For All Their Days

by M. L. Buchman

  For All Their Days

  an Oregon Firebirds romance

  M. L. Buchman

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  1

  Moon eyes,” Stacy whispered.

  “I tell you what I’m gonna do,” Maggie didn’t even bother turning around. “This chiquita is going to poke out the eyes of those two niños pequeños and feed them to the pigeons.” Being a Latina woman from Astoria, Oregon meant she didn’t pull out her Spanish very often, but these little boys were getting irritating.

  “Too bad there aren’t any pigeons around here.”

  “Why you gotta spoil a girl’s fun, huh? Just because you got Curt to put that pretty ring on your finger?” Maggie traded a grin with the Firebirds’ Number One pilot.

  “Yep. Must be why I do it.” Stacy’s voice went all dreamy in a way that no man was ever going to hear from Maggie Torres’ lips.

  She dug around in her toolbox until she found a nice thirty-inch long crowbar, nearly half as long as she was. “They still there?”

  Stacy made a show of moving to check something in the MD 520N helicopter’s cockpit, not that anything there mattered until Maggie finished servicing the engine.

  “Uh-huh. About ten feet off your six.”

  It was cracking ninety today in the southwest corner of Oregon at the Illinois Valley Airport and the midday heat had her stripped down to a tank top and gym shorts while she worked. So of course the guys were watching the show when they were supposed to be cleaning out the trucks from the last wildland firefight.

  She raised the crowbar as if to tap something on the engine that was out of her reach. Then she spun and swung her arm down. The eight pounds of steel spun through the air for one full turn, then spiked down to punch a hole in the dirt between Amos’ and Drew’s sneakers—which were maybe a foot apart. Both pilots yelped and scattered.

  The bright flush on their cheeks as they went back to work told her they weren’t even aware of staring. Two nice boys stuck in the middle of nowhere caught daydreaming about pretty women. Well, she didn’t want no “nice” boy. She wanted someone who fired her blood like the inlet temperature of the 520N’s Rolls-Royce 250 turboshaft engine—eighteen hundred degrees of pure heat.

  “They’re never going to stop, Maggie. They don’t even know they’re doing it,” Stacy confirmed Maggie’s own assessment as she yanked the crowbar out of the dirt, stalked back, and dropped it into the toolbox. “You’re the prettiest woman for probably ten miles around. You make men’s brains switch off.”

  “We’re in the middle of the Siskiyou Mountains, probably a hundred miles.”

  “Two hundred,” Stacy agreed.

  “Now that might be bragging. Besides, I remember seeing some girl in a wedding dress recently who looked pretty damn hot.”

  “I did, didn’t I? Killer dress you helped me pick out. Curt certainly seemed to think so.”

  “The man couldn’t even speak,” Maggie remembered his stunned puppy look. Maybe on the right man, Maggie wouldn’t mind that look so much.

  “Might not have spoken much, but he had plenty to ‘say’ when he took it off me.”

  It was one of the best parts of working for the Firebirds. Maggie loved the six machines she’d been hired to take care of. Loved watching the team of MD 520Ns fly to the firefight. But she also was getting seriously used to having a girlfriend in the outfit. She knew how she looked and that it had a way of pushing other women away.

  Not Stacy. They’d hit it off early and solid, like a well-tuned V8 engine.

  Jana Williams, the outfit’s co-owner with Stacy’s new husband was a little daunting, but she’d been that way when they’d both been in the Army. She and Jana hadn’t overlapped much, mechanic and pilot, but Jana had given her such a sweet offer that she’d signed on with the Firebirds rather than another tour with the Army. While it might not be deep friendship, it counted for a whole lot.

  Amos and Drew, however, were being a major pain in her ass—almost literally. She’d seen it the moment they crawled out of their matching black GTOs with red flames painted down the sides at the start of the season. They weren’t bad guys. They just turned into moon-eyed stunned puppies whenever they got around her.

