Full Measure

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He turned and gave her a granitic look. “The evidence of arson appears faint at best.”

  “Maybe that’s good,” she said. “A negligent accident is still better than a terrorist. It would be a silver lining for our little town to have the wind and San Diego Gas and Electric prove to be at fault. They’re insured for billions for this kind of thing.”

  “I know that.”

  She looked out at the broiled trees and earth and wondered who could start such a fire on purpose. The damage went on mile after mile. She knew that most wildfires were natural and they helped balance and restore the ecosystem over time—nature’s form of self-government. She winced at her own thought. Since becoming mayor she’d felt that she was a governmental wildfire: cutting, cutting; trimming, trimming, no, no; I’m sorry, we can’t afford that, no! We can’t even build a few lighted crosswalks to keep people from getting killed by cars, she thought. Mother Nature and government can be cruel things. Who’s to govern them?

  Then the car came to a stop and she saw two uniformed deputies pulling away orange cones to let them pass onto a county fire road. They bumped along for maybe half a mile then parked. “We’re pretty sure this is where it started,” said Bruck. “You wanted to see it.”

  Evelyn got out and followed the three men down into a shallow arroyo. The fireman-driver carried an extinguisher pack on his back and used a shovel as a walking stick. Evelyn’s jeans were soon lashed with soot and her athletic shoes were blackened with ash. Single file they climbed a hillock. The fireman stopped and blasted a hot spot and Evelyn saw the ash and chemical dust rise and disperse. They stood on top of the rise and looked east.

  “Some of the line went down right over there,” said the fire chief. “You can see the branch that came off that big oak and took down the line with it. You can see that the wind pushed the fire west—Santa Ana winds, strong offshore. Everything east, behind us, was spared because of that. The rest burned and burned. Drifted north as the winds weakened. Skilled arsonists wait for those conditions. Unfortunately.”

  Evelyn shot pictures. The digital SLX had been a Christmas gift from her husband, son, and daughter and she thought of them every time she used it.

  “We’ve got plenty of documentation, Evelyn,” said Sheriff Hazzard. “Just let me know what you need.”

  Evelyn shot more pictures of the power lines tangled within the fallen branches. When she lowered the camera she caught the looks of annoyance passed between the fire chief and the sheriff. Let them be annoyed, she thought, this is evidence of San Diego Gas and Electric negligence and it’s going to mean billions of dollars for Fallbrook and its citizens. Billions.

  She skidded down the embankment to where a power pole stood. The downed line was nowhere in sight. She thought she saw a segment but it turned out to be a snake, caught above ground on the warm night and quick-roasted by the fire. “There’s nothing worth seeing down there,” the fire chief called out.

  “Where’s the power line that came down?”

  “At the crime lab, Evelyn, where it belongs!”

  She looked up from the snake to the blackened ridgeline and the muted sky and the vultures circling above with machined precision. Suddenly she was sickened by it all—by the stench and the ash and the death. The idea of terrorists doing this. Or any other sorry bastard. She angrily broke through a stand of scorched manzanita to find a private place, went to her knees in the ashes, and threw up. Then again. She had to hold the camera to her chest so it wouldn’t swing out on its strap and get puked on. A moment later, slack-faced and panting softly, she stood and wiped her mouth with her hand then wiped that on her filthy jeans. She felt tears running down her face as she kicked some rubble over what she had ejected. She laughed at her simple human instinct—in spite of utter disaster—to not leave your messes for someone else to clean up. And when she looked down to check her work she saw the tangle of wires and fat D batteries and the old-fashioned wind-up travel alarm, all soot-blackened and weirdly fused to what looked like a small melted container. “Bill! Stan! I found something!”

