T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

At some point we’d decided to abandon the mattresses in favor of dirt, and I found myself standing in a knee-deep trench just off the edge of the porch, shoveling like some crazed and fever-racked desperado atop a chest of doubloons. My hands were raw, the fire in the shed spoke with a steady implacable hiss, the mattresses leaked flames into the grass before me. I shoveled. Two scoops on the porch, one in the red-flaming grass. Phil stood above me on the porch, a cutout, flat against the glare, pitching the dirt through the open doorway. This was the shovel brigade. Dig, heave, dig: there was no other rhythm in the world.

I was in the act of lifting my six- or seven-hundredth shovel-load when I was arrested by a new sound from the shed — a fruity, nut-cracking sound, fibers yielding, tree limbs snapping in a gale — and turned to see that a section of the floor had caved in, spewing sparks and glowing cinders into the scrub behind the house. Unleashed, flames shot up through the gap, beating like wings, swelling and shape-shifting till they reached the ceiling. Phil staggered back from the doorway and dropped his shovel just as a can of something volatile — paint thinner? — went up with a percussive wallop. I stopped, too. For the first time since Phil had cried out and I’d started up out of the darkened kitchen, I hesitated. It was overwhelming, hopeless. The shed was engulfed in flame from beneath, the brushfire at my feet was spreading faster than I could cover it, and now the scrub out back was going up, too. I stood there transfixed, my hand clenched round the haft of the useless shovel, the familiar chalky taste of surrender creeping up my throat.

That was when Gesh appeared.

At the stroke of that moment — the paint thinner flaring in triumph, the hole in the floor feeding oxygen to the flames like an outsized bellows, Phil stunned and tired and hurt, my will wavering and the quitter’s taint rising in me like an infection — that was when Gesh emerged from the darkness like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. He came out of the night in white chinos and sandals, his hair slicked down, beard trimmed and aloha shirt pressed, trailing a scent of aftershave. He was running. Head down, shoulders hunched forward, the big man held in reserve for the crucial confrontation, for single combat, the goal-line stand. No time for questions, strategies, appraisals: he slammed through the grassfire, took the porch in a bound, snatched up Phil’s shovel and plunged into the burning shed.

The effect was almost immediate: flames that had leapt to the ceiling were suddenly hobbled, the brilliant dilating light diminished as if Gesh’s bulk alone could displace the flames, as if he were a true believer cast into the burning fiery furnace, a Joe Magarac able to cool molten steel with a touch of his hand. I heard the scrape of his shovel, the snarl of the flames, and then I watched as a steady swirling arc of fire disengaged itself from the conflagration and struck the surface of the porch in an ignifluous rush: a smoldering rug materialized, the charred headboard of a forgotten bed, smoke-spewing cans, scraps of lumber, blazing boxes of rags and newspapers. Shovel flailing, shirt aflap, Gesh stood rooted in the heart of the inferno, a shadow closing over the jagged sheet of flame, choking it, defusing it, stealing its fire. Revitalized, Phil danced round each heap of combustion as it shot through the doorway, poking and stamping like a bushman with an effigy. I came alive too. Suddenly the shovel was light in my hands, a toy, a stick, and I was dumping dirt on the brushfire like a backhoe in high gear.

This was teamwork. With Gesh hacking away in the shed like a hook and ladder company on the eve of a three-week vacation and Phil dredging up some final deep-buried reserve of grit and energy, I was inspired, a shoveling genius. Though the flames snaked through the grass and rose up to hiss in my face, though bushes exploded in a rush of streaming sparks and the ground went hot beneath my feet, I drove myself like a long-distance runner coming into the home stretch, my will undeniable, inexorable, victory in sight. The shovel rose and fell with a mechanical insistence until the last pocket of fire closed on a fist of darkness. Then I turned back to the shed.

Inside, the heat was dizzying, the smoke a noose round the throat. The atmosphere seemed denser now, blacker, and I remember wondering vaguely if this was a good sign or bad. As I inched my way in I thought I could make out Gesh’s form through the haze, but the fumes stabbed at my eyes and tore at my lungs until I found myself backing out the door like a crab. How could he stand it? He’d been in there five minutes, ten minutes, he’d been in there long enough to suffocate and collapse. I suddenly pictured him gasping for breath, going lightheaded, losing his bearings and tumbling into the flames like a man of straw, and then I was back in the shed, shouting his name as Phil had shouted mine over the simmering jerrycans. “Gesh!” I called, the vacuum of my throat torn by the smoke that rushed to fill it. At first I saw nothing, heard only the steady flap of the flames. I called out again. Then, out of a confusion of vacillating shapes, Gesh suddenly appeared, naked to the waist, wielding his shovel like a trident. I plunged forward. Took hold of his arm. Shouted in his face with all the frantic urgency of the rescuer lowered into the fuming pit. “This way!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

The aloha shirt trailed from him in spangled tatters, his face was rigid with fury, his eyes like open sores. “Get out!” he roared, snatching his arm away and turning to fling a bucket of earth at the fiery column rising through the gap in the staved-in floor. I glanced round. He’d managed to clear the floor, prop up the ceiling with a fallen beam and hammer out a section of the wall I’d last seen burning like a Yule log. I tried to pitch in, but quarters were close and he inadvertently slammed into me as he bent, cursing, for a second bucket of earth. Amazed, I watched as he hurtled round the room like a man trapped in a runaway locomotive, damping the main blaze in a chiaroscuro of furious movement, scattering debris, levitating buckets of dirt. The heat was cooking my skin, the smoke curing my lungs. I got out.

If Gesh was getting a grip on the fire in the shed, the blaze out back was the most concentrated threat now. Not only was it feeding the conflagration under the shed, but it was leapfrogging toward the drought-withered trees of the ravine and creeping along the base of the house as well. I turned to it like an outflanked cavalry officer, galloping round the corner of the shed with my spade held out before me like a lance; unfortunately I bowled into Phil, who was hunched feebly over his own digging implement and coughing into his fist like a tubercular orphan. "You all right?” I screamed, staggering past him, everything a shout, the whole world a roar. And then I was bellowing instructions at him and we were shoveling yet again, steel biting earth, earth flying. Together we were able to clear a corridor to the base of the shed, and we began pitching dirt at the flames blossoming beneath the floorboards as Gesh fought them from above. Smoke ran for the sky, the shovel tore at my blistered hands. Flames coughed, sputtered, flared up again with an insidious cackle. We moved dirt, truckloads of it, and eventually we began to prevail; the fire under the shed cringed, shrank, backed off to devour itself in frustration. There was a single astonishing moment when the light suddenly died and I looked up at the shed in stupefaction: it was no longer burning. Gutted, charred, smoking, a sagging depthless web of lines lit only by the sickly glow of the fire at my back, the shed was no longer burning.

The rest was anticlimax. There was Gesh hurtling along the edge of the ravine with a splitting axe, clearing brush, taking down thorn and manzanita as if he were picking flowers, forcing the fire away from the trees and back toward the ground it had already blackened. There was Phil protecting the back wall of the house as if it were Buckingham Palace or the Louvre, Gesh and I cutting swaths through the single fire, dividing it once, twice, and then dividing it again, the heat attenuating, the light fading. We watched, shovels flicking like tongues, as the isolated fires burned themselves out, watched as the coals glowed hot on the charred ground and then faded into the enveloping night. Half an hour after Gesh had emerged from nowhere to snatch up Phil’s shovel and fight his way into the shed, the threat was over.