by Doug Lawson
“Have you ever gone back?” I ask. “To T-Bob’s?” It’s late in the afternoon. She hasn’t eaten much and neither have I, but we have put away a lot of sake. We’ve talked a lot, so much that it almost feels like it did back then.
She shakes her head. “I’m not sure I could. You?”
I avoid that whole part of town. It’s like the whole space has been encapsulated in some sort of bubble, and I don’t have the right equipment to break in.
But maybe now I do.
“Hope took Noah to her dad’s for the weekend,” I say carefully. “Maybe we should?”
“Maybe we should what?” she says, looking at me sideways, her eyes all huge and innocent.
I blush. “Go down to T-Bobs,” I say. “You and me.” I can feel the ocean underneath me again, a wave rising up, rocks ahead.
“Is that a metaphor?”
“It’s just a drive,” I say. “Right?”
“I hear T-Bob is still there, you know?”
“He’s a doctor, I heard.”
“I heard he was a vet.”
I pay the check, and we climb into the van. We head up along the coast, past all of those low, flat houses the surfers rent—the kind we had planned to get someday. I get lost once, it’s been so long, and I have to turn around at a downtown trailer park. When we pull up, it’s clear the old house hasn’t been kept up. Paint is peeling on the ocean-facing side. One of the big picture windows has a hole covered over with cardboard and duct tape. The roof of the porch is pulling away from the rest of the house and taking some of the siding with it, and there are bicycle parts and the back end of an old Chevy in the lawn.
“Should we knock?” Rochi says.
“If you want to get shot.”
“Seriously. Come on.” She gets out of the van, and crosses the street. She opens the gate and waves me over. I follow reluctantly. There are stacks of magazines and papers rotting on the front porch next to black bags of trash.
“Rochi . . .”
“One knock,” she says, and reaches over.
But the door flies open before she can touch it. A shirtless guy stands there in underwear and flip-flops. He’s twenty-two or twenty-three. There’s a tattoo of the Oakland Raiders logo on the side of his unshaven neck. “The fuck you want,” he says.
He looks at Rochi first, then me, then back at her. I take a step backward, raising a hand to apologize—for what, I don’t know. But he’s looking at Rochi in a strange way. “I told you people you can’t come here,” he says. “Fuck! If you want to buy you have to talk to fucking Toby, you can’t bother me at fucking home.”
“We don’t want anything,” I say. “We used to live here. We were just driving by.”
“Right,” he says, looking at Rochi. “Fuck off of my porch,” he says, and slams the door.
“What an asshole,” I say.
Rochi frowns, bites her bottom lip. Then she looks back. “My, my. T-Bob’s looking younger every day,” she says and starts laughing.
I don’t know why it’s so funny, but I start laughing too, so much that tears start coming out of my eyes. “Nice tighty-whities, too,” I say, and we both crack up again. We get back in the van. I head north. I pull over up past the surfer statue on Route 1, beyond the stretch of UCSC stuff, food co-ops, the Mongolian restaurant, the micro-breweries. The full moon is up early. We can see surfers moving across the sea like water spiders.
“Look,” says Rochi, leaning across me and pointing. “Look at that.”
I follow the line of her finger, and see two young women in matching wetsuits, surfing together. They’re pretty good. As we watch, a huge wave rises and they both scramble for it. After a shaky moment, they’re both up and shooting along the surface of the water together.
I know just what that feels like. It feels like flying through the dark sky on the back of a broom. My heart is racing, and I can smell Rochi there in the van—cigarettes, and something else.
She turns to me with a serious look on her face. Then she closes her eyes and leans in closer.
I catch my breath and lean back a little.
“Rochi,” I say, after a minute. I wave my hand in the air between us. “I don’t think these are the droids you’re looking for.”
She sighs and sits back in the seat. “I should go home and rethink my life?” she says with a smirk.
I nod, and put on a grin, too. “It’s been a long—”
“Don’t,” she says. “I get it. Wild Beth really has settled down after all. At least a little bit.”