  * * *

  After a quick shower and a change of clothes at home, Evelyn went back downtown to her office at City Hall. She could hardly focus on her duties after what she had found out in Rice Canyon. If that wretched ash-choked tangle of junk proved to be what Bruck and Stan said it almost certainly was, then three people had been murdered, Fallbrook was out billions of dollars, and a cold-blooded or even terrorist killer was lurking somewhere among them. Or, more than one? She googled Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and found the most recent issue. Sure enough, the table of contents listed a piece calling for jihadi firebombing of forests in the United States. The article was dedicated to starting “huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and remote-controlled bombs.” The magazine called for “Lone wolf attacks on American soil.” Evelyn’s heart jumped and fluttered. Wasn’t Cade Magnus’s group called the Lone Wolves? Or was it Rogue Wolves? Hell, she thought, in a weird way, what’s the difference? Wasn’t everybody a something these days? What reasonable person could be heard, with so many nutcase extremists of every ilk screaming and setting fires? Everywhere in the world! Even right here in Fallbrook! She wondered if this simple computer search would land her on some NSA watch list. She shivered.

  She looked up to make sure her office door was propped open, very important, then started in answering the scores of phone calls and the hundreds of e-mails that awaited her. Talk talk talk. Tap tap tap. There were dozens more media requests for quotes and interviews—with Evelyn herself, not staff—they needed to put a face on disaster. She tried to accommodate them. Talk talk. Most of what awaited her were citizen’s complaints—citizens bereft with loss, citizens furious with the fire department, citizens wondering if the air and water were safe, citizens suspicious of fellow citizens. Tap tap. She answered each one as best she could before hurrying to the next: it was like juggling knives and bowling pins while balancing on a medicine ball. In Fallbrook, the mayor was an elected part-time position that paid two hundred and eighty dollars per month. Some weeks she spent three hours at city work, and some weeks twenty. Or thirty. The next few would be a test of her ability to govern and perform her full-time work as a “wealth manager.”

  She thought of her always open office door as her way of healing the break in her heart caused by 9/11, two bloody wars, the great recession, the mortgage meltdown, the real estate collapse, and the bailouts of the big boys. These things had broken the hearts of her fellow citizens, too. God knew, they weren’t shy about voicing it. But she was doing her part to fix what was broken: she was leaving her door open. The door to cooperation, the door to government of, by, and for the people. Then why did she feel so helpless?

  She looked up from the screen and saw Iris Cash and the two girls who had held up the WHO KILLED GEORGE? sign at the meeting the night before standing in her doorway. Behind them, tall and inelegant, looking as if she would rather be any other place on earth than here, stood a young woman wearing only black, a thatch of copper hair jammed up into a black porkpie hat. “How can I help you?”

  “I am McKenzie,” said one of the girls. “And this is Dulce. We were George’s friends. And this is Cruzela Storm. She has agreed to help us.”

  * * *

  “And their idea is to do a concert and raise the forty-four thousand dollars for the crosswalks,” Evelyn told her husband that evening as they checked the news on the kitchen TV and did the dinner prep.

  “Cruzela Storm could sell out Warrior Stadium in a second flat,” he said. Brian was a rocker by heart but an accountant by trade, and Evelyn’s tireless partner in Anders Wealth Management. She knew that not every fifty-year-old accountant would know of Cruzela Storm, but Brian would, certainly. He had a collection of guitars, mostly electric and vintage and valuable. He played them with voluble abandon through a large Marshall in their music room–den. And of course he had thousands of recordings and high-end audio gear to play them on. “Let m
e get that new one of hers.”

  Still an unrepentant CD listener, Brian came back a moment later with the jewel case and put the disc into the player. He turned off the TV and cranked the music to his usual level of too loud. Evelyn thought the opening guitar riff was dire and slightly head-banging, but when Cruzela Storm’s voice kicked in, it was low, pure, and somehow honeylike. Evelyn looked at the picture on the CD cover: Cruzela Storm looked like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner, but with crazy copper hair instead of crazy white hair, all eyes and makeup. Nothing like she had looked in Evelyn’s office.

  “I like this bass line,” said Brian.

  “How much should tickets cost?” asked Evelyn. “If Cruzela Storm played at the stadium?”

  “Her audience is older because she’s relatively sophisticated—twenties and thirties, I’d say.”

  “Older? Twenties? God, what happened to us?”

  “Hey, hot stuff, I got ten years on you and I’m not complaining.”

