Flash Fire
Authors: Caroline B. Cooney
Caroline B. Cooney
Pinch Canyon Wednesday, October 27th
Pacific Coast Highway 3:38 P.M.
Pacific Coast Highway 3:43 P.M.
Pacific Coast Highway 4:13 P.M.
Pacific Coast Highway 4:25 P.M.
Los Angeles General Hospital 4:27 P.M.
Grass Canyon Road 4:28:30 P.M.
Grass Canyon Road 4:29:30 P.M.
A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney
Pinch Canyon
Wednesday, October 27
th
The Press House
3:15
P.M.
ROCK SLIDE AREA
RESIDENTS ONLY
NO OUTLET
ARSON WATCH
ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING
NO TRESPASSING
ARMED RESPONSE
A
STRANGER WHO DROVE
into Pinch Canyon would think he was entering a war zone. Danna herself would have removed the signs lining the road, and opted to
have
rock slides, strangers, trespassing, and, of course, armed response.
ARMED RESPONSE
was Danna’s personal favorite. She had never seen an
ARMED RESPONSE,
but she remained hopeful. Someday, uniformed responders carrying submachine guns and leading slavering dogs would vault out of a camouflage vehicle and surround one of the houses.
With her luck, she’d be in school.
Danna Press wanted action. Her very own mother and father had just entered a twelve-step serenity class. Please. Who would want serenity?
Danna felt she was an ideal candidate for a kidnapping. She could at least witness a major crime, and then have to testify in court, or else provide vital information about an assassination attempt on the President.
Why, Danna wanted to know, could she not be a terrorist, or date one?
When earthquakes struck, why wasn’t it
her
house that got lifted from its foundations and tumbled down down down into the treacherous canyon below? That way, television cameras would focus upon the Press family, the nation aching over their plight, and falling in love with the beauteous Danna.
But no. The Press family continued on its placid way, outgrowing jeans and renting movies.
Danna turned on the TV for company. Los Angeles (not her area, of course; she couldn’t be that lucky) was engulfed in flames for the ninth day in a row. People are packing their Volvos with photograph albums, thought Danna, calling the dog, hosing down the roof, rescuing their neighbors. And what am I doing? Vocabulary.
“A conflagration!” said the reporter eagerly. Now
there
was a vocabulary word.
Danna studied the TV map. Nothing in the way of a conflagration was near Pinch Canyon. She watched the people watching fires. People had driven to freeway overpasses and brought binoculars and even lawn chairs from which to enjoy the fires at a comfortable distance. Since neither Danna nor her brother, Hall, was old enough to drive, and since their mom and dad checked on them about every sixty seconds, this was not going to be a possibility. They were stuck on Pinch.
Pinch Canyon, well named, was a slot in the mountains, as thin and vertical as a toaster waiting for bread. Twisted oaks and shrubs dusty with heat and lack of rain filled the narrow box bottom on both sides of Pinch Canyon Road. The south rockface flared almost straight up. It was the kind of rock that peeled itself off in layers after storms. Dangerous, impossible-to-climb rock, scarred by years of erosion.
The north face was where the houses had been built. Twenty-one houses were pasted on the canyon’s few slanting meadows. Driveways curled as tight and steep as spirals on school notebooks. Swimming pools and tennis courts and paddocks for horses had been carved into the hillsides.
Most people shared a driveway. Three houses peeled off theirs: At the bottom was Danna’s, Mr. and Mrs. Luu lived in the middle, and stacked on top of them, the Aszlings. Everybody had a lot of land, but it was mainly vertical.
Pinch Canyon had no outlet. The road turned sharply off Grass Canyon Road, was blocked a quarter mile in by a gate, and then cut another mile and a half to stop dead at the foot of Pinch Mountain. Pinch Mountain looked like a five-hundred-foot sphinx glaring down the road, its huge paws forming the sides of the canyon. Most hills around LA were rounded, but her own personal canyon was sharp and harsh, the sides dropping roughly — fifty feet here, a hundred feet there.