  She snatched up a 12mm wrench and began checking the tightness of all of the hydraulic fittings while Stacy inspected the air filters, using compressed air to blow out any built-up fire ash. There were some tasks Maggie would let a pilot do, mainly because there was no way for them to screw it up.

  “I want my man to be made of stuff better than…man.”

  “I don’t know,” Stacy moved on to checking the control linkages from the cyclic and collective controls to the rotor head.

  Maggie had already done those, so it was a safe task. She wouldn’t have let Stacy even do things like that, except she really was a good mechanic by anyone else’s standards other than Papa or Maggie herself. Her father had serviced Coast Guard helos for thirty years; he still did. He’d started teaching her how to wrench a helo before she’d started kindergarten. Two tours in the Army, she’d had to put up with a ton of exactly the kind of shit Amos and Drew were doing. Two “macho” guys who couldn’t figure out how to even speak to her.

  “I like the stuff that Curt is made of,” Stacy was doing more of that dreamy thing.

  “That’s ’cause you just got married, bitch, and like showing off. You don’t got to be fishing around in the barrel like the rest of us poor chicas.”

  “Nope,” Stacy sounded far too happy about that fact.

  But Maggie couldn’t think of what to say back. Stacy was an awesome pilot, even Jana said so which meant something serious. She was totally nice, like girl-next-door nice. Maggie had always liked her three sisters, but they’d stab you in the back and steal your boyfriend faster than you could change your shoes if you let them. Stacy wasn’t like that. She also was walking as if her feet weren’t going to ever touch the ground again, which was just showing off to Maggie’s way of thinking.

  She sighed. Except for occasional fishing trips to the couple of bars in Cave Junction, it was going to be a long, dry summer. On the fire line, the firefighters usually just collapsed into exhaustion when they came off the line—not as if she had spare time and energy during a big fire herself.

  Hydraulics were all tight. She began greasing the linkages to the rotorhead and NOTAR fan.

  2

  Heading up,” Curt called over the radio on the Firebirds’ private frequency. The fire commander’s frequency was set to just monitor.

  “Roger that.” Palo waited until Curt was aloft and far enough clear for the air turbulence to settle, before easing up on his own MD 520N’s collective. With a full load of two hundred gallons of water aboard, he’d take the clearest air he could find to get lift.

  There were just three of them fighting a small fire in the hills southeast of Depoe Bay along the Oregon Coast. He’d never imagined this section of the Oregon forest could get dry enough to burn. Some idiot hikers’ campfire, sparking off after they were long gone because they didn’t know how to douse it properly. It gave them work, he supposed. Department of Forestry would normally let something like this burn quietly to clear out the undergrowth, but the wind was sliding out of the northwest for a change and driving it toward the town of Siletz.

  Not big enough to call out the full flight of six helos, they’d loaded up just three of the six Firebirds and headed over to kill it off before it got out of hand.

  Jasper followed him aloft as
silently as ever.

  There weren’t any natural firebreaks between Depoe Bay and Siletz, but a team of hotshots were on the ground making one out of an old logging road. The Firebirds’ assignment was to narrow the fire’s head until it dead-centered on the break the hotshot crew was cutting. Then they’d hit any spot fires that cropped up once it got there. No reason to call in the big outfits yet, most of whom were fighting a blaze up north in the Columbia Gorge.

  “How’d you do it, Curt?” The three of them flew in a line over the Black, as the burned-over section of a forest fire was called.

  “I just fly low and hit the little button that says Tank Release on it when I’m over the flames.”

  “Ha. Ha. No. How did you get Stacy?”

  “’Cause I’m just that good.”

  “Blind luck,” Jasper commented drily as the three of them came up on the fire.

  “Truth?” Palo eased in close behind Curt. A glance showed Jasper nowhere to be seen, which meant he was exactly astern. It was becoming the Firebirds’ trademark: fly in fast and low in a tight line. Between them, they could lay six hundred gallons—a ton-and-a-half of water—in a tightly-connected clean line or a triple-layered inundation, dead on target. With a nearby water source, they could do it once every two minutes.