  “That’s sickening,” said Ethan, heading for the fridge with half a smile. Ethan was thirteen, taller than his father and still growing, currently in size eleven shoes. He enjoyed castigating his parents but Evelyn rarely saw meanness in him.

  “Get out of there,” said Evelyn. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

  “Cruzela Storm is cool,” said Ethan, tearing off a package of string cheese. “What does she look like in person?”

  “She’s tall and shy,” said Evelyn. “She has beautiful pale skin. She’s not exactly pretty. But she’s … striking.”

  “I’d pay twenty to see her, but only for good seats.” Ethan dropped the plastic sleeve into the wastebasket and walked out.

  “Times two thousand at Warrior Stadium, if you put up chairs,” said Evelyn. “That’s forty grand right there. Then there’s concessions, donations, raffles. Forty-four thousand? Easy. Lighted crosswalks—presto.”

  Evelyn drank some wine, thinking. She slid the sautéed pancetta, then the peas and olive oil, into the pan of bow tie noodles and started mixing. Cruzela Storm sang. “I think it’s really more than cool of Cruzela Storm to help us build two new crosswalks,” she said. “But why wasn’t that little boy’s life enough? Why did the people of his own town have to tell his family his life wasn’t enough?”

  “Because Fallbrook is full of racist pigs,” said Gwen, following in her brother’s footsteps to the refrigerator. She had her mother’s thick dark hair, which she wore straight to her shoulders. “Cruzela Storm is half-Mexican, for your information. That’s why she’s going to sing. If George Hernandez had been white you wouldn’t need Cruzela Storm. We’d have crosswalks leading to the crosswalks.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” said Evelyn.

  Gwen dropped the string cheese wrapper into the trash and bit the stick in half. “You can ask Cade Magnus if it’s true, now that he’s back in town.”

  “There are thirty thousand other people in this city besides Cade Magnus,” said Brian.

  “Yes. Half of them agree with him, and the other half are afraid of him.”

  “That rings true in my heart, Gwen,” said her mother. “And I’m ashamed of it. My own city council. And Magnus wasn’t even there when we voted.”

  “Oh, he was there, Mom. Just invisible, like biological warfare. Like his dad.”

  “Aren’t you a cheerful little girl?”

  Ethan ambled back into the kitchen, tapping a pencil on his leg. “Cade Magnus just wants fame. It’s the creepy losers he attracts that you have to watch out for. When’s dinner?”

  “I’d pay fifty dollars to see Cruzela Storm,” said Gwen. “If I had fifty dollars.”

  “Tell you what,” said her father. “If Cruzela Storm plays in Fallbrook, I’ll buy us all good seats. Good singer, good songwriter, and a worthy cause.”

  Gwen glowered at her mother and walked out in her usual shoulders-forward, head-down kind of slouch. Ethan swiped an apple off the counter and followed her out.

  “Can we leave our children with friends for a couple years and take a vacation?” Evelyn asked.

  “Sure. Where do you want to go?”

  “When I was in Rice Canyon today it made me think of Pala Casino. The hotel room, actually.” She looked up at him with a small smile.

  “With two child-free years we can do better than an Indian casino.”

  “Somewhere with room service and a good view of something.”

  Brian poured her a little more wine, then another full glass for himself, and Evelyn saw the darkness cross his face. She had always loved his easy optimism but in the last couple of years she’d seen the growing frustration in him that he tried to tamp down with alcohol.

  “Archie and Patrick Norris came by today for a big-picture look at where they stand,” said Brian. “What a mess.” He synopsized their plight. “And the Farm Credit Bank won’t loan for replacement trees. So we sold off some of their retirement investments that had finally come back since the crash. That was a breakeven. And some of the second-issue REITs we got them into—I had to dump them on the secondary market at a loss. That hurt. Evie? I’m getting really tired of watching our friends and clients take our advice then lose what they’ve worked for. The crash, the jobs, the drought, the freeze. Now the fire. It feels … endless.”

  “It’s going to turn, honey,” was the best she could come up with. She suddenly felt exhausted.

  He drank. “But the good news is I paid our fed and state quarterlies today,” he said.

  “The ones due back in September?”

  “Those very ones,” he said softly. “We’ll fall within the penalty grace period. Not worried.”

