by Nevada Barr
To the east the sun was consuming the glitter of hot spots with its own superior fire. Lurid red light, filtered through smoke, bathed the camp.
“I have bad news,” Anna said, and she handed the younger woman the note. As if in slow motion, Jennifer’s face crumpled. Her mouth opened slightly as she read, her lips and eyes took on the soft quiver of a child’s, tears ran down her cheeks. Once she looked to Anna as if for a reprieve but there was none.
“Her brother died,” Anna explained to LeFleur. One of the crew boss’s callused hands reached out but stopped before it reached Jennifer. He shot Anna a look of such anger for a second she thought he might try and kill the messenger.
After a moment he said to the air between Jennifer and Anna: “You’ll want to demob. Get home. Anna will work it out.” With the air of a man escaping, he walked away.
Jennifer stopped him: “I won’t go.”
LeFleur looked back without turning.
“He died in this fire, in the Jackknife, that’s what it says. I need to stay, fight this fire.” Jennifer pushed her face back in shape and mopped her tears with her sleeve.
“That’s not the way it works,” LeFleur said. “We can’t use you if your mind’s on something else. Go home.”
He was right, but still Anna wanted to smack him.
“There’s nothing wrong with my mind,” Jennifer snapped. For an instant anger banished grief and Anna took back her slap. LeFleur’s unorthodox therapy seemed to give at least short-term relief.
The crew boss stared at Jennifer and she glared back. Tears poured down her face, but the softness, the quiver had gone.
LeFleur lit a Pall Mall and flicked the match toward the barren earth around the medical tent. Crew bosses had close to absolute power over the twenty firefighters under their care. On a fireline, as in battle, somebody had to be in charge. After a lengthy weighing of Lord knew what factors he said: “If Anna can square it with the brass you can stay with the San Juan.”
“Go on out with the crew today,” Anna said. “I’ll catch a ride down the mountain and see what I can do.”
Jennifer nodded curtly. “Excuse me,” she whispered, and left Anna and LeFleur under the pine. They watched her walk away, spine straight, shoulders back.
“Women on the fireline,” LeFleur said disgustedly, stubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his boot, shredded the paper and let the tobacco scatter.
“Dead brothers aren’t exactly a gender-based liability,” Anna said mildly. LeFleur chose not to answer.
“Time to rally the troops,” he said.
Anna returned to the medical unit to help Lindstrom finish the morning calls.
The line outside the tent had lengthened each day they’d been spiked out. Bodies, nerves, psyches were being worn down by work and hard living. Accidents were becoming more common; cuts, bruises and colds epidemic.
Lindstrom looked up with relief as Anna pushed into the tent. “Sure been lonely around here without you,” he said pointedly. “Howard Black Elk’s pining away. Says nobody does his feet like you. My, my, I do believe it’s love.”
“I’ll do him,” Anna said. A long folding table took up the center of the tent. Two shallow boxes covered the surface. Carefully arranged in each were the tools of their trade: scissors, gauze, compresses, blister dressings, splints, salves, triangular bandages, tweezers, antihistamines. The paraphernalia of Mom’s medicine cabinet on an industrial scale. Backboards, leg splints and cervical collars were stored beneath.
Anna picked through the boxes plucking out the Rx for Black Elk’s feet.
“What was all the cloaking and daggering this morning?” Lindstrom asked. “Much hush-hush cloistering and whispering. Don’t tell me my beloved Jennifer is going to have that barbarian LeFleur’s baby. I couldn’t bear it.”
Anna laughed. It felt good. “Nope. Real bad news. Remember that burned corpse they found near Pinson Lake?”
“The dog guy?”
“Yeah. They identified the body.”
“Schnauzer? Shiat zhu?”
“It was Jennifer’s brother. She took it hard. I didn’t even know she had a brother but then I haven’t known her all that long. As to what a boy from Memphis was doing in the mountains of California, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Joshua lives here. Lived here, I guess I should say now, shouldn’t I?”
