Fire and Rain (8 page)

She hadn’t bothered to answer him then, but now, as the final strains of
Catch the Wind
drifted through the open window into the bedroom, she whispered, “You tell me, Chris.”

He stopped playing, and she waited, hoping he wasn’t through for the night. In another minute, he began again with a song she didn’t recognize, something soft and sweet, and she closed her eyes to listen.

“THEY’RE SWARMING,” MIA SAID
. “I locked the door, but it’s still a little frightening.”

Chris stood next to her desk, looking out the window at the sea of reporters and irate citizens of Valle Rosa who had assembled on the small, brown front yard of the office. Some of the crowd spilled into the street, others, into the minuscule, dusty park next door. Sam Braga from the Valle Rosa Journal stood above the gathering on a footstool he must have brought with him, and the cameras were trained on him. Chris knew what he was saying, since Sam had called earlier that morning to vent his ire over Chris’s hiring of Jeff Cabrio.

“Where the hell do you get off making that kind of unilateral decision?” Sam had barked into the phone. Chris had never heard Sam angry before, hadn’t known he was capable of growling. “We need new stoplights. There’ve been two accidents at the intersection of Fig and Jacaranda just this month. And Verde needs to be widened, and we’ve—”

“We need rain,” Chris had interrupted him.

“What we need is someone at the helm of this ship who doesn’t have his head up his butt. I spoke with the National Meteorology Service to ask them if it’s possible to make it rain here, and they laughed me off the phone.”

Chris winced. It hadn’t occurred to him to call anyone. He had made the decision to hire Cabrio on a whim. No,
more
than a whim. His decision had been based on a feeling so deep in his gut he couldn’t name it or describe it.

He hadn’t predicted this wrath, though, this outpouring of hostility. It was a lot like being booed off the mound.

From his vantage point at the window, Chris thought that Sam looked very tall up on that footstool—tall and slender and bespectacled and frail, just as he had looked as a boy. Chris and Sam had grown up in the same neighborhood in Valle Rosa, two of the handful of people who’d never left. Chris’s love of Valle Rosa was matched only by Sam’s.

“Someone dropped off a petition for you earlier.” Mia lifted a few papers from her desk.

Chris turned away from the window. “A petition for what?”

“They want you to do something about the Mexican illegals who live in the canyons.”

“I’m sure they do,” he said, disgusted. “And they’re Guatemalans. And Salvadorans. Not just Mexicans.”

“Oh. Well, these people are complaining because they’ve had to put locks on their outside taps to keep the Mex… the undocumented workers from coming out of the canyons and using their water.”

And they were the same people, he was certain, who hired the workers for ridiculous wages in the daytime hours. It was only at night, when the aliens were tired and hungry and thirsty, that they were asked to become invisible.

“There’s no water for them in the canyons,” Chris said wearily. “I guess we should just let them die, huh?”

Mia grimaced. “I think the signers of this petition would go along with that.” She bit her lip, then spoke on a tentative note. “Chris?”

He smiled at her. “Give me some good news for a change, Mia, okay?”

“I’m afraid they’ve been putting stuff on the porch.” Her voice was apologetic.

“What do you mean? What stuff?”

She nodded toward the window, and he stepped next to it at an angle, close enough to see out without being seen himself. The small porch of the office was littered with so much debris that at first he couldn’t discern one object from another. Then he saw the avocados, small and dry and hard-looking, and the tiny, withered oranges, and the baskets of dehydrated strawberries and stunted ears of corn.

Mia moved next to him. “See the mice?” She wrinkled her nose.

“Mice?” Chris squinted into the rubble. It was a minute before he realized that the half-dozen or so clear plastic bags nestled among the fruits and vegetables were crammed with dead mice. “Shit,” he said. “This is revolting.”

“There’s Carmen.” Mia pointed into the crowd.

Chris spotted her immediately. Dressed entirely in white, she stood out from the rest of the crowd. She was holding her microphone up to Braga; then she turned and spoke to one of the cameramen, her hands cutting through the air, her movements quick and sharp and assured.

