Fire and Rain

  Chris held up his hand, smiling. “That ‘bitch’ is my ex-wife.”

  Jeff sat back in his chair, a look of surprise on his face. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Chris thought briefly of defending Carmen, but it would take so many words, so much explaining, and the man was a stranger. “No problem,” he said.

  “Anyway, I’m certain I can help you. Help Valle Rosa. Like I said, I’m only passing through, but I can’t walk away from a situation when I know I can make a difference.”

  Chris looked at him skeptically. “What can you possibly do?”

  An instant of silence passed before Jeff answered. “I can make rain fall over Valle Rosa.”

  Chris felt the flame of hope the stranger had ignited in him disintegrate. “Right,” he said. “And someday I’ll pitch another no-hitter.”

  “My background’s in environmental engineering, and I consult for a number of companies,” Jeff said. “They tell me their problems, and I come up with solutions. I’ve been working on a way to modify weather patterns, and I think I’ve finally perfected it. But I haven’t had a chance yet to try it out in the field. My work was interrupted.” He looked down at his hands for a full thirty seconds, long enough to raise the hair on the back of Chris’s neck, then lifted his gaze once more. “The children,” he said, referring again to the victims of the fire, or maybe to those children the fire would take today or tomorrow, and something rolled over in the pit of Chris’s stomach. “You’d be doing me a favor,” Jeff continued, “letting me help. All I ask for is a place to stay and grocery money, and the cost of the equipment I’ll need.”

  Chris cleared his throat. “Are you talking about cloud seeding?”

  The stranger shook his head. He began describing the technology he would use—something about altering sound waves to change the atmospheric pressure—and Chris was quickly lost, although he continued to listen with a skeptical smile. The man was a charlatan, no doubt, and yet something about him was convincing. The intensity of his eyes, the sincerity in his voice. He didn’t seem crazy. He didn’t seem delusional.

  “How about some references?” Chris asked.

  Jeff shook his head. “Can’t help you with that. There are certainly plenty of folks who could tell you how good my work is, but I’m afraid I’m in a position where I can’t contact them right now.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and leaned over Chris’s desk, writing his name and the name of his hotel on a notepad. “I can help you,” he said, straightening up again. “I don’t blame you for your doubts. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to stay in this area any longer than I have to. But when I see something like that fire…” He shook his head. “So, I’ve made my offer. I’ll be around another day or so. That’s it.”

  Chris stood up as well and walked him to the door of his office. “Thanks for stopping in,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  He watched Jeff walk down the hall toward the front door. Clearly, this was a man in trouble. With the law perhaps. Definitely with his own demons.

  Jeff nodded at Mia as he walked past her desk, and Chris was surprised by the flush in Mia’s cheeks, by the way she followed the stranger with her eyes. He had come to think of Mia as quiet, bookish, sexless. Instantly, though, he knew he’d been wrong. Her response to Jeff Cabrio seemed nothing less than visceral.

  “Oh,” she said, noticing Chris in the doorway. “Carmen Perez called while you were meeting with Mr. Cabrio.”

  “Thanks,” he said, surprised.

  He returned Carmen’s call from his office phone.

  “I was thinking, Chris,” she said. “Two of the cottages are vacant. You’re welcome to stay in one of them while your house is unlivable.”

  He thought of Sugarbush, Carmen’s sprawling eight acres that had once belonged to both of them. Eight acres surrounded on three sides by Cinnamon Canyon. He had loved that property from afar as a child and had proudly bought it with cash as an adult. He pictured the shaded patio where he and Carmen had relaxed in the evenings. He thought of the hot tub on the raised deck where they’d soak late at night, naked in the darkness, just the two of them and the stars and the distant howling of the coyotes.

  Carmen now lived alone in the huge, 130-year-old adobe at the heart of the property. She had turned the three small outbuildings which rested along the edge of the canyon into rental cottages, and he knew she was renting one of them to Mia.

  He hadn’t thought through where he would live, what he would do until his house was raised from its ruins. He supposed he’d been thinking in the back of his mind that he would stay here, as he had last night, spending his nights cramped on the couch. One night on the couch, though, had changed his mind about that. But Sugarbush? No matter how thoroughly those three outbuildings had been renovated, no matter how charming and comfortable they had become, he would never be able to think of them as anything other than shacks, suitable for little more than storage.

  “I can find someplace else,” he said. “I mean, it could be quite a while before the house is ready. Wouldn’t it be hard for you, having me in your back yard?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “Well, I’d pay rent of course.”

  “Don’t insult me, Chris, all right?” She hesitated for a moment. “It’s true that money’s tight right now, but I don’t want yours. And there’s plenty of land between the cottage and the adobe. We’ll never even have to see each other.”

  Money was tight? His alimony hadn’t amounted to much after his retirement, but he certainly didn’t think she had financial problems.

