Flash Fire

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Hall felt like a million dollars. He returned home triumphant, yearning to share this huge victory with somebody, but his parents thought Geoffrey was creepy, and they didn’t like their fifteen-year-old son hanging out with a four-year-old, even though at the same time they were mad at the Aszlings for giving up and proud of Hall for bothering.

  Intellectually, Halstead Press knew that fire raged in twelve different places around Los Angeles, but Hall was a person who thought about people, not events. He floated on his back, staring at a sky that was normally blue, shading his eyes to keep the ash out, and planning Geoffrey’s progress.

  The Brushfire

  3:21 P.M.

  FIRE CREATES ITS OWN WEATHER.

  Around the firefighters up Grass Canyon, the wind became an invisible vortex, getting hotter and hotter, swifter and swifter. It had just become a tornado that nobody could see.

  Without warning — or at least any warning the firefighters saw — the heat sucked the flames skyward, into a sudden horrific wall of flame.

  It’s one thing to fight a fire around your ankles.

  It’s quite another to fight a fire a hundred feet tall.

  The rules and the hope changed in half a minute.

  They stopped trying to fight it.

  They practiced staying alive until it moved on.

  The Aszling House

  3:23 P.M.

  OF COURSE ELONY WASN’T allowed to smoke in the house. Mr. and Mrs. Aszling regarded cigarettes like an invasion of gangs bent on murder. Let her light up a cigarette and they’d be in there shrieking and fanning the air and shooing her outside.

  Elony loved smoking.

  You couldn’t tell her it wasn’t fun. It felt good, it gave you energy, it was your own private pleasure, and if she had to give up Spanish, she sure wasn’t giving up cigarettes.

  She stepped outside to have a cigarette. Elony flinched at the heat. She could hardly believe it was this hot. She felt a creepy prickle on her skin, as if she were freezing in the heat. These fires. It was awful, what was happening to this beautiful beautiful city.

  Elony loved LA. It was so full of itself. She loved being part of the huge event that was LA: the huge event of everybody doing better. Elony was going to do better, too. She was going to get rich and drive a car and buy beautiful clothing that fit.

  The key, she had decided, was reading. The big gap between her and the Anglos wasn’t skin and wasn’t green cards and wasn’t height and wasn’t even language.

  The big gap was that they could read and she could not.

  Elony was fighting her way toward reading, without the slightest idea how. There had been no school in her lifetime in her village. She had come to the conclusion that she had to get English inside her mind, not just on her lips. Today she would start thinking in English. All other thoughts she would push out of her mind.

  It was killing her.

  It made her blink and flinch and frown and twitch. Strangers must think she was getting a disease.

  I am, she thought. English.

  One entire side of the vast Aszling house was glass doors. A door cracked, enough for a head to poke out, but not enough to let the air-conditioning out. Elony had just washed every single one of those immense panes of glass, inside and out. She let smoke slowly leave her lungs as Chiffon’s sneaky little eyes checked her over. Chiffon was Baby Geoffrey’s nurse, not that Chiffon had ever once made the slightest effort to do a single thing with Geoffrey other than be sure he didn’t drown in the pool.

  “I’m going out for a while, Elony,” called the Anglo girl, car keys in her hand. Chiffon was pretty in the borderline way that meant she thought more of her looks than other people did. She was probably going to have her nails done, or her hair. She was always taking a key to the best car the Aszlings had not driven that day, and going off on errands. Hers, not the Aszlings.

  Elony tapped her watch. “Bus,” she shouted at Chiffon. “You stay. I go.” Elony had a two-hour bus ride down Grass Canyon, down the Pacific Coast Highway, and finally into LA. Sometimes the bus’s air-conditioning worked and sometimes it didn’t. Elony had exactly two more minutes left in her work day, and then she had to hustle down Pinch Canyon Road to get the bus at Grass Canyon.

  “You can stay late, Elony,” explained Chiffon, since Elony’s life and plans didn’t matter. “I have to do this stuff, it’s important. I’ll be back in an hour or two.” Chiffon waved, as if a flick of the wrist made everything okay, and darted off.

