Even back then, Jenny had been skeptical of the words “darling” and “sweetheart” coming out of her sister’s mouth in a drawl she’d never heard before, but the five dollars was certainly real. For weeks, Jade had had her eye on a yellow raincoat at JC Penney, one that came with a matching umbrella—also yellow, with pictures of more umbrellas on it—and she just needed five more dollars to add to her birthday money before she could afford it.
“That’s okay,” she’d called over her shoulder to the man. “This is just enough. Thanks!”
Over time, people had even joked about this last bit, how if Jade had been just a little greedier, she might not be around to tell the story. Jenny had never thought the joking was funny, especially because the man was never found, and a tiny part of her thought maybe Jade had lied just to make herself seem even more interesting.
It seemed that people had forgotten about the stranger in the woods until two years ago, when another six-year-old girl went missing, in another part of the state. She still hadn’t been found. Jenny was conflicted, since she had always doubted Jade’s story, just a little bit. After all this time, could the same stranger still be out there, calling little girls “darling” with a drawl like a country singer and luring them with money? She couldn’t believe that she’d actually been jealous of Jade and that stupid umbrella.
As the fire bore down on them, they’d had to leave their cat, Colonel Mustard, because they couldn’t find him. Jenny was frantic. He was mostly hers, and she thought he might be hiding on the top shelf of her closet, but the fire crew had refused to let them go back. One of them had even grabbed her arm to stop her from running inside. Under his hard hat, his face was covered with soot, making the whites of his eyes stand out.
“You can’t go in there,” he said, his fingers leaving a black ring around her forearm.
“My cat…,” she whispered, and at that moment there was a deafening crash of burning tree limbs falling nearby.
He’d shoved her into the backseat of the car even as she held on to the reflective tape on his jacket.
“Colonel Mustard. His name is Colonel Mustard.”
“I hear you, Miss Scarlet,” he said, and she thought maybe he even smiled.
But as they drove off, she’d heard another crash of burning tree limbs and wondered why people made jokes in the midst of tragedies, and what if she never saw Colonel Mustard again?
That was already a week ago.
Jenny was lying on the makeshift cot in the emergency shelter, eating a bologna sandwich from the Salvation Army and reading an old People magazine from a stack that had been donated.
Jade refused to lie down, saying she wasn’t going to get bedbugs just because she was now an evacuee. Jenny wondered how much longer Jade would last, sleeping propped against the wall in a sitting position.
“I think lice is more of a problem in shelters,” Jenny said casually, noticing that the magazine’s pages were stuck together with what looked like grape jelly. She hoped it was grape jelly.
“You girls could make yourselves useful helping with the younger kids,” their mother had said. “Go read them books or something.”
Jenny and her sister had exchanged a look, and Jade shook her head emphatically, mouthing head lice behind her mother’s back, which made Jenny laugh and feel for two seconds like they were conspirators. But then Jade’s friends Shelby and Carly bounced over, each threading an arm through one of Jade’s, announcing that they were heading over to the fire update briefing.
How Jade could have such mindless friends was another mystery that Jenny spent too much time pondering. She watched the threesome giggle and weave drunkenly through all the cots at the shelter, which was really their high school gym. The briefing was still an hour away. As if nobody knew the girls were trying to position themselves front and center so the incident command officer who led the updates would notice them. He was almost thirty! What would an old guy like that see in a bunch of teenagers who smelled like pomegranate shampoo? This was a disaster, not a prom.
Their family was in danger of losing their home, and still Jade and her friends were acting as if it were merely a chance for them to attract attention. But why would they stop being themselves just because of a fire? Good riddance, Jenny thought as they pranced out of the gym.
There’d been an announcement that residents could go back home during a one-hour window to get things they’d left behind. Jenny wanted to go. She remembered the firefighter’s grip on her arm.
“Can I come with you and look for Colonel Mustard, Dad?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know if it’s safe,” said her mom.
“Well, if they’re letting residents in, it can’t be too dangerous,” said her dad. “There must have been a change in the wind or something.”
“So I can come?”
Her mother’s right eye twitched, a sign that she was anxious. “Why don’t we wait for them to go back to level two. Then at least we’ll know it’s safe.”
Jenny thought the Forest Service’s system for letting people know when to leave was kind of bogus anyway. They had gone from level one (ready) to level three (go!) in less than two hours, thanks to the wind.
When she and Jade were little, the word “stranger” was their mother’s label for everyone she did not trust. But as they got older, they learned there were categories and subcategories to the strangers their mother held at arm’s length. At the moment, she was very distrustful of the Bureau of Land Management. She wanted to wait until Coyote Jones said it was safe, because he was a local and she had more faith in him than she did in “some bureaucratic arm of the government.” Coyote Jones had been telling people for days to be ready: “Don’t forget the three P’s, everyone: people, pets, papers.”
“Honestly, hon,” her father said, “if it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let any of us go back in. The cat must be scared out of its wits by now too.” Jenny nodded vehemently.
