BASS 2021: Yxta Maya Murray, “Paradise” from The Southern Review #56.3

The 2017-18 California wildfire season caused more than $45 billion in damage and killed approximately 150 people. Paradise suffered one of the most violent of these conflagrations in 2018, when its citizens saw 85% of their town consumed. Five months later, President Donald Trump refused to sign a bill that would provide relief for these victims, as well as for those of the recent hurricane and flooding disasters. His reason? Puerto Rico would get too much money. “I don’t want another single dollar going to that island,” he said. That summer found me at Ucross, in Wyoming, watching videos of the hell-red passage that Paradise residents drove through while escaping certain death. It occurred to me that white supremacy is the worst strategy western civilization ever concocted. It does not even help its constituents. Fernanda, Wesley, and Jesse showed up in the midst of these musings, on a bad afternoon that found me fearful and perplexed in equal measure.

Yxta Maya Murray, Contributor Note

Back in 2018, I watched the Camp Fire in northern California from the safety of my New England living room, and still felt horrified by the images of fire consuming everything, leaving behind rubble and burned out hulks where stores, homes, and cars had been. Yet reading about it here was worse. Murray has a way with description:

At both sides of the road, the landscape turned into what looked I swear to holy Jesus like molten lava. Black-brown clouds streamed down through a bloody sky and onto a swell of hills that had fried deep black and were streaked through with flame. It was getting furnace hot in the car. It was close, like you couldn’t inhale right.

The story itself is a model of simplicity: a woman, her young child, and her father-in-law try to escape the fire.  Wes is a white racist son of a bitch who doesn’t want to leave his home behind, one of those “I’ll ride it out” types you see interviewed after they’re rescued from hurricane flooding. But a storm, while it’s scary, isn’t the same as a fire; we’ve all been through storms, even bad storms, and there’s reason to believe they can be survived. You see a wall of fire coming at you, and you change your mind right quick, though still perhaps too late.

Fernanda, some mixture of Pomo and Latina, is determined to get the hell out of Paradise along with her daughter, Jesse. She was married to Wes’ son, Mike, until he died of a heart attack a few years back. Wes never looked kindly on the marriage – “on our wedding day he sat in the front pew just shaking his head” – but he did have a fondness for his granddaughter, so he invited them to live with him after Mike died. Well, “invited” might be an exaggeration. He sent her an email that she could move into the back room, then told her to keep out of his basement, a room full of treasures – including a bronze statue of Custer – or else.

The conflict of the story keeps shifting. First it’s Wes and Fernanda, who go back well before she even knew Mike, to when she was a waitress at the café where Wes liked his steak well-done. On the morning of the story, it shifts to getting Wes to leave, since Fernanda is pretty sure they stand a better chance of getting out if they take his SUV rather than her little car. And eventually it shifts to the two of them trying to escape as the fires of hell burn around them.

Murray’s description, so effective in bringing us into the fire, seems a bit odd in other places, like the opening paragraph:

“I think we should go, Dad,” I said, shielding my eyes from the wind. The sheriff had tweeted an evacuation order for Pulga twenty minutes before. It was quarter to eight in the morning and the sky didn’t look right. Ten minutes ago it had turned from bright blue to a thick, pale orangy gray.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Wesley, my father-in-law. He looked eastward with his face crinkling up. He was a big bull of a man, about five-eleven. He was white and bald and wore glasses. He had a chipped front tooth and his son’s blue eyes. He wore a Cowboys T-shirt and blue nylon shorts and black flip-flops. Eighty years old.
“That sky, though,” I said. I’m five-two with a big ass and strong arms. I’m forty-four. My black hair frizzed all around my head. I wore black nylon shorts and a pink nylon top and no shoes.

