Burning Man (38 page)

“Let’s say you’re right about all of this. In the end, it was Danny that took his own life. Why did you murder Paul Klein?”

“‘Suicide Is Painless.’”

“I don’t agree.”

“I’m talking about the title to a song. You’ve probably heard it a million times but don’t even know it. It’s the opening music to the show
M*A*S*H*
. I learned that Klein liked to hum that tune when he bullied my son. He’d phone my son and play that tune. He wanted Danny to think about suicide. He pushed him into the abyss.”

“How do you know all of that?”

“I asked the right people. It was Dinah that made me ask the questions, because he was doing the same thing to her. Whenever he got the chance, whenever others weren’t around, Klein hummed his dirge around Dinah.”

There was another scent now in addition to the fumes in the air. Smoke was filling the house.

“We have to leave.”

He shook his head. I wanted to flee, but curiosity kept me there a few moments longer, trumping my fear. “Why did you crucify Klein?”

“Why did he crucify me?”

The room was heating up rapidly, which could only mean one thing: the house was on fire. Miller was a dead man, and if I didn’t leave, I’d join him. But at that moment Miller decided to satisfy my curiosity.

“I am not sure when the idea first came to me to crucify him,” he said. “I had already decided to kill him, but that wasn’t punishment enough. I wanted his death to be a spectacle. I wanted to mock him in death as he had mocked my son in life.”

The window behind Miller began to crack. He turned his head, but out of the corner of his eye saw me move toward him. Miller grabbed the candle. There was no way to reach him without his sending the house up in flames.

“No,” he said, brandishing the candle.

It was his last chance, and mine. I couldn’t afford to try and rescue him. “Let’s go!” I yelled to Sirius.

The two of us raced for the front door. I reached for the handle, and then recoiled. It was hot to the touch. I looked through the window and saw flames enveloping the front porch.

We sprinted toward the back of the house. As we passed by the dining room the window broke. Shards flew as the fumes and whatever had been poured on the table ignited, and Miller was encased in flames. His screams trailed behind us.

Suicide wasn’t painless.

We ran out the back door. Most of the house was already in flames. There was no choice where to run. While we’d been talking, flames had swept over the grove. The fire had leapfrogged into outlying areas; the chaparral on the south side of the fence was already torching, and offered no escape. The only area not yet overrun by flames was to the west.

I kept low, trying to swallow as little smoke as possible, trying to find a way out. The fire seemed to have outflanked us and was attacking on all sides. I cursed myself for having stayed in the house too long, for once again putting our lives on the line. Of all people, I should have known the perils of a wildfire. As we ran I tried to figure out how we were going to survive. Was there an answer? If you believed Bob Dylan, it was blowing in the wind.

Hard as it was to do, I stopped my mad dash. We couldn’t outrun the fire for long. If we were to survive, I had to outthink it. The way the wind was gusting, there was no safe spot. You had to assume the fire was going to burn everything and everywhere.

I patted down my pockets. That’s what people do when they’re desperate to find something they know isn’t there; they search
anyway because they don’t know what else to do. This time I found what I was looking for and pulled free the matches I’d used to start a fire the night before.

The wind kicked up around us. It was a warm wind, but I still felt chilled. I knew what I had to do: I needed to fight fire with fire, and I was Scarecrow afraid.

I needed to create a firebreak. With a big enough dead zone of consumed tinder, we might survive the flames. Firefighters are good at setting back burns, but then they know what they’re doing. They burn an area of vegetation, working to create a fire break that doesn’t add to the main fire. There is an art to back burns. Firefighters set their flames near enough to the primary fire so that it sucks the backfire inward. With no fuel to burn, the fire’s approach is often stopped.

There was a channel running through the grove that was crisscrossed by other smaller conduits. At one time the land might have been irrigated. I made for an area ahead of the fire and then gathered anything that might be combustible, clearing a ten-foot-by-ten-foot area of all its mulch, dried grass, twigs, and branches. Then I spread my gathered tinder along a line and lit a match. Either the wind, or my shaking hand, extinguished the flame.

