Juana listened to Brock haranguing about this Breath of Life, this new god that he had discovered after being rag-dolled underwater so long at Nazaré that Mahina had to mouth-to-mouth him back to consciousness, and, when Brock came to, there was his god: Breath. Life. Breath of Life.
From Mahina.
Brock had talked on and on about that day.
Breath of Life, show us what to do.
He explained to Juana that the Breath of Life was stronger, angrier, but more generous than the old, jealous, self-inflated gods of the past. Brock admitted to having a temper, alright, because anger gets things done, and never turn the other cheek. Life is a fight. The Breath of Life has just one fundamental, nonnegotiable law: Give it up for your brothers and sisters. Love and protect and serve each other, especially those short on love and without protection. People like you, Juana. Find them and help them. Make them better. Breathe life into them just as Mahina breathed life back into me. The Breath of Life is awesome.
Juana dozed through the sermon in the back row, ate half the box of donuts, and drank a lot of coffee.
Now Brock and Mahina go through the always-open door of their church. The lights are on inside, and the smell of woodsmoke fills the big, chilly room.
In the big river-rock fireplace burns a modest fire, with a ragged human family of four arrayed on lumpy Salvation Army chairs before it. There are fast-food bags and empty wrappers on one of the long, burn-scarred vinyl tables.
“I’m Brock and this is Mahina.”
The man stands but doesn’t straighten, giving Brock a long, worried scan, trying to take in Brock’s fierce face and spikey, dark brown dreads, his tattooed legs, the flame climbing up his throat framed by the hoodie. He regards Mahina blinkingly.
“We’re not going to steal anything,” he says. “Just saw the sign on the highway and we’re about down to our last. We’re the Kupchiks. Stan and Angela. On our way back to Tulsa. I was a car mechanic when the back went out, and we can’t live here on comp and food stamps. Sorry to just bomb in.”
“We’ll get you fixed up.”
“The boy tested positive this afternoon. The new respiratory thing they got out now, not the Covid, thank God.”
“Thank the Breath,” says Mahina.
“There’s bunks through that door,” says Brock. “Clean up in the morning. There’s a trailer you can have in a couple of days.”
“Oh, man, really? Thank you.”
“Thank the Breath of Life, brah. Take it in.”
Mr. Kupchik looks from Brock to Mahina then back to Brock again, skepticism brimming. “Yes, I will try. I’ve never been a believer in that kind of thing myself.”
“You don’t have to believe to help yourself and others. You just have to act.”
Brock thinks of the Kasper Aamon message that came to him early today on one of his right-wing, out-there socials:
“Brother Brock, you’re not a Go Dog, you’re a sick dog! Taking care of all those useless pukes at your church. It’s not a church, it’s a slum of sin. You’re no brother of mine, you’re just a jester giving the rest of us something to laugh at.”
“We want to help ourselves,” says Stan Kupchik. “We really do.”
As forecasted, the Santa Ana winds come hard and fast as Brock and Mahina head back for Laguna on Highway 371. The boxy Econoline takes the gusts on its rear flank. This high-pressure front from the Great Basin is pressing the dry air across the deserts, where it picks up warmth, then surges through the passes, howling all the way to the Pacific. Which is where Brock likes to be during a Santa Ana—on his board, bobbing in the Pacific—where the waves stand up hollow and glittering, the wind back-spraying his face at Brooks or Blacks or Malibu or Mavericks.
Breath of Life, for sure.
19
Casey, sleeping as always like the dead, suddenly wakes up to a loud bop!
Sounds like one of those M-80s he used to buy in Ensenada as a kid. Or maybe a gun.
It’s 3:17 in the morning by the apartment clock. He feels the covers for Mae then remembers she’s with his mom.
Gets his white robe with black lettering on the back—“Muhammad Ali”—over his boxers, and the checked red-and-white slip-on sneakers. Heads out the front door to see the first-floor kitchen side entrance of the Barrel on fire. It’s a Santa Ana wind-blown orange demon, devouring the redwood siding in a widening circle.
