Wildfire at Dawn

by M. L. Buchman

  “You tagged a local?”

  “She’s not a damned tree marked to cut,” Akbar snarled at him and headed over to the radio room atop the control tower to get away.

  Damn! He had to get his head together. That line was milder than most things he and Tim teased back and forth about the women they bedded. He’d never reacted like that. Of course, the women he’d “tagged” before hadn’t been like Laura.

  He climbed the tower stairs slowly. By every definition of his life so far, he’d “tagged” Laura. But he hadn’t. Not merely “had sex” either. They’d made love. No two ways about it. How had he gotten to a place where that was the exception rather than the rule?

  That stopped him cold halfway up the tower stairs.

  He wanted to blame it on Two-Tall, but he feared that finger pointed the other way around. Akbar had been the bad influence. Back in high school, he’d pretty much been a loner. The ultimate nerdy geek—he’d taken every AP class and even been in Chess Club for crying out loud. He’d had so many credits, he could have earned a BA in two years, but never got around to it once he’d jumped fire.

  He shuddered at that memory of his former self and continued up the stairs. Then he landed the job as a seasonal on an MHA fire-crew when he was hard up for cash and it was the only work he could find. He hadn’t thought it beneath him for long. He loved the work. He’d bulked up, filled out with muscle from the hard labor.

  Suddenly the girls were paying attention to him. Man, but the lonely outsider had eaten that up, hadn’t he? The ultimate ego stroke. Drop the “wildland firefighter” line and watch ‘em fall. A few years later when he added “smokejumper” to that, they’d fallen on their backs ready to go. Johnny Jepps had been lost in a world of willing women.

  He gave them the best thanks he could, but he never gave for long.

  Akbar the Great fought fire and mowed down the girls to ease something inside. Some lack he couldn’t put his finger on. He stopped with his hand on the radio room doorknob. Whatever the lack was, whatever he’d been hunting for, some part of him had found it and really, really liked the way it felt.

  He couldn’t wait to see Laura again and let whatever that was suddenly make sense once more.

  Chapter 5

  Laura marveled at their routine. A month had gone by and they were borderline domestic. Another aspect of that surprised the living daylights out of her about Johnny. She’d liked using his first name since their very first night together. It somehow fit him better, as if it made him more who he really was rather than Mister “The Great” Smokejumper.

  On that second night she’d returned from the Lodge late because of the paperwork around the accident. As Johnny had predicted, Grayson Masterson had inexplicably left a large tip, a very large one—it was amazing how well he knew people. She was already past half way to owning her brood mare.

  She’d arrived at her cabin at dusk, debating during the entire drive from the Lodge if she should call him, or if that was too forward. When she arrived, there he’d been, sitting in that same chair. Clothed this time. Quiet. Waiting.

  “From an hour before sunset until dawn,” he’d said when she’d come to stand in front of him, “they can’t call us out because we can’t jump at night. I hope it’s okay that I’m here.”

  Laura hadn’t said a word. There were none in her. Instead, she’d taken his hand and led him to her bed. Not a single other word had passed between them until the dawn light once again took him from her arms.

  Now they had a routine. If he was called to a blaze, he’d send her a text with the name of the fire so that she could follow the news. If it was a long fire, he’d send a simple Sleep on his return. That way she knew he was safe, though he always slept off a blaze at the MHA base camp. She’d offered to pick him up so that he wouldn’t have to drive but he’d refused, pointing out that half the time they got called to another fire directly from their bunks. It was a hot and dry season and there were more fires than people to fight them.

  On her own side, she’d text him news of the day: what outing she was leading, a good joke someone had told, a snapshot of a black squirrel no bigger than her palm that had insisted on sharing her lunch.

  The one time she’d gone out on a three-day trail ride and forgotten to tell him, she’d returned to find he’d almost launched a full Search-and-Rescue effort before Bess had talked him down. After that Laura made sure that he knew when she wouldn’t make it back to the cabin at night.

