“Yeah, there He is,” says Casey. “But I love you, Brock, and the unbelieving demons inside you.”
“You’re messed up, man. See you at the Feather Fire. You should help this miserable world for once, instead of only yourself.”
Casey pictures Brock, his minutes-younger twin brother—lanky, dark dreadlocks, inked to the max—in every visible way Casey’s opposite.
Casey worries about him. Always has. Worries about the body that Brock drives to physical extremes in order to ride immense waves. And the angry heart that Brock so eagerly displays. The fights he picks, the scars he wears, and the weapons he collects. The way he thinks he can save the world, one disaster at a time. Playing God instead of worshipping Him.
“There’s bad karma at Mavericks, Brock. Pray to God for protection. Valley of death and all like that.”
“I dread your God, Casey. Just shut up.”
5
Beneath a billowing gray sky pocked with red embers, Brock Stonebreaker and his wife and his Go Dogs—in a motley battalion of pickups, utility vehicles, and vans—have encamped within the eye-burning haze that chokes the Feather Fire evacuation center on the Mendocino College soccer field.
The hills surrounding them are limned in wind-driven flames that launch embers into the sky like fireworks.
The fire was zero percent contained when Brock, Mahina, and the Go Dogs got here two hours ago, and it’s zero percent contained now.
The Go Dogs are the activist wing of Brock’s Breath of Life Rescue Mission in Aguanga, California, a sprawling, state-licensed and accredited house of worship. The buildings and acreage are gifts from the Random Access Foundation, run by a young Silicon Valley billionaire and her husband. The foundation continues to make modest monthly contributions, mostly earmarked for the Go Dogs rescue operations in the US and in Mexico.
Now sheriffs, police, and an alphabet soup of fire department vehicles prowl the perimeter field with their headlights and searchlights, as if looking for something more to do than keep their eye on the flaming, not-very-distant, timber-studded, tinder-dry hills around them.
Brock drips sweat. The tattoos all over his sinewy body are black, slick, and island themed. Got his first one at age twelve, much to his mother’s annoyance, which was half the point. The other half was he liked sea turtles like the ones they’d see surfing on Maui. He’s dark-skinned for a man of his ancestry—some Black Irish way back, his mother told him—your great-grandfather Devon Byrne had that, and blue eyes like yours. Brock’s dreads are short and tightly woven. He’s stripped to the waist because of the record-busting October heat wave, and he’s drawing foul breaths through one of the two hundred cheap “tactical” gas masks donated to the Dogs by a manufacturer down in Orange County.
He’s handing off forty-bottle flats of donated water to thirsty evacuees, many of whom have lost their homes or are losing them this very moment, losing almost everything they love, basically—houses and horses and dogs and gardens—as they tear open the bottles of fresh warm water for their children first, then themselves, quaffing then pouring it onto their upturned, smoke-blackened faces to quench the ember stings and the fires in their terrified eyes.
These are people who have lost it all, Brock thinks. And there will be no regaining what is gone. Only substitution.
He leans into the back of his flagship Go Dogs van, an old black Econoline with the goofy-looking dachshund emblazoned on the sides in Day-Glo green.
Mahina, whose name means “moon” in her native language, is all the way inside, hefting the flats into Brock’s waiting hands two at a time. She’s Hawaiian big, strong and imposing. When they first met, Brock had to really work to beat her at arm wrestling, and she was a stronger, more buoyant, and better swimmer than him. Good surfer, too. She looks like a post-apocalyptic Pacific Island warrior with her hair up in a tight bun, her XXL Day-Glo green and black Go Dogs T-shirt, the gas mask, and goggles. She posts and blogs like crazy for the Breath of Life Rescue Mission. Doesn’t say much out loud, but when she does, her words count.
“We need more water,” she mouths from within the mask.
“Another run to Ukiah,” says Brock. Their third run of the day.
“Thank the gods for Ukiah,” she says.
Ukiah and its roads have so far been spared by a change of wind direction. The Feather Fire—the experts were saying, like so many of the new “super fires”—was so big and so hot it was making its own weather. One expert said the change of wind was a miracle. Another said that the super fires were spawned by the megadrought, which was caused by global warming, which was caused by greenhouse gases.
“The gods have nothing to do with it,” says Brock, who does not believe that a god—and certainly not some cabal of them—in any way intervenes on behalf of the human beings of Earth. He’s always berating his brother for Casey’s self-promoting, Christian notions of divine intervention through prayer. Much better in Brock’s mind is Mahina’s worship of nature—gods who openly help and sometimes destroy their mortals.
