The Next

by Rafe Haze

  Where were the emergency vehicles now?

  As we arrived at our backyard, we could smell the air thick with wood smoke. We looked behind us. To our astonishment, the wall of oily leafy eucalyptus trees that lined Wildcat Canyon Road beneath our house, had already lit up like hundred foot tall matches. They burst into flames as if the bark was infused with gunpowder. One tree after another, the fire exploded towards our house.

  We burst through the dry rusty fence, through Mother’s unsuccessful weed-infested ivy landscaping, and into the backdoor. Father was passed out on the couch, cradling a bottle of bourbon in his armpit, three-quarters empty. The television was blaring a baseball game. Mother was nowhere to be seen.

  We’d never tried to wake our father up when he was passed out. Should we poke him? Pull his hand? Throw water in his face? We were so accustomed to getting whacked whenever we disturbed him, we couldn’t overcome our fear even in that moment of emergency. Paul ran to look for Mother. I ran to the window in the kitchen to see the progression of the fire.

  All the eucalyptus trees were bright red, forming a massive tsunami of flames a hundred feet high. The tops of the flames were so intense with heat they turned blue. I heard sirens finally approach in the distance, but they were not on our road! They were on Wildcat Canyon Road. The fire trucks were too wide for the narrow spidery road that fed our row of houses.

  We had to get out, and we had no time to waste.

  I heard Paul screaming for Mother upstairs and his light footsteps padded toward the master bathroom. I scampered up the stairs. Paul’s screaming stopped.

  “Mom?” I heard him ask.

  Paul was staring into the bathtub. Mother was fully clothed in her blue dress and Birkenstocks underneath the running shower. The water hit the fuzzy patch on her skull where her hair was growing back, then ran down the side of her face. Her temple was blackened and bleeding. They’d been fighting again. I could tell even with the running water down her face that she was not crying. Her eyes were still, with a deadened, withdrawn listlessness.

  “Mom,” Paul repeated, reaching out to hold her wet hand, “There’s a fire. We need to leave.”

  Mother did not lift her eyes.

  “Please?” he asked.

  The power suddenly cut out. The sound of the baseball game stopped.

  “What the hell is smoking?” we heard my father roar from downstairs.

  Apparently the beast had stirred.

  At the sound of Father’s voice, Mother’s eyes darted back to life. She grabbed Paul’s hand and turned off the water. Smoke was starting to enter our windows. I ran to the bedroom and looked out the window.

  The roof of the first house closest to the park was afire. The old wooden shingles curled up in the heat as all the dead orange pine needles that had settled between the cracks caught fire. Since the neighbors who lived in it were away with their daughter for the week, no one would even attempt to protect it.

  The house between the burning one and ours belonged to the Morrows. I could see Mr. and Mrs. Morrow running back and forth between their garage and their blue station wagon with their arms full of computers. Personal computers were only just coming into their own, and in his garage Mr. Morrow had stored prototypes of his new computer which he hoped would compete with an emerging new company known as Apple. Rather than locate and save their two calico cats that Paul and I had helped raise since they were tiny, the Morrows desperately loaded their future into the rear of their station wagon. I was devastated that they’d leave their calicos to burn.

  But I also knew exactly where the cats would hide.

  Between the Morrow’s house and our kitchen was their large aqua-blue concrete and plaster swimming pool, propped on thick wooden stilts resting on deep cement pylons. Because our father wanted nothing to do with pets, Paul and I would always rendezvous with Morrow’s cats underneath their swimming pool. We’d bring leftover food to them. The shade under the pool was cool, and the earth was soft. The calicos would be there. Paul and I would save them if the Morrows would not.

  “Fire! There’s a fire!” our father belched loudly.

  We heard the front door open as he stumbled out to the driveway. From the bedroom window, I heard him screaming at the Morrows in big, blustery garbled words, “What the fuck are you doing? Fuck those fucking gizmos! Save the fucking houses, you fucking nitwits!”

