Salamander

 

I was tired of living in the flames.  Three times, we were evacuated with fire lapping at the edges of the neighborhood in the hills where we lived.  Once, we had to flee after midnight, when a sheriff’s deputy knocked loudly on the door as squad cars cruised the streets with bullhorns blasting out commands in the orange, flickering gloom.  Twice, we were ordered to leave during daylight hours:  at dawn with the air all a grey pall of smoke, and, on another occasion, mid-afternoon as high winds flopped fist-sized cinders across the highway.  On the last occasion, I was at work, and my wife had to leave with the dogs and navigate the curving switchbacks on the highway off the mountain without my help.  Both sides of the road were burning in places and my wife was so frightened that she required therapy for six weeks, a process that resulted in her leaving me.  In each case, the flames stopped just short of the house, either lost in the ravines where the coyotes howled at night, or driven uphill by the stiff winds and away from the bowl in the mountains where we lived.  But the experience was disconcerting and, each year, fire season lasted longer and was more intense: it was either global warming or mismanagement of the forests or the encroachment of urban sprawl on the wilderness or a combination of all of these things – but, whatever the cause, no one had any bright ideas how to ameliorate the fire risk and, so, I decided to sell the home in the mountains (probably necessary in any event due to the divorce) and move to the valley.

At first, I wasn’t happy with the home that I rented in the basin.  It was hot in the lowlands and the lots were landscaped with terraced gravel and cacti.  I missed the forests on the mountain and the wildlife, the deers and peregrine falcons and, even, the coyotes that sang in the twililght.   But I didn’t miss fire season with its sleepless nights and, almost continuous, warnings and alarms.  The house below the flank of the big, green mountain was comfortable and surprisingly cheap to rent.  Perhaps, the low lease payments had something to do with the neighborhood – there was a big Fulfillment Center, an Amazon warehouse, stretching ominously along the base of the foothills a couple miles away and, closer to the home, a factory with turrets and walls that made it look like a maximum security prison.  The Fulfillment Center and the factory worked around the clock and the boulevard near the cul-de-sac where I lived was busy at odd intervals, sometimes in the middle of the night or during the placid hours of the afternoon or mid-morning.  The realtor said that I should rent the property on a short lease – perhaps, six months and, thereafter, month-to-month; a contract for deed was said to be available if all went well.

The rental house was about forty-years old, built in a Spanish revival style, with Mexican tiles in the dining room and a heavy oak door, bisected by ornamental brass straps.  The most noteworthy amenity was a large swimming pool, four-lanes wide and almost eighty feet long, running along the home’s back facade.  The pool was enclosed by a weathered wooden fence built from 8 foot high slats for privacy.  Curiously, a sort of wooden pew, a bit like something you might find in an old church, was backed into the fence, about ten feet from the edge of the pool.  The bath-tub-shaped sides of the pool had once been painted bright turquoise but the sun passing through the water rippling there had bleached the color to a mild greenish blue.  Apparently, an earthquake had cracked the sides of the pool and there was a zigzagging white scar running from the tile deck to the bottom of the basin, grout used to repair the walls and keep the water impounded.  The swimming pool was deep, without a sloping bottom, eight feet of water from end to end.  Some bolt holes in the tiles showed that a diving board had once propelled swimmers into the pool but, probably for insurance reasons, it had been removed.  An Aztec calender made of some light metal cast to look like bronze was above the wet bar under an awning, mounted on the wall of the house overlooking the pool.  A mask at the center of the calender’s elaborate concentric rings showed dark eye-holes, skeletal cheeks, and a knife-shaped flint for a tongue protruding from flesh-less lips.  At each end of the pool, there was an oily-looking eucalyptus plant growing from a bed of pink gravel.  Roots from the eucalyptus trees were levering up the dark Mexican tiles of the terrace holding the pool and their trunks shed flakes of aromatic bark that cluttered the walkway.  

Once more, fire season was upon us.  My bedroom was on the second floor of the house, a little room above the cul-de-sac.  It was cool at first and rainy for almost a month and I slept with my bedroom windows open.  A couple of times, I thought I heard splashing in the pool behind the house, but the sound seemed remote and so I didn’t get out of bed to investigate.  Then, the rains stopped and the hillsides dried out, the little perennial streams flowing from the flanks of the mountain extinct in the arid weather, just dry gulches fanning out from the peak.  The valley became warm and I closed the windows to air condition the house.  The fans, buried in the bowels of the structure, were loud and I couldn’t hear much beyond the walls of the house.  The forests near the crest of the mountain were onfire.  I saw the summit glowing red like an erupting volcano.  Then, I was glad to no longer live on the heights.

