Desperation Reef

He jumps the banister, drops six feet to the entryway pavers, lands heavy but balanced, like dropping in on a twelve-foot wave at Makaha. Runs to the burning kitchen side entrance, dials 911, drops the phone into his robe pocket — they use GPS to find the caller, don’t they? — yanks the extinguisher pin and triggers the white, pressured retardant into the fire.

Swings the device in a big circle, clockwise, trying to corral the swooshing, growing flames, and he hears another explosion to his right — on the north side of the building, then a fourth from the west, between Casey and the beach.

Still spraying, Casey turns reflexively when an engine revs high behind him on almost-empty Coast Highway. Sees a black Mercedes Sprinter van screeching away from the curb right out front of the Barrel, headed south on Coast Highway. It has some kind of decal or emblem on the side but he can’t make out what. A white oval with a dark something and hot orange writing on it.

He really wants to know where that damned thing is going in such a hurry while his restaurant burns, but he can’t abandon his post.

Turns back to the flames, circling them tighter and tighter, the foam converting them into rising tendrils of eye-burning smoke. The wind helps, blowing the retardant directly into the diminishing fire.

Which is finally out, but so is the home-sized, compact extinguisher.

A smoke alarm wails inside the restaurant.

Casey keys open the restaurant front-entrance door, knows the nearest fire extinguisher is behind the welcome/cash register desk, a curving mahogany beauty just steps away.

He dials 911 again and hangs on forever, letting the burglar alarm deactivation time run out. Finally:

“Fire at the Barrel in Laguna! Coast Highway! Fire at the Barrel!”

The burglar alarms join the smoke alarms in a harmonic chaos as Casey grabs the front-desk extinguisher.

He climbs the stairs four at a time to the second-story deck, jumps the banister, and scales the deck railing, almost drops the extinguisher but gathers it back like a nearly fumbled football and brakes just short of the flaming gap in the deck.

This extinguisher is twice the size of the first and its pink foam throttles the lapping flames, then shuts them down. The wind lashes at his back. Casey is not stoked by how big the burned-out hole is. Sirens now, and the station is barely half a mile away. But he fully can’t believe it when another explosion rips away, somewhere down near the front entrance.

This is like hell, he thinks.

When the deck fire is mostly out he unlocks the door to the restaurant proper, flies down the stairs, across the dining room, past his bar and into the lobby, which is swirling with flames. Through one of the big picture windows he sees the beautiful outside waiting-area benches made by John Seeman burning, too, and the palm trees in the planters, and the privacy fence, and the wave-shaped wooden pedestal on which stands the bronze statue of his father.

Where I just was, Casey thinks: Are they firebombing us?

In the lobby heat Casey plants his feet and fires away with the extinguisher. He can’t get too close because of the heat, and he can’t find a good target — it’s all burning — the walls and the fantastic Wyland whale paintings, and the awesome sculptures by Nick Hernandez, even the old barn hardwood floors.

Did they put, like, napalm in the bombs?

He snatches another extinguisher from the kitchen and lets go with it in the dining room, hoping to save the vintage surfboards and the hand-tooled chairs and tables from Taxco and the massively poetic Barbour and Severson photographs, but he can’t keep up with the fire’s advance and the second extinguisher coughs and dies and he can’t get back into the kitchen, which has really gone up, so by the time he returns from the utility closet by the restroom with another cylinder there’s hardly anything in the dining room that isn’t burning.

He’s light in the head and his hair and Muhammad Ali bathrobe are taking on tiny embers, and fudge if that doesn’t hurt.

He retreats past the restrooms to the rear emergency exit, shoulders through the door and into the Santa Anas howling in his face.

When he rounds the building, a Laguna Fire Department engine has already claimed the prime Coast Highway parking slots right out front, and the firefighters are arching water high over the sidewalk and the embankment and onto the Barrel. A fire truck, its red flank throbbing, settles longwise — half onto the curb and half off — and its search lights illuminate the throbbing, windblown water cascading through the dark sky, into the face of the restaurant and the third-floor apartment and its roof.

Casey just stands there for a moment, feels the heat of the Barrel’s wooden walls and the warm fury of the Santa Ana wind blasting down the canyon to the sea. Embers rise and fall through the smoky night. Brushes tiny sparks off his robe.

Help us, God.