The Second Fire

The wind woke Kevin Fitzgerald before the phone did, and he lay in the dark of the early afternoon nap he had started taking since he retired and listened to it work at the house, the long downslope gusts coming off the Sierra and pouring through Caughlin Ranch the way they did every November, rattling the fence, throwing grit against the west windows, and he thought, the way he thought every time it blew like this, that it was fire weather, and then he thought, the way he always did next, that he had had this exact thought once before and been right. That had been nine years ago almost to the week. He got up and went to the west window and looked at the ridge and saw the smoke already standing up over it, brown and fast, leaning east with the wind, and he did not need the phone that started buzzing on the counter to tell him what it was. He had seen this smoke before, from this window, in this month, and it did not surprise him at all, which he understood even then was the worst thing about it.

He was sixty-three. He had spent thirty-five years writing down what happened in this town for the paper, most of it at a desk in the tower on the plaza, city hall and the county and the water board and the school district, the dull machinery of a place that thought of itself as small, and he had a reporter’s ear still for the difference between a thing that was going to be bad and a thing that only felt bad. This was going to be bad. He could hear it in the wind. He turned off the stove and got the box down from the hall closet, the one that had been packed since 2011 and never fully unpacked, the papers and the drives and his mother’s photographs, and he carried it out to the car first, before anything else, because he had learned that lesson the hard way once and did not intend to learn it twice.

His family had been moving toward this ridge his whole life without any of them ever deciding to. His grandfather Michael had riveted the tall hotel downtown and later poured retaining walls along the river for the government, and had lived in a narrow house on Ralston Street a few blocks off Virginia where the whole world was within walking. Michael’s son, Kevin’s father, had bought a tract house out on the west side in the fifties when the meadows were filling with new streets and it had seemed a marvel to have a driveway and a lawn and a mountain view at the end of the block. And Kevin, when he could afford it, had gone one ridge further up, into the master-planned foothills where the good houses looked out over the whole lit bowl of the valley at night, into the very last row of streets before the sagebrush and the pines took over and the town simply stopped. Three generations walking west and uphill, out of the crowded center toward the beautiful open edge, and it had taken Kevin until he stood in his own driveway with the smoke coming over the ridge to understand that the beautiful open edge was the part that burned.

The first time, in 2011, it had come in the dead of a November night, past midnight, and he had come awake to a neighbor pounding on the door and had gotten out with almost nothing, and by morning it had taken most of two thousand acres and better than two dozen houses down the slope from his, and an old man he had never met had died of a heart attack trying to get himself out. Kevin’s house had been spared by a hundred yards and a shift of wind. He had gone back to work and written about it, the arcing power lines in the gusts, the reverse calls that emptied the neighborhoods, the nine thousand people who slept that night on cots in the high school gym, and he had written it the way he wrote everything, cleanly, at a distance, a man taking down the town’s account. He had not written that he had stood in his own street in his coat and watched the ridge burn orange and been afraid. That part had not gone in the paper.

Now it was afternoon and the second one was coming and he was not writing anything. He was a man in a driveway with a box in his trunk and a cat he could not find. The phone had the evacuation order on it now, the same streets as before, the same schools opening their doors for the same displaced, and out on the main road he could already see the cars coming down out of the higher streets nose to tail, the whole neighborhood pouring downhill toward the flat. He found the cat under the bed and got her into the carrier while she fought him, and he did one slow turn through the rooms, not to save anything more but only to see it, the couch and the shelves and the window full of smoke, the house his family had spent a hundred years and three moves climbing all this way to reach.

He thought about the man who had died in the first fire, the stranger whose age was the only thing the paper ever knew about him, and he thought that the town would say what it always said after these, that they had been lucky, that the wind had turned, that only a few houses this time, and that people would rebuild right up against the same slope and wait for the next November, because the view was worth it, because it was always going to be worth it right up until the year it wasn’t. He had spent his life certain that the record was the thing that lasted, the written-down account, the clean paragraph in the morning paper. But the paper was thinner every year and half of it lived on a screen now and none of it would stop the wind, and the only record that was going to matter in an hour was whether the house was still standing when the smoke cleared, and that record had not been written yet.

He backed the car down the drive with the cat yowling in the seat beside him and the box in the trunk and the smoke rolling low across the road, and he pulled into the long slow line of his neighbors going down out of the hills, and he did not look in the mirror, because he had looked in the mirror the last time and it had not helped, and he drove down toward the flat part of the town his people had spent three generations trying to leave, not knowing yet, the way you never know until it is over, whether he would have a reason to come back up.

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