The firefighters pushed us back behind sawhorses, then muscled a big tank off the load-gate of one of their trucks and maneuvered it into place, so I could see the CLASS D FIRE EXTINGUISHER stencil on its side. A couple of firefighters in armored PPE, complete with oxygen, set up by the tank and propped a couple of heavy metal shields between them and the fire. They weren’t screwing around. They sprayed the fire with a cloud of smoky foam that hissed and sputtered as it hit. A few minutes later, the cross was extinguished.
I stared at the afterimages in the sudden dark, wondering belatedly if I’d burned my retinas by looking into the magnesium light and feeling stupid. As the hissing of the dying flames faded, silence descended. I heard irregular, hiccupping breathing and turned around to see a Black guy about my age crying, his face contorted in total anguish, tears coursing down his cheeks.
His face was so distorted by his pain that I didn’t even recognize him, and then I did. “Dave?”
He looked up at me and snuffled up his snot and armed the tears off his cheeks. “Hi, Brooks,” he croaked. I patted my pockets and came up with the hanky I’ve carried since my mom drilled into me that you should always have a face covering handy in case someone decided to gas you. I handed it to him, and he thanked me and wiped his face and blew his nose. On impulse, I gave him a hug, and after stiffening for a moment, he gave me a fierce hug back.
“Are you okay?” I said. He smelled of hash oil and laundry soap.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I guess I’m fine.” And then he started crying. I squeezed him harder. Wilmar and Milena came over and caught my eye and I mouthed, It’s okay, though obviously I had no idea if it was. They gave us space.
Eventually I got Dave to sit on the City Hall steps. I put my arm around his shoulders and listened as his ragged breathing smoothed out.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said, “but if you want to, I’m here.”
He snuffled some more. “To be honest, I don’t really know. I just took one look at that thing and it was like someone had, you know, like they’d punched me in the gut.” He looked thoughtful. “No, I take it back, it’s like they punched me in the heart.” He wiped his eyes and blew his nose again. He was looking more like himself. “Shit, what the hell was that about?”
“Uh, Dave?” I said.
“What?”
“I mean, it was a burning cross, and you’re…”
“Yeah, okay, that. I mean, obviously I’d heard about that from my grandparents and I guess my parents, but those were just stories for me. Like, yeah, plenty of racism to go around still, but the Klan? Shit, that’s like being worried about ogres or something. It’s not 1955. I guess that stuff runs deep.”
“I think you’re right. I don’t want to pretend I can know what this feels like for you, but when I saw that burning cross, it was … powerful. Not in a good way. I guess that’s why they do it, right? Because it brings all this up.”
“Well yeah.” He stood and dusted his hands off. “I’ll wash this and give it back,” he said, gesturing with my balled-up kerchief.
“Don’t worry, I got plenty more. Are you gonna be okay to get home?”
“I’m crashing at Armen’s. That’s how I got here so fast.” Armen lived in a condo around the corner from City Hall with his mom, but used his dad’s address, near my place, to get a place at Burroughs High.
“You sure? I can get you that far, easy.”
He shook his head and stood. He smiled a sad smile. “It’s okay, Brooks. I got this. Thank you, though. I’ll wash your hanky and get it back to you.”
“No, keep it.”
“Oh, right, you said.” He turned to go, then looked back over his shoulder. “Thank you, Brooks.”
“Stay safe, Dave.” I watched him go, watched him give a wide berth to the charred remains of the cross. Most of the crowd had gone, but Milena and Wilmar had waited for me and they wheeled their bikes over. Wilmar had my bike, too.
“Oh, hey, I forgot about that,” I said. It had been on its stand when I noticed Dave and I’d wandered away from it.
“No problem. Is he gonna be okay?” Wilmar jutted his cleft chin in Dave’s direction.
“I guess so,” I said.
We all looked at Dave’s retreating back, then at the smoldering cross.
“Shit,” Milena said. “Well, that happened. What time is it?”
Wilmar rubbed at his sleeve where he had a screen. “It’s two a.m. Glad I don’t have work tomorrow.”
“I was gonna go do some Jobs Guarantee gigs,” I said, “but maybe I’ll just cancel it and work on the house.” Milena and Wilmar were both totally down for me to get rid of the house so the city could build high-rises, even though it meant they’d lose their sweet lodgings. I was secretly a little insulted that they weren’t sadder about losing me as a roommate—it played into my even more secret fear that they were only friends with me because I had lucked into inheriting a house they could live in cheap.
“Well, I have work tomorrow,” Milena said. “We’re solarizing Stevenson Elementary, all new panels, and new storage batteries.”
“You’re doing the lord’s work, Milena,” Wilmar said with a grin. “But I want pie. Brooks, you wanna go to Chili John’s?”