“I’m not so convinced. But maybe you should come up to Felton,” I say.
“Come up and see ya sometime?” she says. “Meet the family? There may be an alternate timestream in which that happens, Beth Tompkins. But I’m not sure it’s the one we’re all floating in right now.”
I drive her back to her car, a beat-up old Corolla. I hug her, kiss her cheek and watch her drive off.
Only later do I realize my wallet is missing. Which you’d think would have pissed me off, but between us Witches it was actually kind of funny.
I assumed I’d never see her again.
All that fall, I listen to the local fire dispatches whenever I can, and carry my pager everywhere, set to the mode that lets you hear all of the calls, all of the chatter. I haven’t been in the department long, and I try to get out on as many calls as I can. It’s not glamorous. I go out on smoke checks, which are mostly charcoal grills or people using woodstoves when they shouldn’t be. I help handle a vehicle fire on Highway 17, and get to direct the traffic until the CHP shows up. It’s not that I’m a woman—I’m not the only one, and all the guys are really great about making me feel like a part of the department. I’m just new.
I spend time surfing, too. I work my way back up from Pleasure Point to Natural Bridges, and from there start heading up to just north of Davenport and Waddell Creek, where all the windsurfers go. I’m not the only person in my thirties on the water, but I am the only one who rides a big redwood longboard. It’s large enough to be what’s called an SUP now, a stand-up paddleboard, and many people confuse it with one. I get a nickname, “Old School,” and that kind of pleases me.
Crazily enough, as I spend more time surfing, Hope and I begin to get along better. Things aren’t perfect, of course. It’s a little better with Noah. But some days, Hope will actually leave him with me, and I’ll take him down to see the waves. I tell him about surfing. I hop up on a guardrail to show him some of the stances, and even get a laugh sometimes.
I start sleeping better, too. And sometimes when I reach out for Hope in the early morning, she’s there. I tell her about see ing Rochelle, about some of the time at T-Bob’s house—things I’d never mentioned before.
I don’t talk about the other kid, though. Not sure I ever will.
Rochi and I had been winning a lot of competitions when he first showed up. Dark brown eyes caked with gunk. He couldn’t have been more than three. His mother was a white Rasta chick with big breasts and dreadlocks and a fake Texas accent who passed through for a month. When she headed on down to Baja she left him behind. He didn’t even have a name, at least not one that any of us knew. He drifted from couple to couple before he landed with Rochelle and me. When we ate, he’d bring over his bowl of tofu and greens and climb up into a chair between us. When we went surfing, he’d ride along in the beater car and sit in the sand, staring out at us. He began sleeping in our room, on a mattress we put at the foot of our bed. Rochelle started dressing him in the morning.
He was ours to play house with, and we both fell hard for him. He was a late talker—I think we taught him his first words, the names of different surfing moves: The pig-dog. The kick-out. The floater. The tail-slide. He could strike different poses on the longboards when we called them out, sort of a party trick around the big bonfire in the yard. After a year of him being with us, Rochi got him his own tiny Night Witches wetsuit, and we started taking him out on some easy waves, close to shore. The kid was
a natural.
We named him Nate, after Rochi’s brother. Sometimes at night, he’d climb up into the bed between us. He snored like a little grizzly.
It didn’t end well, of course. Two years later, almost to the day, the white Rasta woman came back for him, full of official remorse that we suspected had more to do with her ability to collect child support. Nate didn’t even remember her, but she insisted he was going to come with her back to Austin. She got into an argument with Rochi that escalated into a fight. Nate started screaming, and the Rasta turned and smacked him. Rochi went after her with a knife and cut her, pretty badly.
When the woman got back from the emergency room, she brought a pair of cops. There wasn’t much we could do. The woman left, pulling a bruised, sobbing Nate—still in his Witches wetsuit—behind her.
We never saw him again. It was the beginning of the end for the Witches, and for Rochi and me. Rochi started drinking more, and went deep into all of the pharmaceutical options available at T-Bob’s.