I opened the matchbox again, and several of the matches spilled to the ground. It took me three attempts to successfully strike a match, but the sparking and glow lasted only a moment, and once more the flame died out.

The fire was coming at me, reaching out with its heat and smoke and roar. I chafed at the irony of not being able to start my own fire. In Catholic grade school, I remembered Sister Bernadette reading the class “The Little Match Girl.” I was nine years old, and I don’t think I’d ever heard such a sad story. When Sister Bernadette finished reading, I did my best to hide my tears from my classmates. I didn’t buy Sister Bernadette’s explanation that by striking her matches the girl had been able to illuminate an unseen God, and she was helped to go to a better place. I just
remembered the image of a bareheaded and barefoot girl freezing to death on the last day of the year.

I struck another match and failed again. Now I was getting angry. I’d already gone through half the matches. I tried again, and this time the grass lit. I blew gently, added some kindling, and the fire caught. It wanted to be fed, so I added more twigs. When the line of tinder started to burn, I pulled down a dead avocado branch and held it out to the fire. It took maybe half a minute for my makeshift torch to catch, and then I started walking around the space and igniting all the material I’d gathered.

The big fire was drawing close. I threw down my torch and ran to a denuded spot along the channel and began to dig. I wondered if I was digging our grave. We would need a bunker to survive the fire. Sirius took a spot next to me. I didn’t know the command for “dig,” but he worked without being told, and the dirt began to fly. I clawed and he dug in a desperate race against the licking fire. Smoke clawed at our noses and lungs, but we kept digging. And then the fire was too close. There was too much smoke to effectively see if my backfire had worked. If enough vegetation had burned, maybe we’d have haven enough from the nightmare around us.

I called Sirius to get into the hole we’d dug, and then I piled dirt all around its top, trying to make a barricade to ward off the blaze. The fire kept coming, getting nearer and nearer until I was forced to jump into our foxhole, where I held Sirius close and tried to shield him from the flames.

CHAPTER 22:
GRAVE CONFESSIONS

The locomotive didn’t kill us.

That’s how I described it to Seth when he visited us in the hospital. I said as the fire passed over, it felt like I was lying between railroad tracks with a locomotive sweeping by overhead, and nothing separating me from death. All I could do was to wait it out. The sound almost drove me from our hole; the voice of fire is a terrible thing. It raged and roared, and all the while the wind blew dirt and debris and embers at us. I held on to Sirius as the flames swept past us and took their toll. I don’t know how long our torment lasted, but the locomotive finally passed us by.

It left burns all over my back, neck, and arms, but I was alive.

Later, I was told how lucky we were. My backfire might, or might not, have helped us survive. More than anything else, the location of our foxhole probably saved us. It was down low and far enough away from the trees that we were spared from the fire. William Cummings was right: there are no atheists in foxholes.

For three days we’d been at the burn unit. Strings had been pulled from above, and Sirius and I were allowed to share the same hospital room. Officially, Sirius was my Seeing Eye dog. My
burns were much worse than his, as they should have been. It was my fault for putting both of us in the middle of a fire. Still, we came out of our second fire walk in much better condition than we had our first. Our burns weren’t life threatening, and it looked as if I’d avoid adding any new scarring to the old. But then the old were bad enough and didn’t need the help.

Gump had stopped by the hospital a few times, so I wasn’t surprised when he appeared unannounced once again.

“I was thinking of bringing you a plant,” he said, “but they didn’t have any poison ivy.”

“Don’t worry. Your presence is toxic enough.”

Gump took a seat next to me and looked around to make sure the coast was clear. “You want a drink? I smuggled in a hip flask.”

“I better not. Nurse Ratched checks in on me frequently.”

We talked, and Gump got around to his purpose for being there. I answered more questions about the case, and then I must have drifted off. I’d been doing that for a few days. When I awakened, Gump was gone, but I traded up. Lisbet was there.

In all her visits to the hospital she had never arrived empty-handed, despite my telling her that she was all I needed. This time the aroma gave away the secret of what she had brought.

“Pumpkin bread,” I said.

“It was fresh out of the oven when I picked up a loaf.”

“It would be a sacrilege if we didn’t eat some now.”