  “Did you have to raid the college account?”

  Brian studiously did not look at her. “Yeah. And I sold three Gibsons and two Gretsches to replenish it. The Hummingbird. Ouch. But it’s okay. How many guitars does one middle-aged bean counter really need?”

  She came over and kissed his lips lightly and lay her head against his chest. “It’s going to turn, baby. For all of us.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Patrick, Ted, and Archie walked the reeking groves, trying to guess which of the damaged trees might live and which would die. Archibald said that if there was a blessing in this fire it was the speed of it, leaving, possibly, a number of trees still alive. By spring they would see new growth on the survivors, few as they might be. Those without life by April they would cut off at the ground and Norris Brothers would try again to get a Farm Credit Bank loan for replacement trees. Archie said if God smiled on them, which He rarely did anymore, half of the trees were still alive and would make it. A harvest from those trees was three years out now, but if spring showed at least half them alive, the bank would loan. The bank would have to loan on forty acres of good Haas avocados.

  Patrick knew that if replacement trees were watered generously, and did not get Phytophthora root rot, or stem canker or sunblotch disease, or fall prey to looper worms, amorbia larvae, thrips, mites, or worms, they would produce fruit in three years. Three years, thought Patrick. And there had already been no pick earlier this year because of the March freeze. He thought of Pharaoh and wondered what his father had done to bring all of this down on them, knowing he had done nothing.

  But in the meantime, there was plenty to do. First was to paint the southwest exposure of each tree with a fifty-fifty mix of white paint and water to prevent sunburn of the unprotected trunks and branches. This should be done quickly. Then they’d replace the damaged irrigation line, risers, sprinklers, valves, and timers. When that was done the whole system would need to be flushed to keep the mains clean. After that they’d need to circle each tree with straw, out to fifteen feet per tree, to keep the fall rains from washing away the soil. All the while, Archie would continue to make the rounds to the other Farm Credit banks, begging them to do their jobs, as he put it.

  * * *

  The brothers started with the irrigation and Archie began the painting. Patrick worked with his shirt off an
d enjoyed the mild autumn sun on his back. He ducked under the seared branches and walked the grids looking for melted line and sprayers. Plastic was no match for a wildfire. He was soon as black as the trees, the ash got through his bandana into his mouth and nose, and his safety goggles needed constant wiping. He saw that Ted was mostly black also, but he had some lightness in his step, in spite of his bad feet, and he was moving about with his shoulders back, attempting to hold his gut in.

  Patrick’s phone vibrated in his pants pocket and he was pleased to see platoon-mate John Bostik’s name on the screen. “Boss.”

  “Hey, Pat. What are you doing?”

  “Labor.”

  “Everything burned up?”

  “Pretty much. You?”

  “Maria kicked me out so I got my own place in Oceanside. You should come over sometime. Party.”

  “That’s too bad about the girl.”

  “It’s cool. I just met her and I was driving her crazy. I can’t sleep or concentrate. The littlest things freak me out. Fuckin’ car backfired yesterday and I just about lost it. Everybody around me just pisses me off.”

  “Yeah, me too, the little things. I’m getting some sleep, a little. It’s weird not being crowded in. Maybe you should see a doctor, get some pills.”

  “I already got more pills than I can take. Maybe we all could hook up after the Three-Five memorial.”

  “We’ll do that. I’ll talk to Salimony and Messina. You hang in there, Boss.”

  Bostic had operated a heavy explosives detector known as a Minehound for thirteen straight months. He had often been silent, Patrick remembered—silent as he listened for the sound of metal registering through his headset. Bostic was the platoon’s silent ears. Now Bostic was quiet again for a long moment. “I heard ‘Paint It Black’ in a bar and almost couldn’t take it. That’s how I feel. I hate this. I’d way rather be back in Sangin getting my ass shot at. At least I had something to do and training to do it. The only job I can get here is boxing groceries at the PX on base. And outside base, man, it’s just children and grown-up children. America doesn’t go to war, America goes to the mall. Everybody smiles and says thanks for what I did. They don’t know shit about what I did and they don’t want to know.”