  I watched our father try to run up the slope to the backyard of the burning house. His feet were uncooperative due to three-quarters of a bottle of bourbon, and what ought to have been a mere fumble to one knee turned into a full on face plant. Nose bleeding, he rallied to his feet and teetered to the gate adjacent to the burning house. By now the entire top floor was an inferno, which was burning its way down the siding toward the yard.

  I felt a wet hand on my shoulder. Mother and Paul were standing next to me, watching Father approach the side of the house where the hose was. He turned it on and sprayed his own groin.

  “Damn fucking son of a fucking fuck,” he blurted.

  He tried to unspool the hose, but he only managed to wind the hose around his legs. Trying to disentangle himself, he further knotted the pile of hose.

  Mother muttered, “What in Lord’s name is he doing?”

  “Should we help him?” Paul asked.

  She did not answer. We did not move.

  I glanced at the fire trucks on Wildcat Canyon Road further down the hill. Their ten-inch thick white hoses stretched across the road like veins. Water jetted toward the trees in large sweeping arcs, but they were not jetting toward our house.

  Father was now sloppily rolling away from the house, his legs still entangled in the hose. The hose sprayed every direction except toward the house. The fire had now jumped onto the Morrow’s roof, but they had driven off. Their station wagon thumped over the fire hoses when they reached Wildcat Canyon Road. Their axles scraped the tops of the hoses, compressing them and cutting off the water. The firemen yelled angrily at them to get the hell off the hoses, and the Morrows bounced on.

  We heard a loud crack.

  Suddenly Mother screamed.

  One of the tall flaming eucalyptus trees was falling toward the house my father was trying to save. It crashed down a few feet away from him. Red-charcoaled shingles flew into the air. The wall nearest my father shot outward in a burst of white-hot flames, and a ball of heat and burning debris cannonballed toward my father. When the smoke lifted, we saw him running away from the house, his clothes on fire.

  To our horror, we saw the left half of his face was blackened and…melted.

  Half his cheeks, lips, and chin sagged like a soggy watercolor portrait. He was screaming, moving as fast as his wobbly legs could carry him toward the Morrow’s swimming pool. He jumped in with a splash. Although his clothes were now extinguished, he faced a new challenge. Father could never swim sober, let alone sloshed.

  “The fire!” Paul yelled. “It’s crossing!”

  The grass between the Morrow’s house and ours was bright with flames. The row of dry hydrangea bushes quickly turned into hot, smoky red and yellow fireballs. As my father was splashing around, sputtering up water from his lungs, I realized we only had one chance.

  “Get the axes!”

  Paul and I darted down the stairs to the garage, grabbed two large, heavy axes and opened the front door. The air was thick and hot. The surrounding fire had begun to generate its own suctioning that felt like a tornado of charging wind. We hauled the axes between the stilts to a point underneath the swimming pool. If we had a chance of saving our house, this was it.

  I spied a bag hanging from Paul’s belt buckle as we entered the darkness under the pool. Instinctively, he needed to preserve the only things that had given us any comfort in times of chaos and violence. Paul had grabbed our eight Enid Blyton Adventure books in the garage along with the axes. He’d also grabbed our Swiss Army knives from behind the downstairs toilet.

  Mother followed us and continued up the hill to th
e top of the swimming pool. We assumed she was going to rescue our splashing father until we heard her scream for us to stop.

  Paul gave me a look of confusion. I did not understand either.

  The hydrangeas burned closer and closer to our house. If we waited any longer, we would not be able to stop the fire from reaching our home.

  “Don’t move!” I heard my mother command above the splashing of the water above us.

  All at once I realized what her intention was, and what she was willing to sacrifice for it. The splashing gradually slowed. We waited. My head throbbed with conflicting feelings. Paul was equally confused. He did not understand what was happening only feet above his head.

  He shouted at the top of his lungs. “Now, Mom? Now?”

  “Hold still!” she screamed back.

  We heard mewing.

