Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “I ran to him, and there were several seconds—no more than three or four but they felt like an hour or an entire night—when Willis burned, his eyes watching me come to him. Only as I reached him did Willis realize that the lamp in his fist was the source of the fire, and he made a great gesture, one that I am sure he believed would be the last of his life, and hurled the kerosene lamp in a long arc over my head to the depot. The lamp glass shattered, and then everything was silent until a great whoosh! swept the truck yard. I smothered Willis in my arms as the depot exploded with mushrooms of orange and black flame. I turned to see a fireball rising so high that I am sure they could spot it in Berlin.

  “Willis’s fire transferred to my head—that is where this small scar at the temple came from, Mr. Blackwood. But I managed to extinguish him and then to drag him out of the scalding heat of the burning depot and into the beechwood forest. I pulled him several hundred yards, far enough from the breath of the fire but still within range of its fumes and smoke. I dragged him as far as I could, but he was wounded and I was too, although less so, and we lay on the hard forest floor as the sun rose and day broke. As we sit here right now, with the sun pressing through the blind and the hearth empty, I’m sure you can imagine for yourself the lulling qualities of a fire. Well, a large fire, even one shooting truck shrapnel into the trees, can be that much more soothing, especially if you are hurt and tired and desperately scared. I don’t hesitate to tell you that that is what I was: scared for my life, although without any sense of regret. But scared, as any man would be.

  “Eventually the explosions stopped, but the fire continued. Willis and I were huddled against each other and soon we fell asleep. Later, the sunlight through the trees woke me up. I didn’t know what day it was, although it would turn out to be only an hour or so after the first explosion. The fire was still burning, consuming everything within it but for some reason not spreading into the forest beyond. I sat up and Willis stirred, moaning with pain. His arm was less burned than you might think, for the flame had consumed more of his sleeve than it had his flesh. But his neck was badly burned, the flesh open and weepy. He could not sit up. He was ashen in the face, and he kept clearing his throat with a terrible thirst. With his eyes he begged me to do something for him, but I didn’t know what I could do. He pressed together his lips and whispered, ‘Water.’

  “I stood to survey what had happened, but as I did so, my own shirt fell away as if it had been woven of ash. For in smothering Willis’s fire, my clothes had burned too, and I was down to a pair of trousers dotted with holes and my diceboxes loosely laced and the little piece of coral around my throat.

  “Again, Willis begged for water. Needless to say, the water barrel had overturned, and the stream was on the far side of the depot, a quarter of a mile from where we were. I tried to lift Willis, but the pain overtook him, and as urgently as he had begged for water he now begged me to release him and leave him lying. I scoured the strewn debris for a tossed canteen, but there was nothing but bits of fender shredded to the size of tin-can openers. I told Willis, ‘I’ll go to the stream.’

  “Due to the hot summer the stream ran low, but there was enough current and flow for me to sink my face into it. The water was a great relief to the patch of broiled flesh at my temple and to my own dry throat. I hadn’t realized how much oily smoke I had breathed until I washed out my mouth. But there was no way for me to bring water back to Willis. When I returned to him I said, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a cup.’

  “His eyes met mine and it was clear that he was disappointed, although not with me. No, it was as if, for the first time, he was disappointed with life. With fate. I told him that the explosion had been so great that it was unlikely we would have to wait much longer for a couple of soldiers to come along to investigate. Willis tried to take comfort in this, nodding as much as he could, but the fire had chewed the flesh so viciously from his nape that even a tilt of the neck hurt him more than a man, even a man like Willis Poore, should be asked to bear. I knelt by him and asked what I could do to make him more comfortable. He told me to help him adjust his head, and doing my best to ignore his horrible wincing and shrieking I rearranged him so that his cheek was resting against my thigh. And in that position we waited.

  “The morning sun reached noon’s peak, and still no one arrived in the forest. In war, a lack of response can be a good sign or something more ominous, there’s no way to be sure, so I knelt patiently, and my leg fell painfully asleep.

  “Willis was too uncomfortable to sleep, and eventually he gave up trying. His open eyes met mine, and there was a long intimate moment, his head in my lap, of us looking at each other, like two animals thrown together in a cave, one might say, or perhaps the way man and wife cautiously study each other across the conjugal bed on their wedding night. Willis and I shared a deep sense of not knowing what to expect from the other, and I believe that he both trusted and feared me at the same time.

  “Willis lay wounded in my lap, which is where men dream of finding their enemies one day. Isn’t that the case? Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Bruder stopped talking and stared at nothing for a long while. His face looked like that of a man in prayer.

  “Now I’ve come to the final part of my story. As I was saying, Willis Poore was dying in my lap. Given my past encounters with him, to say nothing of his murderous arson attack, I’m sure you would think that I would relish this moment, that I would nudge him toward death, that I would search for a pinch of salt to throw onto his open pink wound. I might even have thought this myself. But in fact that wasn’t the case. I surprised myself by becoming concerned for Willis, and after we’d stared into each other’s eyes for some time, I said, ‘Willis? What can I do?’

