California Fire and Life (16 page)

Not to like
stress
you, darling, but …

It doesn’t end there.

Nick has God knows how much tied up in leveraged real estate. Balloon payments looming, then the bottom drops out. Orange County goes bankrupt and you can’t get a construction loan at any price. Even money can’t buy money.

First real estate, then the furniture. People can’t make their mortgages, they’re not going to buy George II side tables, so what was an investment becomes a collection. Nick gets his ego wrapped up in it. The damn furniture become his
possessions
. Even on the rare occasions when he gets an offer, he won’t part with them.

And they need the money, they’re so stretched out.

He mortgages the house, at God knows what psychic cost.

Prime interest and his balls.

He takes it out in coke and fucking, Letty says. The money goes up his nose and out his dick.

Pam becomes the quintessential lonely South County wife and starts to drink. First it’s liquid lunches; after a while she’s already primed by the time lunch rolls around. Sobers up in the afternoons for the kids, gets them dinner, bathes them, puts them to bed, then drinks herself to sleep.

“Letty …,” Jack says.

“I know,” Letty says. “But I’m telling you she was
sober
.”

“Maybe not that night,” Jack says. “You know, Nick has the kids, he’s going to divorce her …”

Letty shakes her head.
“She
was divorcing
him.”

“Oh.”

Pam finally gets tired of it, Letty tells him. Tired of his fucking around, his coke, his lying, his smacking her when the real estate deal falls through or when she objects to him buying a five-thousand-dollar sculpture with money they don’t have.

Tired of herself, too. Tired of the way she feels and looks. And horrified that she’s starting to see her kids through the long-distance smoked lens of pills and alcohol.

So she checks herself into rehab.

I don’t know what went on in there, Letty says, but Pam went in a
faux
princess and came out a real woman. She must have
dealt
with stuff there, because she comes out, she’s different. More real, somehow. Warmer.

She starts calling, inviting me over. Even introduces me as her half
sister. We speak Spanish together, which makes Nick crazy. I spend time with the kids—take them to the beach, take them to the country—

“What do you know about the country?” Jack asks.

“I live there now,” Letty says. “I bought a little place up along the Ortega Highway, Cleveland National Forest. Are we talking about me or Pam?”

“Pam.”

Pam comes out of rehab warmer.

And
strong
.

Gives Nick an ultimatum: Straighten up or the marriage is over.

She hauls him into counseling.
That
works. Three weeks later she comes home to find him in their bed with some coke whore from Newport Beach. She tells Nick to pack his bags and get out.

Nick storms out and comes back an hour later with a head full of blow and beats the crap out of her. Princess Pam would have taken it, but this Pam goes into court the next day and gets a restraining order,
throws
his ass out.

He runs to Mommy. She calls Pam and tells her that she’ll never, ever get the kids. She’s an unfit mother. The Vale lawyers will take her apart.

You’ll take my kids
, Pam says—get this, Jack—
over my dead body
.

Set on fire, Jack thinks, melted
into
their bed, cremated again and scattered over the ocean.

“He was terrified of a divorce,” Letty says. “He’s already up to his ears in debt and she’s going to take half. And the house, and the kids …”

Daddy says Mommy is all burned up
. “You have motive,” Jack says, “but—”

“He
told
her he was going to kill her,” Letty says. “He’d break into the house when she was gone and take things. Leave her threatening notes. Call her on the phone late at night and
tell
her he was going to kill her.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“She called me the morning before she died,” Letty says. She starts to cry as she’s telling this.

He came over to pick up the kids
, Pam had said.
And he whispered in my ear, I’m coming back tonight. I’m coming back and I’m going to kill you
.

“I begged her to come out and stay with me that night, but she
wouldn’t,” Letty says. The tears pour down her face now. “I should have
made
her. I should have come and stayed with
her
. I should have—”

“Letty—”

“He has the kids, Jack,” she says. “That rotten bastard and that bitch are going to raise her kids.”