  “No, you stay!” shouted Elony. She raced back into the house after Chiffon, chasing her through the huge rooms and up the occasional wide flat step that divided one space from another. Elony hated how she didn’t have enough English to go around for situations like this.

  But Chiffon had had too much of a head start. Giggling triumphantly, Chiffon waved and drove off.

  I hate you! thought Elony.

  No cigarette would make her feel better about missing the bus. What was she supposed to do now? Leave the little boy alone in the house? The maddening thing was that Mr. or Mrs. Aszling would care only if somebody found out. They just wanted to look like good parents.

  Nobody would pay her overtime for staying with Geoffrey. She had found out that Mrs. Aszling was breaking laws by paying her so little. She also knew if she mentioned it, Mrs. Aszling would fire her. If Elony missed the bus, one of them would have to drive her home. She knew from experience that instead of thanking her for staying with Geoffrey, they’d just be mad about the long drive.

  Mr. and Mrs. Aszling had not bothered to learn how to pronounce her name. They never talked to her. Never asked any questions. Never said, “How did you get to the States, Elony?”

  So she’d never told them about the civil war she had survived, the brutal hike over mountains, the fording of a river full of disease and corpses. How she had paid for that border crossing in a stinking airless truck: with her body. They never even asked how old she was.

  Seventeen.

  Here in America, seventeen-year-olds were still children. Not Elony. Elony scrubbed toilets, mopped floors, polished furniture, and ironed more clothing every week than her entire village had possessed.

  The baby is not my responsibility, thought Elony, furiously stubbing out the cigarette. He’s Chiffon’s.

  Elony didn’t look in on Geoffrey. He would be exactly where Chiffon had left him, curled on floor pillows, sucking his thumb, watching for the zillionth time a tape of Cops. Geoffrey loved Cops as long as he was safely wrapped in his blankie.

  The blankie drove Mr. and Mrs. Aszling wild.

  It was three yards of velour, a gaudy vivid fuschia purple, from which Elony had meant to sew a bathrobe for herself, until Geoffrey adopted it. Geoffrey didn’t like to meet strangers without his velour. Mr. and Mrs. Aszling never suggested repaying Elony for the cloth.

  Geoffrey never moves anyway, she told herself. He’ll be fine. He’ll just lie there in his blankie.

  Elony got her purse, an immense black carrier in which she kept her entire life, and left the house. At the top of the four-fingered Aszling driveway, in the shade of the thick pines, she lit another cigarette. In this appalling heat, shade made no difference whatsoever. Hurrying down the steep switchbacks, she passed the paddock behind the Luu house, where the two horses always frightened her, and then the Press house. It hurt her ankles to go downhill because it was so steep.

  Down on Pinch Canyon Road, half hidden by the two-story green exclamation points of cypress trees, were Mexican yardmen waving, but not at Elony. They were hoping to get a ride with the Severyn boy, who usually obliged anybody fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

  Elony hurried, so as to be in the right place at the right time.

  The Severyn House

  3:25 P.M.

  BEAU SEVERYN WAS BORED.

  Everything about life and school bored him these days. He didn’t want to be bothered. His parents regarded boredom as failure: It meant you weren’
t disciplined enough, or trying hard enough.

  LaLa Land, they called this place. To Beau, “la la” meant frothy people who never stopped to think. Beau had never met anybody like that in Los Angeles. This was the thinking-est crowd on earth: how to get ahead, how to mold a better body, how to have a better relationship, how to score, earn, fight, win, get published, be a star.

  Beau phoned his father at work, although Dad didn’t like him to do that. Dad was in charge of network news advertising. Companies didn’t like sponsoring disasters; they yanked their ads when the news was race riots or celebrity murder trials or baseball strikes or, in this case, fire. Dad was a wreck over the fires, but it wasn’t the fires wrecking him; it was advertisers whimpering their way out of contracts. Dad was losing millions and he was ulcerated and crazed. “Yes, Beau, what is it?” snapped his father, implying that it had better be good. His father had no use for people, especially sons, who were not the best.

