Pasadena (68 page)

They were off to spray the trees around the mausoleum with a fine mist of petroleum, and to douse the roots. In the past they’d sprayed the grove with fuel to fight off fungus and mites, and as no one had any better ideas of how to stop the spreading decline, Willis decided they had nothing to lose. Hearts and Slay hated the spraying more than any other job on the ranch. For a week they’d smell of bitumen, the vapors off
their flesh so strong that Clune’s wouldn’t sell them tickets to the matinee. Following them down a middle, Lindy thought it was like being stuck behind two old belching Tin Lizzies, the petroleum fumes trailing them. She ran ahead and asked where Willis was, and Slaymaker mumbled through his metal mask, “He’s out here spraying too.”

When they reached the mausoleum, she found Willis slick with fuel sitting on the steps, his sprayer at his feet. He looked worn and small, his eyes dull in his greasy face and his clothes damp-dark with sweat and fuel. The far end of the grove smelled like the Richfield filling station, where the serviceman in the jumpsuit with the eagle stitched to his breast stacked the quart cans of Richlube in pyramids eight feet high.

“I’ve come to help,” said Lindy.

She expected Willis to turn her away, and she was prepared to fight to stay and work with them, but he simply ran his hand through his hair and said, “All right. Take my sprayer.” And he heaved it up and worked the leather straps over her shoulders, tightening the buckles and adjusting the mask over Lindy’s mouth. And then he saw the cotton taped to the crook of her arm. “What happened to you?” She said that a bee had stung her, but the mask garbled her words and no one heard her lie. No matter, for Willis was already busy explaining how to use the nozzle, showing her the stopcock, maneuvering the rubber hose. His demonstration released a cloud of petroleum mist that immediately cooled the air around them, but then it changed, the vapor heating in the sun, thickening to something both invisible and deadly. Even behind the mask her nose and throat burned, and it made Lindy think of the lion’s-mane jellies on Jelly Beach, invisible, almost a product of the imagination, until a long yellow tentacle snared a girl’s thigh, burning the flesh off in strips.

The sprayer tank was half full but it pulled on Lindy, and she shifted her hips, trying to find a spot of balance on her back; she leaned forward heavily, fearing that if she were to stand up straight, she might teeter over. “I’ll help you up the ladder,” said Willis, and they walked to a tree at the mausoleum’s rim and he set the ladder inside the branches. She climbed until her nozzle reached high and then she waved at Willis to stand back. He walked down a middle into a place where the trees were full-canopied and green, and she watched him scurry away to the ranch house for shade and water. From the ladder the grove stretched before
her, nestling the bottom of the valley and rolling up into the foothills. She saw from here how the mausoleum echoed in its design the house on the hill, both white and rising from the surrounding chaparral. Willis had installed a special telephone line between the house and the ranch house, its thick gray wire strung down the hill along stripped ponderosas, and the wire looked as if it were crackling in the heat. Several yards away, Hearts and Slaymaker were up in the trees too, gingerly working their nozzles through the branches, spraying and turning their heads, spraying and turning away.

Lindy adjusted the sprayer on her back, aimed the nozzle, and flipped the stopcock. She released a mist of petroleum and the sunlight caught it, illumining each particle as if it were a shattered diamond blown aloft. The small cloud descended and veiled a section of the tree, its leaves turning greasy. The petroleum fumes reached her through the mask and she coughed and held on to a slick branch while a dizziness arose in her, fluttering her eyes, seeping the blood from her head. But the spinning stopped, and she sprayed again and again, dousing the tree down to the trunk and then misting the roots through the hard dirt, each spray causing a lightness in her head. By the time her first tree was complete, her tank was empty and her clothes were wet.

She returned to the fuel shed, the mask hanging around her neck. She called after Willis but couldn’t find him. She began refueling her tank, the petroleum running hot through the rubber tube, and she smelled nothing but the burning fumes, as if they had sprayed the entire ranch. There was nothing in the air but fuel, petroleum lining the breeze, a river of fuel mist for the grove jays, a spring of fuel air for her thirsty throat. Her eyes were watering and she touched her cheek and found it hot with grease, and when she closed her eyes she felt her mind boiling. The tank overflowed with fuel, a rivulet running across her feet, saucing her boots and ankles, and Lindy shut the valve.