On television, a large stucco house, built in pastel stacks like huge children’s blocks, slowly caught fire. Smoke came before flames, so first the house turned into a soot-breathing dragon. Then, magnificent and horrific, it turned blazing gold. In minutes, only its black skeleton remained.
“You guys get all the good stuff,” Danna said to the television. “I’m stuck here with abdicate and abjure.”
Vocabulary ought to stay in elementary school. Sixth grade was the absolute oldest you should have to have vocabulary. Ninth grade was far too sophisticated for vocabulary lists. Nevertheless, she had a vocabulary list, one of those tricky ones meant to catch you by the alphabet heels. Abdicate, abjure, abhorrent, aborigine, and abstention.
Although Mom and Dad were at the studio today, fighting over a contract, they kept relentlessly in touch. There was no avoiding the family rule of Homework First. What with beepers, E-mail, fax, and phone, Danna and Hall never had a minute of freedom. Mom even wore a wristwatch that beeped at appropriate intervals to remind her to check on Danna’s homework/clarinet practice/dance practice/tennis practice/horseback riding.
I’m sick of vocabulary, thought Danna, who sickened quickly over most homework.
She could go outside and swim with her brother, but the temperature was in the nineties and the Santa Ana wind was no relief: It cleaned out the lungs like a dry scouring pad. Because of the fires, the air was full of ash. Strange, particulate black ash. Not papery flakes, but little microscopic pieces of things, each different, like snowflakes — as if, with a microscope, you would know that one was from a roof shingle, another from a baby crib, or a birdhouse.
Anyway, Danna was wearing her favorite T-shirt, which was white, and she didn’t want it to turn gray from the falling ash. It was from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, featuring the outline of a human body, as if chalked by police on a street. It came down to her knees, making the chalk body about a quarter life-size. Mom and Dad said it was sick and tasteless, but since writing sick and tasteless screenplays was their trade, they had to quit arguing early. Danna always got a kick out of the fact that her strict, careful, and affectionate parents wrote stuff so sick that when it finally came on television, Danna and Hall weren’t even allowed to see it.
“So okay,” said Danna to the television, “I should feel sorry for the owners of that burned-up house, and their children, and their pets, and their insurance company, and I do, I really do. I really am a nice person and I do feel sorry when other people suffer. It’s just that nothing happens to
me.”
Danna planned what she would take if she had to run from a fire.
Kittens first.
The stray cat she’d adopted had provided kittens. Everybody who walked into the house fell in love with the kittens, crooning and cuddling, but not a single kitten-adorer would actually take one home. The mama cat moved on and left all seven babies to Danna. Danna named the kittens for LA burbs, so they had Pasadena, Burbank, Venice, LAX for the airport, and so forth. Her brother thought this was pretty crummy, a kitten named LAX, so he was calling the kittens by the names of fruit trees that grew on their property: Orange, Lemon, Kumquat, etc. Since the kittens looked alike, you couldn’t tell which you were calling anyway, and Kumquat (or LAX) and Lemon (or Venice) just skittered around between your shoes trying to get you to fall over on one of their brothers or sisters.
Danna couldn’t even guarantee there were seven kittens anymore, because getting them in one place at one time, even for meals, wasn’t a happening thing.
Even though the fire was miles away, and would have to work its way through thousands of houses, cross major highways, step over hundreds of firefighters, and outwit dozens of tanker planes before it hit Pinch Canyon, Danna entertained herself by making kitten contingency plans.
3:16
P.M.
F
IVE MILES UP GRASS
Canyon Road, and down a minor road that led inland and north of Pinch Canyon, was an ordinary brush fire. It moved along casually, like a person bored with exercise.
What you wanted to do with fire was to kill it around the edges. The edge was its line of attack. So you put your trucks and your firefighters at the edge. You bottled the fire up until it ate the fuel and then the fire died.