He retreats past the restrooms to the rear emergency exit, shoulders through the door and into the Santa Anas howling in his face.
When he rounds the building, a Laguna Fire Department engine has already claimed the prime Coast Highway parking slots right out front, and the firefighters are arching water high over the sidewalk and the embankment and onto the Barrel. A fire truck, its red flank throbbing, settles longwise—half onto the curb and half off—and its search lights illuminate the throbbing, windblown water cascading through the dark sky, into the face of the restaurant and the third-floor apartment and its roof.
Casey just stands there for a moment, feels the heat of the Barrel’s wooden walls and the warm fury of the Santa Ana wind blasting down the canyon to the sea. Embers rise and fall through the smoky night. Brushes tiny sparks off his robe.
Help us, God.
Calls his mom, who’s heading in on Laguna Canyon Road, traffic already backing up in both directions. If she can’t get onto Coast Highway she’ll use the Art Festival parking lot and run to the Barrel.
Calls Brock.
But the call drops just as two Laguna Beach patrolmen order him off the property, and when Casey hesitates, they each take an arm and guide him to the steps leading down to the sidewalk.
“Okay, man,” he says, shrugging them off. “I’m going.”
“Sorry, Casey,” one says. “You’re in danger here.”
Casey joins the growing batch of spectators cordoned off behind a police barricade. Sees the helicopter tilting in from the east, another circling high.
The wind funnels down from the mountains, pushing Brock and Mahina southwest down Laguna Canyon Road as if they’re hurrying him to the Barrel.
Short of Coast Highway, just past the Art Festival grounds, the traffic has come to a stop. He sees flashing lights up ahead and cops turning the cars around. Ahead of him, drivers pick their moments to U-turn back out of the canyon.
He waits a full minute without moving, gets a faint whiff of the same sickening smell he breathed for three straight days at the Feather Fire evacuation center in Mendocino.
Sees the faint orange smoke rising south and west of here, the sparks rising in the black sky like campfire embers.
Brock feels that familiar anger crawling up through him. Knows he shouldn’t have left Casey alone in the apartment.
Knows he should have truly listened to that sick fuck Jimmy Wu and his smarmy, know-it-all daughter making their lame moves on Casey and Mom. Turning Mom’s fire comment into a not-so-veiled threat.
You knew. You let your guard down.
Santa Anas, he thinks: best time to set a fire if you want things to burn fast. Ask any arsonist. They do it all the time.
He gets a break in the oncoming cars, cranks a U-turn and floors it back to Broadway, tells the uniform he’s Brock Stonebreaker, a licensed pastor, lies that he lives right up here on Third Street, kids at home, please let me through, and incredibly the young cadet lets him through.
He screams up the Third Street hill, tires smoking, zigs and zags Bent to Park to Short to Wilson, then down Thalia toward Coast Highway.
He can see orange flames atop the Barrel, leaning back, a rippling, wind-blown wall. Silver rivers fraying in the wind. The second-floor apartment windows belch fire and the roof spits whirling dervishes from between the tiles.
“Brock, this is most very evil.”
He parks in someone’s driveway on Thalia, runs down the middle of the street in his flip-flops and swim trunks and the Go Dogs shirt for Coast Highway, Mahina just steps behind him.
Hits Coast Highway and looks north, where the Barrel burns before him like an enormous bush.
Bottom to top.
All sides.
Flames bent west with the wind.
He gets to the barricade but the cops won’t let him through this time.
He sees his mom, Casey, and Mae standing in mute shock, their faces burnished by the flames.
20
Looking Back—
WHO WAS JOHN STONEBREAKER AND WHAT WENT WRONG AT MAVERICKS?
By Jen Stonebreaker
Part three of a special series for Surf Tribe Magazine
Remember “Adios,” the Linda Ronstadt song about running away from home when she was seventeen to be with some man on the California coast?
That was me but I had a year on Linda.
I said yes to Cortes Bank.
Which John said was the biggest surfable wave on Earth.
Said it was rough and cold out there.
Rough and cold indeed.