Her first attempt to reload the sprayer onto her back ended in her falling over. The second time, she crouched into the straps and slowly pulled herself up. The galvanized tank loaded with fuel was heavier than a rucksack of bricks, and she was so bent over she could nearly touch her toes. She fleetingly thought about leaving the spraying to Hearts and Slay, but she didn’t want to walk away from the work. She made her way back to the mausoleum, each step heavy and clumsy and painful. By now her forehead burned, the coat of grease intensifying
the heat of the sun, her skin turning pink and then red. It felt as if there wasn’t a clean breath to be had in the valley, as if all the air would be hazy and toxic until the winter rains swept in to scrub the atmosphere.

And she realized, as she set the ladder in the next tree, that Bruder wouldn’t return to the Pasadena for her. He would leave Pasadena and live at Condor’s Nest and she might never see him again. Lindy flipped the stopcock and the petroleum sprayed out and she hung to the top of the ladder, panting. What was it he had said? “You’ve chosen, Linda.” He didn’t understand, she reassured herself; something might look like a choice but was in fact inevitable. She knew, even then, that the first fever would come before morning. Soon she would be trembling in a cold bed of sweat. It didn’t frighten her; she knew what to expect. Her mind would grow dark, her vision would close down, her teeth would chatter, a clamminess would dress her, her hair would lay damp against her throat. She would wait out the ague, teetering at the brink of delirium, and Rosa would ice her forehead. She would call to Willis through the door that
everything was all right, go back to bed
. Rosa would tell Lolly that Lindy wanted to be alone. Sieglinde’s will was harder than the others’, Lindy knew; she might cry at the door, kicking it, flinging herself against it until her Mommy let her in. Sieglinde would blame Lindy for turning a bolt upon her, but Lindy would burn through the icy fever saying nothing, biting back the groans, and then as dawn rose over the oily valley, the fever would recede, the yellow-pink restored to Lindy’s cheek. She had steeled herself to last the dozen bouts, and only then to request the quinine. She wanted to return to Dr. Freeman and say,
I have done as you said. Am I healed?
She believed that she would recover. She believed that her future would be long. Now, she believed it more than anything.

Up in the orange tree, Lindy asked herself if she might die, and she said
No
. She considered it and dismissed it and she was certain; and Lindy Poore would never ask herself again. It was what kept her from being afraid: her ability to ignore the embers of evidence. She aimed the nozzle and sprayed her way down the second tree, resetting the ladder four or five times. By the time she was in the third tree, Willis had returned with a cart loaded with barrels. He called Hearts out of his tree to help him. When Hearts removed his sprayer there were red ribbons of welts across his shoulders. He didn’t bother to examine them, just gave Willis a hand unloading a barrel and dumping it at the base of a
tree. The barrels were filled with water and a curdy layer of petroleum, and Willis used a broom handle to stir it up before dumping it into the soil. “If this doesn’t get that goddamn worm, nothing will.” He and Hearts continued turning the barrels over, and Willis was cursing the
fucking nematodes
, the
goddamn evil worms
from
fucking hell!
He was coiled and stooped and red, and Lindy watched him from the treetop. In their five years of marriage he had taken on a leathery quality about the neck, and his hair had gone wiry. He was thicker in the middle, not yet soft but on his way, and when the City Beautiful Committee meetings didn’t keep him busy outside the ranch, draw poker and Santa Anita did. Sometimes, when he was exasperated with Lindy, he would say, “For Christ’s sake, don’t you love me anymore?” In spots he had roughened, just as she had hardened in patches, and both were aware of the sparking friction between them, both smelled the early smoke. He was good with Sieglinde, when he was interested. Sometimes, not always, Lindy looked at Willis and thought that soon he’d be gone—not dead but far off—and no longer would she be Mrs. Poore; she didn’t cling to this, nor articulate it specifically, but it remained a possibility, like the inevitable chance of good fortune walking up your path.

“Need a hand with the ladder?” Willis called. He helped her set it into the next tree but then he said, “You look worn out. Maybe you should take a rest.” He tried to help her out of the sprayer’s straps but she resisted. She wanted to keep spraying and she climbed up into the branches. Down the lane, Slaymaker was up in a tree and he waved, and behind him it seemed as if the afternoon sun was continuing to rise, throbbing more and more with each hour, and it felt as if everything in the valley would catch fire and explode—the sky white, the sun white, the dirt drained of any color but the rainbow beads of petroleum water. And just then, in the span between a rising and falling breath, something did catch—sun through the prism of blowing petroleum mist, a spark shot from the sizzling telephone wire, two flinty rocks falling in the foothills—but no one would ever know exactly what, or where. White smoke rose in the mountains far above the ranch, at first as lazily as a lonely drift of ocean fog. Slaymaker wasn’t waving hello: he was pointing out the smoke far off in the distance. He pulled his mask from his face and called, not urgently but with respect, “Fire.”