  He told her he would think about it. Then he went home—to what was left of his home—with the list of losses Mia had typed up for him. The insurance representative was due to meet him there at two, but Chris wanted a chance to go through the rubble himself. He found some clothes he would need to have treated for smoke, but at least they were still in one piece. In the family room he collected his soot-covered trophies, his Martin guitar, nearly clean in its case, and the photograph albums, which had been somewhat protected by being in the hutch. He piled the things in the trunk of his Oldsmobile and then returned to the house.

  After meeting with the insurance agent, he spent the rest of the afternoon driving around Valle Rosa, assessing the fire damage. Despite its small population, Valle Rosa covered a great deal of land dissected by hills and canyons and avocado groves. Isolated neighborhoods sprang from the hillsides, some of the homes old and ramshackle, others new and imposing, all of them at risk. The fire showed no favoritism.

  At the relief center set up in the high school by the Red Cross, Chris visited some of the families who had lost their homes. Until last night, they’d been objects of his sympathy. Now, suddenly, these people were his fellow victims. Some of them were defeated and numb; others were angry, and they directed their anger at Chris for want of a better target. The woman who had lost three of her children had been hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, and he sat with her for half an hour while she stared past him. He wasn’t even certain she knew he was there, and it gave him time to think, time to feel his impotence, his helplessness over what was happening to Valle Rosa. He had never felt so alone. When Jeff Cabrio’s offer sifted back to him, it came in a new light.

  It was ridiculous, of course. If it were possible to alleviate the drought by making rain, someone would have done it long before now. But there was something about Jeff, something Chris couldn’t put his finger on. He trusted the stranger. It made no sense, yet the feeling was as strong and deep as anything he had ever felt before, and he knew he was going to ask Jeff Cabrio to help him shoulder the burden of Valle Rosa.

  3

  CHRIS SLEPT THAT NIGHT on borrowed linens in one of the small cottages at Carmen’s sprawling Sugarbush. It was long after sundown when he arrived, and the three cottages, including Mia’s, were dark. He was glad of the darkness, glad he couldn’t see Sugar
bush in its sunlit beauty, glad he couldn’t see Carmen’s spectacular, award-winning rose garden, or the way the manzanita trees clung to the edge of the canyon. But he could smell Sugarbush, and that was nearly as bad. The musky scent of the ornamental eucalyptus enveloped him as he watched Carmen unlock the door to the easternmost cottage. There was nearly half an acre between Mia’s dark cottage and his, and the remaining cottage stood between them. Behind the cottages, the canyon was a dark abyss.

  Carmen switched on the lamp in the living room. “What do you think of the new color?” she asked, dropping a pile of sheets and towels onto the sofa.

  Chris looked at the walls. She’d painted them a soft mauve shade, a color he had long associated with her. “Very nice,” he said. “Did you do all three in the same color?”

  “Mia’s is yellow, the middle one’s blue.”

  “How’s Mia working out as a tenant?”

  Carmen shrugged and sat down on the arm of the sofa. “I rarely see her,” she said. “She’s quiet. Comes home alone every night and locks herself in her cottage.”

  Carmen had been the one to suggest that Mia talk to him about a job. He’d hired Mia for many reasons, none of which made good business sense. He’d liked the idea that Mia would be living at Sugarbush, as if that would somehow keep him closer to Carmen. And there’d been something about Mia, some desperate quirk in her smile, the way she bit her lip after telling him she had absolutely no experience doing any of the things required of the position. Well, so what, he’d thought. He was green, she was green. A perfect match.

  Chris raised the window shade to look out at the canyon. He could see no lights other than the stars. “There’s someone I might hire,” he said, testing the words. “Someone to help out with the water problem. If I do, would you consider renting the third cottage to him?” He turned to see Carmen’s frown.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  He had invited Jeff Cabrio to meet the following day with Rick Smythe, one of the engineers working in Valle Rosa’s water conservation program. “A guy came to see me today. I’m going to meet with him again tomorrow and make a decision about hiring him.”

  “Hiring him to do what?”

  “Make it rain.”

  There was a moment’s silence before she laughed. “I hope you’re kidding.”

  He smiled. “Actually I’m not.”

  “Remember that movie with Burt Lancaster? The Rainmaker? You’d better rent it, Chris. You can borrow my VCR. The guy was a con-artist.”

  “I think this one’s for real.”

  Carmen gave him that look of disdain only she could achieve. “Chris. The media’s going to eat you alive.”

  “You included?”

  “Me first and foremost. I think you’ve lost your marbles.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I’ve lost everything else.” He was referring to his house, his possessions, but as soon as he spoke, he knew Carmen thought he was referring to her. She stood up and walked into the kitchen, where he could hear her opening and closing the cupboards.

  “I’d apologize for the mouse droppings,” she said, “but they’re everywhere, even in the adobe. The drought’s really driven the mice out of the canyon.”

  “I know.” He walked to the doorway of the kitchen. “I’ve had them, too.”

  “If this guy’s sane, he can rent the cottage,” she said. “Otherwise, spare me, all right?”

  “Fine.” He leaned against the door jamb. “By the way, I wanted to thank you for not interviewing me last night at the fire.”

  “I would have if you hadn’t disappeared.”