“Looks like it.”

“Over my dead body,” Letty says.

Then she starts to cry. Breaks down right there and would maybe collapse except he holds her. Asks her, “Do you want to come home with me?”

She nods.

As they’re pulling out of the driveway, Jack notices a car parked on the street.

Two guys stand by the car.

Same guys who were in the church.

Nicky’s hired security.

Jack lives in your basic Southern California neofascist “gated community.” A walled-in cluster of tile-roofed condos and town houses sitting like a castle on a shaved-off hill on the corner of Golden Lantern and Camino Del Avion.

“When did you move from the trailer?” Letty says as she gets out of her car in the Guest Parking slip.

Jack says, “When they tore the park down to build condos I couldn’t afford. So I bought this place.”

This place is a one-bedroom condo on the top floor of a three-condo unit. There are two units below him, sort of out and away as they slope down the hill. As a matter of fact, the two units get a little more out and a little more away every day because they’re literally moving downhill.

Jack explains, “They built this back in the boom days in the ’80s when they couldn’t throw this shit up fast enough. Everybody and his uncle was a contractor all of a sudden and there was big money to be made, so they cut corners with a chain saw. They were in too big a hurry to compact the soil properly, so every building pad is on shifting ground. The whole damn complex is slowly sliding downhill. The homeowners
association is trying to sue the contractors, but they’re long gone in the recession. So now the association is suing the contractors’ insurance company. And so on and so on … Anyway, the complex is heading back toward the ocean.”

“I thought that was only supposed to happen when the Big One hits,” Letty says. The Big One being the Earthquake, the apocalyptic event that everyone in So-Cal jokes about and dreads.

“It won’t take the Big One,” Jack says. “See those hills behind us? Those are about the last undeveloped hillsides on the south coast. There’s another stretch above Laguna, and another one above San Clemente.

“It’s fire season—hot, dry, windy—and those hills are covered with brush. One spark on a windy day and we’ll be fighting the fire from the beach again. It’ll blow down these canyons, surround all these complexes, some will burn down, others will make it.

“After fire season comes the rainy season. We haven’t had a serious one in a few years, but we’re due. So say we get a big fire and the brush is burned off those slopes. Then the rains come …

“The mother of all mudslides. All these hillsides that they shaved off and built this crap on, they’re all coming down. All these condos and town houses built on shifting soil? They’ll collapse from the bottom up because the ground will literally give out beneath them. We’ll slide down the hill in a flow of cheap materials, bad construction and mud.

“First Mother Nature burns it, then she flushes it.”

“You’d like that, Jack, wouldn’t you?”

They’re standing in the street by his garage. Beneath a row of condo buildings that are all exactly identical.

Jack says, “Maybe I would.”

Maybe then they wouldn’t get a chance to ruin the Strands.

There’s a note on his garage door.

“Surfboard workshop?”

“I have a couple of old boards in there,” Jack says. Because of the cantilevered design of the building, Jack’s garage sits directly below his
kitchen. He pushes a remote button on a handheld clicker and the garage door opens with a metallic groan.

A surfboard workshop isn’t a bad description, Letty thinks.

Jack has two old longboards on sawhorses and a couple more hung up on racks. The garage smells of surf wax and wood finish. There are posters from old surf movies on the walls.

“You never change, Jack,” Letty says.

“This is the best one,” Jack says. He rubs a hand along an old wooden longboard stretched across two sawhorses. It has three grains of wood, dark wood blended into light—beautifully jointed, seamless. A flawless piece of work. “Made by Dale Velzy back in 1957.”

“It was your dad’s.”

“Yeah.”

“I remember these things.”

“I can see that.”

“You’re stuck in the past,” she says.

“It was better then,” Jack says.

“Okay.”

They go up the sixteen concrete steps to his door.