  “His lips parted and his tongue emerged and then he spoke slowly, like someone who must ponder the creation of each word. ‘I was going to pull you out of the fire,’ said Willis. ‘I planned on rescuing you.’ I told him to stop, he didn’t have to tell me anything, not now, but he persisted. ‘I had a plan,’ he said. ‘A plan to make it look like we’d been shelled. Then we could have fled.’ Here I insisted that he stop his explanation. It could change nothing now.

  “I don’t know if I believed him. I don’t know even today. But I know my fortune forever changed at that moment.

  “I told Willis to stop speaking, it would only exhaust him more and leave him in greater need of water. Several more hours had passed, and the burn on his neck seemed to be worsening, as if it were continuing to eat at his flesh and dig down to the knuckles of his spine. It was a terrible sight, as close as anything to seeing into a man’s soul, a hole so open and deep that I could have launched anything—a louse, a villainous thought—directly into his brain. The thirst was overcoming him, and he returned to begging me—in that California way—for water. I told him I didn’t know how to get him to the stream, and he said, ‘Please bring me some water, please, do anything.’

  “The other thing that interests me about death is how clever it can make a man. As Willis struggled to maintain consciousness he pointed at my boots, the old diceboxes that had reshaped my feet into hard red blocks. ‘Bring me water in your boot.’

  “In my boot? I had to admit it was a good idea on his part, and I told him so. I ran to the stream, removed my right boot, and filled it with water. Of course the boot leaked, but I believed it would suffice as a vessel and I ran carefully back through the forest. Needless to say, a boot is not meant to transport water, and it spilled its contents as I returned to Willis. By the time I reached him the boot was wet but empty, its laces grimy and limp. Willis’s disappointment was apparent in his eyes. I said, ‘I’ll try again.’ But he was becoming desperate now and he said, ‘There’s no time.’ His chest rose and fell, and he said, ‘Bring me water in your mouth.’

  “ ‘In my mouth?’ He began to nod, but the pain of it caused him to scream. He was right to ask for this, and I returned to the stream and knelt at its bank and pushed my face through it
s surface. I drank for a long time and then filled my cheeks and began to make my way back to Willis.

  “Have you ever run with a mouthful of water? It isn’t as easy as it might seem. The water slips down the throat, especially if your throat remains greasy with smoke; it pushes its way out the nose. No, as we all know, God created no vessel more leaky than the mouth. My telling you this is a prime example. In any case, by the time I reached Willis, there was little water left behind the dam of my lips. But I knelt beside him, and he chose to bear the terrible pain of lifting his head to me, and with surprisingly little embarrassment we brought our lips together. And when I opened my mouth to his waiting tongue, only drops of spittle transferred. But Willis was so thirsty that he began to suck the moisture from my lips, and I had to push him off me or he might have slurped the flesh from my face.

  “By now it was clear to me that Willis had stepped upon death’s threshold, and that if something did not happen he would leave me alone. And it was clear to him as well. He gripped my leg and said, ‘Go back to the stream. Bring me more.’ At first I resisted, thinking I had run a quarter of a mile there and a quarter of a mile back to carry a single drop of water. After all, what was the point? I am fatalistic that way. But Willis clawed at me, and his pleas filled the forest. ‘Go! Hurry!’ ‘But, Willis,’ I said. ‘I didn’t bring you any water. You were drinking the spit from my tongue.’

  “The mood of a man in Willis’s position can change instantly, and he released his hand from my thigh and fell back and said, ‘You are right.’ He was silent with resignation for a while, and then he said, ‘Bruder? Will you tell them I died honorably?’

  “ ‘But you did not,’ I said.

  “ ‘But will you tell them that I did?’

  “ ‘How can I?’

  “Willis asked me to come closer, to bring my face within inches of his. I did so, and I could feel his breath upon me when he said, ‘Don’t tell them that I was trying to flee. Don’t tell them that I burned the depot. Tell them that we were shelled. That the enemy brought me down.’

  “ ‘But it isn’t true.’

  “ ‘We can make it true.’

  “Was I shocked at his request? No, I wasn’t shocked. Desperation produces desperate acts. But I was surprised by my willingness to listen. What was it the poet once said? ‘I can endure my own desperation, but not another’s hope.’

  “Willis looked into my eyes and said, ‘I have a proposal for you, Bruder. A proposal for a transaction.’

  “I asked what he had in mind.

  “ ‘A transfer of property.’

  “Willis motioned for me to lean in even closer, so that now our noses almost touched. He said, ‘I’ll give you anything you want if you tell them I died an honorable man.’ I asked him what he meant, and he repeated, ‘Anything.’

