Perhaps his father had been fatalistic, nearly desperately so. Perhaps that last flight through the thermals over San Bernardino had been more than just a little suicidal. Perhaps windsheer is an adjunct to human failure. Perhaps a beloved dead wife calls to a man of reason in a way he cannot understand, and causes him to seek death in ways he admits to no one, especially to himself.
She must have been beautiful, this mother he could not remember. He had always pictured her smiling, looking down at him and smiling, as though in each memory of her he was still an infant. To remember my mother, he came to realize, I have to forget my own manhood. There are many ways to be beautiful, and she must have had them all, this absent woman, this half of his childhood he would never know. Often he found himself wondering, what would she think of me? And what, if we met in some plane out of time and space, would I think of her? Would we disappoint each other?
But I am not like my father, Speke had always reassured himself. I embrace life with both arms. I am not secluded with my number three pencils and my designs for improved valves for pressurized deodorant. And yet, standing there, seeing that his house was about to burn, surrounded by fire on all but one side, he understood that he had deliberately chosen such a place. Its fragility, the fact that it could vanish in smoke, surrounded by drought-prone brush, had made it all the more precious. Perhaps, Speke thought, we value most that paradise we can lose.
The trucks, when they arrived, broke through the line of fire and tumbling smoke.
First Brothers and Bell careened to a stop on the lawn, then a stream of green county trucks. Men with orange hardhats spilled from the vehicles, and there was a clatter of spades and a surprising lack of speech.
Speke leaped, and half-fell, down the ladder to direct them. Ordinary time was stripped away, leaving a sequence of heat and smoke. The men worked, shoveling a naked firebreak across the smoldering lawn.
“The house,” Speke called, or perhaps he didn’t call it at all. Perhaps he thought it so desperately that everyone heard him.
Save the house!
At one point during the afternoon, airplanes, graceful shapes like sharks, dived at the fire, disgorging gouts of orange. The orange plumes started as precise, well-defined spouts that slowly fattened and dispersed. Men ran, orange with powder.
Through it all, he came to believe that the house was lost. It was logical, it was even just. He had done harm in the world, great harm. This was being taken away from him, exacted from him by the mindless twitch of the flames.
The wind continued to shower Speke with fine ash the size and color of eyelashes. They collected in the hairs of his arms, clinging to his sweat. Now and then one blinded him for an instant. The men stooped, and shoveled dust, surrounded by a rain of burned fur. Speke shouted encouragement, his voice a rag, and at one point Brothers stopped him with a crowbar nearly as tall as a man, and thick, a great, iron lever.
“We got a problem,” said Brothers. He waited for a moment, as though counting his syllables.
He looked down at the ground, and smoothed a spent ash with his shoe.
Oh, for a man of words, Speke nearly said.
“Someone had a chain on the gate,” Brothers said. “We had to crash through. Damn near wrecked one of the county trucks.”
Speke spat an ash from his lips.
“That’s not the only problem,” said Brothers, hesitating.
Speke waited.
“I think,” said Brothers, lowering his voice, “that we have a death.” He jerked his head in the direction of the Outer Office. Then he looked back and studied Speke with a gaze of worry and curiosity. Brothers could not add: tell me I’m wrong. His glance said: tell me its not true. “Is anyone missing?”
Speke grabbed a pick from the smudged green of the lawn and gave what he hoped was a manly nod. Understood, he tried to say. We’ll deal with it later.
“There’s a body,” Brothers said. “You can—you can smell it in the smoke.”
It’s nothing but a deer, Speke wanted to say. It’s nothing but a trick.
Brothers stepped before him, and asked, “Where’s Maria?”
Speke tried to talk, couldn’t, and then tried yet again.
But something in Brothers’ character, or Speke’s look, prevented further questions. Brothers hurried off to wrest at things with his lever, wellheads, Speke imagined, or flaming timbers.
