by Susan Sey
He didn’t know how to argue with that so he didn’t try.
“What happened to you?” she asked quietly. “What took away all those sweet words you used to have and put all that noise in your head?”
“Nothing happened to me. That’s exactly the problem.”
Her silence was calm, endless. She’d have sat there forever, waiting serenely for him to go on without being remotely tempted to throw in a word or a thought of her own. Which was maybe why he started talking.
“I have this uncle,” he said finally. “My mother’s brother. Ben. He was a Black Canyon Hotshot when I was growing up, which gave him a cool factor somewhere between a Navy SEAL and an Olympic snowboarder. Hotshots are like the Marines of the wild land firefighters, you know? Smoke jumpers parachute into the fight, which is wicked cool and has its own challenges, I’m sure, but hotshots get there the hard way. They hump in on foot, carrying half their body weight in equipment and gear. They’re the toughest bastards on the fire line, and that was who I wanted to be.
“My mom, on the other hand, ran an Irish pub in Denver. And no, we’re not Irish. But nobody does a better pub than the Irish and my mom’s just like my uncle. She doesn’t do second best, not at anything. She put everything into that place after my dad died. She wanted to build something for my sister and me, something that would be there for us after she died, too.”
“Did she?”
“Die? Hell, no. Mom’s as tough as Ben, and Ben’s a stick of goddamn jerky. But did she build something? Yeah, she did. And my sister Julie is just like our mom. The instant she graduated college — college was Mom’s one nonnegotiable — she went to work at the pub full time. She talked Mom into buying this incredibly expensive espresso machine and—” He cut himself off, dragged a palm down his face. “And I’m stalling.”
She squeezed his hand but held that dark, inviting silence of hers. He pulled in a deep breath and it was full of her stillness. It settled him. It didn’t solve him but it settled him enough to go on.
“The restaurant business wasn’t for me. I wanted to be Ben. My mom knew it, and she didn’t fight me. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d been working as an EMT for two years. I still pulled shifts at the pub but my heart was set on fire. I went to Colorado State University for a Forestry degree, with a concentration in Forest Fire Science. Applied to hotshot crews for two years after college before I finally got on with a brand new crew out of New Mexico, the Silver Creek crew. Oh, I wanted to be one of Ben’s Black Canyon boys but I knew I needed to prove myself. Black Canyon was a legend and Ben was the next thing to a dad to me. Hell, for all practical purposes, he was my dad, and I wanted to prove myself to him as much as to myself. Probably more. I wanted to come up the hard way, just like he had. So I landed on the Silver Creek crew and took my damn lumps.
“That first season was hell on earth. I’d never been filthier or more exhausted in my life. I’d never been happier, either. Hotshotting is sixteen hour days, fourteen of them in a row sometimes, cutting fire line. That’s essentially ripping a path the size of a decent highway through a forest but instead of using a bulldozer, you do it by hand. You take out every tree, every bush, every root, even the damn soil, anything that could possibly burn. It’s twenty guys building a fuel-free strip between a fire and anything the government doesn’t want to burn. And I loved it.
I started as a scrape, just like everybody else does, trailing the chainsaw teams, chopping out and raking away anything the sawyers and their swampers left behind. Worked my way up to swamper, dragging felled trees off the line. Then I was a sawyer, felling those trees. Then I was squad boss for the sawyers. By the time I was twenty-five I was the captain of Silver Creek, answered only to the superintendent. And our supe — Vic — he was kind of a dick. That’s what we called him, in fact. Vic the Dick. He was old school. Very military, right down to the crew cut.”
Eli scrubbed a rueful hand over the stubble covering his scalp. It was a reminder every day of his hubris. Every chill breeze was a warning — don’t get too comfortable, too confident. Don’t forget that you’re still above the earth in the sun, breathing and eating and living while nine good men aren’t.