  “Although I was young, and in many ways still an unformed man, even then I knew precisely what I wanted. Yet until that moment I didn’t know how greedily I had desired it. I did not know what I was willing to do to acquire it.

  “I held Willis’s face in my hands and said, ‘I want the Rancho Pasadena.’

  “I expected Willis to protest, to say that that was the one thing he could not give me. Yet of course in many ways it was the only thing he had. He did not flinch. He only closed his eyes and opened them and said, ‘All right.’ From my pocket I produced a scrap of paper and a pencil. With significant effort Willis sat up, groaned, and began to write something down. While he worked on his note, I said, ‘How do you know I will keep my word?’

  “ ‘I don’t,’ said Willis. ‘But with this paper you know I will keep mine.’ He handed me the note and I read it: ‘Upon my death, I, Willis Fishe Poore II, leave the Rancho Pasadena to Private Bruder of Company 17.’ The note was short and spontaneous but legally irreproachable. What shocked me most about that day in France was the note itself. It looked as if a seven-year-old had written it. The letters were elementary and oversized and very much in the hand of a child. And I suppose that that was the case. But the note left me profoundly sad, and I genuinely felt compassion for the young man—a boy, really—dying before me. I did not take pleasure in the great treasure that would soon transfer to me. My life had changed with that note, and it actually felt—at first, at least—that Willis’s murderous disgrace was falling away. ‘The ranch is yours,’ he said. ‘Treat my sister kindly. You must make sure that Lolly does not suffer.’ I said that I would indeed look after Lolly. ‘And no matter what, you must not tell anyone how I died. Please always call me a hero, from this day on.’ I said that I would. And it was that simple. The deal was done! Willis’s disgrace had been erased, the truth of his impending death had been twisted into an unrecognizable form, and I had become one of Pasadena’s greatest landowners.

  “Do you see what war can do? Everything can change with a single shot. In an afternoon, history, both personal and national, can turn itself around.

  “But I did not have time to think of such things there in the forest. Willis was suffering greatly, and I knew that he wanted nothing more than another drop of water. ‘I’ll try again,’ I said. I ran through the trees, stopping only to tuck the note into my one dry boot. It was late afternoon by now and a shadow had fallen across the stream, as if someone enormous were standing over it. I knelt at the stream’s edge, but this time I closed my eyes for a minute. I cannot say whether or not I knew enough to pray then, but I stopped to think about the fateful day I had just survived; I relived it in my head and told myself to always remember it as it was, not as it might have been, or should have been. No, I would hold history correctly, artlessly. Then I pushed my head beneath the surface and filled my cheeks with water. Under the water, I thought I heard a clanging like cowbells, yet I was sure it was nothing but the stream running over the rocks. Willis was waiting, and I knew that I must return to him with the final drops of water he would ever drink. I pulled my head out of the stream and shook the water from my face. It was a great relief to the burn at my temple, but there wasn’t time to think about that; no, I had to get back to Willis Poore. But when I stood and turned around, there, not ten yards from me, was a little man with white hair and a white beard and a wide rack of tin cups and pans and canteens strapped to his back. He was wearing a little cap with earflaps, and it was clear that he wasn’t a soldier but a salesman. What was he doing and who was he?, you ask. Oh, that’s simple to say. It was Dieter Stumpf, hawking his tin cups up and down the front, from trench to trench, and on that day in September 1918, Dieter reached up over his shoulder and plucked from his rack a tin cup with a curled lip and said, ‘Need a cup, soldier? Only five cents.’ He moved toward me, the cup extended, and when he was at my side he said, in a voice that could have sold me anything, ‘I’ve also got a first-aid kit for that burn of yours, soldier. It can be yours for a dime.’ ”

  3

  Bruder’s story stayed with Andrew Jackson Blackwood as he drove home from the Rancho Pasadena on Christmas Day, and he returned to it many times during the following week. It began to explain things, at least sort of, and he felt as if he had succeeded at a difficult task in getting Bruder to unravel his past.

  Blackwood alluded to this when he called Mrs. Nay the day after New Year’s, but she was furious with him for going to the property without her: “Your relationship with the client should be via me.” She scolded him for behaving unethically, prowling around the ranch like a thief, and Blackwood tried to explain that his interest had grown so intense that he couldn’t keep himself away. “Then meet me at the house this afternoon,” she ordered, “and I’ll show you the rest.”

  In truth, Cherry Nay didn’t want Bruder to tell the story; even though it wasn’t about her, she felt it was hers to recount. Hadn’t she been the one who tried to sort out things in the end, for Bruder’s benefit? She saw it as her role—and her right.

  “I told you already, Mrs. Nay,” said Blackwood. “I managed to see the orange grove. Mr. Bruder graciously showed me around.”

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