So we ate turkey chili on soft rolls and topped it off with lemon chiffon pie and admired the mural of the original Chili John’s favorite hiking spot and debated whether it was in the Sierras somewhere or back in Wisconsin, where the first Chili John’s had opened in 1913.
Riding home, stomach full of hot chili and lemon pie, I remembered how I’d worried that Wilmar and Milena didn’t really like me, and thought of how foolish that was. Burbank was my town, and these were my people, and we were here for each other.
* * *
I woke up the next day knowing that I had to get rid of the guns. And maybe the gold, too. I couldn’t afford to keep that shit around the house, not with cross-burning crazies out there. I wasn’t gonna go to the cops, either. Gramps had a couple of friends who were BPD and a couple who’d been LAPD, and everyone knew there were connections between the cops and the Maga Clubs. Plus I didn’t think I could keep a straight face while explaining that I’d only just stumbled on Gramps’s secret compartment.
And I knew exactly where they’d be safe.
I had to watch some videos to figure out how to take them apart, but once I did, they fit well enough in my biggest backpack, along with a roll of heavy plastic and some contractor bags. Our cleaning closet was full of heavy-duty, immortal plastic that Gramps had stockpiled when they started phasing it out.
I thought about covering the guns in oil before caching them, like I’d read about in a novel, but decided that was overkill. I was hiding them in the hills of Burbank, not the jungles of Burma. Besides, the bag was already heavy enough to strain the shoulder straps.
The cache box looked weirdly empty once I had its contents loaded up, a sad, cracked concrete cavity that Gramps had stored his most precious belongings in. I looked around the room for something to put in it but nothing seemed right. Then I looked at the folded pile of old clothes on top of the dresser, stuff that no longer fit or had worn out, but that I was keeping for some sentimental reason, and, right on the top, my baby blanket. It was the only thing I had left of my parents, the only thing that came with me when I was evacuated from Canada and sent to my grandfather, my last precious remnant of the dream my parents had chased. I picked it up and smelled it, as I always did, but it no longer smelled of my parents, nor of the scary journey I’d had after leaving them. It had been washed since then. Still, putting my face into its soft, fuzzy, broken fibers triggered a strong memory of what those smells had been long, long ago. I smoothed it out and put it in Gramps’s cache, fitting the lid overtop of it. My most precious belonging, in Gramp’s most secure cache. It worked.
Once I had the bag on my back and my butt on my bike, I started pedaling toward the site of the flood. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was overcast and hazy and I immediately began to drip with sweat. By the time I started to climb the hill, shifting down to the tiniest cog on both my front and back wheels, I felt like my back was so slippery that my entire shirt might come off and take the backpack with it. I had filled a water bottle before leaving and by the time I was halfway up the hill I’d already drained it dry and was feeling light-headed. It used to be newsworthy when Burbank cracked 15 percent humidity, but today it was close to 75 percent and it was the third day of the month to hit that mark.
The flood site was still taped off, the sandbag walls drooping as some of the water evaporated out of them. I set my bike down behind a section of wall and looked around and made sure I was alone. I was definitely alone, except for about ten million mosquitoes. My normal backpack had lots of kinds of bug dope, but not my big pack, which I always emptied and cleaned after camping trips. I slapped at my arms and blinked salty sweat out of my eyes and tried not to dwell on what an idiot I could be.
It took me a while to find the old septic tank, because there were multiple fence lines that had been sliced away and multiple slumped-over sandbag walls along the ridge. After a sweaty half hour, I found it. It still had a stagnant puddle at the bottom and when I bent over to peer into it, a cloud of mosquitoes lifted off from the water, and I ate at least a dozen of them. I tried to console myself with the thought that anything I hid in this thing would be safe because only an idiot like me would go poking around in it.
Breathing through my nose, blinking away more sweat, I wrapped the guns and the gold in multiple windings of heavy plastic, then wrestled the bundles into double thicknesses of contractor bags and nestled them in the bottom of the cistern. I covered them with a few layers of partially dehydrated sandbags, then scrounged for big rocks to fill most of the rest of the cistern, topping it off with another layer of sandbags.
As I stood to examine my work, I felt light-headed and then I stumbled a little and found myself sitting in the grass. I tried to remember what the symptoms of heatstroke were and couldn’t and wondered if that was a symptom of heatstroke.
Whatever. I knew for sure that if I did have heatstroke, I should get out of the sun and get some cool water as soon as possible. I got shakily to my feet and straddled my bike. I sipped the last slug of water from the bottom of the bottle, clipped it to the crossbar, and started downhill, riding the brakes.
