Against Babylon

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Carmichael flew in from New Mexico that morning and the first thing they told him when he put his little plane down at Burbank was that fires were burning out of control all around the Los Angeles basin. He was needed bad, they told him. It was late October, the height of the brush-fire season in Southern California, and a hot hard dry wind was blowing out of the desert, and the last time it had rained was the fifth of April. He phoned the district supervisor right away and the district supervisor told him, “Get your ass out here on the line double fast, Mike.”

“Where do you want me?”

“The worst one’s just above Chatsworth. We’ve got planes loaded and ready to go out of Van Nuys Airport.”

“I need time to pee and to phone my wife,” Carmichael said. “I’ll be in Van Nuys in fifteen, okay?”

He was so tired that he could feel it in his teeth. It was nine in the morning and he’d been flying since half past four, and it had been rough all the way, getting pushed around by that same fierce wind out of the heart of the continent that was threatening now to fan the flames in L.A. At this moment all he wanted was home and shower and Cindy and bed. But Carmichael didn’t regard firefighting work as optional. This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big firestorm. There were times he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick choking glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways.

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