“I guess I have to go out there,” he said. At one time he’d had no fear of cameras, no fear of facing a mob of reporters. Carmen had groomed him for that part of public life, teaching him how to handle questions, how to modulate his voice. She’d denied having much to do with his success, though. “You have a natural presence in front of the camera,” she’d told him. “You know how to make friends with it. It’s a rare ability.”

At the moment, he felt none of that old self-confidence. This crowd wasn’t likely to be welcoming. His heart battered his rib cage, and the surge of fear he felt as he turned the doorknob reminded him of the day five years ago when he’d last faced a sea of reporters. He remembered struggling against tears that day— and failing.

The sun was blinding as he stepped onto the front porch, and he carefully cleared a space in the debris with his feet so he had a place to stand. The crowd turned in a wave, away from Sam Braga and his footstool, to face Chris. The reporters instantly began firing questions at him.

“What do you have to say to the transportation board?”

“Do you think you’ve made a wise decision?”

“What proof do you have that Cabrio can make it rain?”

Chris tried to smile, holding up his hands to still the crowd. He should have predicted this impromptu press conference today and worn something other than a T-shirt and shorts.

“Don’t we already have enough problems?” a woman shouted from the street. “You’re playing games with our lives and our livelihood.”

The gathering responded with a fresh roar of indignation, and he held his hands up once again and waited for silence.

“I understand you have a lot of questions,” he said when he thought he could be heard, “but for now, all I can tell you is that I take full responsibility for hiring Mr. Cabrio. I believe he’ll succeed in helping Valle Rosa with its severe water problem, but I’m prepared to take the blame if he fails.” He turned back to the door.

“Chris?”

He looked down to see that Carmen had elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. Her eyes were huge. Brown velvet. Mesmerizing.

“Where is Mr. Cabrio now?” she asked.

“He doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Chris said, and although he found it difficult to turn away from Carmen, he opened the door and walked inside.

He took a call at Mia’s desk from the Los Angeles Times, telling the reporter exactly what he’d told the crowd. Then he walked back to his own office, opening the door to find Carmen sitting behind his desk.

“Jesus,” he said, startled. “How did you get in?”

“Back door.” She smiled. “You’re lucky I was the only one who thought to check it. And look.” She swept her arm through the air. “No cameras. No mikes. Just me.”

“You’ve never needed a camera to be intimidating, Carmen.” He sat down across the desk from her. Although the fire had nearly burned itself out, a papery chunk of ash clung to Carmen’s hair where it curved softly over her shoulder. He resisted the temptation to reach over and brush it away.

“Where is he from?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Chris. This is off the record.”

He smiled. “Nothing’s ever off the record with you.”

She leaned forward. “I need a story, Chris. The fires are old news. Don’t make me beg.”

Her voice was strong, but there was a fear in her eyes he had never seen before. “I’m sorry, Carmen. I don’t know anything about him to tell you.”

“Where did he work before coming here?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“I know you’re not stupid enough to hire him without knowing
something
about him. Was he working in Ohio?”

Chris shrugged, suddenly glad he knew so little.

“Do you think I could interview him? Everybody’s caught up in the
you
part of the story—you know, how Chris Garrett took one too many line drives to the head. So I could focus on
him
.”

“He wants to be left alone.” He smiled again. “And he’s a little bit strange.”

Carmen shuddered. “And you’ve invited him to live on my property. Thanks a lot.”

He tried not to show any emotion when she called Sugarbush her property. “He’s not dangerous. Actually, he’s very likable.”

“Look, Chris. I’m broke. They’re paying me some sort of token salary at
News Nine
. I need to prove to them they need me.”

“Why don’t you go somewhere else? It’d be their loss.”

“I spoke with Joe Simmons over at KCBJ. He was warm and friendly until he heard I was calling about work. He said, ‘Let me be frank, Carmen. Forty would be one thing if you’d been working steadily on
Sunrise
and the ratings had stayed high. But to try to make a comeback at forty. Forget it.’ He said he was surprised
News Nine
took me back at all.”

Nice business she was in, Chris thought, although he knew that baseball hadn’t been much better. “Maybe there’s something else you could do. Some other kind of work?”

“Like what? Teaching high school?”

He sucked in his breath. “Low blow, Carmen.”