  The calicos were there.

  “Go get them,” I told Paul, trying to get him to focus on something comforting.

  But the cats were spooked. As Paul approached them, they sprinted underneath the house. Paul started following them under the house as well.

  “Let them go!” I yelled.

  I dropped the axe and grabbed Paul’s leg. He tried to kick my hand off, but I gripped his jeans even tighter and pulled him toward me. He wept as I swung my arm around him, holding him tight.

  I looked down the hill. The fire had already made its way past us and was starting to burn a dry thorny rose bush at the corner of our house near the front door. We could hear some final faint sputtering in the water above our heads.

  Then the splashing stopped.

  For the next few seconds, my senses blocked out everything but Paul hugging me as tight as his little arms could. He was losing everything he loved as his little world burned down around him. I hoped to God he had no awareness of what was happening in the swimming pool above us.

  As I held him, I realized in that moment no person or place was more precious to me than my brother. We’d find other cats. We’d find another magical kingdom. We’d find another home. We no longer had any need of parents like the ones above us. We needed only each other. As every single thing combusted around us, I knew only one thing…

  I loved Paul so much.

  I started to cry with him.

  “Chop, boys!” we heard our Mother yell.

  We picked up the axes and swung. The blades chipped into the outer concrete layer. We swung again. And again. And again. We finally gouged into the inner plaster, water splattering our faces. We gouged more. Then the water began to gush out of the irregular holes we’d created. It rushed in a strong stream down the hill and doused the fire beneath it.

  Too late.

  Mother had made us wait too long. The flames raced up our wooden siding toward the eaves of our roof. Our kitchen window cracked, shattered, and dropped. The white curtains inside combusted. Feathers of flames skidded across the glossy ceiling toward the hall.

  Our home was lost.

  We dropped the axes and ran up the hill to join our mother. The water level of the pool dropped until at last it was empty. Father lay at the bottom of the pool.

  He was dead.

  I looked at my Mother’s expression. She had receded into that listless, withdrawn place again. I probably knew back then that she’d remain there until the day she died. I probably felt what the state of California would soon deem to be true—she was no longer mentally fit to raise us.

  She freed Paul and me, but sacrificed our home to do it.

  She sacrificed herself to do it.

  The fire took seven Berkeley homes and most of the park that day. We never saw the calicos again. Our park was no more than a barren, blackened valley. The secrets paths we knew and loved were no more. King’s Rock jutted at the top of the hill, exposed and grey like a ruin. Jack and Phillip had burnt to a crisp along with our adventures, for Paul and I never played again.

  Jessie’s murder was considered a casualty of the fire.

  Years later I was standing in line to obtain my license downtown at the DMV, and a young blond guy turned from the counter and stared at me. He’d grown facial fuzz and he wore a Stanford baseball cap and sophisticated glasses. He held several law books under his arm. His eyes were no longer angry and vicious. He had smiled openly at the person behind the counter with an easy and charming energy about him. When our eyes finally met, sadness washed over him.

  I had every option available to me. With Paul as my witness, I could have destroyed his life. I could have kicked his teeth in. I could have merely demanded an apology. But I did nothing. He did nothing. I turned away and let him go. I let go this stranger who robbed us of so much that day, including our ability to be kids again.

  I felt Marzoli’s hands on my shoulders, sliding behind my back as he pulled me toward him. His chest pressed into mine. How coherently had I told my story? I had no idea. But to elicit an embrace that solid and encompassing, it must have been effective.

  He spoke, and I felt the vibrations of his voice penetrate right into my chest. “I don’t understand, after all that, why you don’t want your brother’s ashes?”

  I pulled back from the embrace.

  Marzoli looked me in the eye, searching. “What came between you and Paul?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you live after the fire?”

  “The state forced us to live at our grandfather’s.”

  I’d felt oddly calm until he started asking questions. Grief, anxiety, and anger had arrived and departed with the narrative as the moments changed. I’d felt cleansed and still, but as he continued his inquisition, my core constricted.

