The house is a small two-bedroom built in 1915 by locals. River rock walls, heavily cemented, a newish aluminum roof. Vaguely Craftsman in design, with a peaked front porch under the roof extension and staunch beam caissons.
Brock and Mahina have furnished it in secondhand, mostly Pacific Island furniture — bamboo and rattan, bright floral padding, a glass tabletop on coconut-tree stumps, Hawaiian carvings of turtles and fish. White bamboo bookshelves. Masks. A humble tiki bar.
Inside, Mahina hands him a very cold Bohemia. They touch bottles and sip.
“We did good work today, Brock. We maybe saved Gail’s life.”
He nods. Imagines the sidewalks of tents and tarps, the slow-motion citizens eyeing them suspiciously, caught in squalor.
“And we got Mae back,” she says. “What do we need from here, for the Barrel?”
“Fire extinguishers, guns, and night-vision goggles.”
“Are you worried?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you’re still alive.”
Brock looks through the windows facing east. Hidden down there are twenty-six trailers, some small and some large, most of them older. Last he checked, there were eighty-seven people housed there, including twelve children — six home-schooled and six who catch the bus at the Aguanga post office for the public schools in Anza Valley.
The Breath of Life Rescue Mission charges no rent, and supplies the electricity, propane, and water pumped in at some expense by the county. Random Access Foundation, which bought and donated the property four years back, chips in a little every month.
All the Breath of Life Rescue Mission asks of its once-homeless citizens is that they help each other as they help themselves, keep up the grounds and pick up after their dogs, obey state and county laws, attend Breath of Life services on Friday mornings when possible, help clear the brush, level the ground and pour the cement pads needed for more trailers. No recreational drugs except for marijuana.
Brock sets his empty bottle on the kitchen counter and looks out the window. Considers the faint shapes of new trailer pads being cleared, which is tough work in the tall, dense, iron-tough manzanita that thrives throughout the church property.
Back outside, they load the gear they’ll need if Jimmy Wu and his rough crew actually try to burn down the Barrel.
Brock sees a minivan parked across the big parking area in front of the big cinderblock church. He notes the crippled slouch of the van, and a stuffed, tarp-clenched luggage rack on top.
They crunch across the lot toward the church, pale in the moonlight. Brock likes the stout, secular, no-nonsense air of the church. No meddlesome gods there. It’s the opposite of spiritual. It’s functionaclass="underline" serving as chapel, schoolhouse, meeting room, kitchen and dining hall, concert theater and auditorium, and a half-court basketball venue when it rains. Plus an indestructible concrete floor, and a fireplace big enough to keep the whole thing almost warm on the cold, high-desert nights.
It was built in the 1950s by a San Diego utopian cult as a meeting hall, complete with a steel-reinforced basement bomb shelter. There have been various owners, squatters, and vandals since then. The entire property was purchased then gifted to the Breath of Life church just after Brock and Mahina founded it. Brock was just twenty-two, Mahina thirty. The gift was an unpublicized donation.
Brock and Mahina and their scant new “congregation” reroofed the building, cleaned out the massive stone fireplace, broomed away the lizards and field mice, rebuilt and refurnished the industrial-sized kitchen, bought enough folding chairs for a small army, and set up a good PA system so Brock could be heard.
Now, the congregation varies on any given Friday morning between ten and seventy worshippers. Brock chose Fridays for worship to distance the Breath of Life from the other churches, gods, and saints.
But he’s not at all sure this hasn’t hurt attendance, given that lots of people work on Fridays.
His very first Friday morning congregation?
One: Juana Flores, a young Cahuilla Indian woman who was living in one of the caves in the rough hills behind the compound, selling her handmade baskets and carved wild gourds from a blanket on the shoulder of Highway 371.
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.