California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “When did you move from the trailer?” Letty says as she gets out of her car in the Guest Parking slip.

  Jack says, “When they tore the park down to build condos I couldn’t afford. So I bought this place.”

  This place is a one-bedroom condo on the top floor of a three-condo unit. There are two units below him, sort of out and away as they slope down the hill. As a matter of fact, the two units get a little more out and a little more away every day because they’re literally moving downhill.

  Jack explains, “They built this back in the boom days in the ’80s when they couldn’t throw this shit up fast enough. Everybody and his uncle was a contractor all of a sudden and there was big money to be made, so they cut corners with a chain saw. They were in too big a hurry to compact the soil properly, so every building pad is on shifting ground. The whole damn complex is slowly sliding downhill. The homeowners association is trying to sue the contractors, but they’re long gone in the recession. So now the association is suing the contractors’ insurance company. And so on and so on … Anyway, the complex is heading back toward the ocean.”

  “I thought that was only supposed to happen when the Big One hits,” Letty says. The Big One being the Earthquake, the apocalyptic event that everyone in So-Cal jokes about and dreads.

  “It won’t take the Big One,” Jack says. “See those hills behind us? Those are about the last undeveloped hillsides on the south coast. There’s another stretch above Laguna, and another one above San Clemente.

  “It’s fire season—hot, dry, windy—and those hills are covered with brush. One spark on a windy day and we’ll be fighting the fire from the beach again. It’ll blow down these canyons, surround all these complexes, some will burn down, others will make it.

  “After fire season comes the rainy season. We haven’t had a serious one in a few years, but we’re due. So say we get a big fire and the brush is burned off those slopes. Then the rains come …

  “The mother of all mudslides. All these hillsides that they shaved off and built this crap on, they’re all coming down. All these condos and town houses built on shifting soil? They’ll collapse from the bottom up because the ground will literally give out beneath them. We’ll slide down the hill in a flow of cheap materials, bad construction and mud.

  “First Mother Nature burns it, then she flushes it.”

  “You’d like that, Jack, wouldn’t you?”

  They’re standing in the street by his garage. Beneath a row of condo buildings that are all exactly identical.

  Jack says, “Maybe I would.”

  Maybe then they wouldn’t get a chance to ruin the Strands.

  There’s a note on his garage door.

  Owners of one-car garages are expected to park their vehicle in that garage, not in parking slots on the street. The garages are intended for vehicles, not surfboard workshops.

  —The Homeowners Association

  “Surfboard workshop?”

  “I have a couple of old boards in there,” Jack says. Because of the cantilevered design of the building, Jack’s garage sits directly below his kitchen. He pushes a remote button on a handheld clicker and the garage door opens with a metallic groan.

  A surfboard workshop isn’t a bad description, Letty thinks.

  Jack has two old longboards on sawhorses and a couple more hung up on racks. The garage smells of surf wax and wood finish. There are posters from old surf movies on the walls.

  “You never change, Jack,” Letty says.

  “This is the best one,” Jack says. He rubs a hand along an old wooden longboard stretched across two sawhorses. It has three grains of wood, dark wood blended into light—beautifully jointed, seamless. A flawless piece of work. “Made by Dale Velzy back in 1957.”

  “It was your dad’s.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember these things.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You’re stuck in the past,” she says.

  “It was better then,” Jack says.

  “Okay.”

  They go up the sixteen concrete steps to his door.

  Jack’s condo is Plan C—“The Admiralty.” To the right as you come in is a small but functional kitchen with a window that looks out at the cul-de-sac end of the condo complex, and on a clear day has a view of Saddleback Butte to the east. To the left is a dining alcove and then a living room with a fireplace. The bedroom is off the living room to the left.

  A sliding glass door off the living room leads to a small balcony.

  “Mira,” Letty says. “You have some view.”

  She steps out onto his balcony.

  “Yeah,” Jack says, nodding to a strip mall that sits across Golden Lantern down to the right. “I can see Hughes Market, Burger King and the dry cleaners. In a west wind, I can smell the grease from Burger King. An east wind, I get garlic from the Italian place.”

  “Come on,” Letty says, because the view from the balcony is spectacular. Disregard the strip mall, and the condos down the slope, and look straight ahead and you have miles of ocean horizon. You can see Catalina Island to the right and San Clemente Island straight ahead. Dana Point Harbor is behind a knoll just to the left and then it’s open coast all the way down to Mexico.

  “You must have some great sunsets,” Letty says.

  “It’s pretty,” Jack says. “In the winter the ocean rises up like this big blue bar of color. It’s two miles away, but at least I can see it.”

  “Are you kidding? This is a million-dollar view.”

  The place cost him $260,000—cheap by local standards.

  Letty says, “I think I’m going to start crying again.”

  “Do you want someone with you or do you want to be alone?”

  “Alone.”

  He’s about to say Mi casa es su casa, but thinks better of it.

  “The place is yours,” Jack says.

  “I don’t mean to kick you out.”

  “I have things I can do downstairs,” he says. “If you need me, stamp on the floor or something. I’ll hear you.”

  “Okay.”

