No cell phone reception for most of it, and no services at all for the 100 miles between Weaverville and the Pacific. You were on your own on 299. It was No Man’s Land.
“You’re wondering why I’m even giving you a ride back to Eureka,” the old man says as they’re passing one of the last flat straight-aways opposite Whiskeytown Lake & its Ghost Town: brick shells of historic buildings usually haunted by tourists but deserted today for some reason. “Partly, I don’t want you lurking around underfoot in the same town with my son.”
“I didn’t take it for a gesture of good will,” Patrick says.
The old man shrugs. “Whatever you say. But I also won’t leave you stranded away from your home stomping grounds just because things didn’t work out for you here.”
“I set you two up in that apartment and you blew it. But you got to understand, if you were my son, it’d be Chris leaving, knife or no knife.” The old man aims those laser beam eyes at Patrick and away again. “But you’re not my son, are you?”
“You’re not my Dad,” Patrick agrees, observing how the Lake, usually dotted with pleasure boats and fishermen, is completely empty: a blind idiot eye mirroring the staring sky.
There’s a California Department of Forestry camp on the side of the highway as they hit Trail Gulch. Dozens of fire trucks are parked or moving, a tent city in place with hundreds of firefighters milling around fussing with gear and hoses, in the background a helicopter hovering a few feet off the ground at an improvised helipad. Lots of comings and goings.
There are ragged banners of smoke scudding toward the Grand Prix over the hills Patrick and the old man are approaching. It’s Fire Season, and the CDF is hard at work as always.
“You think I don’t know where you come from, Patrick?” the old man asks. “Think I don’t know what it’s like?”
“No, you don’t,” Patrick says, as they hit Water Gulch and commence the series of harsh switchbacks and hairpins that lead up to 299’s first summit.
There’s a CDF woman holding a sign as the Grand Prix slows hard for the first switchback. The sign says ‘Danger Fire Zone Ahead.’
Then its hairpins and blind curves, with the old man having to slow the long motorboat Grand Prix to as low as 5 MPH on some of the turns. As they drive back, forth and up, previously burnt areas stretch to both sides of them. That dead charred ground looks like the moon, with blackened toothpick remnants of once living plant life dotted randomly about in the ashen expanses.
Eight miles of back-and-forth hairpins later they hit the summit, 1500 feet higher than at the base.
“You have no complaints you know,” the old man says, but it sounds to Patrick like he’s more trying to convince himself with his own bullshit. “From the gutter you came, to the gutter you return. Tough break kid, but that’s how it goes.”
“I ain’t looking for your sympathy,” Patrick says, waggling his jaw to make his ears pop in adjustment to the higher altitude.
Patrick has nothing in Eureka but the pointless beckoning Corner, the old man will just be dumping Patrick in Old Town amongst the meth heads, hookers and the feral kids freshly raised from Pelican Bay. Still, he knows all the sketchy folk in Eureka, and it’ll be easier to be homeless in his hometown than back in Chico.
The sky overhead is a deep sullen crimson now as they start the first steep straight-away leading down, the kind of balls out roller coaster decline that makes a big rig trucker’s sphincter pucker. Patrick looks over and sees the speedometer needle quivering at 130 miles per hour.
The Grand Prix feels and sounds as smooth as if 130 is nothing. It’s no more than cruising speed for this old muscle car; the Grand Prix may be an antique, but it’s not decrepit.
The sun is an oblate spheroid suspended in the red sky, cooled by the scarlet smoke concealing the heavens to the point that old Sol looks like a weird alien gas giant in a science fiction movie, instead of the nearest star.
“He’s all I have,” the old man says, voice a little raised. “You were supposed to rub off on him. You were supposed to be there for him, that was your job.”
“Chris is weak all right, but I never seen you around,” Patrick counters.
The old man’s mouth tightens, Patrick figures he feels guilty about not being there for his son. The old man is simmering next to him.