  “Dad, the television says the fires are getting a little closer.” It was not the fires that worried Beau and it was not the fires he wanted his father to talk about. But he and his father did not have intimate conversations, or even conversations, and he could only recite, as his father did, the news.

  “What did I tell you last night, Beau? Pinch Mountain is a firebreak. That little brush fire last year burned every twig. The whole wilderness back there is naked as a baby. In any event, the fires are miles away.” His father’s voice was raspy and tense.

  Beau knew his father wanted a cigarette. Giving up smoking was killing Dad. He’d be better off risking lung cancer than getting this frantic. But Beau didn’t say so. Mom acted as if the most important thing in the history of time was Dad quitting cigarettes. When Dad took a deep deep breath Beau could hear through the phone, it wasn’t Dad schooling himself to be patient with his son; it was a pretend lungful of friendly calming wonderful smoke.

  “Dad,” said Beau, who had been up on that mountain with Halstead Press, fooling around, and knew that the result of last year’s minor fire was that the undergrowth this year was stronger and fuller than ever, “the mayor is ordering evacuations — ”

  “Miles from you!” snapped his father. “What are you really asking me, David?”

  David was his real name. Mom and Dad used it only in anger, never in love. It gave Beau the creeps, as if his real name were poisoned now and could never be used.

  Beau avoided the topic of what he was really asking, just as the entire family had avoided it for so long. “If we had to evacuate the house,” he said finally, “what should we save? I mean — ”

  He meant the box. The dumb stupid box on the mantelpiece that he thought about all the time now.

  “Beau, your mother and I do not worry about earthquakes or fires. We take our chances. The odds are in our favor.” Beau’s parents did not approve of worry. If you had enough self-discipline and paid enough attention to the details, you could dispense with worry. Therefore it was against the rules for Beau to say that his life was evenly divided between boredom and worry.

  “I know, Dad. I guess, just in case, I was trying to work out — ”

  “If something goes wrong, Beau, I have faith in you. You’ll handle things. Now listen, I’m in a meeting.”

  Beau hung up slowly and surveyed his house. Twelve thousand square feet, enough for a high school in some parts of the world. Each time the network paid his father more, his parents bought more house and more car to match. Beau loved the sheer size of it — room after room after room, each a great spread of cool tile floor the color of sliced cucumber. Glass walls illuminated the dusty olive California hills and the indigo sky, backlit with California sun.

  Except now, of course, when it was backlit by distant fires.

  Outside, oak and pine, oleander and cypress leaned against each other, their branches and scents interwoven. A reflecting pool filled the huge atrium, while the lap pool lined the highest part of the property like a canal.

  There were not many houses on Pinch Canyon because there were not many building sites. The Severyns had the most beautiful spot of all, said his mother, and although Beau did not agree with his mother on much, he agreed with her on that.

  Beau went outside to check garden hoses. If fire came, he didn’t care how much danger there was nor how foolhardy it might be: He was staying with the house. It made him feel wide-chested and great-hearted to make that resolution. He rather hoped he would have to defend his property, with a great blazing enemy to stave off.

  The two maids and the two groundskeepers were leaving. The Mexicans paused, hoping Beau would drive them down to the bus stop. They didn’t want to walk in this heat. The bus would pick them up on Grass Canyon Road, and two miles down Grass the road would intersect with the Pacific Coast Highway. From there they would sit stolidly for however long it took to reach their Los Angeles neighborhood.

  It would have been impossible to live the way Pinch Canyon did and not have household help. What with careers and shopping, luncheon dates and fashion decisions, body sculpting and aromatherapy and relationship discussion, who had time to cook or clean? Beau’s parents had no idea what a household chore was and certainly never expected their children to do one. They could not imagine washing their own car or doing their own laundry. Beau’s mother would no sooner contribute to a school bake sale than swim in a storm drain.