Anna looked up not only because of the unexpected answer but the wooden monotone that had crushed Stephen’s usual vibrance.
“You knew him.”
“Knew him.” Lindstrom nodded. “He did some freelance work for the Forest Service in Reno setting up our new computer system. We—”
“Cut the sewing bee short.” A slightly nasal voice with a raw-edged twang sliced between Anna and Lindstrom. From the corner of her eye Anna could see Leonard Nims planted just outside the tent flaps, the only agitation between two lines of patient firefighters. With impatient taps he forced a filtered cigarette from a box marked Harley Davidson.
She ignored him. “Good friend?” she asked Stephen.
“Good friend.”
“Fucking women,” Nims hissed just loud enough Anna would hear. “Next thing they’ll be hiring faggots. Don’t ask, don’t tell, give me a fucking break. If you ladies will excuse me.” He pushed into the tent and began rummaging through the items on the table. “It’d be nice to get some attention before a man bleeds to death.”
Neither heat nor light had yet penetrated the tent’s interior, but by the harsh glow of the Coleman, Anna noted two scratches running from Nims’s temple to the middle of his cheek where a tree or something had scraped his face. The deeper of the two oozed beads of blood into the black stubble of beard.
Lindstrom laid a hand on Nims’s wrist, stopping the pillage of their supplies. The shorter man’s face grew mottled red and his eyes bulged slightly.
Good candidate for a stroke, Anna thought hopefully.
“This’ll do for you,” Lindstrom said evenly, and he handed Nims a small tube of Neosporin.
Wordlessly, Anna took the ointment from Nims’s fingers and replaced it with an alcohol pad and a vial of iodine.
“The ointment would’ve worked,” Lindstrom said as Nims left.
“Iodine will hurt more.”
Stephen laughed. “I want to be just like you when I grow up, Anna.”
She waited a second to see if he needed to talk about Joshua Short. He didn’t and there wasn’t time. Gratefully, Anna turned back to her work.
By the time the last firefighter was cared for, the sun had crept clear of the heaviest smoke and poured into the compound burning off the morning’s chill. Anna tipped her face to the light and felt renewed. “I’m going down the hill,” she said as she heard Stephen clearing up rubbish from the shift. “Make a list of what we need. I’ll come back by after I’ve made sure of my ride.”
“Riding down with Polly Wolly doodle all the day?”
“If she hasn’t lit out on me.”
“She may have. I’ve noticed when the men leave camp it loses much of its allure for our heroine.”
“I’ll pick you up some cream,” Anna said.
Stephen meowed unrepentantly.
A HEAVYSET MAN around thirty with a belly that hung over his belt and the thinning hair of a much older man was pulling cold lunch boxes from inside a truck and setting them on the tailgate where the crews could help themselves. Neil Page: Anna dredged the name up from some list she’d seen. Page was in charge of spike camp supplies. A local himself, he’d recommended the local hires and supervised the handful of drivers who trucked food up from Incident Base.
Anna leaned on the truck’s bumper and waited till he grunted back, another box in his arms. “Seen Paula?” she asked.
“Probably rifling wallets in the tents.” He puffed and loosed a brown stream of tobacco juice over the tailgate. “Greedy little bitch.”
Anna waited.
“Last I saw her she was squabbling with—” A pi
le of lunches slithered from Page’s arms and scattered across the packed dirt. To show what a great gal she was, Anna gathered them up for him.
“With who?”
“Hell if I know,” he growled, as if Anna’d gotten personal. “They were over by that truck of hers. You can do your own snooping.”
“Thanks,” Anna said dryly.
“Anytime.”
Anna found Paula stretched out on a folding lounge chair in her truck bed, her pants legs rolled as high as they would go and her shirt tied up baring her midriff. It was too early in the day to hope for any tanning action but Anna doubted that was the focus of this particular exercise. Slanting morning sun the color of molten lava lighted the girl most flatteringly, much to the enjoyment of columns of firefighters headed for the line.
“Sorry to make you wait.” Anna leaned against the truck and watched the display sputter to life.