It happened as Lindy knew it would: she leapt from the ladder and she was dizzy and Willis ripped the sprayer from her shoulders and took
her hand and they ran to the ranch house. Hearts and Slaymaker were behind them, and they panted in the pepper tree’s shade while Willis telephoned the house, but no one answered and he was yelling, “Come on, where is she? Where’s that sister of mine?” He held the receiver to his ear and the sweat ran down his face and he hit the wall with the palm of his hand and at last he said, “Rosa, call the fire department! What? No, no, no. She’s here. Just call!” The fire was miles away but they didn’t know which way it was traveling, and they didn’t know if it had just taken hold or had been burning for hours and only now turned down a canyon to come into sight of the ranch. At first, only slow, lazy smoke rose from the mountainside and it was far enough away that it was more beautiful than menacing. But soon they could smell it, the bitter burning coming down through the foothills, and each of them inhaled the smoke and Slaymaker said, “Pine smoke.” A light flurry of ash drifted down.

When the first gold flames came into sight, no one was surprised. Hearts propped his ladder against the ranch house and they climbed up on the roof and passed a pair of binoculars around. They saw a platoon of flames standing erect in the mountains, idling as if deciding which direction to run. A hole in the pineland opened for the fire, and Willis and Lindy leaned against each other, and Hearts and Slaymaker leaned against each other, and the afternoon burned toward gloaming and the fire swayed, orange as the Pasadena navels. The smoke blew up the foothill chimneys, and the fire lay against the Sierra Madres like a huge fluttering blanket. Lindy thought she heard a distant roar, like the steady sound of traffic on Colorado Street: the flames sweeping away the sumac and the toyon and the lemonade berry. Hearts had turned on the radio in the ranch house and the announcer’s voice filled the yard and greeted them on the roof: “This just in: Fire in the foothills.” Almost at once the smoke changed from white to black, fueled by single-leaf pinyon and the blue-black berry cones of the western juniper. The afternoon was closing, but it was hotter than ever in the valley, and Lindy felt the ripple of fever behind her eyes. She touched her ears and found them hot as flame and she reached for Willis. Was the smoke drifting through the Linda Vista hills and across the Arroyo Seco, passing the Hotel Vista’s terrace? Was it sending word?

The wind shifted and the fire flapped like a sheet being shook out, and then it leapt both up the mountainside and down, and soon they
heard the fire engines pass the service gate. Willis and Hearts and Slaymaker climbed down from the roof, and they were yelling and pointing while the fire picked its way in no discernible direction—now it was retreating west, now it was lurching east!—and Lindy, in the tin roof’s glare, felt herself erupt with fever as she waited for the valley to explode. She waited and she began to tremble and she was becoming cold and she clung to the brick chimney. Its mortar loosened beneath her grip, and the dusk swallowed the afternoon, just as the fire swallowed a swath of scrubland, climbing up into the mountains, and by night it was certain that the ranch would be spared even as the fire burned out of control. She thought she could hear the gray squirrels screaming and the black bears weeping and the bobcats hissing for help and the live-oaks falling as the fire burned into the forest, devouring the mountain, hungry for the entire range. By nightfall, firefighters from all over Los Angeles and in from Riverside were in the hills cutting firebreaks and hosing down cabins and trying to hold a line. As a precaution, Hearts and Slay had flooded the far end of the grove, and the trees sat in a foot of water and the mausoleum was covered with snowflakes of wandering ash, and late at night the fire was an orange strip on a far-off ridge, rancid and distant; but the smoke was reaching them, coming for them. Onlookers from all over drove into the rancho’s valley and up into the mountains to see the fire, to smell it, to stick out their tongues and taste the ash. They would park their cars at lookouts and drink from glove-compartment flasks and bet which way the flames would next dash; and some of them would make love for the first or the last time; and some of them would make love as if there were nothing special about tonight. And all the while the fever would continue to burn in Lindy, and eventually Rosa would drive her up the hill and escort her to bed, where she would shake through the night atop cold, damp sheets. She would lie awake alone, her arms crossed over her breasts, and patiently wait, her breath nearly stopped. She could withstand anything, she told herself as she lay her hand on the cold brass rail and lifted her foot to climb the stairs to bed, and just then, with Rosa’s hand at the small of her back, Lindy saw the note propped against the Cupid statue. At the landing, the far-off hills burning outside the window, she would read the note and learn—while Rosa gasped and Sieglinde cried upstairs in her room—that Lolly had taken Palomar and eloped with Bruder to Condor’s Nest.