Perhaps it was only his imagination, but there did seem to be a number of men using dashboard radios. Several men stopped work to gaze off in the direction of the Outer Office.
Speke endured. He was still fighting. He would not quit. But the faith, the power of belief, was waning. There was nowhere else to retreat. It was afternoon, but dark. The engine of another dive bomber surged overhead. The darkness streamed above them.
Sarah stood on the gables, watering the roof.
The Outer Office had completely burned, showing scarlet, blazing ribs. The building, however, seemed fueled from within. The roof fluttered fire, and the blazing lumber fell inward. The fire finished its work quickly, and then it did not die. Their bodies were caverns of flame—he tried not to think this, but he could not escape the knowledge. Asquith was about to step into his life again, as a presence that would have to be explained, an absence that had weight and charred form.
The men battled everywhere he looked, but the wind was strong.
Speke bounded up the ladder. He used his most commanding voice, the voice that never failed to win respect from man, woman, and beast. “You have to leave, Sarah. I’m sending you away.” His voice was strong, but he wanted to beg her: please. Please go.
Her eyes were bright, and she did not answer.
His voice shook. “I’m not going to lose you, too. I won’t let it happen.”
“I’m staying here.” Her voice was crisp and definite, like a wire of gold.
“If I lose you … I can’t bear it.…”
She cast the hose aside, and the writhing thing cast water in one direction, and then another. She held him, and then kissed him, her lips on him with the fervor of someone resuscitating the dying.
He let her hair stroke his lips. He whispered her name like a word he had struggled to recall for years.
Sarah, he thought—after all this time.
“I don’t think we can save the house,” he said at last. “What do you want us to try to save from inside?”
She touched his face. Her hand was pale against the grime of his skin, and her touch was strange, strong and calm. He had never felt a touch like this, like a hand out of another world.
Manuscripts, she wanted to say. All your manuscripts. The art.
Everything. Save everything.
“It’s time,” he said, through tears, whether caused by grief or the smoke she could not tell. “I’ll get anything. Anything you want. Just tell me what it is, and I’ll go in and get it.”
Still, she could not respond.
“Tell me what you want from in there, Sarah!”
“The house is saved,” she said.
“No,” he groaned. Reading her expression, he said, “I don’t believe that any more. This is stupid optimism, Sarah. The house is going to go, and when it starts it won’t take any time at all. Think of all the art. Think of—” Words failed him. He made a wild gesture. “Think—”
But he stopped himself. He had her. That was all that he wanted, and all that he could rescue. The rest of his life was gone, finished.
Sarah understood. The house should be saved. But, she knew, if the house were lost, what did that really matter? Ham was what counted.
“There is one thing you can save,” she said. “Not that I’m giving up hope …”
He was too eager, shaking her. “What? Tell me!”
“It’s a symbol.”
He leaned forward eagerly.
“Go in,” she said, “and use the white net beside the aquarium.”
He did not have to say: yes?
“Use one of the smaller b
owls in the cupboard.”
He blinked in the smoke.
“Save the piranha.”
Speke studied her for a moment, and then he laughed. He laughed so hard that one of the men on the lawn adjusted his hardhat so he could gaze up at them.
After a while there were shadows again, and late afternoon sun made the shadows long. The earth was a mat of black, and white streams bled from a hundred places.
Long before sunset men from the sheriffs department came, and men from the county coroner gathered around the dark, spent place that had been the Outer Office.
Speke’s eyes stung, his contact lenses fogged with smoke. There was time, fifteen minutes he supposed, before the house itself began to burn. There was time to step into the house and to see it again, to inhabit it once more, however briefly.
45
Outside, cop radios jabbered in the darkness. There was a residue of fine ash over the tops of books, and on the dust cover of the computer. Speke had glimpsed the men in suits, dark jackets and dark pants, the men in black shoes and wool blends whose presence meant: a few more minutes and they’ll be done with body bags and have their list of questions.
They would have many questions. Many wonderful questions, and he would sit still and tell them all. Fire and the law. They went together in a kind of visceral logic.