He gets the fire extinguisher and a set of restaurant keys from the apartment, slips his phone into the robe pocket, and hustles down the stairs, past the Barrel’s ocean-front deck toward the fire. But another explosion rattles the night, blowing a hole in the deck from underneath, plank splinters shooting up next to a four-top with its umbrella collapsed for the night. Flames jump through the hole, leaning seaward in the offshore wind, chewing at the umbrella fabric. Casey stops right there, not sure if he should dial 911, or leap the banister and climb the deck railing to engage this new threat, or haul butt to the ground floor and fight the kitchen-wall fire, which has grown substantially.
He jumps the banister, drops six feet to the entryway pavers, lands heavy but balanced, like dropping in on a twelve-foot wave at Makaha. Runs to the burning kitchen side entrance, dials 911, drops the phone into his robe pocket—they use GPS to find the caller, don’t they?—yanks the extinguisher pin and triggers the white, pressured retardant into the fire.
Swings the device in a big circle, clockwise, trying to corral the swooshing, growing flames, and he hears another explosion to his right—on the north side of the building, then a fourth from the west, between Casey and the beach.
Still spraying, Casey turns reflexively when an engine revs high behind him on almost-empty Coast Highway. Sees a black Mercedes Sprinter van screeching away from the curb right out front of the Barrel, headed south on Coast Highway. It has some kind of decal or emblem on the side but he can’t make out what. A white oval with a dark something and hot orange writing on it.
He really wants to know where that damned thing is going in such a hurry while his restaurant burns, but he can’t abandon his post.
Turns back to the flames, circling them tighter and tighter, the foam converting them into rising tendrils of eye-burning smoke. The wind helps, blowing the retardant directly into the diminishing fire.
Which is finally out, but so is the home-sized, compact extinguisher.
A smoke alarm wails inside the restaurant.
Casey keys open the restaurant front-entrance door, knows the nearest fire extinguisher is behind the welcome/cash register desk, a curving mahogany beauty just steps away.
He dials 911 again and hangs on forever, letting the burglar alarm deactivation time run out. Finally:
“Fire at the Barrel in Laguna! Coast Highway! Fire at the Barrel!”
The burglar alarms join the smoke alarms in a harmonic chaos as Casey grabs the front-desk extinguisher.
He climbs the stairs four at a time to the second-story deck, jumps the banister, and scales the deck railing, almost drops the extinguisher but gathers it back like a nearly fumbled football and brakes just short of the flaming gap in the deck.
This extinguisher is twice the size of the first and its pink foam throttles the lapping flames, then shuts them down. The wind lashes at his back. Casey is not stoked by how big the burned-out hole is. Sirens now, and the station is barely half a mile away. But he fully can’t believe it when another explosion rips away, somewhere down near the front entrance.
This is like hell, he thinks.
When the deck fire is mostly out he unlocks the door to the restaurant proper, flies down the stairs, across the dining room, past his bar and into the lobby, which is swirling with flames. Through one of the big picture windows he sees the beautiful outside waiting-area benches made by John Seeman burning, too, and the palm trees in the planters, and the privacy fence, and the wave-shaped wooden pedestal on which stands the bronze statue of his father.
Where I just was, Casey thinks: Are they firebombing us?
In the lobby heat Casey plants his feet and fires away with the extinguisher. He can’t get too close because of the heat, and he can’t find a good target—it’s all burning—the walls and the fantastic Wyland whale paintings, and the awesome sculptures by Nick Hernandez, even the old barn hardwood floors.
Did they put, like, napalm in the bombs?
He snatches another extinguisher from the kitchen and lets go with it in the dining room, hoping to save the vintage surfboards and the hand-tooled chairs and tables from Taxco and the massively poetic Barbour and Severson photographs, but he can’t keep up with the fire’s advance and the second extinguisher coughs and dies and he can’t get back into the kitchen, which has really gone up, so by the time he returns from the utility closet by the restroom with another cylinder there’s hardly anything in the dining room that isn’t burning.
He’s light in the head and his hair and Muhammad Ali bathrobe are taking on tiny embers, and fudge if that doesn’t hurt.