  “Truth?” Curt left it hanging out there as he dove on the fire and Palo followed him down. They were coming in along the edge of a forested ridge. It was covered in hundred-foot Doug fir and trash alder. If they could keep the flames on the south side of the ridge, the fire would narrow itself as it burned along the sharpening valley which climbed up into the Coast Range.

  “Truth is he has no idea,” Jasper spoke up. Curt and Jasper went all the way back to grade school, which meant Jasper knew.

  Curt sighed his agreement as he released his load over the edge of the fire. “If you really want to know, Palo, you need to ask Stacy. I have no idea what a woman that amazing sees in me.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. If he asked Stacy, she’d want to know why. And if he told her that, she’d tell— Wasn’t going down that way one bit.

  Palo followed Curt’s line, then peeled off to tank up. The Siletz River was close by, but it was too narrow with tall trees on both banks for most helos. Their little MD 520Ns could slip right in, lower a fifteen-foot long snorkel to suck up a load, and be on the move twenty seconds later without ever landing. What they didn’t have in load-carrying capability—the big Firehawks could carry a thousand gallons to his two hundred—they more than made up in speed and agility.

  Speed and agility? How in the world was that supposed to help him with a pixie-tall, Latina-fireball of a woman like Maggie Torres?

  3

  To Maggie, the campfire felt empty that night with just the three women around it.

  Amos and Drew had gone into Cave Junction. Two thousand people made it the biggest town for thirty miles in any direction. Two thousand people, four restaurants, and very few bars made the odds of running into them far too likely. Besides, as much as Maggie liked men, that whole scene was getting old really fast.

  Over the first couple months of the fire season, she’d already tried out most of the local boys. Very few even made it past the first-drink test.

  It was a simple test. Could they share one drink without some remark that was the moral equivalent of the Jimmy Buffet classic, Why don’t we get drunk and screw.

  Even fewer had made it past the second-drink test: would her head hurt more if she finished the second drink, which she never actually did, or if she woke up beside the contender?

  And the tourists who hit Cave Junction to visit the Oregon Caves—because no one else in their right minds except a wildland firefighter came out here—were traveling as couples. The Caves weren’t really a single guy kind of attraction.

  She, Stacy, and Jana didn’t even have to change positions with the vagaries of the evening breeze—because there wasn’t one. It was so quiet that the smoke rose straight up with only the occasional flicker of sparks. They just sipped their beers and watched the fire and the stars.

  At least Amos and Drew—when their brains weren’t switching off on them unexpectedly—were good for a laugh, bantering back and forth like twin brothers despite one being black and the other white. Maybe it was a New York City thing.

  She was more of an Astoria, Oregon gal. Most of her childhood had been spent at the US Coast Guard Air Station. Sometimes she’d travel with Papa to Cape Disappointment on the Washington State side of the Columbia.

  Cape Disappointment: another one of her life’s ironies. The major Coast Guard installation in the Pacific Northwest perched close by the mouth of the Columbia River. It had some of the most dangerous waters in the entire country. Some said that there were more wrecks crossing the Columbia Bar than the entire Gulf of Alaska. All three of her sisters had married Coasties, but for her there had only been disappointment. Not a single one of them had been made of the same metal as Papa. Most Coasties wouldn’t even give her the time of day once they learned she was Chief Torres’ daughter. Her sisters never had that problem, so why did she?

  So here they were, three women staring at the warm coals and flickering sparks. The former Siskiyou Smokejumpers Base had been closed in 1981 after launching over fifteen hundred fire jumps. She could feel the men who had lived here through the years—and not just because of the small museum and historic landmark buildings. It was in the night air. In the smell of dry pine and drier grass.

  “Story time,” Stacy broke the long silence.