“Animals are really good at finding safe places to hide,” said her mother. “I doubt he’ll come out until this is all over.”
But Jenny jumped up before her father could be swayed by her mother’s eye twitch, which was ramping up.
“We’re at level one, Mr. Scaife,” she said in what she hoped was her best impression of the fire service spokesperson. She grabbed his arm. “Level two, Mr. Scaife. Get set.
“See you in an hour, Mom. Mr. Scaife, we are at level three. Go, go, go!”
That was about as silly as Jenny would get, especially once they were near their neighborhood. It felt like driving into the apocalypse. Miles of hoses crisscrossed the empty streets, and there were huge holding tanks around the perimeter of every structure. Water trucks were going in and out, filling the tanks, which looked like gigantic blow-up swimming pools. Before they could actually drive down their street, they had to stop at a security checkpoint.
“Yikes, this looks serious,” said her father.
“I just need to see some ID,” said the man at the checkpoint. “You’d be surprised how much looting there is in a disaster.”
“Really?” said Jenny’s father, genuinely surprised. He had a hard time thinking the worst of people, unlike her mother, and in spite of everything they had been through. Jenny often felt like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing between her parents. They had such different outlooks.
“Yeah, but we also need to know when people come in and out so we don’t lose anybody.” The man winked at Jenny.
There was tobacco juice in his beard and a wad of chew in his cheek.
She waited for her father to say something like “Winking’s not really appropriate, don’t you think?” Her mother would have. But she knew he was overwhelmed with the idea of looters, and from dealing with the fire, the threat of losing their home. In his mind, if the guy had helped save their home, well, let him wink at Jenny if he wanted to. It was ha
rmless. She bit her cheek and said nothing.
The checkpoint man taped a pass on the windshield with the date and time, and they drove slowly through the war zone that had once been their neighborhood. So far, none of the houses had been lost—although two sheds and a chicken coop had burnt to the ground and were still smoldering.
There was a big orange X painted on the front door of their house, meaning it had been checked and all residents had evacuated. All except poor Colonel Mustard, thought Jenny, turning the knob, which was warm to the touch. Inside, the house smelled like its contents had been broiled with a blow torch. Jenny covered her nose, taking shallow breaths while making the clucking noise that Colonel Mustard liked.
“Here, boy. Who’s the precious kitty? C’mon, boy.”
Nothing.
She rummaged under all the beds and in all the closets, although the only closet he ever slept in was hers. When she looked in her sister’s closet she was surprised to see the tiny umbrella Jade had bought with the stranger’s money stashed in the corner. Why did Jade still have it? Why did her parents—especially her mother?—let her keep money that could have easily led to something sinister?
Why was she just now wondering this?
“Any sign of him?” said her father, sticking his head in the door.
“Nope, just this.” She held up the stupid umbrella.
“That probably won’t do much against the fire,” said her dad.
“Why does everyone think it’s okay to make jokes?” Jenny tried to keep her voice down but failed. “You know, you almost lost your daughter to a psychopath.”
She had never said that out loud before. Her father instantly looked hurt.
“Sorry, Jenny. Would you rather we just focus on all the ways we’ve barely managed to escape tragedy?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Forget it,” she said, throwing the umbrella back into the closet. “Let’s just find Colonel Mustard.”
He was nowhere. Outside, fire crews were spraying down all the houses, keeping them wet. Jenny got up the nerve to ask someone if he’d seen a cat with a broken tail. She was disappointed that it wasn’t the same guy who had grabbed her arm when they’d evacuated and then was taken aback by her own disappointment.
“Are you Miss Scarlet?” he asked her, flashing a mouthful of overlapping teeth.
“Excuse me?”
“Nate said if you came back to let you know.”
“Nate?”
“He found your cat. Relish or Ketchup or something?”
“He found Colonel Mustard?”
“Ah, that’s it. He was getting off a sixteen-hour shift, so he said he’d take your cat to the shelter.”
“Oh, that’s great. That’s wonderful. Thank you. Thanks.” She didn’t know what else to say and was afraid she’d start bawling with relief. So she extended a hand, which he looked at skeptically. He held up a glove covered in black smudge that appeared to be smoking.
“High five from afar. Glad your cat is okay. You know, except the tail, I guess.”
Then he shouldered a chain saw and moved past her, toward the crackling fire in the forest beyond.
* * *
—
Her father was quiet all the way back to the high school. Jenny was sick of calling it a shelter: it was a high school, with cots laid out in the gym underneath banners proclaiming their team’s cross country and volleyball state titles. The evacuees were all showering in the locker rooms, where the girls usually refused to get naked in front of their classmates and now had to shower with the whole town.
Jenny had pointed this out to Jade, who said, “That’s what a disaster will do,” as if she were an expert on the matter. “Provide a whole new perspective.”
Right, Jenny had thought, because the worldly one is so wise. But of course, she said nothing. Just chewed on her cheek again, the familiar taste of blood reminding her that perspective was something she had a hard time holding on to around Jade.