There will be questions, and then handcuffs. Maybe that was logical, too, the theater of the law. They would march him manacled before the flash cameras and the mikes, to the police car. Speke sat in his office, rubbing Pliagel over one of his contact lenses. He rinsed the flexible, collapsible lens with a squirt of saline solution, and lifted the tiny, inverted disk to the surface of his eye.
He blinked. His vision was new again.
It was all theater, all of it a stage, all of it imagery to be consumed. He shot a peek out the big windows of his office and he saw hardhats in the dim distance, around the garage, and heard the snap and bite of yet more flames somewhere in the dark.
He could feel it in his bones: there was a fire somewhere in the house, maybe in the floorboards, maybe in the lath and plaster of the walls. Smoke began to foul the air yet again. You see, he hissed to himself: I told you. You can’t rest. You’ll never be able to rest, ever again. The house is not out of danger yet. And what difference does it make? It might as well burn. They will take it all away from you. They should. It’s only right. After all: you killed.
He pressed the lid over the saline solution, and thought, Which of my lawyers will I call? My contract man will be useless with this sort of case. Thank God my father never lived to see this night.
He had lived a childhood of simple prosperity. It had seemed normal to him, unremarkable, his life drifting just as a childhood should. But as an adult one morning, walking up a ravine near Oaxaca, passing goats and rotting garbage, the rattle of the automated looms in the distance, he had realized that his childhood had been Southern Californian, convenient and without disease or violence. He had washed the dust of newspaper ink from his hands and watched television, waiting for his father to come home from the Hickory Pit with the thick-as-cardboard paper plates laden with pork and potato salad. His small, quiet family had not been rich, but the bicycles leaning against the garage walls were always the newest ten-speeds.
His favorite cartoon character had been Popeye. His brother had preferred the Road Runner. He and his brother had walked along the beach, peeling jellyfish from the wet sand. The dead, glutinous creatures left the trace of a stain on the sand from their purple markings, like those make-believe tattoos one could buy and apply to one’s wet—usually just-licked—forearm. The purple dapples of the jellyfish left a transfer pattern like a starburst, a nova, an exploding sun. It was as though nature could not endure an ugly thing, but even in its randomness and blind reproduction achieved symmetry and hue. His boyhood had been one of unremarkable comfort, a life of late dinners while the sprinklers danced water over the bermuda grass outside. His father had been kind, quiet, always quick to encourage, to help find the puncture in the bicycle’s tire, to up the allowance when the paper route became so successful Hamilton could not squeeze all of the newspapers into his canvas bag and decided to quit.
Why wasn’t I satisfied? Speke asked himself. Why didn’t I plan on becoming a realtor or a car dealer, a lawyer or an engineer? My father could have gotten me a job with Ford or IBM, especially toward the end when Time ran that thumbnail bio of him under “America’s Brain Trust,” next to cardiologists and weapons specialists. Neighbors and friends had always liked me. Any number of friendly neighbors would have given me a start in retailing, distributing, investing. I could have had a wife and kids, a normal wife and normal kids, kids who need braces and break arms playing soccer. Instead I wanted something that life can never offer. A life of magic. And I got it. I got it, and then I lost it, because it was always too much to hope for, too much to want.
But he had wanted life—not to be simply alive, but he wanted that version of immortality, life multiplied, that success can bring.
He avoided the professional voices, the matter-of-fact discussion tones and almost surgical caution of the kitchen. He peeked out one of the upper windows and saw Holub’s car, gleaming amidst all the sooty trucks. Television lights were set up, glaring blue-white beams illuminating the still smoking coals. And there was still a fire to be fought. What a show it must be, carried live.
Like a planned demolition, the garage was consumed. For a few moments it was a scribble drawing of itself in tangerine and scarlet, until it sagged. Someone thoughtful, perhaps Bell, perhaps Brothers, had rolled the Jaguar out of the garage and down the drive, nearly as far as it would go and not be surrounded by fire-stripped trees.