“Yeah. Well.” Paula slapped her trouser legs down and fumbled at the knot in her shirtfront. “I got a lot of stuff I gotta get done today.”
“Me too. I’ll need a ride down the hill as soon as I get a list from Stephen. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.” Anna left Paula to finish dressing.
ANNA HADN’T BEEN out of spike camp since she’d been detailed there the week before. This outing felt like a holiday. She liked watching the world go by the window: the endless trees, the sameness of the evergreen color, the red of manzanita and the gold of the soil, sun-dappling the lichen and pine needles in intricate mosaics. All overlaid by strange smoke-filtered light, as if seen through tinted glass or the dire prophecies of some ancient soothsayer.
And she was going to get a hot shower. As the miles bumped by and the plume of dust they laid grew longer, she could almost feel the water combing through the muck of dirt and ash in her hair, scratching her itchy scalp, sloughing off the grime of camp.
Even Paula’s chattering as they jolted down the rough logging roads didn’t take the edge off. Once Paula Boggins found out Anna wasn’t going to bite her she never stopped talking. For a while Anna listened, learning more than she ever wanted to about all the things Paula needed to buy during her short stay on Planet Earth, then she tuned the girl out. Fortunately Miss Boggins wasn’t the type to require answering and Anna let the words flow over her with the engine noise.
In contrast to the small and isolated spike camp, Incident Base, with its one thousand souls and all the supporting staff and machinery for the campaign, bustled like the big city: parking lots, tents by the score, buzzing phones and faxes, hot and cold running personnel. Anna took in the sights. She bought fresh underwear at a commissary that had sprung out of the back of a semi-truck trailer to offer life’s necessities: fire boots, chewing tobacco, candy and Tampax. She stood in the shower, an eight-by-eight metal room in the back of another trailer, with a central column surrounded by showerheads to accommodate six women at a time, until long after guilt should have forced her to stop wasting water. She dried herself on the gigantic paper towels trucked in for that purpose. She braided her hair and studied her face in the polished aluminum that passed for mirrors over the line of washstands outside the canvas dressing room. The gray tracing age through her braids was taking over the brown but the soft reflection of the metal was kind to the lines and wrinkles carved in her forehead and around her eyes. She visited a “Women Only” Porta-John the women in the Communications and Information tents had taken over in what was being termed the Honey Pot Uprising.
After a full sit-down meal in a mess tent with shade and netting to keep the flies and yellow jackets at bay, Anna felt ready to face the brass.
Logistics sent her over to Time Keeping and Time Keeping to the Command tent. Wherever there were two government employees to rub together, a bureaucracy flared up. Anna was beginning to remember the isolation of spike camp almost nostalgically when she finally cornered the Operations section chief and got her questions answered.
Short’s staying or going was a moot point. Spike camp was due to be demobed. Two of the three crews were coming out tonight and the San Juans would head out the following day.
The fire was gearing down. They estimated containment soon. The National Weather Service predicted a cold front due in twenty-four hours with a seventy percent chance of rain below forty-one-hundred feet and snow at the higher elevations.
The Jackknife was about to fold.
Anna would stay on at Base as an EMT until the fire was completely controlled but even she and Stephen would probably be demobed by the end of the week. Good news, Anna guessed. She’d miss the money—overtime jacked her paycheck up enough the IRS took notice—and the boot-camp simplicity would be replaced by grown-up worries. But home meant comfort and her cat and clean clothes.
She arranged a lift back to spike with the helicopter taking up hot suppers and bringing down the two women in charge of Time Keeping. With an hour to kill till her ride left, she scored a Pepsi from one of the ubiquitous coolers of soda, candy and fruit that littered every fire camp she’d ever been in, and wandered down the dusty road from the Command area tents.
Constant traffic had pulverized the soil to a fine gray powder that flowed over the toes of her boots like fog. Pines, their lower branches made ghostly by dust, leaned close, breathing out a faint scent of resin. The helicopters had momentarily abandoned their constant water brigade to and from area lakes to dip their buckets.