  He gets out quick because even saying okay her voice quivers and her eyes are full. So he goes down in the garage and works on the board. Takes a sheet of 000 sandpaper, folds it over a block of wood and runs it up and down the length of the board. Slowly, lightly, he gets into a rhythm, sanding the old balsa down to a high, smooth finish.

  Upstairs he can hear her sobbing. Sobbing and yelling and throwing pillows and stuff and he half expects to get a call from the association telling him that his condo is a residence, not a funeral home or a shrink’s office, and that open displays of grief are in violation of the CC&Rs.

  It’s an hour and a half before it gets quiet up there.

  Jack waits another twenty minutes and then goes up.

  She’s asleep on his couch.

  Her face is puffy and her eyes are slits, but they’re closed anyway. Her black hair is splayed out on the pillow.

  Watching her sleep is something wonderful and painful. Letty asleep is like an underground fire—placid and beautiful on the surface, but something always smoldering underneath, waiting to ignite. He remembers that from when they were together and he’d wake up earlier and look at her lying there and he’d ask himself what he ever did that someone that beautiful and that good could be with him.

  And twelve years later, he thinks, I’m still in love with you.

  So what? he thinks. I threw you away.

  Like something tossed into the ocean, and now a wave washes up on my little stretch of the beach. Life giving you back something you don’t deserve.

  Don’t get carried away, he thinks. Take a step away from yourself. She’s not back because she loves you; she’s back because she needs you.

  Because there was a fire and her sister died.

  He gets a spare blanket from the hall closet and puts it over her.

  Her story doesn’t change a thing. Pam had a history of alcoholism, a history of p
ills. Her blood tested positive for both.

  Nothing Letty says can change that story.

  The only thing that can really tell the story, Jack knows, is the fire.

  41

  Fire has a language.

  It’s small wonder, Jack thinks, that they refer to “tongues of flame,” because fire will talk to you. It will talk to you while it’s burning—color of flame, color of smoke, rate of spread, the sounds it makes while it burns different substances—and it will leave a written account of itself after it’s burned out.

  Fire is its own historian.

  It’s so damned proud of itself, Jack thinks, that it just can’t help telling you about what it did and how it did it.

  Which is why first thing the next morning Jack is in the Vales’ bedroom.

  He stands there in that dark fatal room and he can hear the fire whispering to him. Challenging him, taunting him. Like, Read me, you’re so smart. I’ve left it all here for you but you have to know the language. You have to speak my tongue.

  It’s okay with me, Jack thinks.

  I speak fluent fire.

  Start with the bed.

  Because Bentley called it the point of origin and because that’s just what it looks like.

  They had to scrape her off the springs.

  In fact, Jack can see the traces of dried blood on the metal. Can smell the unmistakable smell of a burned body.

  And the bedsprings themselves—twisted, congealed. It takes a hot fire to do that, Jack knows. This kind of metal only starts to melt at 2,000°F.

  That’s the fire telling you, I’m bad, baby. I’m a badass fire and I did her in the bed.

  Then there’s the hole in the roof. What’s known in the trade as a BLEVE, a boiling liquid evaporation explosion. Also known as a chimney effect. The fire ignites at the point of origin, and the superheated gases rise and form a fireball. The fireball hits the ceiling and boom. Which certainly means that something hot and heavy happened around the bed. Fire saying, I’m so bad you can’t even keep me in the room, Jack. I’m so big and bad I have to fly. Break out, baby. Show my stuff to the sky.

  Jack looks down and sees where Bentley dug through the ashes on the floor by the left side of the bed, and he can see the vodka stain—the spalling—literally burned into the wood floor. He can see some shards of smoked, oily glass, including the neck of the bottle.

  He can see where Bentley got his theory.

  But the lazy bastard just stopped there. Saw an Insta-Answer and grabbed at it so he could start packing for the big fishing trip.

  So Jack keeps looking.

  Not only because he thinks Bentley is a cretin, not only because of Letty’s story, but also because it’s just laziness to repeat someone else’s work. That’s where mistakes—if indeed there is a mistake here—get perpetuated. One lazy bastard after another copying each other’s work.

  A circle jerk of error.

  So start again.

  Start from scratch with no preconceptions and listen to the fire.

  The first thing that the fire is telling him is that it burned a whole lot of stuff in this room, because Jack’s standing in char up to his ankles. He clips his Dictaphone inside his shirt and starts talking notes.

  “Note ankle-deep char,” Jack says. “Indicates the probability of heavy fuel load. Whether primarily live load or dead load I can’t tell at this point.”

  The heavy char tells Jack something else he isn’t going to speak into the tape. Usually heavy char means a hot, fast fire, simply because it shows that fire had the chance to burn a lot of stuff—fast—before the Fire Department could get there and put it out.

  So the next thing he looks at is the char pattern.

  If fire has a language, then the char pattern is its grammar, its sentence structure, its subject-verb-object. And the sentences this pattern is banging out are like Kerouac on speed, because it’s like verb-verb-verb, it’s talking about a fire that was moving, man, not stopping for periods or commas or nothing.