  His parents were fond of their children, but on the side. Like a sauce they might not want once they tasted it.

  Halstead and Danna Press referred to their parents as SuperMom and SuperDad. Beau privately referred to his as SemiDad and NeverMom. He liked them. If he, too, were a grown-up, he’d enjoy their company and be friends. But they were not actually parents in any sense. They were beautiful, rich people who maintained a beautiful house in which they kept children who had better be beautiful, too.

  Poor Elisabeth did not meet the guidelines. Last week, Beau’s mother lamented to her women friends, “How could Aden and I, of all people, turn out a knock-kneed, nearsighted, overweight, boring little girl?”

  “Mom, don’t talk like that about Elisabeth,” said Beau afterward. “Lighten up. She’s only eight. Give her time.”

  “Beau, darling, these are my friends. They understand. I need understanding. You don’t know how difficult it is, a daughter like that. Let me describe to you what I had in mind.”

  Elisabeth was never going to be what Mom had in mind.

  “Would you like a ride to the bus stop?” Beau asked the help.

  They nodded. There were never conversations with the help, just orders and nods.

  “Wanna play tennis?” he asked his sister on the way to the garage. Tennis was an essential skill in their circle. He was always trying to tutor Elisabeth in the essentials.

  “You’ll beat me.” Elisabeth invariably took that view: Why do anything; somebody will beat me. Mom of course hated having a daughter so lacking in drive and self-discipline.

  “You need practice, Lizzie. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  Beau took the Suburban. His parents had bought it on a whim, immediately hated it and never touched it again. Everybody else had bought English: Land Rover or Range Rover. Beau loved the Suburban. With room to ferry a small band and its equipment, or else half a sports team, it was high off the road, heavy but easy to maneuver, and the driver had a great view and tons of power.

  He picked up two more yardmen trudging down Pinch, and honked as he approached the gate so he wouldn’t have to slow down. The guard was poky opening up, and Beau had to come to a full stop. He made sure to glare at the guy to let him know he’d better not cause this problem on Beau’s return.

  Grass Canyon Road

  3:30 P.M.

  MATT MARSH WAS THE happiest, most excited twenty-two-year-old in the great state of California.

  It was the big game. And he was on the team.

  He was wearing a new helmet, since the old one had melted fighting yesterday’s Altadena fire, and he was using, o
f course, a new hose, since the one he had held to save his own life had also melted.

  Matt referred to the fires in sports terms: The score, for example was: 100,000 acres burned, 240 houses destroyed, 44 casualties, no deaths.

  In some weird way, Matt was cheering for the fire.

  He was awed by it. Stunned by it. Fascinated by it. They were fighting it hard and relentlessly, and yet it was winning: Winning so brilliantly, he could only admire it. It was like getting beaten by the world champion: There was a certain valor even in defeat.

  He was gleeful about his army’s numbers: 85 engines, 30 bulldozers, 31 water tenders, 8 aerial bombers, 7 helicopters.

  And one huge awesome spectacular lethal fire.

  And that was just Grass Canyon! There were another ten or so fires elsewhere. Matt, like most of the firefighters, was mutual aiding. Each town offered its services and equipment to the neighborhood that needed them most. Matt, however, knew this part of LA well: He’d grown up a few miles south of here, in Pinch Canyon.

  Command knew that Grass would be tough to defend. Where there were houses, of course, people soaked lawns at night with sprinklers, and so the gardens and grass were green and lush and somewhat damp. But above the houses, Grass Canyon rose rather gently to three- and four-hundred-foot heights, covered by shrubby, weedy growth that was thick, sturdy, and very very dry. Previous fires had not touched it. Mud had not slid down it. Grass Canyon was just thousands of acres of tinder.

  Therefore, the critical objective was to hold the fire north of the wide asphalt break of the road itself.

  They did not have a hope of actually putting the approaching fire out. It was mammoth and many sided, driven by maddened wind. The fire was not neat. It zigged, it hopscotched, it doubled back. There were few places actually to set up lines of defense.