We stopped competing—stopped surfing altogether. I quietly moved back in with my parents. I think I was gone a week before she noticed.
The night of the Swanton Canyon fire, I wake to the sounds of the pager screaming. Unusual winds had been howling all that week. A meth lab out west of Bonny Doon had been raided and a camper went up in a massive fireball. It started a blaze that spread across a hundred acres in minutes. Then five hundred. Then a thousand.
I hear the first engine out of Bonny Doon dispatched, and then I hear them report back—the fear and intensity in the captain’s voice when he says just how bad it is, how much it’s spread already, and how fast it’s moving. Every station has its own set of specific call tones, and that night I hear all of them, one after another, all the stations around Santa Cruz and Watsonville and then over in the valley, and all the way up the Peninsula. I roll over to wake up Hope, but she is already sitting up and pulling on a sweater. “Oh my God,” she says. “Oh my God.”
“I’ve got to go in,” I say, as the pager plays the tones for Felton again.
“I’ll get Noah,” she says. “We’ll go down to my dad’s.”
I jump out of bed, run to the van, and start pulling on my bright-yellow turnouts. From the driveway, I can already see the horizon to the west glowing an ominous orange. The smoke column is thick and black and edged with silver in the moonlight. It blocks out a whole part of the sky.
Bonny Doon isn’t far from us. The terrain is rough, and the flatland trucks will have a hard time getting in to the heart of it. Cal Fire aircraft won’t launch until the sun is up.
And the wind is blowing our way.
We bundle a sleepy Noah into the Subaru and throw in the emergency jump bags, though neither of us know what’s in them now. At the last minute, I run back into the house and grab the laptop and the album of Noah’s baby pictures and toss them into Hope’s trunk. In the van, I follow them out to the highway, and watch as Hope signals left and pulls away and their taillights blend into the river of cars heading down into town. The other cars are full of things thrown in at random—flat screens and bicycles, dogs and computers. I even see a rooster riding in someone’s front seat.
By the time I turn back toward Felton, the pager is saying the fire is at fifteen hundred acres and no containment. Our station is out on Empire Grade Road, where we’re working to set up a line to keep the fire from getting across. I’m late, so I go there directly in the van and check in with the site lead. He puts me on pumpkins with Jeff Powell. Pumpkins are these big orange flexible water containers. You flop them out onto the ground, fill them with the hose, and they’re ready to use. We’re to drop some of them up Empire Grade, so that when the engines from the Valley get here they’ll have a water source.
I like Jeff. He talks a lot but it fills in all the air. He drives the water tender and tells me about his dogs while I drop and fill the pumpkins. We drop one, fill it up, and head back to the school in Bonny Doon where there’s a water source to refill the truck.
It’s an eerie night. The road is deserted, though we can hear sirens off in the distance. Smoke wends its way through the trees and drifts across the road in the tender’s headlights. To the east the night is clear, and the Milky Way stretches up across the sky, but from the west ashes are blowing in. A herd of boar startle from a thicket of scotch broom and scatter across the road in front of us, grunting and huffing, and then sprint off across a Christmas tree farm on the other side. I smell burning pine and live oak but also something acrid, like plastic, which usually means a house has gone up. It won’t be the last.
Then I see a person up ahead, stumbling along the side of the road.
I call to Jeff, and we pull the tender up.
It’s Rochelle.
She looks like hell—all covered in dirt and soot. Part of her hair is singed, and there’s a bruise across the left part of her jaw. She carries her right arm tucked in tight to her side, holding her ribs.
“Rochi! Jesus Christ,” I say. She must have come through the fire, but wasn’t that still a mile off? I pull the medical bag out of the back and run over to her.
“Beth?” she coughs. “Well, hell. What’s a girl like you doing out in a place like this?”
Jeff jumps down and grabs a blanket out of the back, and I lead her over to the back of the tender. She’s so light I could have carried her with one arm. Jeff goes back to the cab to call for an ambulance, while I hook a mask up to the oxygen tank.