  She constantly reminded herself not to expect too much, but it was hard to remember when he made it so clear how much he enjoyed being with her.

  Laura was slowly adapting to the constant surprise of a willing and attentive lover. It had its up moments and its down ones, which only made the relationship feel all the more real. Though there were fewer of the down moments than any relationship she’d ever had before.

  But now she sat in her truck, halfway up her narrow driveway through the woods to her cabin. It was as far as she could get. The afternoon sun shone on vehicles of every shape and size cluttered along her one-lane track. There were a good dozen vehicles, most of them one form or another of pickup, though a rusty clunker Chevy Cavalier and a sparkling red Corvette were in the collection.

  What the hell was going on? This was her hideaway from the world. Not her parents, not… Johnny. Johnny Akbar Jepps was about to get his ass kicked but hard. This was not some goddamn party pad. He was welcome in her bed, in her home, but this was too much.

  Her immediate progress was blocked by a massive Dodge Ram pickup with rear dualies that looked even more hard-used than her own Ford 150.

  She parked and locked her truck. Whoever they were, none of them could leave until she decided to let them out. It had been a long and harrowing morning. She’d led her first group since Grayson Masterson up onto the ice and snow. Everything had gone as perfectly as it had in the fifty jaunts she’d led before, but her nerves were a wreck. She needed a glass of beer and some quiet time on the porch. She did not need a god damn smokie convention.

  She had hoped that Johnny might be around, maybe he’d be willing to cook because she was tapped out. And no one delivered take-out a half hour drive out of town.

  Now she was hoping he was around so that she could kill him, slowly and painfully in front of all his friends.

  She stalked up the driveway, kicked his Jeep’s tire for good measure when she passed it. Then she registered the sounds which were echoing through her forest. Chainsaws, plural. And the biting roar of a wood chipper.

  She broke into a run. This was her land. No one was supposed to be logging here, ever. They—

  The spectacle at the end of the drive brought her to a stumbling standstill. Twenty feet of chip truck was parked at the head of her driveway. It was painted glossy black with brilliant red-orange flames climbing the sides. It was the Mount Hood Aviation paint job. Behind it, an equally well-maintained and brightly-painted chipper was shooting a steady arc into the back of the truck.

  Three people in hardhats and wearing heavy gloves were feeding in dead branches. She turned to the trees to see a half-dozen of them had people up them. Those trees, actually all of the trees for three-quarters of the way around her property no longer had any of their lower dead branches. The people in them were working so fast that the branches appeared to be falling in a continuous cascade.

  “Pretty great, huh?”

  “Shit!” Laura about jumped out of her skin when Johnny put his hand on her waist from behind. He wore a hardhat, climbing harness around his waist, and had a chainsaw slung over his shoulder as if it was the most normal thing on the planet.

  “What the hell, Johnny?” She waved a hand helplessly at the trees and fended off his attempt to kiss her. He was covered in sawdust.

  “Your place is a fire trap, Space Ace. Been making me crazy since the first time I came out here. In a fire all that dead wood cooks off,” he snapped his gloved fingers. Then he pulled off the glove and tried again with bett
er results. “Massive amounts of fuel just begging for a fire to rip right through it. We had a promised dark day today, so I invited the crew out to do a little fire mitigation in exchange for pizza.”

  “Did you think about asking first?”

  His brow furrowed for a moment, then he shrugged off the idea. “Can’t say that I did. Doesn’t matter. I wanted you to be safer. This was something I could take care of for you.”

  She turned back to inspect what was happening. There were six sawyers in the trees. Another six or eight were dragging branches over to the chipper—swampers he’d called them when explaining how a crew fought fire.

  This was his specialty. There probably weren’t all that many people who knew more about protecting residences from fire than Johnny.

  “We okay with this?” he sounded a little worried. Clearly he was starting to rethink his initiative.

  She kept her back to him to hide her smile. It was hard not to feel charmed that he’d recruited all of his smokejumper friends on their day off to help protect his girlfriend.