One hot night, wind gusting in the gravel lawns and kicking up little vortices of dust, I heard something that woke me, and, then, went to the toilet.  My old Labrador retriever (my ex-wife had kept our dachshund) wasn’t exactly vigilant.  The dog was awake, fearfully sniffing the air, and not really barking – to maintain some self-respect as guard dog, the old animal was making a sort of discrete huffing noise.  One of the walls with an window to the rear of the house was painted blood-red and, when I looked to see the origin of the light, I saw fireworks in the backyard, a fountain of red sparks reflected in the pool where people were swimming.  

I collected my handgun from the bedside drawer, put on my pants and a flannel shirt that my ex-wife had sometimes worn as pajamas and went to investigate.  I kept the pistol on safety, tucked into my jeans.  

About a half-dozen people were sitting on the pew next to the long pool.  Another Roman candle was flaring next to one of the eucalyptus trees and I was afraid the bark shed from its trunk would ignite.  Two coolers with beer and hard seltzer sat next to the pool.  A man was earnestly swimming laps, kicking up water with each stroke.  Two young women, topless but wearing bikini bottoms were floating on either side of the lane used by the swimmer.  The men and women seated on the pew were drinking, whispering among one another, also wearing bathing suits with towels as capes or hitched around their hips.  Someone had been smoking marijuana – there was a strong skunk odor in the air.

The people on the pew eyed me curiously.  

“Good to see you, boss,” one of the men said.  He offered me a beer.

“Good to see you,” I said.

I held the cold beer can but did not open it.

“How did you get in?”  I asked.  

“We have keys to the gate on the fence,” the man said.  He waved a little carved piece of metal in the air.

I could see that the back door into the house was propped open.  That door led down to a landing (there was another set of stairs to the upper level) and, then, more steps down to the basement.  Another man pushed open the back door emerging from the lower level of what I thought was my house.  He was wearing an immodest Speedo and had a heap of towels in his hands.

“Didn’t they tell you, boss-man?” the man with the keys asked.

“No one told me,” I said.

“Well, boss, this is kind of the neighborhood swimming hole,” he said.  “The owners have made it a custom to keep the place open for us.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

Overhead, the mountain was glowing red above the gouged-out side where there was a small ski resort.  The fires high on the mountain caused the night sky and the clouds of soot in the air to glow with a livid red glare.  

“We’re all shift workers at the factory or the Fulfillment Center,” the man said.  “In warm weather, we like to come here for a dip when our shifts are done.”

I nodded my head as if this explained things.

One of the topless girls dragged herself up the poolside aluminum ladder and out of the water.  She stood dripping on the dark Mexican tiles.  I saw a droplet clinging to her left nipple, trembling a little in the breeze and, then, falling from her skin onto the tiles.  

“Someone should have told you,” the girl said.  “But, in nice weather, we come here a lot.  It’s always been okay with the owner.”

“I see,” I said.

“Why don’t you join us?” the girl in the dark bikini bottom said.  “The water is very nice.”

I shook my head.

“We don’t care if you skinny-dip,” the girl said.  “After all it’s your pool.”

“Yes, it’s your pool, boss-man,” the young man added.

“We can all skinny dip,” the girl said.  

I shook my head again and said that I was tired and would go back to bed.

“It’s okay, boss,” the young man said.  “See you soon.”

Someone lit another Roman Candle that hissed, a jet of red and dark blue sparks flaring in the darkness.  I saw the year and day marks on the Aztec calender moving as if animated.  The monster with the flint blade for a tongue seemed to wink at me.  

I went inside but couldn’t sleep.  After tossing and turning for an hour, I went back to the toilet and looked down at the pool from my back window.  It was dark outside, except for the faint red light from the fire on the mountain top.  The pool was empty and there was no sign of the people who had gathered there.

In the bright light of morning, I thought that I had dreamed.  I went through the sliding glass doors onto the tiles next to the pool.  The water was limpid, a bluish plane reflecting the back facade of the house and the grey plume of smoke overhead.  The pew was dry and there were no burn marks in the eucalyptus bark below the trees.  

But when I went downstairs, I almost slipped in several pools of water by the bathroom on the lower floor of the split-level.  The puddles seemed to have been tracked into the house and there were several towels drying on a nylon line pulled across the downstairs rec room.  I hadn’t noticed the nylon clothesline before, nor had I taken any note of the big armoire shoved into the corner of the room.  When I opened the cupboard doors, I found that it was full of neatly folded towels.