“Jesus, Rochi.” I hold the mask up to her. I show her how to hold it when she breathes in.
Jeff comes back from the cab and says, “There’s a car with its lights on, about a quarter mile up. That yours?”
Rochi nods. “Out of gas,” she says, but talking makes her start coughing again. The way she holds her arm in to her side makes me think she’s broken a rib.
“I called in the medical aid,” Jeff says. “The paramedics are all working the explosion site, though. We can get an ambulance out of Watsonville, but that might be an hour. Might be better if we get someone at the school to run her in?”
“I can do it,” I say. “My van’s back with the engines.”
“We have enough pumpkins.” Jeff nods. “At least for a while. Let’s find out. You’re going to be OK, ma’am,” he says to Rochi. “Just hang in there.”
We OK it with the site lead. Jeff helps me get Rochi back to the van, and then heads back to the truck. I pull away from the group and out onto the empty road, probably driving too fast. The little oxygen tank hisses, and the smell of smoke coming off of her fills up the vehicle. I crack the window, but there’s so much smoke outside now it doesn’t make a difference.
I look over at her, and she’s watching me with those bright eyes. “What the hell happened?” I say. “Did you have to drive right through the fire?”
“Beth,” she says. She puts her hand on the dash and takes another breath. She looks out of the windshield. “I was the fucking fire.”
I’m quiet for a minute, putting it all together. “The explosion? The lab?”
She nods. “You didn’t guess?”
I shake my head. “That’s how you were paying for it? All of the Burning Man stuff?”
“It wasn’t my setup, but yeah. One of the guys got really into it and it took on a life of its own.”
“Christ, Rochi.” How’d you let it get so bad? I want to say, but I know that’s not really a question with an answer.
“Look, Beth,” she says hesitantly, after taking in some more deep breaths. “I kind of need your van.”
“Because it matches the wallet?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” she says, and her eyes flash. She starts coughing again. Then shakes her head. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
“You need a hospital,” I say.
“If you take me in, the cops won’t be far behind.”
I have to slow down, because the smoke is blowing thick across the road now. I turn on the fog lights, but it doesn’t help. “Whe
re were you going to go?”
She leans her head against the window. “Hell, I don’t know. Baja, maybe. Down the coast on Route One—they probably wouldn’t be watching that way.”
“And then what?”
She sighs, coughs. “Look, I have to say I didn’t have a full evacuation plan set up in the event of a fucking apocalypse.”
I have to slow down—there’s a flock of wild turkeys in the road. The sky is getting lighter in the east, and I realize I’ve been up all night. I hear over the pager that air support is being called in, and that there’s zero percent containment of the fire. It’s completely out of control.
I guess my feelings for Rochi aren’t entirely contained either. I’m not giving her the van, but I do take her down to Hope’s dad’s house in Santa Cruz instead of the hospital. She coughs the whole way, and when I get her out of the van she staggers and I can see she’s bleeding.
Hope comes out in her robe and gives me that look I’m used to, but I shake my head. “Later,” I say. “She’s hurt, pretty badly. Can you grab the first-aid kit out of the back?”
Hope grabs the kit and Rochi’s other arm, and together we get her inside.
Hope’s dad, Rory, comes downstairs. He’s a start-up guy, with some pretty wild hair. “Hey there, Beth,” he says. “What’s that meth-head doing on my couch?”
“Dad,” Hope says, “Close your kibble hole.”
“Closing.” Rory grins at me. “She OK?”
“She needs to get to the hospital,” I say. “I’m just waiting for her to realize it.”
Rory says, “I’ll call 911.”
“No,” Rochelle, Hope, and I all say at the same time.
“What?” says Hope, when I look at her. “If you wanted the ambulance you wouldn’t have brought her here, right?”
I nod. “Hope, this is Rochi.”
“Hey,” Rochelle says. “I’m the Ghost from Communes Past.”
“Um, hey there, bleeding woman.”
“I was the beta test,” Rochelle tells Rory. “Too many bugs.”