Good, Patrick thinks, letting his insolent smile mar his face. Let the fossilized motherfucker give himself a stroke.
They pass a highway sign indicating they were less than 20 miles out of Weaverville. They haven’t seen any other traffic for a while.
“I was wrong about you. You’re no Billy Badass, you’re nothing more than a boy masquerading as a man,” the old man declares, perhaps irritated that Patrick isn’t nodding his head and agreeing with his pearls of wisdom.
“Now I got you pegged,” the old man says with a sneer. “Guess your mama never cut the apron strings, huh?”
Patrick feels his face flush and his hand closes around Billy’s foldie in his pocket. Mom had run off with whoever a long time ago, but Patrick isn’t about to share that tidbit with this withered son of a whore.
“Ah, that knife again,” the old man says, glancing down at where Patrick’s hand is parked in his front pants pocket. “You like it enough to be brandishing it at my son. How’s about you try it on me?”
The old man glances at Patrick again with eyebrows raised, and then returns his gaze to the road ahead. “No one here but us chickens. What do you say little boy?”
Patrick’s hand is shaking in his pocket as he clenches down on his knife. But he’s also steamed enough now to ignore how non-stop nervous he’s always been around this old man.
He glares at the old man’s profile but his voice is low and steady: “If I do pull my knife you’ll regret it.”
They’re rounding a blind curve as Patrick speaks, and the old man’s eyes widen as he stares slack faced at the road ahead. Patrick feels momentary glee at the belief that he’s startled this wrinkled termagant by calling his bluff. But he’s shocked in the same instant at how still and hard the old man’s face has gone.
It isn’t Patrick that’s frightened the old man.
Patrick braces one hand against the dash in reflex as his gaze whips forward to look in the same direction; looking for the threat. His eyes are as wide and his own face slack as the old man’s. Alarm bells are clanging in Patrick’s head as the old man stomps on the brakes, the Grand Prix’s wheels lock up, and they commence shuddering to a halt.
Ebony smoke is moaning past overhead from right to left in the strong cross wind, and the sky above is mingled scarlet and black. The Grand Prix skids to a stop bare inches behind the bumper of another car stopped dead in the middle of the road. A second car is stopped ahead of that one, and in front it is a red CDF truck, angled sideways to block the highway.
Patrick swallows as a great windblown tongue of fire sweeps across the highway less than a hundred yards ahead of the CDF truck, incinerating the greenery on the other side and moving with satanic purpose, faster than a man could run. A couple of firefighters are scrambling back toward the CDF truck away from the blaze cutting off the highway.
“Turn around,” the firefighter standing in front of the blocking CDF truck bawls. “Go back.” He makes huge furious gestures with his arms to emphasize his command.
The old man returns to life and reverses the Grand Prix in a tight Y-turn. The other two cars are starting to back up too, everyone in a jumbly hurry.
A false hell dawn backlights the hills above them to the north, but it isn’t the sun that crests the ridge-line: a rolling fireball as tall as heaven tops the hill and pours down toward them like a demon train on crack, propelled by the howling wind.
“Go,” Patrick moans at the old man, pushing a foot against the floorboards as if he had the gas pedal on his side, willing the car forward to head away east.
But from around the curve back east toward Redding, wildfire comes pouring in at them as well. The ol
d man’s eyes and mouth open stupid-wide for an instant before he clamps down hard again. They’re trapped here, doomed.
“All right then,” the old man creaks, and exits the car to scramble towards the other vehicles, all of them paused in mid-turnaround as the drivers stare in horror at the firestorm surrounding them on three sides.
Patrick follows the old man, surprised despite the situation to be having a hard time keeping up with this dinosaur.
“Get out of your cars,” the old man barks to the other drivers as he runs, in the tone of a man used to being obeyed.
But Patrick can barely understand the old man’s words over the steadily increasing howl of the wind whipped fire.
People start piling out of their rides.