“I figured you might say that,” Lisbet said and pulled some paper plates and plastic cutlery from her bag. She cut each of us a generous slice, and we munched happily while holding hands. Sirius gave her a plaintive look and got rewarded with his own piece.

“I also brought us dessert.”

“Let me guess: penguin chocolates?”

“Close but no cigar.”

“I didn’t guess a cigar.”

“Do you like peanut brittle?”

“There are those that might argue that sugar, peanuts, and butter are as holy a trinity as barley, hops, and wheat.”

“Let’s eat to that,” she said, opening up the box and handing me a piece of brittle.

When we had our fill, I noticed that Lisbet had left a few crumbs on her fingers. I decided to lick them off. She returned the favor. And then the two of us started kissing. We kissed for a long time and would have kissed for even longer except for a strange thump-thump sound that forced us to investigate.

Sirius was watching us and wagging his tail.

“Quit being a voyeur,” I said.

We had another piece of brittle and then did some more kissing. It really was a great combination. There wasn’t much of a view from my hospital room, but the two of us sat contentedly watching the afternoon shadows give way to evening.

When all vestiges of the day were gone, Lisbet sighed and said, “I wish I could stay longer, but I took on a new job and that’s going to force me to burn the midnight oil.”

“As soon as you finish this project, I call dibs on you and the midnight oil, as well as the massage oil.”

“I look forward to that.”

“That’s two of us.”

Something in my voice must have made Sirius decide to start thumping again. I looked at him and said, “I said the two of us, which means that two is company, and three is a crowd. The next time I have the pleasure of this woman’s company, you’re going to be doing your thumping from another room.”

“Don’t worry, Sirius,” Lisbet said, “his bark is worse than his bite.”

She patted him but kissed me and then stood up to leave. “You don’t have to walk me out,” Lisbet said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I do have to walk you out. It’s a good excuse to get out of bed, and besides, when we meet up tomorrow, it won’t be here. I intend on checking myself out in the morning.”

“I thought your doctor wanted you to stay through the weekend and then evaluate your condition on Monday.”

“That was before my miraculous recovery.”

“You haven’t told him you’re checking out, have you?”

“It might have slipped my mind.”

“I hope you’re not pushing it.”

The concern was in her words and her face. It had been a long time since someone had cared for me like that.

“I’m not. And FYI, the only reason I didn’t check out this morning was that I didn’t want you to freak out.”

“FYI, I like that.”

We smiled for one another, and then Lisbet picked up the bag in which she’d brought my presents. She seemed surprised that it wasn’t quite empty but then remembered what was inside.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “Sylvia Espinosa called and wanted to know if I’d like her to send me a copy of today’s
University Times
. I told her that since I was going to be driving by the campus, I’d stop and pick up a few copies.”

She handed me a paper. Instead of looking at it, I casually put the paper aside. “Thanks for thinking of me.”

Lisbet and I had fought over the article, and I wanted her to know she was more important than any case. Instead of holding the paper, I held her.

“I’ll let you play nurse tomorrow if you come to my place for an early dinner.”

“I’ll let you play doctor if you order Thai food.”

“That’s what you call a no-brainer. If you’re lucky, I might even share my pad Thai with you.”

“Panang curry with shrimp on the spicy side,” she said, “a seven or eight, and an appetizer of spring rolls. And don’t count on my sharing with you without some creative begging on your part.”

“I don’t mean to brag, but I do look sexy in a sandwich board soliciting handouts.”

“You found my kryptonite.”

The two of us walked to the elevator, and we made good use of our wait time for the car. Our kiss was long and leisurely and when we finished, Lisbet said, “You seem to be coming along in your physical therapy.”

“I’ve been practicing on all the nurses.”

She feigned umbrage and we kissed and made up. When Lisbet had first visited me in the hospital and seen my burned face and damaged lips, I told her that my physical therapist was insisting that I do a lot of kissing to assist my lip recovery. That had made her laugh and gotten me a kiss. Even though my lips were still raw and cracked from the fire, they were on the mend, and I was convinced Lisbet’s lips were working miracles.