  Jana’s grunt said she wasn’t adverse to the idea, as long as it didn’t start with her. She sat far enough back in her folding chair so that only her blonde hair and the steel hooks that had replaced her right hand showed. She could still fly like a demon, but she couldn’t fly to fire because she couldn’t work the thumb and finger controls on the cyclic. She was their head trainer and ran the business with an iron, or rather a steel hand, while her brother flew.

  “I know you’re both sick of me babbling about being married—”

  “Totally,” Maggie teased her.

  “—so I’ll shut up about that for a change. That leaves you, Maggie.”

  “Oh.” That hadn’t gone well. She listened to the night and could imagine the ghosts of shouts to “saddle up” over the racket of Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radial engines coughing to life on the DC-3 jump planes. It left a silence now broken only by the crackling fire and the occasional flutter of bat wings.

  Story time had become something of a tradition among the women of the Firebirds. Ever since the massive misunderstanding that almost had Stacy leaving the outfit, they’d held story time. By telling each other pieces of their past when the guys weren’t around maybe they could avoid messing each other up in the future. There weren’t many opportunities, but they were slowly getting to know one another better for it.

  “When Papa had to work late, I used to ride my bike over to the Astoria, Oregon Airport after dinner. I’d help him service the helos, handing him tools and asking a thousand questions. Afterward we’d sit out like this and watch the stars. Sometimes we’d go across the runways to sit beside the Columbia River and watch the ships come in as the sun set over the Pacific.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Not much. Engine mods maybe. Boy trouble, a little. Let’s just say that I started looking like this pretty early. Having a papaíto who was a USCG mechanic and a chief petty officer helped a lot with that.”

  “Was he pretty like you?” Jana tried to make it sound as if she might be tempted.

  “No. I’m a throwback. The shortest one in the family by eight inches. Just like Nana—my grandmother. Ma’s pretty, but not in Nana’s league, and all my sisters take after Ma, kinda mostly. Papa is really solid, like a rock. Like Palo I suppose.” There was a parallel she’d never thought of. “What is he anyway?”

  “A hunk,” Stacy was still so newly married that she saw all men as beautiful, wonderful creatu
res.

  Jana snorted and tossed her empty beer bottle toward the small cooler.

  At least she and Jana knew it was never that simple.

  Maggie waved at the cooler to see if she wanted another, but Jana shook her head in a shimmer of blonde hair.

  “You’re going to laugh when I tell you what he really is,” Jana spoke little louder than the fire. “Palo Akana is Finnish-Hawaiian. Though I don’t remember which of his parents is which.”

  “Last name Hawaiian, probably his dad,” Maggie figured.

  “Hunk,” Stacy affirmed.

  Palo was so quiet that Maggie had never given him much thought. Not awkwardly silent like Jasper—who only crawled out of his shell at all when…Jana wasn’t around. Huh! That was interesting.

  Palo wasn’t Hawaiian large, but neither was he Finnish light. He was dark, handsome, and built rock-solid. He also flew so well that Jana and Curt had hired him, which said a lot about the man. Said a lot about Drew and Amos too—at least their abilities if not their shining personalities.

  As if hearing her thoughts, there was the low thrum of a pair of diesel trucks coming along the Redwood Highway. She listened. V8. The deep note of a GMC 6.6 liter under moderate load. Enough tire noise to tell her there was a lot of rubber on the coarse-sealed road: like two pickups with rear dualies and hauling trailers.

  “The boys are back.”

  “What?” Stacy lit up like…a newlywed. The girl couldn’t help rubbing it in.

  Jana was still twisting back and forth as if seeking the sound, not locating it until they were almost in the parking lot. Probably lost some sensitivity in all those years she’d flown for the US Army’s 101st Airborne. Maggie missed those days herself sometimes, but she’d left voluntarily—unlike Jana after an accident took her hand.

  With the hard crunch of gravel, the two GMC Denali pickups rolled in, each hauling a gooseneck trailer that had their helos tied onto the decks. They rolled up close to the fire before shutting down and clambering out.