At one point Kevin stopped beside Nadezhda. “I think the choppers might do it,” he said. “You should get some gloves on.”
Nadezhda looked down the line of the break. Gabriela was driving a dozer, shouting happily at a patch of mesquite she was demolishing. Ramona and Hank were hosing down the newly cleared section of firebreak, following a water truck. Alfredo was hacking away at a scrub oak with an axe. Stacey and Jody were running brush to a pick-up, as Nadezhda had been until just a moment before. Many others she had not met were among them performing similar tasks; there must have been a hundred people up there working at this break, maybe two. Several had been injured and were being tended at an ambulance truck. She walked over to look for Tom. “Is this your volunteer fire department?” she asked a medic there.
“Our what? Oh. Well, no. This is our town. Whoever heard about it, you know.”
She nodded.
The firebreak held.
Hank walked up to Tom and held his arm. “House burns, save the nails.”
Just before sunset Hank and Kevin joined Alice Abresh, head of El Modena’s little volunteer fire department, and they drove one of the pick-up trucks back around Black Star Canyon Road, to search for the origins of the fire. In a wind like theirs such a search was relatively simple; find the burnt ground farthest east, and have a look around.
This point turned out to be near the top of a small knoll, in the broken canyony terrain east of Tom’s place. From this hilltop scorched black trees extended in a fan shape to the west, off to the distant firebreak. They could see the whole extent of the burn. “Some plants actually need that fire as part of their cycle,” Hank said.
“In the Sierra,” Alice replied absently, looking around at the ground. She picked up some dirt, crumbled it between her fingers, smelled it. Put some in plastic bags. “Here they mostly just survive it. But they do that real well.”
“Must be several hundred acres at least,” Kevin said.
“You think so?”
“Smell this,” Alice said to them. They smelled the clod of dirt. “This is right where the thing had to start, and it smells to me like kerosene.”
They stared at each other.
“Maybe someone’s campfire got away from them,” Kevin said.
“Certainly a bad luck place for a fire as far as Tom’s concerned,” Hank said. “Right upwind of him.”
Kevin shook his head. “I can’t believe anyone would… do that.”
“Probably not.”
Alice shook her head. “Maybe it was an accident. We’ll have to tell the cops about this, though.”
That night Tom stayed at the house under Rattlesnake Hill, using a guest room just down from Nadezhda’s. When they had seen that the second firebreak would hold, they had led him down to the house, but after a meal and a shower he had taken off again, and was gone all evening, no one knew where. People came by the house with food and clothes, but he wasn’t there. The house residents thanked them.
Nadezhda glanced through the photo album he had saved. Many of the big pages were empty. Others had pictures of kids, Tom looking much younger, his wife. Not very many pictures had been left in the album.
Much later he returned, looking tired. He sat in a chair by the atrium pool. Nadezhda finished washing dishes and went out to sit by him.
The photo album was on the deck beside him. He gestured at it. “I took a lot out and tacked them to the walls, a long time ago. Never put them back in.” He stared at it.
Nadezhda said, “I lost four shoeboxes of pictures once, I don’t even know how or when. One time I went looking for them and they weren’t there.”
She got up and got a bottle of Scotch and two glasses from the kitchen. “Have a drink.”
“Thanks, I will.” He sighed. “What a day.”
“It all happened so fast. I mean, this morning we were biking around and everything was normal.”
“Yeah.” He took a drink. “That’s life.”
They sat. He kicked the photo album. “Just things.”
“Do you want to show them to me?”
“I guess so. You want to see them?”
“Yes.”
He explained them to her one by one. The circumstances for most of them he remembered exactly. A few he was unsure about. “That’s in the apartment, either in San Diego or Santa Cruz, they looked alike.” A few times he stopped talking, just looked, then flipped the big pages over, the clear sheets that covered the photos flapping. Fairly quickly he was through to the last page, which was empty. He stared at it.
“Just things.”
“Not exactly,” Nadezhda said. “But close enough.”
They clicked glasses, drank. Overhead stars came out. Somehow they still smelled of smoke. Slowly they finished the glasses, poured another round.
Tom roused himself. He drained his glass, looked over at her, smiled crookedly. “So when does this ship leave?”
It was strange, Kevin thought, that you could fight a fire, running around slashing brush with an axe until the air burned in your lungs like the fire itself, and yet never feel a thing. To not care, to watch your grandfather’s house ignite, and note how much more smokily plastic burns than pine….
Numb.
He spent a lot of time at work. Setting tile in Oscar’s kitchen around the house computer terminal. Grout all over his hands. Getting into the detail work, the finishing, the touch-ups. You could lose yourself forever in that stuff, bearing down toward perfection far beyond what the eye would ever notice standing in the door. Or lost in the way it was all coming together. Oscar’s house had been an ordinary tract house before, but now with the south rooms all made one, and clerestory windows installed at the top of their walls, they formed a long plant-filled light-charged chamber, against which the living rooms rested, behind walls that did not reach the ceiling. Thus the living rooms—kitchen, family room, reading room—were lit from behind with a warm green light, and had, Kevin thought, an appealing spaciousness. Some floors had been re-leveled, and the pool under the central skylight was surrounded by big ficus trees alternating with black water-filled pillars, giving the house a handsome central area, and the feeling Kevin always strove for, that one was somehow both outdoors and yet protected from the elements. He spent several hours walking through the house, doing touch-up, or sitting and trying to get a feel for how the rooms would look when finished and furnished. It was his usual habit near the end of a project, and comforting. Another job done, another space created and shaped….
He never saw Ramona any more, except at their games. She always greeted him with a smile both bright and wan at once, a smile that told him nothing, except perhaps that she was worried about him. So he didn’t look. He avoided warming up with her so they wouldn’t get into another session of Bullet. Once they were in a four-way warm-up, and lobbed it to each other carefully. She didn’t talk to him as she used to, she spoke in stilted sentences even when cheering him on from the bench. Deliberate, self-conscious, completely unlike her. Oh well.