been listening to my conversation with Sampson.
“You might be getting wet,” he said. “I called your location in to the chopper, and we’ll see if we can clear a path out for you. In the meantime, you’ve got to protect yourselves.”
I was amazed at how calm he sounded. If I’d been worried about him I doubt I could have kept the fear from my voice. “What should we do?” I asked.
Kitty, Jimmy, Akoni and Saunders clustered around me, listening to Mike. “Is there any water around you?” he asked.
I looked at the map. “Nope. Just trees and rocks.”
“How about a clear, open area?”
Akoni said, “There’s a clearing just behind us, off to the right.”
Mike’s voice crackled over the radio. “You need to get as much space between you and anything that can burn as you can. Get to the middle of the clearing, and try to dig some ditches you can lie in. If you get below the level of the fire, it may blow right past you.”
He didn’t have to say what would happen if we didn’t protect ourselves. “Roger that,” I said.
Akoni led us a few feet back up the trail and through a stand of guava trees, the nearly ripe fruit smashing around us. In some parts of the park, they were considered a pest, because they grew so fast; my dad had spent years beating them back from the edge of our yard. But they’d give us some quick kindling to help redirect the fire.
The clearing wasn’t that big, only about ten yards in any direction. As soon as we reached it, Saunders headed to the center and started digging. Kitty limped to him, leaning on Jimmy, and they joined him on the ground, using rocks to create ditches.
Akoni and I started tearing off guava limbs and building a fire break. We hoped that by giving the flames enough to feed on, the fire would circle around us instead of jumping overhead. Like leaving a trail of bread crumbs, or giving Pele, the goddess of fire, enough to sate her hunger that she wouldn’t want to feast on us.
The noise grew louder and louder. Trees falling around us, a roar of fire catching on dry underbrush, the sound of Air-2 or the DNR chopper somewhere nearby. I couldn’t hear anything over the radio, and I knew we were on our own. Akoni and I had just finished our fire break when we saw Saunders frantically signaling to us, and I realized he’d finished shallow trenches for Akoni and me and we had to get into position.
My trough was next to Jimmy’s, and I lay down next to him. He was shivering with fear, and I reached my arm over his shoulders. He started talking again as soon as my ear was near him. “We pulled up in the driveway of this house,” Jimmy said. “He told me to stay in the truck. He came back a little while later, with this big leather bag and a couple of rifles. I was so scared. I was sure he was going to kill me.”
I heard a boom and a crackle behind us, and knew that the fire had to be close. I squeezed Jimmy’s shoulder, and he continued his story.
“He drove us up to the park, and he put duct tape on my mouth and made me get in the back of the truck, and covered me up with this thing.”
Suddenly, the fire was all around us. I’d thought that the flames at the Marriage Project headquarters were bad, but this was a thousand times worse. The noise was overwhelming, and at any moment I was afraid that a tongue of fire would land on one of us.
I had been in bad situations before, but I’d always felt there was something I could do. Talk down a guy holding a gun, use my weapon, run away. But I felt so helpless there on the ground, knowing there was nothing more I could do to protect myself or the people around me.
Thankfully, Pele was watching out for us, and she guided the flames along the firebreak Akoni and I had constructed. As quickly as the fire descended on us, it passed us by. I just lay there in my trough for a minute, my whole body shaking, waiting for my heart rate to slow down.
Almost as soon as the flames passed us, Air-2 passed overhead. The Bambi bucket dropped water on the path below, and the cool breeze swept over us. We all sat up, evaluating our condition. “My skin feels hot,” Kitty said.
“Mine, too,” Jimmy said.
“Anybody burned?” I asked. We all looked at each other. Akoni and Saunders, the biggest of us, hadn’t been low enough into the ground, and both their backs had been swept by the flames. Their burns looked superficial, though, just some reddened skin on the parts of their lower arms that hadn’t been covered by their shirts.
“I think it’s time we get out of here,” I said. It only took us a few minutes to descend the path to the park entrance, though we had to be careful of the slippery trail and any smoking embers still around.
Sampson saw Kitty coming and ran up the trail toward us, running surprisingly fast for such a big man. “Don’t you ever do that to me again,” he said, grabbing her in his arms.
I turned aside to give them a chance to share their tears in private, and was surprised to see my parents, Aunt Mei-Mei and Genevieve Pang standing below. My father looked pale and tired, leaning against a black and white police car, my mother standing next to him. Both their faces were wreathed in smiles when they saw me.
I hurried over to them, and hugged them both. Jimmy followed shyly, though Aunt Mei-Mei enveloped him in a big hug, getting smoke smudged on her face and her white blouse.
“We need a quick debriefing, and then you can take Jimmy home,” I said to Aunt Mei-Mei. As he and I walked over to Sampson and Kitty, I tried to raise Mike on the radio, to let him know that we were safe, but I couldn’t get him. I told both my brothers to get their teams down to the park entrance, that the fire was too strong and we had to let the fire fighters take over.
“I thought you said there were kids up there,” Haoa said.
“There are,” I said. “But we don’t know where any of them were when the fire swept through. It’s too dangerous, Haoa. Mom and Dad are here. You both need to get down.”
Saunders couldn’t stop coughing, so he went over to the paramedics for treatment. Akoni and I sat at a park bench with Sampson and Kitty, and I relayed most of what Jimmy had told me, ending with him wrapped in a tarpaulin in the back of Jeff White’s pickup.
“This is where I come in,” Kitty said.
I saw her squeeze Jimmy’s hand again.
“I went over to the Hardings’ this morning for the picnic, and Fran and Eli said that we were going to meet the Whites, too. So we all drove over to their house, and I left my car in the Whites’ driveway.”
“I saw that,” Sampson said. I could see he was struggling to keep a lid on his temper.
“Everything was going okay,” Kitty said. “Fran and Eli went in the cabin to get the food together, and I took Caitlin and Cole for a walk in the woods.”
“Where were the Whites?” I asked.
“I drove up in Sheila’s car with her, following the Hardings. Jeff went off to get some beer. When we got up to the cabin, Sheila started unloading stuff. While I was gone with the kids, Jeff came up in his truck, and I saw him go off into the woods with her.”
She looked pleadingly at her dad. “Everything was going fine. It was just going to be a picnic.”
“I’m just glad you’re safe,” he said. “But if you ever scare me this way again I’ll kill you myself.”
I had a feeling my boss might be capable of just such a thing. There was a wildness in him, lying below the surface, the kind of temperament that let him romp around naked in the mud at a rock concert. I’ll bet he had worked hard to civilize those impulses.
“I was walking past Jeff’s truck when I heard this thumping. I steered the kids over there, and I saw this big bundle under a tarp. I could see a piece of Jimmy’s hair at the top, and as I was looking his foot snaked out from under the tarp, too, and banged on the side of the rail three times.”
Kitty looked more sure of herself then, and in that moment I knew that she’d be a damned good police officer some day. “I sent the kids up to the cabin, and once they were out of sight I reached over and pulled back the tarp. That’s when I saw Jimmy. His hands and feet were bound with rope and there was a piece of duct tape over his mouth. He looked scared as hell.”
“My hero,” Jimmy said.
“I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew something had to be wrong. I peeled the duct tape off his mouth, and he told me that Jeff was the guy in the picture.”
She looked over at her dad. “Sometimes it takes me a while to listen to you, but everything you’ve been