In that odd pocket of silence, it occurred to Anna the forest would heave a great sigh of relief to be rid of this shantytown with its garbage and buzz of engines and saws. Wildfires were business as usual. They’d burned since the first tree had been struck by the first bolt of lightning. Forests had survived, evolved, grown stronger. But man, hacking firelines with Mcleod and dozer, shovel and pulaski, took some assimilating. Sometimes the fighting left more lasting scars than the fire.
Where the dirt road turned clear of the trees and into the main body of the camp, under the shade of a ponderosa, two security guards in Forest Service green sat at a folding table looking bored. One, ankles crossed on the back of an empty metal chair, read a dog-eared copy of Praetorian. The other appeared to be amusing himself by interrupting. Both were relieved when Anna meandered up.
Looking out of place, a phone sat on the corner of the table, its wires vanishing into a shallow covered trench leading beneath the roadway.
“You can use it,” the nonreader offered. “Anybody can. Five minutes free anywhere in the country.”
“No kidding?”
“Swear to God.” He crossed his heart and looked so solemn Anna laughed. Like a majority of firefighters he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. His boyish good looks probably got him carded in every bar he walked into.
“Anywhere? Free?”
“Yup. You should see the line at night when the crews come down. Sixty to a hundred guys waiting to make their call. It’s empty now,” he said invitingly.
The plain black plastic did look seductive, with its promise of access to another world, one presumably where people were just dying to hear from you.
Anna wished she had someone to call.
“Come on, when was the last time Uncle Sam gave you a freebie?” the young man cajoled.
Anna thought of calling her sister Molly but a glance at her watch told her it was three-ten New York time. Molly would be with a client.
“Go on. Reach out and touch somebody.”
“Do you sell used cars in the off season?” Anna teased.
“Car stereos.”
“What the hell.” She picked up the receiver. Cradling it to her ear, she dug her wallet out of her hip pocket. Crunched between her Visa and her library card was a gold-embossed business card. On one side, scrawled in letters as gangling as their creator, were the words: “Call me if you need anything.” Anna flipped it over. “Frederick Stanton, Special Agent, FBI” was printed in black, along with the number.
An onslaught of butterflies the size of pterodactyls flapped through Anna�
�s innards as she dialed the number. “Frederick Stanton, please.”
She made it by the secretary. The young security guard nodded encouragingly.
“This is Agent Stanton.”
Anna’s mind froze. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth—at least that’s what it felt like. Quietly she hung up. “Busy,” she said.
“Try again.”
Anna shook her head. “Got to get back to spike.”
So much for her sojourn in the fast lane.
CHAPTER
Three
BY NOON THE next day spike camp was all but gone. The medical tent and the supply tent were in the final stages of disassembly. Wearing shorts and a tee shirt, Paula stood by watching as Anna and Stephen loaded the canvas into the back of her truck. Neil Page, a chaw of tobacco distending his lower lip, rested his belly on the truck’s radiator, staring glumly at the engine. An oily red rag protruded from his hip pocket, flagging exposed derriere decolletage. A screwdriver and crescent wrench, the only tools he was conversant with, were balanced on the fender.
“I’m not hanging around up here all day waiting for you to get that damn thing up and going.” Paula sucked on an orange Gatorade. The colored drink painted a Kool-Aid smile on her round face.
“Like you got a choice,” Neil muttered.
Tossing her hair, Paula pouted at Stephen. “When they coming to get you? There room for me? I’ll sit on somebody’s lap if I got to.”
“Yeah. And talk about the first thing that comes up,” issued from under the truck’s hood along with a stream of brown tobacco juice.
“Fuck off, Neil. Can I?”
Stephen pushed the roll of canvas farther up on the bed. “No problem, little lady,” he mimicked John Wayne’s classic cadence.
If she got the joke, Paula didn’t let on. “When ya goin’?”
“Tonight with the bus that comes for the last of the San Juans.”
Paula turned her back. “That’s later’n us even. That don’t do me no good.”