Up ahead beyond the fire truck, Patrick hears a scream muted by the rising crackle and roar, sees the flames overrun the two fleeing firefighters. They both throw up their arms over their heads as they evaporate into the wall of fire like they never were.
“Jesus,” Patrick breathes, trembling.
There’s a crack of impact rocking his head back and he realizes the old man’s palm has just smacked his cheek hard. Patrick’s eyes are wild as he stares at the old man.
“Focus,” the old man shouts, his words a warbling blur through the fire’s increasing roar even though he’s close enough to touch. “On me.”
The old man turns and trundles back toward the other cars instead of uphill away from the fire. Patrick looks up that steep, maybe-safe southern ridgeline, his whole body yearning toward its cool greenery as the approaching firestorm’s heat slaps against his body like a mortal sunburn.
The old man and the one surviving firefighter are helping people out of their cars. Patrick hustles to join them, cringing at the sight of the fireball which has hit the bottom of the hill and is spilling toward the highway and them in a tidal rush, extending as far as Patrick can see in both directions on that side of the highway.
There’s a mom with a little boy in her arms out of one car, and a blue haired little old lady out of the other, and then they’re all running for their lives across the highway and uphill away from the firestorm.
The firefighter has the old lady by the arm and is jerking her along so hard he’s almost yanking her off her feet. She isn’t complaining at the rough treatment.
The old man has one arm around the child-burdened young mother’s shoulder, but then has to let go and take her hand as they hit heavier undergrowth and their progress up the steepening hill slows to semi-single file.
Patrick brings up the rear, crowding the back of the firefighter dragging the old lady. He’s enraged at all the trees and shrubbery slowing their flight, as if this forested slope was a human enemy personally thwarting him, trying to assist in his homicide.
A wall of smoke overtakes them thick enough that Patrick can’t see for a moment, and he’s coughing and spitting out ash as he keeps climbing through the murk. When the smoke clears Patrick risks a glance uphill, but quickly drops his gaze to focus on the slope directly in front of him. The hill looks impossibly steep, and the crest looks like it’s far out of reach in whatever little bit of time they have left.
Gas tanks start going off behind them in quick succession in titan hammer blows as the old lady’s heart gives out and her eyes roll up in her head and she sags to the ground. She’s a limp rag doll being dragged along uphill by the firefighter for an instant before he realizes her plight. Patrick almost steps on her scissoring legs before the firefighter shoves Patrick past and kneels next to the old lady, tugs out some kind of shiny silver blanket and lays down by her as he starts pulling the sheet up over them both.
Patrick sneaks a peek backward as he continues laboring uphill after the old man, and sees the fire storm thrusting a french kiss of flame ahead of the main oncoming mass as if deliberately. The fire tongue licks over the firefighter and the old lady while the fireproof blanket is only halfway in place over them, and they’re engulfed together.
Patrick refuses to look back again as the surviving four toil upward toward heaven, with hell laughing as it races up their heels. Trees are going off like bombs all around them to the right and to the left, but the explosions sound mild as fire crackers against the din of the blaze. Patrick desperately wants to put one hand in his pocket and grasp Brother Billy’s knife for comfort, but he needs both hands here to grasp every available handhold on the almost vertical slope.
Then they finally reach the crest and Patrick lets a moment’s wild hope bloom in his breast that they might survive, even though his back’s so hot it feels like the flames are already lapping up his butt-hole.
The mother sets her foot in a gopher hole and her ankle snaps clean as she topples forward with her foot still caught in the depths of the burrow, clutching tight to her baby. Patrick can’t hear her screams over the firestorm, but her face is so contorted he figures she’s making the appropriate kinds of noises. He can see bloody bone sticking out of the 90 degree break in her lower leg.
The old man falls on his butt as he pulls her out the hole, the old man and the young mama just sitting there side by side looking up at Patrick as if in expectation of something. The little boy is screaming silently too, sticky tears drenching his red, fat little face.