  “Space Ace?”

  Laura let him suffer a little longer, but could barely keep the smile out of her voice as she let him off the hook. “You said something about pizza?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him pointing upward.

  Masked by the sound of the chainsaws, a small black helicopter—with the inevitable red-flame-on-black paint job—was slowing to a stop overhead and then began descending toward the center of the presently unoccupied corral—the only space big enough for a chopper to land.

  The man was having pizza delivered by helicopter? She could get very used to this, but didn’t want to let it show quite how much he was sweeping her feet out from under her.

  “Did you get Hawaiian?” she took the quarter step back to slip her arm around his shoulders despite the dirt and sawdust that coated him. The chopper touched down and began cycling down its engines.

  “Got an extra one. Knew it was your favorite.”

  Laura couldn’t help herself. She turned to kiss him. A cheer and a round of applause from around the clearing accompanied the heat of Johnny’s hand holding her ever so tightly against him.

  # # #

  Laura felt as if she’d come out of the closet. For a month, Johnny Akbar Jepps had been all hers. Suddenly she was surrounded by his friends and teammates. And every single one had to check out and approve of their boss’ choice in women.

  The chopper pilot, a woman name Jeannie, sat down next to Laura on the cabin’s porch very early on. She didn’t say much, just sat there in the chair Johnny usually occupied.

  Laura remembered the red streak in her hair from that first meeting at the Doghouse Inn. And when Grayson had gone into the snow, this same helicopter that had delivered the pizza had appeared to save his sorry life. She was obviously a fixture in Johnny’s life, and Laura tried to prepare herself for the upcoming catfight. Laura really needed this day to be over soon.

  Johnny had drifted off with some of the others, holding court around her picnic table suddenly buried in pizza boxes, and a big cooler of sodas nearby.

  At first she was ticked at Johnny for abandoning her. Was he being unthinking? No. Johnny was never unthinking, but he often thought differently than she did. So he was…being a second center of attention so that everyone wasn’t crowded about her at once. She wished he’d found a way to call Jeannie aside, but the woman showed no signs of moving off.

  As time passed and one group of smokies drifted off only to inevitably be replaced by a few fresh recruits, Laura began to see what Jeannie was doing.

  Somehow, by simply sitting beside Laura, she was placing her stamp of approval or at least easing the start of each successive conversation. The crew drifted by in twos and threes, some chatting with Jeannie for a moment as an excuse to not make it look like the tag-team interrogation that it actually was. Everyone wanted to hear from her own lips who she was, what her background was, her political views and…

  It took her a while to figure out that mentioning she was a wilderness guide saved her a lot of well-intended nosiness. It also told her that Johnny hadn’t been bragging about her all around camp. Despite the mayhem he’d unleashed on her today, he apparently respected some aspects of her privacy.

  That simple “wilderness guide” title was a ticket of first-class boarding priority in the smokie world. She’d thought it was just Johnny who felt the way she did about the wilderness. Laura soon figured out that each and every person here loved living and working in the wilderness. Jumping out of a plane to fight a forest-killing inferno up close and personal was a job most of them would pay to be allowed to do.

  Johnny had held off the tall guy until nearly the last. He shot her a slightly worried expression as the man sauntered up to greet Jeannie.

  So, this one was important to him. Of course, they’d arrived at the bar together; apparently Johnny’s wingman both on and off the fire line.

  “Two-Tall, that’s t-w-o, Tim, that’s D-a-v-e,” he offered a genuine enough smile to accompany his joke, and a handshake that wholly enveloped her own hand. “Damn! I can’t believe you brushed me off for Akbar the Great. He is short, you know.”

  “I admit I noticed,” Laura’s throat was dry despite sipping at her soda. Even sitting on the edge of the porch he loomed, his back casually against one of the posts. All he needed was a cowboy hat and a six-gun slung around his fire gear to look totally, well, out of place.

