California Fire And Life

40

Jack lives in your basic Southern California neofascist "gated community." A walled-in cluster of tile-roofed condos and town houses sitting like a castle on a shaved-off hill on the corner of Golden Lantern and Camino Del Avion.

"When did you move from the trailer?" Letty says as she gets out of her car in the Guest Parking slip.

Jack says, "When they tore the park down to build condos I couldn't afford. So I bought this place."

This place is a one-bedroom condo on the top floor of a three-condo unit. There are two units below him, sort of out and away as they slope down the hill. As a matter of fact, the two units get a little more out and a little more away every day because they're literally moving downhill.

Jack explains, "They built this back in the boom days in the '80s when they couldn't throw this shit up fast enough. Everybody and his uncle was a contractor all of a sudden and there was big money to be made, so they cut corners with a chain saw. They were in too big a hurry to compact the soil properly, so every building pad is on shifting ground. The whole damn complex is slowly sliding downhill. The homeowners association is trying to sue the contractors, but they're long gone in the recession. So now the association is suing the contractors' insurance company. And so on and so on… Anyway, the complex is heading back toward the ocean."

"I thought that was only supposed to happen when the Big One hits," Letty says. The Big One being the Earthquake, the apocalyptic event that everyone in So-Cal jokes about and dreads.

"It won't take the Big One," Jack says. "See those hills behind us? Those are about the last undeveloped hillsides on the south coast. There's another stretch above Laguna, and another one above San Clemente.

"It's fire season – hot, dry, windy – and those hills are covered with brush. One spark on a windy day and we'll be fighting the fire from the beach again. It'll blow down these canyons, surround all these complexes, some will burn down, others will make it.

"After fire season comes the rainy season. We haven't had a serious one in a few years, but we're due. So say we get a big fire and the brush is burned off those slopes. Then the rains come…

"The mother of all mudslides. All these hillsides that they shaved off and built this crap on, they're all coming down. All these condos and town houses built on shifting soil? They'll collapse from the bottom up because the ground will literally give out beneath them. We'll slide down the hill in a flow of cheap materials, bad construction, and mud.

"First Mother Nature burns it, then she flushes it."

"You'd like that, Jack, wouldn't you?"

They're standing in the street by his garage. Beneath a row of condo buildings that are all exactly identical.

Jack says, "Maybe I would."

Maybe then they wouldn't get a chance to ruin the Strands.

There's a note on his garage door.

Owners of one-car garages are expected to park their vehicle in that garage, not in parking slots on the street. The garages are intended for vehicles, not surfboard workshops.

– The Homeowners Association

"Surfboard workshop?"

"I have a couple of old boards in there," Jack says. Because of the cantilevered design of the building, Jack's garage sits directly below his kitchen. He pushes a remote button on a handheld clicker and the garage door opens with a metallic groan.

A surfboard workshop isn't a bad description, Letty thinks.

Jack has two old longboards on sawhorses and a couple more hung up on racks. The garage smells of surf wax and wood finish. There are posters from old surf movies on the walls.

"You never change, Jack," Letty says.

"This is the best one," Jack says. He rubs a hand along an old wooden longboard stretched across two sawhorses. It has three grains of wood, dark wood blended into light- beautifully jointed, seamless. A flawless piece of work. "Made by Dale Velzy back in 1957."

"It was your dad's."

"Yeah."

"I remember these things."

"I can see that."

"You're stuck in the past," she says.

"It was better then," Jack says.

"Okay."

They go up the sixteen concrete steps to his door.

Jack's condo is Plan C – "The Admiralty." To the right as you come in is a small but functional kitchen with a window that looks out at the cul-de-sac end of the condo complex, and on a clear day has a view of Saddleback Butte to the east. To the left is a dining alcove and then a living room with a fireplace. The bedroom is off the living room to the left.

A sliding glass door off the living room leads to a small balcony.

" Mira," Letty says. "You have some view."

She steps out onto his balcony.

"Yeah," Jack says, nodding to a strip mall that sits across Golden Lantern down to the right. "I can see Hughes Market, Burger King and the dry cleaners. In a west wind, I can smell the grease from Burger King. An east wind, I get garlic from the Italian place."

"Come on," Letty says, because the view from the balcony is spectacular. Disregard the strip mall, and the condos down the slope, and look straight ahead and you have miles of ocean horizon. You can see Catalina Island to the right and San Clemente Island straight ahead. Dana Point Harbor is behind a knoll just to the left and then it's open coast all the way down to Mexico.

"You must have some great sunsets," Letty says.

"It's pretty," Jack says. "In the winter the ocean rises up like this big blue bar of color. It's two miles away, but at least I can see it."

"Are you kidding? This is a million-dollar view."

The place cost him $260,000 – cheap by local standards.

Letty says, "I think I'm going to start crying again."

"Do you want someone with you or do you want to be alone?"

"Alone."

He's about to say Mi casa es su casa, but thinks better of it.

"The place is yours," Jack says.

"I don't mean to kick you out."

"I have things I can do downstairs," he says. "If you need me, stamp on the floor or something. I'll hear you."

"Okay."

He gets out quick because even saying okay her voice quivers and her eyes are full. So he goes down in the garage and works on the board. Takes a sheet of 000 sandpaper, folds it over a block of wood and runs it up and down the length of the board. Slowly, lightly, he gets into a rhythm, sanding the old balsa down to a high, smooth finish.

Upstairs he can hear her sobbing. Sobbing and yelling and throwing pillows and stuff and he half expects to get a call from the association telling him that his condo is a residence, not a funeral home or a shrink's office, and that open displays of grief are in violation of the CC amp;Rs.

It's an hour and a half before it gets quiet up there.

Jack waits another twenty minutes and then goes up.

She's asleep on his couch.

Her face is puffy and her eyes are slits, but they're closed anyway. Her black hair is splayed out on the pillow.

Watching her sleep is something wonderful and painful. Letty asleep is like an underground fire – placid and beautiful on the surface, but something always smoldering underneath, waiting to ignite. He remembers that from when they were together and he'd wake up earlier and look at her lying there and he'd ask himself what he ever did that someone that beautiful and that good could be with him.

And twelve years later, he thinks, I'm still in love with you.

So what? he thinks. I threw you away.

Like something tossed into the ocean, and now a wave washes up on my little stretch of the beach. Life giving you back something you don't deserve.

Don't get carried away, he thinks. Take a step away from yourself. She's not back because she loves you; she's back because she needs you.

Because there was a fire and her sister died.

He gets a spare blanket from the hall closet and puts it over her.

Her story doesn't change a thing. Pam had a history of alcoholism, a history of pills. Her blood tested positive for both.

Nothing Letty says can change that story.

The only thing that can really tell the story, Jack knows, is the fire.