“Now,” her father said, “before you go look for Colonel Mustard, you might want to shower. I think we both smell a bit smoky. It might unnerve him.”
“I really want to see him first,” said Jenny. “I’ll shower right after, I promise.”
But when she found him, Colonel Mustard was so freaked out, Jenny realized it had been a mistake to say hi and then leave right away. His broken tail was smudged black on the end, and he wouldn’t come out from under the blanket in his crate. There were so many dog carriers filled with stray pets—one even held a ferret—that Jenny worried her cat might have been happier wherever he’d been hiding before he got rescued.
“It’s okay, buddy. You’re safe now. I’ll be right back.”
Because the fire crews also showered at the school, Jenny’s father said the men’s locker room smelled like hundreds of blackened hot dogs. As Jenny walked to the women’s side, wrapped in her towel, she noticed a woman who had just emerged from a shower stall and was toweling off a blue-and-green tattoo of a dragon across her left butt cheek. When she pulled on her thong underwear, the dragon’s tail whipped like it was alive, its claws creeping under the thin waistband.
The woman caught Jenny staring and smiled at her, but Jenny, flustered, just pulled her towel tighter and stepped into a stall. She hadn’t thought that a woman could be feminine, wear a thong, and work alongside men fighting fires. But why not? Although she never would have guessed such a tattoo existed under the hunter-green uniform pants.
She soaped up quickly, washed her hair, rinsed, and then got back into the safety of her towel as fast as she could. Jade was wrong: the disaster did not make Jenny feel any differently about showering in public.
When she walked back out to the lockers, the woman was loading her many pockets with radios and tightening her belt.
Jade cleared her throat.
“Do you know a firefighter named Nate?” she asked.
The woman tilted her head. “Nate?” She had curly jet-black hair that glistened all around her face, which was tanned from working outside. “There’s about four hundred people working this blaze now, so I’m not sure. I might know him, but he’s not in my crew.”
“Oh, of course. That makes sense,” said Jenny.
“A crush?”
“Oh God, no. He just found my cat, so I was hoping to thank him.”
Jenny was getting cold standing there in her towel and wished she hadn’t said anything.
“I can call on my radio,” said the woman, holding it up.
“No, no, that’s not necessary.”
“Okay, if you’re sure?”
“Yes, definitely. So do you think we’ll get to go back home soon?” She didn’t want to leave the woman with the impression that she was looking for Nate like some kind of stalker.
“Depends on when we can get solid containment. You don’t live in the Canyon, do you?”
“No, we’re on the east side of town, actually.”
“Oh, you’re lucky. We lost forty houses in the Canyon. There was just no way to stop it.”
“That’s terrible,” said Jenny. She had heard they’d lost thirty. The number was going up.
“I know. I hate coming in here to shower and running into people from there. I feel so guilty. But luckily, no deaths.”
“Well, people don’t blame you, do they?”
“I think people always want someone to blame in a tragedy. And that wacko with the illegal radio station really set us back.”
“Coyote Jones? He’s not a wacko.”
It was just a gut reaction, but Jenny immediately sensed she’d hit a nerve defending him.
“Okay, well, I have to go do the briefing. Nice to meet you.”
“People really trust him,” Jenny said quickly. “It’s just, you know, he’s local and everything. And his signal reaches
into three states….”
Did the woman just raise an eyebrow?
“I mean, nobody knows him personally. But he’s been our go-to guy for years for everything—storms, fires, weird weather fronts…”
Why was she trying so hard to make a point about Coyote Jones? She was acutely aware of being naked under her towel and her teeth were starting to chatter, but for some reason she kept talking.
“I mean, yeah, he’s not FCC legal or anything, but you’re all kind of on the same side. We’re really appreciative, I promise.”
“We can’t have conflicting information. If we say go and he says stay, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Jenny wished she’d kept quiet.
“You’re freezing. If I meet Nate, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
“Oh, please don’t. I don’t even know him.”
The woman cocked her head again, then shrugged and said, “Well, I hope you get to go home soon. Sounds like your house will make it. Nice to meet one of the lucky ones.”
One of the lucky ones, Jenny thought as she dressed.
She felt like the woman was holding back, as if she’d wanted to enlighten Jenny about what was really going on.
She pictured how disappointed Jade and her friends would be when the person leading the briefing turned out to be a woman instead of the dishy guy they were hoping for. A woman with a dragon on her ass who hates Coyote Jones, Jenny thought, trying to make all those bits of information fit in her head.
She pushed the door open and ran smack into a firefighter coming out of the men’s locker room with a towel over his head and scissors in his hand.
“Oops! Whoa, careful—I almost impaled you.”
“Oh, hey!”
“Wow, what are the odds of running into you, Miss Scarlet?”
“It’s Jenny. And thank you for saving my cat.”
“Jenny, hi. I’m Nate.”
“What happened to your face?”
“It ran into the claws of a very scared cat.”
“Oh no, Colonel Mustard did that? I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. I was dragging him out of what he thought was a safe place, so I don’t blame him.”
Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Page 13