  “But he is great,” his teasing expression suddenly shifted to a serious one. “Best crew boss I ever walked fire with. Even better than TJ, but don’t you dare tell him I said that.”

  She crossed her heart.

  He chatted a bit more without saying much. But she had the impression that she was being more thoroughly examined by him than any of the others.

  After he moved off, Laura observed quietly to herself, “Well, he’s a deep one.”

  Jeannie beside her nodded, “Two-Tall is an ogre.”

  Laura looked over, but figured it out before she had to ask. Like Shrek the ogre comparing himself to an onion, Tim had layers upon layers despite the carefree womanizer he presented to the world.

  Like Johnny Akbar Jepps.

  Her lover constantly revealed new aspects to himself. His knowledge of fires was his main focus, but he would often lead her off into head-spinning explanations of the science behind combustion or how the historical impact of the burning of Ancient Rome upon literature of all crazy things. It was as if his lack of a college education and his voracious reading habits had combined to create an intensely out of the box thinker.

  Soon the smokies began shifting back to finish the trees. In a matter of minutes, they were back in the woods, chainsaws at the roar. Then they fired up the big chipper and the clearing once again reverberated with the clean-up operation.

  She felt she should go help, but knew she’d be in their way. They had it down to a science. Johnny and Tim were switching off on successive trees, taking turns cutting and swamping the cut branches. They covered half again the ground of any other team.

  “They’re something, aren’t they?” Jeannie still sat in the chair Johnny usually occupied. She’d been so quiet that Laura had almost forgotten she was there.

  “They make it look like a ballet.”

  Jeannie nodded amiably, “They’re the very best in the business. It would help if they didn’t know it, but they do. And only Carly can read a fire better than Akbar; she’s scary good. Kind of on the level of our lead pilot Emily.”

  Laura could hear the worshipful tone in Jeannie’s voice. She knew from following the articles this last month that MHA’s reputation was the gold standard of wildland firefighting. If Johnny was the gold standard of that… The breath whooshed out of her a bit. What in the world had she hooked herself up to?

  “You want another piece?” Jeannie clambered to her feet.

  Laura nodded.

  Jeannie returned with a paper plate bearing
a couple slices of Hawaiian without even asking and another plate with a couple combos, but she didn’t sit back down after handing Laura’s over.

  “Been watching you.”

  Oh great. She’d been right the first time. Jeannie had a thing for Johnny and he’d been too blind to see it. Now she was going to really catch it.

  “If Akbar screws this up, I’m gonna kill him. You’re great!” Then she flashed an impish smile and headed toward her chopper as she ate her pizza.

  Too stunned to respond, Laura could only watch her go.

  Well if that didn’t beat all.

  # # #

  After they finished with the trees, a fire had been started in her brick-lined fire pit. Cold pizza was inhaled and a cooler of beer had been recovered from one of the trucks. Almost no one had more than one, though, in case they were called in the morning.

  They’d sat for hours, talking about fires and, perhaps inevitably, women. Krista, a broad-shouldered Nordic blond and apparently Johnny’s other main assistant, sat across the fire beside Two-Tall, razzing the men about all of things they didn’t understand about women. She was as brash and salty as many of the guys—funny, but a little out there for Laura. She wished Jeannie had stayed; she would have liked to get to know the woman better.

  She was walking back in the dark from moving her truck out of the way, when she spotted Tim and Johnny standing close by the cabin’s front porch outlined in the light of the open front door. They were an odd couple, but there’d been no denying how perfectly they worked together. On the job, the two men rarely had to speak, but their communication was obviously crystal clear nonetheless.

  “Damn, man, I just don’t know.” Tim’s deep voice carried easily across the still night air.

  Laura braced herself. She’d been so happy. Despite the unexpected beginning to the evening—and the intense scrutiny—she’d enjoyed herself. Johnny’s team was close-knit and would walk through fire for him. She laughed a little at the metaphor. They actually did that one literally, all the time.