At least it’s downhill, I thought, and distracted myself by trying to remember which corner store was closest, and which path I could take to reach it quickest, and which cold drink I would buy out of the cooler when I got there. I had nearly settled on a Burbank Kombucha Co. black licorice flavor (slogan “Better than you’d think!”) when I realized I was about to crash into a group of people.
I’d been sticking to the lanes and alleys that ran behind the houses, autopiloting around the odd forgotten street-hockey net or overfilled drain or bold house cat, but I had somehow not noticed these three people until it was too late. I slammed my brakes, leaned over and dropped a foot to scrape the ground and turned my handlebars hard and managed not to crash into anything except the ground, which I hit pretty hard, leg trapped between the bike and the cracked concrete, head bouncing off the hard ground an instant later.
Someone lifted the bike off me, and then I was in shade from the three people leaning over me, staring up at their faces, all concerned expressions.
“Stay there, buddy,” one of them said. Someone held up fingers.
“How many?”
My vision swam a little, then resolved. “Three,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Open your eyes, let me look at your pupils?” I did, and then submitted to gentle hands that probed me from feet to head, making sure I hadn’t broken anything. “Okay, bud, I think you’re fine, but if you want, we can get an ambulance, put you on a spine board?”
“Uh,” I said. I struggled up onto my elbows, which was a stupendously bad idea, but I didn’t think that I’d fallen that hard. “I’m okay. Sorry, it was my bad. Have you got anything cold to drink?”
They helped me into a sitting position and one of them gave me a hose from her CamelBak. The water was flat and warm but I needed it. I made myself drink slowly. “I’m really sorry,” I said again, once I’d had a couple of good-sized swallows. “That was totally my fault. I went out without enough water and got a little sun-blasted.”
“No biggie,” the one who’d been talking said. “Your bike’s fine, you’re okay, and we’re okay. I’m Ana Lucía, and these are Jorge and Esai.” She offered me her elbow and I dabbed it with mine, then got the other two.
I finally took them in: hard-wearing road clothes, worn hard; ripstop stuff gone the color of dry soil, big packs patched with tape and road-stitching. Deep tans, shaggy hair, dirty fingernails.
“Are you guys the refugees?” I blurted.
They looked at each other. “We’re refugees,” Ana Lucía said. “I don’t know if we’re the refugees.”
“I mean, are you from the Tehachapi caravan? The one coming to Burbank? I mean, obviously you’re in Burbank, but are you—”
“That’s us,” Ana Lucía said. I realized belatedly how wary all three were looking.
“No way!” I said. “Damn, look, sorry, I didn’t mean to weird you out. I’m so glad to meet you.” I flung my arms out. “Welcome to Burbank! Seriously!”
They were definitely trying to figure out if I was yanking their chains.
“Seriously,” I said. “My friends and I can’t wait for you all to get here! We love Burbank and want to show you what a great place it is.”
Ana Lucía quirked her head to one side. She was older than me, mid-twenties, with the same vibe as Kiara, that leader/organizer vibe, though of course they didn’t look like each other (Ana Lucía is Latina and Kiara is Black), but the expression Ana Lucía was wearing was one I’d definitely seen on Kiara’s face. “Listen, uh—”
“Brooks,” I said. “Brooks Palazzo.” I held out my hand for a shake, which was not usual for me, and she snorted and unclipped some hand san from a D ring on her back and rubbed it into her palm before shaking. Her hand was strong and callused and cold and slimy with the sanitizer.
“Ana Lucía Alarcon,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Palazzo.”
A raindrop, fat and hot, landed on my eye and made me blink. More landed on Ana Lucía and her two friends. Thunder rumbled in the hills.
“Shit,” Ana Lucía said, and shucked her pack, pulling a poncho out of a side pocket. Her friends did the same. “Shit,” she said again, as the rain began to pound us. I found it a relief, but I was worried that I’d made a bad impression.
“Are you guys in a hurry? My place is like thirty minutes’ walk from here—downhill!—and I haven’t had lunch yet.”
They exchanged looks. The rain battered our heads.
“That’s nice of you,” Ana Lucía said. “Thank you.”
* * *
Ana Lucía insisted that she and her friends would cook while I had a shower and found a change of clothes. I insisted that she use my food, not the provisions in her pack, because I was hosting, and we made an agreement.
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at my kitchen table and we were all drinking cold brew and eating absolutely perfect grilled cheese sandwiches.
“How did you get them to go this color?” The sourdough was golden brown, like a menu illustration, and crispy.
“You like it?” Esai said. He was missing a tooth on top, and it made him look like a grinning, friendly pirate.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said, trying not to spray crumbs. “It’s amazing!”
“My mom’s secret,” Esai said.
“Oh,” I said. “If it’s a secret—”
“He’ll tell you,” Ana Lucía said. “It’s not that kind of secret. Right, Esai?”
