California Fire And Life

25

The voice takes him back a long way.

Back to the days when he graduates from fire school and goes back to the Sheriff's Department and they put him in the Fire Inspector's Unit.

Jack is a comer, a real potential star.

He works his ass off, takes every seminar offered, goes to fires that aren't even his. The joke is that every firefighter in south Orange County is afraid to barbecue a burger because they're afraid Jack will show up.

Jack, he figures he has life just about dicked.

He has a trailer across the PCH from Capo Beach, so he's ten minutes from Trestles, ten minutes from Dana Strand, and twenty from Three Arch Bay, and he can always just go across the highway to surf Capo if he's pressed for time. He's got a primo '66 Mustang that needed only a little Bondo, and he gets a yellow paint job on that hummer, wires the sound system himself and puts on a rack, and he is rolling.

Rolls out to a firebombing scene one day and everything else he could want in life is standing out in front of the Jewish Community Center waiting for him.

Letitia del Rio.

It's hard to look good in an Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy's uniform, but Letty gets it done. Black hair an inch longer than regulation, golden brown skin, black eyes in a face that is stunningly beautiful, and a body that is pure sex.

"This shouldn't be a tough one for you," Letty says to Jack as he walks up. She juts her chin at a teenage skinhead being loaded into an ambulance. "Adolf Jr. over there threw a Molotov cocktail and set himself on fire."

"They think it's the liquid," Jack says, "not the fumes."

"That's because they sleep through their classes," she says.

Jack shakes his head. "It's because they're morons."

"Well, that too."

Two minutes later he hears himself asking her out.

"What did you say?" she asks.

"I guess I asked you to dinner," Jack says.

"You guess?" she asks. "I'm not going out on a guess."

"Would you go out to dinner with me?"

"Yes."

Jack blows out the savings account on a meal at the Ritz-Carlton.

"You're trying to impress me, huh?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"That's good," Letty says. "I'm glad you're trying to impress me."

Next date, she insists on Mickey D's and a movie.

Date after that she cooks him a Mexican dinner that is only the best meal he's ever had. He tells her so.

"It's genetic," Letty says.

"Did your parents come from Mexico?"

She laughs. "My family was living in San Juan Capistrano when it was still part of Spain. Do you speak Spanish, white boy?"

"A little."

"Well, I'll teach you some more."

She does.

She takes him into her bedroom and Jack thinks he learns not only a little Spanish but the entire meaning of life when she steps out of her jeans and unbuttons her white blouse. She's wearing a black bra and black panties and her smile says that she knows it's sexy and she looks down at the bulge in his pants and says, "I make you hard, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Good," she says. Then smiles and says, "What I've got for you, baby…"

She's not kidding.

You can take all those classroom definitions of fire, Jack thinks, but you don't know about heat until you have Letty del Rio swirling on you. He reaches up to touch her breasts but she grabs his hands and pushes them down on the bed and holds them down while she keeps moving on him. She's focusing his attention to just where she wants it; it's like, Once you' ve been in here, you're never going to want to be anywhere else. You are home, baby. And when he's about to come, she reaches underneath him and lightly strums – later she'll call this her "Mexican guitar" – and while he's coming she's talking dirty in Spanish.

She's not only gorgeous and smart, she's tough and hardworking and ambitious and she gets it. Like, they're necking on his couch in the trailer when the scanner squawks about a fire on a houseboat, and after a minute Letty sighs Go ahead because she knows Jack has never done a boat fire before. Letty's so cool she's even there when he gets back and she lets him tell her all about it.

Some of their dates, they go to the shooting range together where Letty invariably beats him and then busts his balls about it all through dinner, telling him that because he lost and she won he has to do anything she says when they get home.

" Any thing," she says, touching his dick with her toe. Then she starts murmuring en espanol what she wants him to do to her, and when he asks her what it all means she says, "You just start doing. I'll let you know when you get it."

She's so cool she goes down to Mexico with him and sleeps in the back of the truck he borrows from his dad, and when they get back she says, Sweetie, that was wonderful. Next time, a hotel.

Pretty soon they're spending all of their off time together. They go to the beach, to movies, they go out to clubs and dance. They make love and talk about cases. They talk about marriage and kids.

"I want two kids," she says.

"Just two?"

"What? I'm Mexican, I'm supposed to want ten?" she says. "I'm one of those modern Mexican women. I read Cosmo, I read Ms., I give head. Two kids, you can help me make them."

"No, I'm one of those old-fashioned Anglo men," Jack says. "You have to marry me first."

"Maybe," she says. "But if you want to propose to me, I want the dinner, the flowers…"

Jack starts saving for a ring.

So he has a place, a car, a woman.

And a job he loves.

Wakes up and goes to sleep to the sound of the ocean, sometimes sweetened by the sound of Letty's breathing.

Then Kazzy Azmekian's carpet warehouse burns down.

It's a big freaking fire, so they put two guys on it.

Jack and a more experienced guy.

Brian Bentley.