She looked down at her hands, a rare blush staining her cheeks. “Sorry.”

“I don’t have a lot of money myself right now,” he said. His money had been eaten up by medical bills. Carmen’s. Dustin’s. “But I can—”

“No.”

“Just rent. You could be making money off that cottage if I wasn’t in it.”

She looked at her hands again, then cocked her head at him. “I’ll tell you what you
could
do, if you think it’s fair.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the house needs work. I’ve got some plumbing problems, and the walls have really gotten dingy and can use a new coat of paint, and half the windows are stuck shut, and—”

“Yes.” The idea delighted him. “I’d be happy to do some work in the house.”

“When I’m not there,” she added hastily.

“Fine. And let me at least pay for the paint and any materials I—”

“Chris.” She groaned. “I don’t want your money. Just give me Cabrio. Give me the story.”

“I don’t have a story to give you.”

“Where is he now? Where’s he holed up.”

Chris hesitated. He saw that fear in her eyes again, passing through her like a spasm she couldn’t control.

“In that abandoned warehouse by the reservation,” he said.

She sat back, a triumphant gleam in her eye.

“Leave him alone, Carmen. Please. Let him work in peace.”

She stood up to leave. “I won’t disturb him,” she said. “I promise.”

JEFF LEFT HIS COTTAGE
before dawn and returned after dark, five days in a row. Mia watched him come and go. She’d be up early in the mornings, working on Henry, when she’d hear the banging of his screen door, and if she looked out her window she could barely make him out as he walked across Sugarbush through the lifting darkness. At night she watched for the beam of his flashlight as he walked from the driveway to his cottage. Inside his cottage, his lights stayed on no more than an hour before he turned them out, and she pictured him falling, exhausted, into bed. He hadn’t been kidding when he told Chris he would give him all his waking hours.

Carmen had talked about him on the news. She hadn’t improved his image, nor Chris’s for having hired him. Jeff Cabrio was a loner, she reported, with no fixed address prior to his move to Valle Rosa. He was holed up in an abandoned warehouse on the rim of Cinnamon Canyon. There was one picture accompanying her report, a photograph obviously taken from a good distance away, of Jeff entering the warehouse.

Mia had had no opportunity to sketch him again, and she was about to despair of ever getting the chance when he showed up at her door the sixth morning after his arrival. It was seven o’clock. She’d been working on Henry, and the sudden knock made her jump. She opened her door to find him standing there, the early morning gold of the sun lighting one half of his face and body.

“Didn’t wake you, I hope,” he began and then suddenly grabbed her arm. “What the hell did you do?” he asked.

For a moment, she was afraid. She pulled her arm away, holding it close to her chest. “What do you mean?”

He took her hand again, straightening her arm out in front of her. “What…God, it’s paint!”

Mia looked down at the reddish stains on the inside of her forearm. “No,” she said. “It’s clay.”

“
Clay
. I thought it was blood. Thought I had a suicide attempt on my hands.” He shook his head, and she could see the relief in his face. “You know how it is, Mia. You try to keep a low profile, and you end up living on the property of a television journalist and a famous ex-ballplayer, and you innocently knock on your neighbor’s door, thinking, what could be safer, and you end up spending the rest of the day in an emergency room with everyone asking you questions about yourself.”

He was a madman. She drew her arm to her chest again. “You have an overactive imagination,” she said.

“Maybe.” He glanced toward the adobe, then back at her once more. “Could you do me a favor? Chris already left. He wanted me to stop by the office this morning, but I won’t be able to. Sometime in the middle of the night I realized I’m off base with a few of my equations, and I need to get to the warehouse to work on them. Would you let him know that, please?”

“Sure.” She had gotten his nose entirely wrong in her sketches. It was longer. There was the barest hint of a flare to his nostrils.

“Clay?” He peered behind her into the living room. “You’re working with clay at seven in the morning?”

“Actually, I’ve been up since five.”

He raised his eyebrows. “May I see?”

She stepped back to let him in. He walked across the plastic-covered carpet and sank to his knees in front of the orange crate. Henry grinned up at him. “Holy shit,” he said softly, sitting back on his heels. “This is definitely not amateur hour.”