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.
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.