From the Fire Hills

Aerial

II 21 AERIAL Heavy with answers, planes banked toward the hillside, alive, on fire, while my sister—all wedding gown and shock—hovered over our pool, in my friend’s arms, on that threshold between his drunkenness and the anger of my mother, while the free world held its breath. He didn’t let go, though the ushers did toss the groom and both fathers, while the canyon offered its sparks. For the most part, California was like that: admixture of fear and celebration, like root canals, or my father thrown into our pool of meager wealth— he of the bad back. Ash everywhere but imperceptible. The grapefruit tree, pruned violently, displayed its wounds with an almost Eastern European sense of inevitability, while bearded men I knew before their beards danced with anyone but their wives. The fires isolated, my family threw everything into the day— months of training, a fantastic processional of rental chairs and dance floor, surrogate 22 flames of the chafing dish afloat on sterno—our backyard some low deck of the nearly tragic cruise ship, its fate avoided at the final minute, anyway, as the seaman waves, witness to the tip of something on the horizon, bleak and monogamous. Next day, my friend and I raked our memories of domestic terror: the saccharine Jordan almonds nestled in pygmy hairnets, wads of chalk-white napkins moldering like mice among the oleander, and those uncountable aluminum cans, spent shells on the last lawn I ever mowed or mourned or swept clean of wedding flak. In the distance, a plane spilled retardant, returning empty, I supposed, to its origin. It all seemed routine, the violence that ignited each summer in the San Gabriels, weddings attendant to such eruptions of sage and scrub oak, the bombardments, which reminds me: first we peppered a lonely raft with cans sticky and given to ants; then, being male and stupid, we jumped in—I amid the bright brand names, my friend under the diving board he negotiated with my sister the night before. While London could have burned for it all front page and large enough the print ran 23 black in the eternal rain of my childhood mostly spent in the dark shelter of the Republican Party and wildfire ash, in a suburb decadent enough to watch, with no intent to punish, two teen boys tread at opposite ends of a pool and take turns pelting one another with cans half-loaded with water, bombing with the imprecision of bombers, until the enemy surrenders, calls time-out with blood on the temple, or at least acknowledges by raising his hands that he gives, really gives, then hoists the white flag of my sister’s dress once, before placing her down, into the arms of the late twentieth century. ...