“Guess first,” he said.
I laughed and did spray crumbs and they laughed too. I swallowed and had some cold brew. “You toast it first?”
“Nope.”
“Extra butter.”
“No.”
“Uh…” I looked around the kitchen, which I should have done in the first place. I spotted the jar on the counter. “Mayonnaise?”
All three laughed. “Yes, mayo! Instead of butter. Makes everything go golden and crackly,” Esai said. He crunched into a sandwich. I crunched into mine.
“These are amazing,” I said. “You see, that’s what I love about all this—” I gestured at them, at me, at their packs. “Cultural exchange!”
They laughed, but this time it was a little forced.
Ana Lucía wiped her mouth with a rectangle of paper towel. “You know that not everyone here feels that way.” She flipped open her screen and tapped at it. “Like these guys.”
She passed me the screen and I scrolled. It was bad. Really bad. Death threats. Doxings. Screengrabs from other devices, showing how many different people had gotten the threats. Rape threats. Rape threats against kids. Death threats against kids. Signed with names like “Burbank Patriot” or strings of Punisher and U.S. flag emojis. I scrolled and scrolled but I didn’t get to the end.
“This has got to be bots,” I said. “Or a psycho who stays up all night posting from ten different accounts. There’re only a hundred and fifty thousand people in Burbank! And most of them aren’t Nazis!”
“Some of them are, though,” Ana Lucía said, tapping the screen, landing on a block of text about race-mixing and demographic replacement.
“Some of them are,” I said. “God, I hate Nazis.”
Esai snorted. “You’re a trip, dude.”
I laughed. “Sorry. Everyone hates Nazis, but I’m just so sick of these guys.”
“They’ll die off soon,” Jorge said. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, it was with real thoughtful gravity.
“Will they?” Ana Lucía said. “Or will they make more?”
* * *
I broke out beers next and we sat in the backyard. I learned that they were the advance scouts for their group, coming ahead to figure out how serious all the doxings were. I asked where they planned to sleep and they said they’d marked out a woody spot in Angeles Forest that they had planned to hike back to and pitch a tent in and so I texted Wilmar and Milena to make sure they were cool and then I invited Ana Lucía and her friends to pitch their tents in my backyard.
Milena and Wilmar came back as we were grilling tofu and squeaky cheese and sweet potatoes and Milena got her guitar and Jorge brought out a harmonica and it turned out Ana Lucía could really sing.
“That was beautiful,” I said, after a singalong whose chorus went “Y te vas, y te vas, y te vas,” and we roared along with it.
“José Alfredo Jiménez,” Ana Lucía said. “My great-aunt married a Mexican and they used to play him all the time. The lyrics are terrible, but it’s so fun to sing.” She swigged beer. “I wish we could just keep going, all the way to Mexico.”
“Border’s tighter than a frog’s ass,” Wilmar said, and burped.
“Especially for Salvadorans,” Ana Lucía agreed. “We’re the boogeymen they scare their kids with when they won’t eat their dinners, especially after the Russians got to them.” I filed that away. So many people believed so many things about the Russians, and I’d learned the hard way not to engage on the topic unless I wanted to dive way, way down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole.
“Maybe so,” Milena said, “but I hear they’re done letting white people in, too. After all the health-care refus, they lost their appetite for ’em.”
“Couldn’t speak the language,” Esai said, and we all laughed.
“All right, it’s true,” I said. I switched to Spanish: “My Armenian friends speak better Spanish than I do.” We laughed some more.
We helped them pitch their tents and loaded their laundry into the washing machine before bed. Afterward, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water before bed and ran into Milena, who was carrying her own water glass back to her room.
“Those folks are great,” Milena said.
“Right?”
“I’m so glad you brought ’em here. Can’t wait for the rest to arrive, either. It’ll be the kick in the ass that this town’s needed for decades.”
I thought of Gramps’s buddies. “You can say that again.”
Wilmar joined us in a tee and sweats, a little toothpaste at the corner of his mouth. “We’re gonna have to get a lot more Airbnb rooms, though. Last I heard we were short by like fifty beds.”
I looked from one to the other. “You guys, feel free to say no to this, but I was thinking, we’ve got that big front yard and the huge backyard and we hardly ever use it, and all of Ana’s people are traveling with tents already … We could get a couple porta-potties and set up a field kitchen and—”
“I. Love. That,” Milena said.
Wilmar laughed. “I’m gonna rotate back to the factory soon, so I don’t guess I should get a vote, but for whatever it’s worth, I vote yes, too. Plus, someone can have my room when I go back to Mojave.”
I clapped and did a little dance. I couldn’t wait for breakfast and the chance to tell Ana Lucía and Esai and Jorge.