Patrick looks at the old man, whose face is grim and stony as ever. But the almost vertical climb has finished him, this ancient fucker’s done and he knows it. Patrick’s own heart is pounding fit to burst as he watches the old man’s chest shudder, studies how gray and sweaty and smoke-stained the old man’s reptilian face is around those fluttering raptor eyes.
The rising heat makes the old man, the young mother and her kid all waver in Patrick’s vision. The old man looks at the silently wailing child in the mother’s arms then back at Patrick. The old man’s eyes beam some kind of silent message at Patrick.
Patrick flashes back to the night his big brother Billy died. The half dozen huge-ass Samoans surrounding Billy and clubbing him to death with Louisville sluggers, taking their time about it, having fun. And Billy’s eyes never leaving twelve-year-old Patrick’s as Billy fought his hopeless death battle, his eyes seeming to beam some kind of silent message to Patrick, just like the old man’s eyes were right now. ‘Love you, little brother?’ ‘Run away, save yourself?’
After, Patrick had crept up to Billy’s body and took Billy’s foldie from his pocket, the only legacy Patrick had from his family. He’d thought of Billy every time he touched that knife ever after. But that was seven years ago, an eternity past.
Patrick has been trembling for an endless moment in memory, but suddenly awakes to the present, shocked with himself for his momentary distraction. The old man is unable to stand, he starts rolling around grabbing branches and leaves and stacking them around and on top of himself and the crippled young mother, as if he thought it would save them.
Patrick knows what the old man needs him to do. He bends and scoops up the boy from his mother’s unresisting arms.
“Useless,” Patrick howls as he whirls and starts downhill on the steep far side of the hill, sailing through the air like he could fly, almost doing the splits with each long rubbery stride as he clutches tight to the little boy, who’s waving his pudgy arms behind them towards the Mommy this child would never see again.
One stumble or trip would murder them both, but Patrick has no time for caution as the firestorm crests the ridge behind them and the fire’s howl lifts to a bass scream. His eyes have to squint the light is so bright even facing away, he’s gagging and retching from lungfuls of smoke, and his back cringes at the rapidly increasing heat baking it. The fire’s catching up, and they won’t get away no matter how hard he runs.
Suddenly Patrick’s lying on his face on the ground as if a titan hand were squashing him down. He’s unable to see or to breathe. The painful heat is gone, but the fire’s roar has been replaced by a torrential liquid sound, as if a thousand giants are gurgling watery pleasantries loud in Patrick’s ears while pressing
him and the kid down into the earth unbearably hard.
For an instant Patrick thinks that the fire has gotten them, and he’s grateful that he’s gone into shock so instantly that he can’t feel the fact that his eyeballs and lungs have been flash-fried into ash. Then he feels his cheek pressing into the deliciously cool mud underneath them, feels the cold torrential wet enveloping him, and he realizes that they’re somehow underwater.
He has no point of reference for this surreal sensory input, his mind unhinges a little for an instant. He seems to hear oddly familiar voices, see the faces of strangers that he might have known in another life, before he wrestles his brain back into sanity and the present instant again.
Patrick clenches his mouth shut and covers the child’s face with one hand as the endless tons of water keep coming and coming, squeezing them into the soft ground that’s the only thing preventing them from being crushed to death. From previous panic terror over being burned to death, Patrick shifts gears enough to wonder if he and the kid are gonna drown on dry land here.
Then there’s a greenish rippling flicker of light for a few seconds before the last of the water sheds away from them in all directions to pour across the smoking earth like a tidal surge at the beach, sinking into the hungry earth almost as fast as it pours. They can breathe again, they can see the sky.
The fire’s roar is much subdued. Patrick manages to lift his head from the embedding mud in time to hear a throbbing aircraft engine, sees the belly of a big plane as it sails past low and up close above. It looks old.
Patrick has no idea what model of plane this old four-engined prop job might be. But he’s seen them in action on TV. Patrick and the child have just been on the ground zero receiving end of a tanker plane dropping a load of H2O.
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