How convenient, thought Speke ironically. That meant that if a last remaining fork of fire should reach the car, turning it inside out with heat, we’ll all be able to watch. It’ll be carried into homes all over Northern California. This news next: The Lives of the Rich and Burned.
Even now he had a sense of humor, an inner, dry laugh, the old itch of something that passed for wit. The fire became a tradition. There had never been a time in which it had not laid seige to the house. There had never been a time before now, the air of each room ripe with smoke. He carried the fire extinguisher from room to room, sure that somewhere, hidden, unseen, there were more flames to fight.
The Hemingway letter had already burned in the Outer Office, along with the leather-bound Goethe. Speke loathed the thought that flames could consume the Monets here in the house. Those paintings were more than stretched canvas on frames. They were portions of a man’s soul.
The tube of the extinguisher dangled, its nozzle a brass sleeve that swung wide and knocked against maple bedposts and mahogany wainscoting as he hurried from room to room.
When her voice interrupted his search it paralyzed him and he could not respond. “They want to talk to you,” she said.
He didn’t even understand her for a moment.
She looked radiant, peaceful. He tried not to look broken. Yes, he thought, of course they do. A nice long talk, Mr. Speke. A couple of things you can help us with. His breath caught. It was all so cruel to Clara. And Maria, and Asquith. All, fundamentally, his fault. He squared his shoulders. He would not embarrass himself.
“That’s fine,” he said. His voice sounded solid, serious but not overly concerned. It’s good to know, Speke thought, that I know how to keep up appearances. Then he added, “Stay with me, Sarah. Please.”
He was by her, hurrying outside. It was time.
The wind was dead, and the lawn was trampled wet in the spotlights. There was a lunar look to the woods, in the opening-night lights. The landscape resembled another, more foreign moon, the moon of a distant planet.
He sensed the eyes watching him. People had always watched him. Both men and women had always found him the one to follow with their eyes. He waited on the porch. Sarah joined him, and a tiny thread of calm took its place in his soul. He coul
d not make out where the knot of cops waited, the ones that would arrest him. A phrase came to him, perhaps something out of an old gangster movie: facing the music.
Poor Sarah—she had no idea what the world was really like. Good calm Sarah expected cops to be like she was, steady and understanding.
But her father had been a policeman, Speke reflected. Perhaps she had seen this sort of arrest before.
They stepped off the porch, into the heat of the lights. He had done all he could. His eyes were two sores in his face, and he could not take a deep breath without giving a great cough.
The crush of people made progress difficult, although the crowd made way for them. A camera flashed, and another. Someone asked a question. He was quiet, and merely gazed at the charcoal-dusted lawn. It did not seem to be day, or night. They stood on an island that had no time, smashed lawn crisscrossed with TV cables.
There were atolls of ash, pure, carbon black. There was a new smell, too, of clean, empty air. Black grass smoldered. Feet left white footprints that curled with smoke.
He endured what he knew was only the beginning of his new, ugly public role. Even now he could sense it: people saw him and believed in him. He was strong, broad-shouldered, important to the people around him even in defeat.
A figure stepped to his side. “I don’t think you need to worry about these people, Mr. Speke.” The man’s tone was respectful, reassuring. “I’ll tell them everything they need to know.”
Speke gazed at the gray-haired man wonderingly. He was the only man here in a glowing, pale suit. It was a well-cut suit with black buttons, and there was not a single ash anywhere on it. The man smiled, showing a brown canine in his otherwise perfect teeth. His tie was silk, green lizard patterns, Speke noted dumbly. Or were they iguanas?
“It’s Inspector Holub,” Speke said, his memory working with the jerky determination of a steam shovel. “Come forth to tell all.”
He had meant it, in his numb state of mind, half ironically, but Holub gave a short, quick nod. “I’ll do that,” he said, in his crisp, humorless cop voice.
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