I’m not sure what all this description adds at this moment. I’m also puzzled that five-eleven is seen as a “big bull of a man.” Even with a heap of solid muscle weight, that doesn’t seem that big to me, and I’m five-two as well. I wonder if the point is, to a brown woman, a five-eleven white racist looks a lot bigger. I’m also confused about the blue eyes, since later Mike’s eyes are specifically described as green, and daughter Jesse inherits them, giving Fernanda genetic reason to assume some white heritage. Is this to contrast brown eyes with not-brown? Is it an editing glitch? I doubt it, given the level of publications we’re dealing with, but it’s not impossible.

I had to laugh at the swipe Wes takes at 45, while maintaining his bigotry:

“I’m never going to make back what I lose,” Wes said. “I’m too old.”
“Insurance will cover you and then Trump will make you a rich man with one of those disaster packages,” I rattled on. The sky was really starting to darken, and I could see a thick haze of smoke coming in fast on a current.
Nancy moved onto Pearson. I inched the Yukon to the stoplight. I turned on my turn signal like she had because we all had to become robots.
“That asshole will leave us stranded,” Wes said. “He’ll piss on some more hookers and burn it all on golf.”
I started laughing. Tears were streaming down my face. “You liked him, I thought.”
“Only on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans,” Wes said.
“Right.” I laughed some more.
“Not you,” Wes said.
“I don’t care, it’s okay,” I said. “because if we get out of this alive I’m going to punch you till you sneeze teeth, you old son of a bitch.”
“Okay,” Wes said.

I’m not sure I’d be able to laugh if I were Fernanda. But she’s weighed the cost of moving into a house with a Custer statue already, taken the insult of being warned not to steal, for pete’s sake: “I knew I had to eat the grits he gave me.” She’d compromise just about everything for the sake of her daughter, who Wes really does dote on. (By the way, the funds for California and Puerto Rico were finally released, after much dramatic threatening about using them to build The Wall.)

I’m not even sure how much time passes on the road out of town, as the fire burns around them. I envision Wes imagining himself being thrown into Hell for his sins; the metaphor is there, regardless of how the character sees it. And, as someone fearing eternal damnation, he starts begging for mercy, for atonement, for grace, for forgiveness:

“Tell me you forgive me,” he wept.
I watched the hellfire sweep across the trees to our right and kept my foot steady on the gas.
“Tell me,” he said.
“I forgive you, you Custer-loving bastard,” I lied.
…The red underworld rose up to heaven, exploded in the pines, and whirled above us like naked stars. The pale spot of clear sky continued glimmering ahead, though, and I aimed for it, without praying, and filled with something less like faith then a blind keeping-on. And what I hoped was not my last thought was What a Native woman’s got to put up with in this goddammed life doesn’t stop until the minute that she dies.

That last sentence is a gem, and echoes with me still.  And it played a big part in resolving what was my biggest uncertainty.

I wanted to categorize this differently than Ward did. I felt immersed in the fire. I’ve never been in a fire, never been near a threatening fire, only carefully tended campfires and bonfires. I found it terrifying. Ward instead considered it as part of the “problematic characters” group; she describes Wes  as “brusque and unyielding and racist, but the story peels away the layers of his personality so that by the end we feel empathy for both of them.” I felt his racism had become more of a defense, now perhaps a substitute for grief over the passing of his son.

Then I realized I was seeing him as Archie Bunker:  funny in his absurdity, but well-meaning underneath; he’s not really one of those racists, the ones who would kill and exclude and let die by the side of the road, but more the Norman Lear racist with a warm, gooey inside.

Nothing in the story indicates that. Although he offers them a home, he’s clear it’s for Jesse, and he’d throw Fernanda out in a heartbeat if he had an excuse, and Fernanda’s laugh is not one of humor but of bitter acceptance. So I have to recognize my own delusion here:  that he feels the need to beg for forgiveness as he faces Judgment indicates consciousness of guilt. And again, as with his size, Fernanda no doubt sees him very differently.

Again, I say it: the power of story, to see the world through another’s eyes.

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• Jake Weber’s post at Workshop Heretic pointed out some weak spots in this story: “We’re halfway through before we really get to the point where someone wants something.”