T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Drowning in fire, Phil clutched at me. He was dancing — we were dancing — whirling and shouting, frenetic, Laurel and Hardy dropped in the giant’s frying pan. My nostrils dilated round the chemical stink of incinerated hair, my flesh touched his and I burned. For a single terrible runaway instant I was caught up in his panic, frozen, unable to act — WOULD-BE RESCUER DROWNS IN FOUR FEET OF WATER — until I got hold of myself and shoved him from me. His face heaved, he shouted out my name. But I was already on him again, slapping the crown of his head, tearing at his shirt until it dropped from him in luminous strips, and then driving him through the door and out into the merciful night. Tangled like wrestlers, we pitched over the edge of the porch and I pinned him to the ground, buried him beneath me, rubbing, massaging, beating at the flames until they gave in.

We looked at each other, the moment crystallizing round the pained gaping incomprehension of his face, the feel of the blistered flesh of his arm, the dust cool as balm. Phil’s mouth was working, fishlike, trying to close on a bubble of shock, his pompadour was gone and the wicked hungry glare of the fire glistened in his eyes. There was no time for assessments, repairs or solicitude: the jaws were making another pass. “Quick!” I hissed. “The hose, the hose!” And then I was back in the shed, flinging things at the flames — a box of newspapers, a pillow, a pair of gutted mattresses — anything to give us a second’s purchase. Flames sprang up, I slapped them down. The overturned lamp spat like a torch, I kicked it across the room. I felt nothing — neither the heat on my face nor the burns on my hands and arms — nothing but the imperative of the moment: we had to quench the fire, kill it before it killed us and took the house, the woods and the mountain with it.

Even then, even in those first few frenzied seconds, I knew that our lives were at stake, that the fire, once loosed on the parched fields, would burn to Ukiah. We’d gone five months without water. Alder, manzanita, pine, hollow grass and withered scrub — it was all kindling, stacked and waiting. This was no grassfire we had here, no mere acre-scorcher or garage fire, this was the germ of the conflagration, the blaze that leaps into the air and rushes through the trees like apocalypse, the fire that outruns you, chokes you, incinerates you. I fought it. No thought of quitting, running, ducking out: this was the end of the line.

I stood just inside the doorway, flailing at the flames with an old overcoat. Across the room — through a gauntlet of heaped refuse and sudden startling splashes of fire — stood the jerrycans of gasoline. Four of them. The fire flowed toward them like the tide rising on a beach and I saw that they would be enveloped in a matter of minutes, and thought of teenaged Phil in the dump truck, too stupid to realize he was about to die. I was stupid, too. Beating back the flames with the smoldering overcoat, breathing fire, my eyes tearing with the smoke and ears slapped and stung by the roar, I pictured that moment of crushing combustion: my flesh — fat and lean — sizzling like bacon, roiling clouds of fire, the house going up as if napalmed. They’d never even find my bones.

At this juncture, Phil appeared in the doorway. He was shirtless, his sneakers were steaming and his head looked like a scorched onion. In one hand he held an intermittently spurting garden hose, in the other a dripping mop. Though his eyes gave away his terror — the sockets could barely contain them, the wild ducking eyes of horses trapped in a burning barn — he trained the hose on the heart of the blaze and began swabbing the heaps of burning refuse like a frenetic scrubwoman. Encouraged, I edged forward and lifted the nearest mattress, itself aflame now, and slammed it down again, momentarily damping the fire so that I could tear through the room to the cans of gasoline.

I tore. Through Stygian gloom and Tartarean fire, through a smoldering clutter that would have given a fire marshall nightmares, kicking aside paint cans and leaping mounds of fuming rags and discarded clothes. When I reached the far side of the room I couldn’t see Phil or the open doorway. The jerrycans were hot to the touch. I crouched over them, bending low to snatch a quick breath beneath the loops of smoke raveling down from the ceiling, thinking What next? Was I really going to sprint through that inferno with a pair of ten-gallon cans of gasoline tucked under my arm? Twice, no less? I saw smoke, flames like teeth. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Insidious, the image of a Buddhist monk, his charred frame the center in a whirling jacket of fire, came to me. So this is heroism, I thought, feeling like the buck private who flings himself on the hand grenade to save his buddies in the foxhole, the platoon, the general and his chiefs of staff, and by extension the whole of the United States and the American way of life. I.e., foolish.

Protean, the flames licked at the walls, roared beneath the elevated floorboards, tendrils and creepers of some spontaneous, irreversible growth. I was coughing, my lungs turned inside out like a pair of rubber gloves. The jerrycans weren’t getting any cooler. As from a great distance I heard Phil shouting my name, but I’d begun to feel dizzy, sleepy somehow. Smoke inhalation, I thought numbly, and inhaled more smoke, pinching my eyes shut against the acid haze. In another moment I’d be too groggy to stand, let alone heft eighty-pound cans of gasoline.

It was then — the pyre awaiting me, my throat constricting, inertia pinning me to the spot — that I became aware of an almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, a flow of cooler air, the soft incongruous touch of a breeze on the back of my neck. I jerked round to discover the rents Marlon had torn in the back wall — jagged, night-black, rents the size of jerrycans. The fire talked to me, harsh and sibilant, but I didn’t listen. One, two, three, four, the cans were gone, tumbled in the grass, and I was ducking across the room like a deserter in no-man’s-land. Phil gave me a wild desperate look as I flung myself past him and out into the open, where I fell to my knees and coughed till I thought I was about to give birth.

Twenty minutes later we were still at it. Stripped to the waist like stokers, soot-blackened and viscid with sweat, we plied shovels, hauled buckets of dirt, stamped out a grassfire on one side of the shed while flinging burning rubbish out of the door on the other. It was impossible, maddening, a losing proposition: one minute we’d think we finally had things under control, and the next flames would be spitting in our faces. We might have escaped the holocaust — the single scorching gasoline-fed blast that would have decided the issue once and for all — but the steady incremental force of the fire was beginning to take its toll. Phil was hurting, his chest and shoulders scoriated with whiplash burns, his right forearm slick with pus. He looked tired, scared, worn, looked as if he were about to throw down his shovel and bolt for the car. I didn’t feel much better. Though we’d worked like automatons, oblivious to heat, thirst, pain, worked without remit and in perfect accord, grunting instructions to each other, rushing from one threat to the next in feverish concentration — though we plumbed the depths of our physical and spiritual resources, reached down deep inside ourselves for that something extra and got it — we were barely running even. And we weren’t getting any stronger.

If we’d had water pressure it might have been different. But the hose, drawing on the spring-fed tank that supplied the house, could deliver no more than a trickle. (The water table was low, the tank small — a class of thirsty kindergartners could have come in off the playground and drained the entire thing without blinking. In better times — that is, when our lives weren’t imminently threatened by an advancing inferno — this was merely an annoyance; now it was critical.) Within minutes Phil’s mop had gone up like a pitch-pine torch, and we began to recognize the futility of attempting to fight a three-alarm blaze with teacups of water. We turned to the mattresses as a stopgap. Flung at the core of the conflagration, they would smother the flames for a minute or two while we frantically scattered burning debris and parried fiery thrusts with our shovels. Of course, this procedure had its drawbacks. Unlike more conventional fire-fighting agents— water, sand, CO 2foam — bed ticking and cotton batting are themselves flammable, and periodically the mattresses had to be dragged out into the grass and beaten. Soon the grass was ablaze, and we were fighting fires on two fronts.