  Jack’s thinking that this fire was rolling. Because Jack’s looking at what’s known in the business as “alligator” char. It looks like what it sounds like, the skin of an alligator. What happens is that a hot fire moves fast. It burns quickly and moves on, so it leaves sharp lines of demarcation between what it burns and what it doesn’t. Turns out looking like alligator skin.

  The hotter the fire, the faster it burns, the bigger the alligator you got.

  Jack’s looking at one big alligator here.

  He scans the charred remains of what had been the expensive white-and-gold wallpaper, which is going to cost a bundle to replace, and he questions whether this wallpaper, pricey as it was, was sufficient fuel to feed this hungry an alligator.

  He doesn’t say that into the tape recorder, though. He keeps those thoughts to himself. What he says into the recorder is, “Moving along the west wall of the bedroom, I observe large, alligator-type char.”

  Observing it’s one thing, recording it’s another, because the room is black, and black photographs like nothing. So Jack hauls out his portable flash unit and starts “painting” the room with the light.

  He stands in one corner and looks through the camera viewfinder as he moves the light out from one wall toward the center of the room. He observes where the light fades so he knows where he’ll need to start for the next shot. He snaps his shots—color and black-and-white—and then moves the flash in toward the center of the room. Then he moves to another corner and repeats the process and so on and so forth until he has the room covered. He jots down a note for every shot he takes and speaks what he’s doing into the tape recorder.

  Then he draws a rough sketch of the room and notes where he was standing for each shot and what part of the room the shot covered. So when the smart-ass lawyer asks him, “You don’t really know that you were standing in the southwest corner when you took this photograph, do you?” Jack can whip out the notebook and say, “Actually I do, counselor, because it’s my practice to make notes of my location when …”

  Because the point is, Jack thinks, that you have to do it every time. Take your time, do it right, go on to the next task.

  So the next thing he does is measures.

  Gets out a steel tape and measures the dimensions of the room and notes certain “landmarks” from which he can triangulate. He has a number of marks to do it from, because the big furniture in the room left heat shadows.

  Pale marks on the wall—reverse silhouettes, if you will—where the heavy furniture shielded the wall from the initial flashover. So he uses two of the heat shadows as triangulation points and moves on, goes back to listening to the fire.

  What else does the fire have to say?

  The char on the rafters.

  Same thing, alligator char on the wood, sharp lines of demarcation between the bottom edge of the rafters, which is heavily charred, and the top edge, which isn’t.

  Nothing unusual there, Jack thinks. Fire burns up, so you’d expect to see the bottom edges of the rafters more heavily charred than the top. And you’d expect to see the heaviest char directly above the bed, where the fire burned the longest. What you wouldn’t necessarily expect is what Jack’s seeing, and that is that there are several areas of the rafters that are showing heavier char than others. One over by the opposite wall, one by the closet, another by the door that leads into the bathroom.

  “Note heavy char on rafters above bed,” Jack says. “Sharp lines of demarcation. Note also, heavier char on rafters near closet and near entrance to bathroom.”

  Jack takes out a steel ruler and jams it into the middle of a char blister on the rafter above the bed.

  “Char is one and three-eighths inches deep on rafter above bed,” he says, and then does the same for the other two areas. “One and three-eighths on area near closet. One and three-eighths on area by entrance to bathroom.”

  Then he measures two points in the rafters that look less heavily charred. The char is an inch deep.r />
  Which is interesting, Jack thinks, because there can’t be three places where the fire burned the longest. Not accidentally. Of course, there could be other explanations. Depends on what was sitting under those charred rafters. Maybe there was something really tasty for the alligator, something that burned hot and deep and long. That could explain the apparent anomaly.

  Then again, the dog was out in the yard when it wasn’t supposed to be. And the flames were the wrong color, and the smoke was the wrong color.

  That, combined with three hot spots on the rafters, is starting to get Jack pissed off.

  Jack knows what Bentley did. Bentley looked at the hole in the roof above the bed, looked at the heavy char on the rafters above the bed, dug the ashes from around the bed and saw that the fire had burned into the floor. Saw the broken vodka bottle and the burned mattress and the twisted bedsprings and figured he had his point of origin.

  Because there should be only one point of origin and smoking in bed is the number-one cause of fatal bedroom fires.

  Which is good as far as it goes, Jack thinks, but it doesn’t go far enough.

  So Jack goes looking for V-patterns.

  42

  Fire burns up and out.

  Like a V.

  It ignites at the base of the V and flames up—because fire burns up, where the oxygen is—and out, as the atmosphere in the room tries to equalize the heat and pressure.

  It burns up and out from its point of origin and often it leaves a V-pattern mark. In which case the fire points to where it started.

  Now, when a fire starts in the middle of the room, you’re not going to see a V-pattern, because there’s no surface for the fire to mark. When a fire starts away from a wall, what you’d expect to see instead of a V-pattern is a circular pattern on the ceiling above the point of origin.

  Which there certainly is. Above the bed there’s not only a circular burn pattern, there’s a freaking hole blown through the roof. But there’s also ankle-deep ash and deeper char on several places on the rafters and there’s a hole in the roof and there’s a dog barking outside.

  Jack starts in what used to be the closet.