Alan Russell - Burning Man

“Fire isn’t something you want to mess with,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”

“That’s why you and Fido should take off.”

“That’s why we all should. My dog and I were caught in a fire a few years ago. We got burned up, and it was as bad as anything I ever want to experience. You don’t want that.”

The window behind Miller was now a vivid orange. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought the sun was rising. I wiped my suddenly wet brow. My body seemed to have forgotten that I don’t sweat as much as normal people.

Miller took note of the growing fireball behind him. “The flames were hot on my feet when I took off. It took longer to get here than I thought it would.”

“You started the fire?”

“I drove my ATV to the end of my property line and then walked into the canyon. I knew once the fire started the winds would drive it over the crest and move it in this direction. I wouldn’t have gone to all that effort if I’d known you were going to show up. I just would have set the damn house on fire.”

“Maybe I was meant to show up. Maybe you should take it as a sign that you weren’t meant to die.”

Miller didn’t seem to be listening to what I was saying. “I had to get the fire going good,” he said. “Avocado and citrus are more fire resistant than most trees. But I made sure to put a lot of dry mulch in my groves. It’s making for good tinder.”

His eyes strayed to the fire, and he nodded, but then his head swung back toward me. Despite the booze and whatever else he might have taken, Miller was still very much aware.

“You don’t want to die in a fire. I can’t think of a worse way to die.”

“I can,” he said, “lethal injection.”

“Once a jury hears how your son was bullied, they’ll be sympathetic to your position. They’ll understand you were in pain.”

“My son wasn’t just bullied. He was murdered. He couldn’t take the suffering anymore. I only saw him weekends, you know. My wife and I divorced ten years ago. I knew my son was unhappy, but I didn’t know why. I learned too late how they killed him.”

Orange light now filled the dining room. The fire was announcing itself.

“What do you mean when you say they killed him?”

“Dinah opened my eyes. When she first called the crisis line everything she said had this terrible deja vu quality. So I did a little digging, and I found out about my son and his friend. Someone saw them hugging one another. That really brought out Klein and his jackals. They never gave him any peace after that.”

“Was his friend Jeremy Levitt?”

Miller sighed and nodded. “I don’t know if my son was gay, but I do know how special he was, and how sensitive. Those animals played on his sensitivity.”

“He died of a drug overdose,” I said.

“That’s what he wanted it to look like. It was an accident, just like this fire was an accident. Like son, like father.”

An orange light was now reaching out for my body; I was in its light and heat. The fire was descending on the house. There was no time for stories, but I continued to listen.

“My son didn’t want my ex-wife and me to feel responsible for his death, so he made it look like he was taking drugs and had an overdose.”

“Jeremy told you this?”

“Jeremy told me he never saw my son take drugs and never heard him mention using them.”

“There was a report that your son went to raves, and that he was seen taking drugs.”

“He went to one rave. That’s where he bought the drugs that he used two weeks later to kill himself. That’s why he made a show of taking them at the rave.”

“Let’s say you’re right about all of this. In the end, it was Danny that took his own life. Why did you murder Paul Klein?”

“‘Suicide Is Painless.’”

“I don’t agree.”

“I’m talking about the title to a song. You’ve probably heard it a million times but don’t even know it. It’s the opening music to the show M*A*S*H* . I learned that Klein liked to hum that tune when he bullied my son. He’d phone my son and play that tune. He wanted Danny to think about suicide. He pushed him into the abyss.”

“How do you know all of that?”

“I asked the right people. It was Dinah that made me ask the questions, because he was doing the same thing to her. Whenever he got the chance, whenever others weren’t around, Klein hummed his dirge around Dinah.”

There was another scent now in addition to the fumes in the air. Smoke was filling the house.

“We have to leave.”

He shook his head. I wanted to flee, but curiosity kept me there a few moments longer, trumping my fear. “Why did you crucify Klein?”

“Why did he crucify me?”

The room was heating up rapidly, which could only mean one thing: the house was on fire. Miller was a dead man, and if I didn’t leave, I’d join him. But at that moment Miller decided to satisfy my curiosity.

“I am not sure when the idea first came to me to crucify him,” he said. “I had already decided to kill him, but that wasn’t punishment enough. I wanted his death to be a spectacle. I wanted to mock him in death as he had mocked my son in life.”

The window behind Miller began to crack. He turned his head, but out of the corner of his eye saw me move toward him. Miller grabbed the candle. There was no way to reach him without his sending the house up in flames.

“No,” he said, brandishing the candle.

It was his last chance, and mine. I couldn’t afford to try and rescue him. “Let’s go!” I yelled to Sirius.

The two of us raced for the front door. I reached for the handle, and then recoiled. It was hot to the touch. I looked through the window and saw flames enveloping the front porch.

We sprinted toward the back of the house. As we passed by the dining room the window broke. Shards flew as the fumes and whatever had been poured on the table ignited, and Miller was encased in flames. His screams trailed behind us.

Suicide wasn’t painless.

We ran out the back door. Most of the house was already in flames. There was no choice where to run. While we’d been talking, flames had swept over the grove. The fire had leapfrogged into outlying areas; the chaparral on the south side of the fence was already torching, and offered no escape. The only area not yet overrun by flames was to the west.

I kept low, trying to swallow as little smoke as possible, trying to find a way out. The fire seemed to have outflanked us and was attacking on all sides. I cursed myself for having stayed in the house too long, for once again putting our lives on the line. Of all people, I should have known the perils of a wildfire. As we ran I tried to figure out how we were going to survive. Was there an answer? If you believed Bob Dylan, it was blowing in the wind.

Hard as it was to do, I stopped my mad dash. We couldn’t outrun the fire for long. If we were to survive, I had to outthink it. The way the wind was gusting, there was no safe spot. You had to assume the fire was going to burn everything and everywhere.

I patted down my pockets. That’s what people do when they’re desperate to find something they know isn’t there; they search anyway because they don’t know what else to do. This time I found what I was looking for and pulled free the matches I’d used to start a fire the night before.

The wind kicked up around us. It was a warm wind, but I still felt chilled. I knew what I had to do: I needed to fight fire with fire, and I was Scarecrow afraid.

I needed to create a firebreak. With a big enough dead zone of consumed tinder, we might survive the flames. Firefighters are good at setting back burns, but then they know what they’re doing. They burn an area of vegetation, working to create a fire break that doesn’t add to the main fire. There is an art to back burns. Firefighters set their flames near enough to the primary fire so that it sucks the backfire inward. With no fuel to burn, the fire’s approach is often stopped.