I watched one worker arrive and another, a woman, leave. The porch’s crispy-dry lumber caught flames, in my mind, and worked like a fuse to barbecue the whole building.
We were near the airport. A long straight road ran along the edge of town. One side of the road was developed—houses, strip malls, gas stations, a burger joint, gated communities and well-designed vegetation dotted by the occasional palm tree. The other side offered vast expanses of high desert, the way California looked since the early Paleozoic, when it was all covered by a warm shallow sea and when robocalls weren’t a thing.
On the developed side of the road, however, the crush of new buildings eased. Baxter pulled into a lot with a two-story stucco structure plunked down in the middle. The landscaping was just that—la