  “What happened at your grandfather’s place?”

  “We…um…we ate hotdogs.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And beans.”

  “Was it there that something divided you and Paul?”

  I’d relived whole passages of my past in that miserable trailer park when I’d least expected to, but when I was asked to recall the most crucial event…zipadeedoodah. Palmer’s conversation had narrowed down something crucial related to Graves’ death, but it had also narrowed down my fucking inability to recall it.

  My temples began to throb. Surges of blood hit my forehead like a pileup on I-5 in a dense fog. I started hitting my forehead with my palms.

  What the fuck was my problem!

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “It’s not fucking okay!” I erupted. “What’s okay about fucking dead ends? What do I get out of it? What do you get out of it?”

  Marzoli grabbed my hands and held them against his chest. I felt his heartbeat through my palms. Somehow, revealing my past was valuable. I couldn’t nail down any relevance to the present by the actual narrative, but by the firmness of Marzoli’s hands on mine and the nearness of his heart, I could tell I’d developed some profound equity in our relationship—equity which would be paid off tenfold before I knew it.

  “If you had all your shit together,” Marzoli whispered, “chances are you wouldn’t let me be here with you right now.”

  Was that an admonishment of him or of me?

  “You’re golden, you asshole,” I said. “Anything you want you get.”

  He remained silent. His eyes saddened. His reaction was not of false modesty. Something about wanting and getting twisted inside of him painfully. He obviously thought he did not get what he wanted, which means he obviously wanted more than he was letting on. This man was everything any man or woman could dream for. What possible impediment could exist that would cause someone to say no to him if he just asked? And was this impediment the reason he turned away from me only minutes ago?

  “Marzoli,” I said, “I’ve been in a fuck-muck for a year. I don’t have any confidence in my intuition. I need you tell me in words, clear as day. Why are you here at all?”

  As he took in a breath to fuel his response, I saw movement over his shoulder. Marzoli turned to see what I was seeing.

  Layworth had
risen from his bed.

  We ducked behind the curtain, our heartbeats accelerating.

  Alright, mofo. Game on.

  Chapter Twenty

  I pulled the cord.

  For the first time in a long time, the curtains parted all the way.

  The stage was lit with the bouncing afternoon sun. My apartment dazzled, sparkling from our hard labor. The white of the counter and the scrubbed windowsills glowed as my pupils acclimated to a flood of natural light. The star of the show stepped in the spotlight and peeled off his polo shirt.

  My…holy crap…God.

  His abs were each divided by valleys so deep they cast shadows on each other. His chest resembled two overhanging boulders cantilevered outward beyond his ribs. Dark chest hair spread smoothly down from his clavicles, below his pink nipples, and then disappeared for an inch in shadow below the rounded ledges. The hair picked up at his sternum like the head of the Amazon, broadening and thickening as it rushed past his navel, then funneled outward and plunged toward the river’s mouth below the beltline.

  His neck was dark and muscular, and the muscles slid in a smooth landslide over the mounds of his scapula, his shoulders, his rounded biceps, and his striated triceps. His nipples were pink and juicy bull’s-eyes.

  He opened his thick lips. “Speak.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, ridiculously and adorably embarrassed.

  What the hell had this bastard to be embarrassed about?

  He unbuckled his belt and pulled it swiftly and sharply out of the loops. The leather holster housing his gun clunked to the floor. Marzoli discreetly kicked it my direction and tossed his belt on top of it.

  He picked up the broom and pretended to sweep the immaculate floor, gripping it with flexed muscles. For all intents and purposes, it appeared that I had moved out, and a new hotter neighbor had moved in. I’d positioned the webcam so it discreetly faced the courtyard as I sat beneath the windowsill, viewing Layworth’s apartment on my laptop. Layworth had walked to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, and headed back to the bedroom. He’d not yet looked in this direction.

  “Think this’ll work?” Marzoli whispered.