Ross MACDONALD - The Underground Man

Kelsey turned to me, the flesh around his eyes still crinkled by the long look he had taken. “Be careful if you’re going up that way. The fire is still on the move.”

I said I would be careful. “Can I drop you anywhere?”

“No thanks. I can use the pickup to get downtown. But first I want to do some further checking on Fritz.”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“Up to a point I do. But you never get all the facts on the first go-round.”

He went back toward the house. Mrs. Snow was standing framed in the doorway like a faded vestal virgin guarding a shrine.

On my way up to Crescent Drive I punched on the car radio. It was tuned to a local station which was broadcasting continuous fire reports. The Rattlesnake Fire, as the announcer called it, was threatening the northeastern side of the city. Hundreds of residents were being evacuated. Smoke-jumpers were being flown in and additional firefighting equipment was on its way. But unless the Santa Ana stopped blowing, the announcer said, Rattlesnake might strike across the city all the way to the sea.

The Armistead house, like the Broadhurst house, was in debatable territory. I parked in the courtyard beside a black Continental. The fire was so close that I could sense its fibrillation when the engine died. Ashes like scant gray snow were sifting down onto the blacktop in the courtyard. I could hear water gushing somewhere at the rear.

The house was white and one-storied, set like a classical temple against a grove of cypress trees. It was so nicely proportioned that I didn’t realize how big it was until I hiked around it to the back. I passed a fifty-foot swimming pool at the bottom of which lay a blue mink coat, like the headless pelt of a woman, anchored by what looked like jewel boxes.

A tanned woman with short gray hair was spraying the cypresses with a hose. Beyond the cypresses, in the dry brush, a dark-haired man in dungarees was digging a furrow and beating out falling embers with his spade.

The woman was talking to the fire as if it was a crazy man or a wild dog –“Get back, you crummy bastard!”– and she turned to me almost gaily when I called her name.

“Mrs. Armistead?”

I saw when she turned that her gray hair was premature. Her face was a hot brown, cooled by slanting green eyes. Her body was elegant in a white slack-suit.

“Who are you?”

“Archer. I brought your Mercedes.”

“Good. I’ll send you a check, provided the car’s in good shape.”

“It is, and I’ll send you a bill.”

“In that case you might as well help out here.” Her downward smile made a white gash in her face. She gestured toward a spade which lay on brown cypress needles under the trees. “You could help Carlos dig that ditch.”

It sounded like a poor idea. I was in city clothes. But I peeled off my jacket and picked up the spade and went through the trees to help Carlos.

He was a sawed-off middle-aged Chicano who took my arrival as a matter of course. I worked behind him, broadening and deepening his furrow. It was almost certainly hopeless, a token scratch in the dirt across the base of the chaparral-covered hill. I could hear the fire very plainly now, breathing on the far side of the hill. Behind me the wind was soughing in the cypresses.

“Where’s Mr. Armistead?” I said to Carlos.

“I guess he moved onto the boat.”

“Where would that be?”

“In the marina.”

He gestured toward the sea. After a few more spadefuls, he added: “Her name is Ariadne.” He pronounced the name slowly and carefully.

“The girl?”

“The boat,” he said. “Mrs. Armistead told me it’s a Greek name. She’s crazy about Greece.”

“She looks a little like a Greek.”

“Yeah, I guess she does,” he said with a ruminative smile.

The sound of the fire became louder, and his face changed. We spaded some more. I was beginning to feel the work in my shoulders and in the palms of my hands. My shirt was pasted to my back.

“Is Mr. Armistead all by himself on the boat?”

“No. He’s got a boy with him. He calls him a crew, but I never seen him do any work on the boat. He’s one of these long-hairs, they call ’em.” Carlos raised his grimy hand to his head and caressed imaginary locks.

“Doesn’t Mr. Armistead like girls?”

“Yeah, he likes girls.” He added thoughtfully: “There was a girl on the boat the other night.”

“Blond girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see her?”

“My friend Pedro saw her when he was going out of the harbor yesterday morning. Pedro’s a fisherman – he gets up before the daylight. The girl was ’way up the mast and yelling like she was going to jump. The boy was trying to talk her down.”

“What did Pedro do?”

Carlos shrugged. “Pedro, he’s got children to feed. He don’t have time to stop and fool around with crazy girls.”

Carlos went back to his work with renewed concentration, as if he was digging a foxhole that would shelter him against the contemporary world. I worked along behind him. But it was clear that we were wasting our time.

The fire appeared at the top of the hill like a brilliant omniform growth which continued to grow until it bloomed very large against the sky. A sentinel quail on the hillside below it was ticking an alarm.

Carlos looked up at the fire and crossed himself. Then he turned his back on it and beckoned to me and walked away from his furrow through the trees.

One of the cypresses was beginning to smoke, high beyond the reach of Mrs. Armistead’s hose. She told Carlos to climb the tree.

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t do no good. The trees are gonna go, and maybe the house, too.”

The fire was coming down the hill, gathering speed and size. The trees had begun to sway. From the undergrowth beneath them, a bevy of stubby-winged quail flew up fighting for altitude over the house. Smoke like billowing darkness followed them.

Mrs. Armistead went on spraying the trees with her ineffectual hose. Carlos moved past her to the faucet and turned it off. She stood with the dripping nozzle in her hand, facing the fire.

It made a noise like a storm. Enormous and hot and wild, it leapt clumsily into the trees. The cypress that had been smoking burst into flames. Then the other trees blazed up like giant torches in a row.

I took Mrs. Armistead by the hand and pulled her away. She resisted jerkily, instinctively, like a woman who had trouble taking direction. She held onto the hose as long as she could, and finally dropped it in the grass.

Carlos was waiting impatiently by the pool. Fire was falling around him, sputtering and turning black in the blue water.

“We better get out of here,” he said. “We might could be cut off if she jumps the driveway. What do you want me to do about the fur coat?”

“Leave it in the pool,” she said. “It’s too hot for mink.”

I didn’t exactly like the woman, but I was beginning to take her personally. I gave Carlos the key to the Mercedes and went with her to the Lincoln Continental.

“You can drive if you like,” she said. “I’m a little done in.”

She grimaced. The admission cost her pain. As we followed the Mercedes down the driveway, she added a kind of explanation: “I love those quail. I’ve been feeding them and watching them ever since we built the house. They were finally beginning to feel safe. They brought their chicks right into the yard this spring.”

“The quail will come back.”

“Maybe so. I wonder if I will.”

We came to a turnaround which overlooked the city. Carlos pulled the Mercedes off the road, and I followed him. Smoke hung over the city, giving it a sepia tint like an old photograph. We climbed out of the cars and looked back at the house.