The Breath of Life is what Brock would pray to if he prayed at all.
Instead, he worships actions, forged by the heat of the real.
Forged in the absolute belief that people can change the world.
You can just watch, Brock says in his “sermons.” Or you can act. Join the battle.
That’s the foundation of the Breath of Life Rescue Mission, and of every angry sermon and call to action that Brock has issued from his pulpit on the Aguanga compound over the last year. And ranted from his media platforms.
God(s) or not, in Brock’s mind, the Red Cross simply made it to Ukiah because they made it to Ukiah, and—with typical NGO caution—wouldn’t risk getting close enough to the danger to give away their ample supplies of water, food, clothing, blankets, diapers, pet food, battery-powered lanterns, generators, coffee and coffee makers, generators, motel vouchers, and, oddly, twelve pallets of canned beets! There are twenty-four twelve-ounce cans per plastic-wrapped bundle. Though none have pull tops, and not one manual can opener is in sight.
Which is the kind of thing that drives Brock Stonebreaker crazy—always has—when people get ninety percent of the job done but don’t close it off with the final ten. Then blame it on a god’s will, or a rule or a law, or a forecast, or a tarot reading, or global fucking warming.
Which is why he created the Go Dogs, and why he only accepts people who will not hesitate to go that last ten percent, or more, to get it done. And called them the Go Dogs because a dog understands that last ten percent without ever being taught it, or even bothering to think about it.
You see. You go. You do it until it’s done.
You take off on that wave and you are committed.
On a huge wave, the last ten percent is fear. Brock dwells on that a lot in his rants. Fear is hesitation and hesitation is death on a sixty-foot wave.
Hell, thinks Brock: a twenty-foot wave. He saw a boyhood friend killed by a wicked-thick eighteen-foot demon at Sunset Beach on Oahu.
A friend.
Brock was a teenager himself then, and he’d gotten Glenn to shore as fast as he could and CPR’d him until the paramedics came running across the beach with their boxes and stretcher, and they let Brock ride in the back of the truck to the hospital under colors and a loudly optimistic siren.
Brock had prayed to God in that bumpy, wailing truck, just like his grandpa—Pastor Mike Stonebreaker—had taught him to.
Pressing his forehead to Glenn’s bouncing chest, praying hard and clear and rationally, offering all he had, making a hundred promises if He would just keep Glenn’s heart beating.
Well, He didn’t.
Which is another reason Brock created the Go Dogs within his Breath of Life Rescue Mission. To help people who are too bad off to help themselves.
Brock wasn’t going to be fooled twice.
By 2 A.M., the Go Dogs have given up every last water bottle, food stuff, bar of soap, tube of toothpaste, and family-sized tent—thirty of them—donated by a Go Dogs friend who owns a chain of outdoor/camping/fishing/hunting stores in Costa Mesa. The tents are high quality and expensive, waterproof, fire resistant, and quick to set up.
Now—just after two in the morning—Brock helps a family of five drive the final stakes into the soccer stadium grass. Mahina circles them, shooting video for the Go Dogs website and Brock’s social media, to which he posts with great volume and profanity. Mahina writes some of the less heated dispatches under the Brock Stonebreaker/Go Dogs handle.
The tent-building dad drives his last spike with an angry swing; his wife sits on the ground with her back to the tent, wrapped in a clean new blanket, nursing her baby.
Exhausted Brock sits on his butt beside Mahina and they look out through the drifting smoke to the hills sparking in the near distance, and to the mountains farther out glowing red with flames and rocketing embers. He’s been up for thirty-six hours. His eyes are burning but looking out to the little village of tents pitched on the soccer field, he feels his heart beating steady and strong.
6
Two hours later they make Ukiah, where they load the ash-encrusted Go Dogs Econoline with more Red Cross survival provisions, and find gas.
Mahina squeegees the filthy windshield while Brock tries to post a call for reinforcements on his heavily attended socials. His phone has only two bars out here, but he writes anyway, his orders as separate posts, like bullets:
Come on you lazy people, JOIN the GO DOGS here in Mendocino County where the Feather Fire is 100% NOT CONTAINED!
Everything is burning! ALL ANIMALS HUMAN AND OTHERWISE MUST HELP! Bring food and water! Bring your motor homes and trailers if you have them.