Jack’s condo is Plan C—“The Admiralty.” To the right as you come in is a small but functional kitchen with a window that looks out at the cul-de-sac end of the condo complex, and on a clear day has a view of Saddleback Butte to the east. To the left is a dining alcove and then a living room with a fireplace. The bedroom is off the living room to the left.

A sliding glass door off the living room leads to a small balcony.

“
Mira
,” Letty says. “You have some view.”

She steps out onto his balcony.

“Yeah,” Jack says, nodding to a strip mall that sits across Golden Lantern down to the right. “I can see Hughes Market, Burger King and the dry cleaners. In a west wind, I can smell the grease from Burger King. An east wind, I get garlic from the Italian place.”

“Come on,” Letty says, because the view from the balcony is spectacular. Disregard the strip mall, and the condos down the slope, and look straight ahead and you have miles of ocean horizon. You can see Catalina Island to the right and San Clemente Island straight ahead. Dana Point Harbor is behind a knoll just to the left and then it’s open coast all the way down to Mexico.

“You must have some great sunsets,” Letty says.

“It’s pretty,” Jack says. “In the winter the ocean rises up like this big blue bar of color. It’s two miles away, but at least I can see it.”

“Are you kidding? This is a million-dollar view.”

The place cost him $260,000—cheap by local standards.

Letty says, “I think I’m going to start crying again.”

“Do you want someone with you or do you want to be alone?”

“Alone.”

He’s about to say
Mi casa es su casa
, but thinks better of it.

“The place is yours,” Jack says.

“I don’t mean to kick you out.”

“I have things I can do downstairs,” he says. “If you need me, stamp on the floor or something. I’ll hear you.”

“Okay.”

He gets out quick because even saying okay her voice quivers and her eyes are full. So he goes down in the garage and works on the board. Takes a sheet of 000 sandpaper, folds it over a block of wood and runs it up and down the length of the board. Slowly, lightly, he gets into a rhythm, sanding the old balsa down to a high, smooth finish.

Upstairs he can hear her sobbing. Sobbing and yelling and throwing pillows and stuff and he half expects to get a call from the association telling him that his condo is a residence, not a funeral home or a shrink’s office, and that open displays of grief are in violation of the CC&Rs.

It’s an hour and a half before it gets quiet up there.

Jack waits another twenty minutes and then goes up.

She’s asleep on his couch.

Her face is puffy and her eyes are slits, but they’re closed anyway. Her black hair is splayed out on the pillow.

Watching her sleep is something wonderful and painful. Letty asleep is like an underground fire—placid and beautiful on the surface, but something always smoldering underneath, waiting to ignite. He remembers that from when they were together and he’d wake up earlier and look at her lying there and he’d ask himself what he ever did that someone that beautiful and that good could be with him.

And twelve years later, he thinks, I’m still in love with you.

So what? he thinks. I threw you away.

Like something tossed into the ocean, and now a wave washes up on my little stretch of the beach. Life giving you back something you don’t deserve.

Don’t get carried away, he thinks. Take a step away from yourself. She’s not back because she loves you; she’s back because she needs you.

Because there was a fire and her sister died.

He gets a spare blanket from the hall closet and puts it over her.

Her story doesn’t change a thing. Pam had a history of alcoholism, a history of pills. Her blood tested positive for both.

Nothing Letty says can change
that
story.

The only thing that can really tell the story, Jack knows, is the fire.

Fire has a language.

It’s small wonder, Jack thinks, that they refer to “tongues of flame,” because fire will talk to you. It will talk to you while it’s burning—color of flame, color of smoke, rate of spread, the sounds it makes while it burns different substances—and it will leave a written account of itself after it’s burned out.

Fire is its own historian.

It’s so damned proud of itself, Jack thinks, that it just can’t help telling you about what it did and how it did it.

Which is why first thing the next morning Jack is in the Vales’ bedroom.

He stands there in that dark fatal room and he can hear the fire whispering to him. Challenging him, taunting him. Like,
Read me, you’re so smart. I’ve left it all here for you but you have to know the language. You have to speak
my
tongue
.