of all, some kind of warning signs. ‘Danger—Keep Out.’ Something like that.”

  “To keep people from hounding you?”

  “No. We’ll be moving into a phase soon where there really may be some danger. The risk is extremely small, but I don’t want to take the chance of anyone getting hurt.”

  For the first time, Chris felt a wave of uncertainty over hiring this stranger to help Valle Rosa. “What are we talking about here?” he asked. “There’s nothing radioactive or—”

  Jeff chuckled. “Nothing like that. I’ve discussed it with Rick to be sure he understands the risks, and he’s okay with it.” He hesitated when Chris didn’t respond. “Do you need to know more?”

  “No.” Chris made a quick decision to continue operating on trust. “What else do you need?”

  “A couple more vats. Very specialized. Little plastic pockets on the inside. Two hundred gallons. Air-tight. I know where I can get them, but I’d like to do some research to find another source. Not too many people need exactly what I’m looking for, and I’d rather they didn’t put two and two together and figure out who’s doing the ordering.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re expensive. Sorry.”

  Chris shrugged and smiled. “What else?”

  “That’s it for now.”

  A breeze slipped across the porch, dropping a few powdery ashes on the guitar. Chris blew them off and stood up. “How about a beer?” he asked.

  This time he could see Jeff’s smile. “Love one,” he said.

  Inside the house, Chris switched on the living room light and went into the kitchen for the beer. When he returned to the living room, Jeff was sitting on the couch, pulling a sooty baseball bat out of one of the boxes Chris had brought from his house.

  “This looks like an interesting collection.” Jeff peered into the box.

  “Memorabilia,” Chris said, embarrassed. His ego was in that box.

  Jeff balanced the bat across his hands, ignoring the soot it deposited on his palms. “What makes the bat special?” he asked.

  Chris placed Jeff’s beer on the coffee table and sat down in the chair nearest the sofa. “Well,”—he twisted the cap off his beer—”when you’re known for your pitching, nobody takes you too seriously as a hitter. But in this one game—against the Phillies, as a matter of fact—they had me batting ninth, and as usual, told me to bunt. Something got into me, though, and I told myself to ignore them and just let it rip.” He took a swallow of beer and smiled at the memory. “Got a home run. I wasn’t about to part with the bat.”

  Jeff pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the soot from the bat and his hands. “I remember reading about that in Throwing Smoke,” he said.

  “You read Throwing Smoke?” He hadn’t taken Jeff Cabrio for a baseball fan.

  “Yeah. I enjoyed it.”

  Chris shook his head. “That book embarrasses the hell out of me now.”

  “How come?”

  “A biography about someone who’s only thirty-five years old seems ridiculous. Pretentious.”

  He hadn’t thought so at the time, though. He’d felt worthy of having an entire book written about him, and he’d thought that the author had captured him well. The tone of the biography had been flattering, with Augie seen as his best friend and driving force. Chris’s early excesses and escapades were described in entertaining, almost comical terms, and his marriage to the country’s least typical baseball wife was seen as a testimony to the unpredictability of love. The book sold very well, but Chris quickly realized that it had been written prematurely.

  “Here it is, only five years later,” he said to Jeff, “and if I read that book again, I wouldn’t even recognize myself.”

  Jeff nodded. “Well, I doubt the Chris Garrett in Throwing Smoke would ever say he was afraid to perform in front of a crowd.”

  Chris’s mouth twisted in a sad half-smile at the memory of his former, crowd-loving self.

  Jeff raised his beer to his lips and took a long drink before setting the bottle on the table again. “I remember something about you turning down offers to coach in the majors after you hurt your arm,” he said. “Why didn’t you stay in baseball?”

  Chris sighed. “It would have meant leaving Valle Rosa. Carmen and I had separated by then, but I still didn’t want to desert her because she was… pretty sick at the time. And I didn’t want to be too far from my son.” Chris knew he wasn’t offering much—just cryptic pieces of information—but it was far more than he usually said. Still, he wasn’t sure if Jeff was following him.

  Jeff nodded, though, as though he heard all that Chris wasn’t saying. He must know then, Chris thought, about Carmen’s depression, and about Dustin. He probably knew the story from Rick. Or at least, he kn
ew the story as Rick understood it.

  “Also, I wasn’t sure I could stomach being behind the lines in baseball. You know, being involved as a coach without being able to play.” It wasn’t a lie, but not the truth either. Quitting baseball and staying in Valle Rosa, had, in many ways, been the easy way out.

  Jeff pulled the box closer to him. “Tell me about the stuff in here.”

  Chris couldn’t resist the invitation. He moved to the floor and began pulling his treasures from the box, describing each of them to his rapt audience. There was a baseball in a sooty plastic holder from the first major league game he’d pitched in, and another from the game that marked his hundredth win. He showed Jeff a few of his trophies. At the bottom of the box, the Cy Young award was wrapped in a towel.

  “Wow.” Jeff held the plaque with appropriate respect. “You must be relieved this didn’t get ruined in the fire. It’s got to be one of your most prized possessions.”

  “Yes and no.” Chris studied the plaque himself. He always felt a strange combination of satisfaction and sorrow when he looked at it. “It was the greatest honor of my life,” he said, “but my father died right after I received it, and the two events are sort of tied forever in my head.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jeff nodded. “I know how that happens.”

  Chris set the plaque on the coffee table. “Would you like to go to a Padres game sometime?” he asked, impulsively. The thought terrified him. “I haven’t been to a game myself since I retired, but maybe it’s about time.”

  Jeff’s eyes lit up, but the rest of his face was reserved. “I’d be afraid that being with you would make me too visible,” he said.

  “Well, the truth is, I don’t feel like being all that visible myself at the moment.” Chris laughed. “We can sit in the nosebleed seats. No one will give us a second look.”

  “Let me think about it a while.” Jeff stood up and yawned. “Right now, though, I’d better get some sleep.”

  He walked to the front door and turned to face Chris again. “I know you’re taking a lot of heat for hiring me,” he said. It was almost an apology.