  “It was good to see you working again. It must have been hard though, with all that was going on.”

  She let out an exaggerated sigh. “Not you too,” she said. “The work’s a piece of cake, Chris, just as it always has been. But the way everyone’s treating me is pissing me off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like I’m the new kid on the block. I’ve got to jump through all their goddamned hoops all over again.”

  “I’m sorry, Carmen,” he said, as though he were to blame. In a way, he was. This close, he could see new lines across her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved blue silk blouse. Someone had told him she always wore long sleeves now, that the scars were too noticeable. Her hair was still thick and shimmering, but the trademark swath of gray had widened over the past few years. “You’re still very beautiful,” he said.

  She waved the compliment away. “The makeup guy spends about an hour on my face before I go on for my puny little North County Report. Thank God for the fires. At least this week I’ve gotten a little more air time.” Her face darkened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  Chris shrugged away the apology. “My Martin survived. And the photograph albums.”

  “Always were sentimental to a fault, weren’t you?” She closed a cupboard door and peered inside the oven.

  He suddenly remembered all the anniversaries they’d spent at the seedy bar where they’d first met. She would insist they go there and sit in the same booth, eat the same greasy burgers they’d eaten that night many years earlier. If anything, she had been more sentimental than he was. The hardness she was projecting tonight was an act. In the past, though, it had been an act for the rest of the world, not for him.

  She shut the oven door and leaned back against it.

  “They treat me as though I’m going to fall apart any minute at work,” she said. “I’m absolutely fine, and they tiptoe around me like I’m some pathetic little porcelain doll. Have you seen the woman who took over San Diego Sunrise? If I can call her a woman. I swear, she must be no older than nineteen.”

  He nodded. Of course he had. For a year or so after Carmen’s breakdown, Sunrise, the early morning show she had created and anchored, flew through a series of hosts, none of whom could begin to match Carmen’s combination of brains, brass and beauty. But then they hit on Terrell Gates and quickly knew they had a winner. Terrell’s style was much different than Carmen’s. Her scrubbed, girl-next-door looks made her sudden eruptions of bite and sass disarming to her guests and titillating to her audience.

  “Do you think she’s any good?” Carmen asked him.

  “She’s very young,” he answered carefully, “but I think she’s finding her niche.”

  He saw the sheen of tears in her eyes as she turned away from him, and he wished he had found another way to answer. He wanted to touch her. He hadn’t touched her in so long.

  She walked past him quickly, avoiding his eyes. “Mia didn’t want a phone,” she said, “but I suppose you will, so go ahead and arrange it.”

  He opened the door for her, and she stepped out onto the small wooden porch. “Carmen,” he said, “if you ever want to talk… You know, sometimes when you used to get upset at work, when you had to do something like interview that mother last night or whatever, and you’d come home and want to talk about it… “

  She cocked her head. “Look, Chris, I invited you to move in here because I felt sorry for you. I’d feel sorry for anyone who’d lost his home, okay? You need a place to live, and I’ve got a place you can have. That’s all there is to it. I am really sick of people treating me like I’m made of glass.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This is me, Carmen. You don’t have to try so hard to act tough with me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She stepped off the porch, and didn’t bother to face him when she spoke again. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need, all right?”

  He watched her walk across Sugarbush until she melted into the darkness. Behind him, the small, mouse-infested cottage waited. He was going from bad to worse, he thought, the continuing saga of his life the past five years.

  The double bed took up nearly every inch of space in the cottage’s one bedroom, and a soft breeze blew in thro
ugh the open window as he made the bed. He had nearly drifted off to sleep when the coyotes started their eerie howling. It sounded like a dozen or more of them, but he knew two or three could easily make that much noise. They sounded very near. He lay there, listening. He’d forgotten how close Sugarbush was to nowhere.

  After a sleepless hour, he got up to bring the photograph albums back to the bed. He looked through the first one, the one he and Carmen had started more than a decade ago, with pictures of their two weddings. The first wedding had been held in San Diego, with all the hoopla and media attention. Augie was there, his broad, beaming smile focused in every picture on his son and new daughter-in-law. Chris’s other relatives had flown in from Arizona, but Carmen’s family wasn’ticeably absent. The aunt and uncle who had raised her and the cousins she’d grown up with were no longer speaking to her by that time. Women were not supposed to flaunt themselves on television, they said, and she was so unfeminine on TV. So pushy. Cold. The qualities for which Carmen was rewarded professionally made her the object of disdain in her Latino family. He didn’t think she had ever quite recovered from the pain of their rejection.

  The two women Carmen had considered her closest friends appeared in many of the pictures. Chris had heard separately from each of them in the last year. Carmen wouldn’t see them, they complained. They wanted to help, wanted to do whatever they could to get her on her feet again, but she ignored their phone calls and their invitations. Their children missed her, they said. Indeed, Carmen had always had a special relationship with any child who crossed her path. Chris tried to explain to her old friends as best he could his interpretation of the problem: Carmen couldn’t bear to see them or their children. She couldn’t bear to be reminded of what she’d longed for and what had been taken from her.