Even then, even in those first few frenzied seconds, I knew that our lives were at stake, that the fire, once loosed on the parched fields, would burn to Ukiah. We’d gone five months without water. Alder, manzanita, pine, hollow grass and withered scrub — it was all kindling, stacked and waiting. This was no grassfire we had here, no mere acre-scorcher or garage fire, this was the germ of the conflagration, the blaze that leaps into the air and rushes through the trees like apocalypse, the fire that outruns you, chokes you, incinerates you. I fought it. No thought of quitting, running, ducking out: this was the end of the line.
I stood just inside the doorway, flailing at the flames with an old overcoat. Across the room — through a gauntlet of heaped refuse and sudden startling splashes of fire — stood the jerrycans of gasoline. Four of them. The fire flowed toward them like the tide rising on a beach and I saw that they would be enveloped in a matter of minutes, and thought of teenaged Phil in the dump truck, too stupid to realize he was about to die. I was stupid, too. Beating back the flames with the smoldering overcoat, breathing fire, my eyes tearing with the smoke and ears slapped and stung by the roar, I pictured that moment of crushing combustion: my flesh — fat and lean — sizzling like bacon, roiling clouds of fire, the house going up as if napalmed. They’d never even find my bones.
At this juncture, Phil appeared in the doorway. He was shirtless, his sneakers were steaming and his head looked like a scorched onion. In one hand he held an intermittently spurting garden hose, in the other a dripping mop. Though his eyes gave away his terror — the sockets could barely contain them, the wild ducking eyes of horses trapped in a burning barn — he trained the hose on the heart of the blaze and began swabbing the heaps of burning refuse like a frenetic scrubwoman. Encouraged, I edged forward and lifted the nearest mattress, itself aflame now, and slammed it down again, momentarily damping the fire so that I could tear through the room to the cans of gasoline.
I tore. Through Stygian gloom and Tartarean fire, through a smoldering clutter that would have given a fire marshall nightmares, kicking aside paint cans and leaping mounds of fuming rags and discarded clothes. When I reached the far side of the room I couldn’t see Phil or the open doorway. The jerrycans were hot to the touch. I crouched over them, bending low to snatch a quick breath beneath the loops of smoke raveling down from the ceiling, thinking What next? Was I really going to sprint through that inferno with a pair of ten-gallon cans of gasoline tucked under my arm? Twice, no less? I saw smoke, flames like teeth. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Insidious, the image of a Buddhist monk, his charred frame the center in a whirling jacket of fire, came to me. So this is heroism, I thought, feeling like the buck private who flings himself on the hand grenade to save his buddies in the foxhole, the platoon, the general and his chiefs of staff, and by extension the whole of the United States and the American way of life. I.e., foolish.
Protean, the flames licked at the walls, roared beneath the elevated floorboards, tendrils and creepers of some spontaneous, irreversible growth. I was coughing, my lungs turned inside out like a pair of rubber gloves. The jerrycans weren’t getting any cooler. As from a great distance I heard Phil shouting my name, but I’d begun to feel dizzy, sleepy somehow. Smoke inhalation, I thought numbly, and inhaled more smoke, pinching my eyes shut against the acid haze. In another moment I’d be too groggy to stand, let alone heft eighty-pound cans of gasoline.
It was then — the pyre awaiting me, my throat constricting, inertia pinning me to the spot — that I became aware of an almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, a flow of cooler air, the soft incongruous touch of a breeze on the back of my neck. I jerked round to discover the rents Marlon had torn in the back wall — jagged, night-black, rents the size of jerrycans. The fire talked to me, harsh and sibilant, but I didn’t listen. One, two, three, four, the cans were gone, tumbled in the grass, and I was ducking across the room like a deserter in no-man’s-land. Phil gave me a wild desperate look as I flung myself past him and out into the open, where I fell to my knees and coughed till I thought I was about to give birth.
Twenty minutes later we were still at it. Stripped to the waist like stokers, soot-blackened and viscid with sweat, we plied shovels, hauled buckets of dirt, stamped out a grassfire on one side of the shed while flinging burning rubbish out of the door on the other. It was impossible, maddening, a losing proposition: one minute we’d think we finally had things under control, and the next flames would be spitting in our faces. We might have escaped the holocaust — the single scorching gasoline-fed blast that would have decided the issue once and for all — but the steady incremental force of the fire was beginning to take its toll. Phil was hurting, his chest and shoulders scoriated with whiplash burns, his right forearm slick with pus. He looked tired, scared, worn, looked as if he were about to throw down his shovel and bolt for the car. I didn’t feel much better. Though we’d worked like automatons, oblivious to heat, thirst, pain, worked without remit and in perfect accord, grunting instructions to each other, rushing from one threat to the next in feverish concentration — though we plumbed the depths of our physical and spiritual resources, reached down deep inside ourselves for that something extra and got it — we were barely running even. And we weren’t getting any stronger.
If we’d had water pressure it might have been different. But the hose, drawing on the spring-fed tank that supplied the house, could deliver no more than a trickle. (The water table was low, the tank small — a class of thirsty kindergartners could have come in off the playground and drained the entire thing without blinking. In better times — that is, when our lives weren’t imminently threatened by an advancing inferno — this was merely an annoyance; now it was critical.) Within minutes Phil’s mop had gone up like a pitch-pine torch, and we began to recognize the futility of attempting to fight a three-alarm blaze with teacups of water. We turned to the mattresses as a stopgap. Flung at the core of the conflagration, they would smother the flames for a minute or two while we frantically scattered burning debris and parried fiery thrusts with our shovels. Of course, this procedure had its drawbacks. Unlike more conventional fire-fighting agents— water, sand, CO2 foam — bed ticking and cotton batting are themselves flammable, and periodically the mattresses had to be dragged out into the grass and beaten. Soon the grass was ablaze, and we were fighting fires on two fronts.
At some point we’d decided to abandon the mattresses in favor of dirt, and I found myself standing in a knee-deep trench just off the edge of the porch, shoveling like some crazed and fever-racked desperado atop a chest of doubloons. My hands were raw, the fire in the shed spoke with a steady implacable hiss, the mattresses leaked flames into the grass before me. I shoveled. Two scoops on the porch, one in the red-flaming grass. Phil stood above me on the porch, a cutout, flat against the glare, pitching the dirt through the open doorway. This was the shovel brigade. Dig, heave, dig: there was no other rhythm in the world.
I was in the act of lifting my six- or seven-hundredth shovel-load when I was arrested by a new sound from the shed — a fruity, nut-cracking sound, fibers yielding, tree limbs snapping in a gale — and turned to see that a section of the floor had caved in, spewing sparks and glowing cinders into the scrub behind the house. Unleashed, flames shot up through the gap, beating like wings, swelling and shape-shifting till they reached the ceiling. Phil staggered back from the doorway and dropped his shovel just as a can of something volatile — paint thinner? — went up with a percussive wallop. I stopped, too. For the first time since Phil had cried out and I’d started up out of the darkened kitchen, I hesitated. It was overwhelming, hopeless. The shed was engulfed in flame from beneath, the brushfire at my feet was spreading faster than I could cover it, and now the scrub out back was going up, too. I stood there transfixed, my hand clenched round the haft of the useless shovel, the familiar chalky taste of surrender creeping up my throat.