“We were on a fire in the mountains a couple hours outside Sedona. I had half the guys and Vic had the other half,” he began and stopped. Had to swallow and start again. “It was a beast of a fire, hot as hell and faster than lightning. It was tough country, all pockets and canyons and peaks, and the fuel load was staggering. It hadn’t burned since 1971 and it was dry as hell. My crew and I were cutting line on the heel of the fire down in a valley—”
“The heel?”
“Behind the fire.”
“Why would you do that? I mean, if the fire’s going one direction, why wouldn’t you put all your resources into cutting line in front of it?
“Because there’s no guarantee the fire’s going to keep moving that direction. Forecasts are handy but when a fire starts making its own weather, all bets are off.”
“A fire can make its own weather?”
“Sure. There’s a shitload of water stored in even the driest forest, and when it burns hot and fast, that’s not just a column of smoke you’re seeing in the sky. It’s steam, too. And you know what happens when a bunch of hot, wet air meets a bunch of cold dry air somewhere way the hell up in the atmosphere?”
“It comes down,” Willa said wonderingly. “The steam condenses into water and it comes down as rain.”
“It sure does. The actual rain evaporates before it gets to the ground but the wind it generates would put a hurricane to shame. And that’s when shit gets dangerous because nobody can predict which way that wind’s going to blow. A fire that’s been creeping west all day will suddenly double back on itself and tear up five hundred acres to the east that nobody was even looking at.” He shrugged. “The heroes with a track record get to be on the front lines, but when the government’s fighting a fire, they hedge their bets and put a team on the heel, too.”
“I see.”
“Heeling’s a shit job but that’s what the young, unproven crews like Silver Creek are for. But we were hot to change that.”
“How?”
“By being fearless motherfuckers with balls of steel, of course. So we’d been heeling for three days already, watching the smoke and steam climb like a damn skyscraper.” A mental picture rose up in his mind’s eye, as vivid to him now on a midnight porch in the north woods as it had been on a sweltering July afternoon in the mountains. A towering column of brackish smoke arrowing into the sky, like the fire itself giving you the finger. Dread and terror balled together in his throat but back then he’d only felt awe and anticipation. “It was going to crash down, all that steam. Everybody knew it, from Uncle Ben — who’d been named incident commander of the whole fire — on down to the newest scrape on Silver Creek. And when it did, the shape of the valley would probably funnel the wind — and the fire — right back the way it had come. Back toward my crew.”
She said nothing, but her hand was a warm, reassuring presence on his thigh. He cleared his throat and went on.
“When you’re heeling a fire and it turns on you, you have two options. You either run toward the fire or away from it.”
“Why on earth would you run toward it?”
“After a fire rolls through a section of forest, there’s nothing left to burn. That area’s called the good black and there’s nowhere safer. The good black is always your first option when the fire you’re heeling turns on you.” He let out a breath — had he been holding it? — and forced his shoulders to relax. Forced himself to go on. “Your other option, of course, is to run away from the fire and hope like hell that the line you’ve been cutting buys you enough time to get to some other previously identified safe zone. It’s riskier, of course, but sometimes it’s the right call.”
“Was it?” she asked quietly. “Was it the right call?”
“No,” he said, just as quietly. “But we made it anyw
ay.”
CHAPTER 15
WILLA CLOSED HER eyes and concentrated on breathing, slow and even. The hair on her arms lifted and the air smelled electric, as if the thunderstorm in Eli’s memory were gathering in the skies above them, here and now, threatening to break. But it wasn’t. Willa knew it. The only thing that would break tonight was Eli.
She thought of her thinnie, of its impossible age, of the serenity born of that age. She put her mind in the center of it, even as her heart stayed and bled with Eli. She focused on that ancient calm, and pushed it from her pores into the air between them. She was a catalyst for the coming storm; she understood this even as she tried to comfort him. She acted on Eli like a trigger of some sort, pulling something from him he had no desire to give up, something he wouldn’t thank her for demanding.
But there was no going back, not now. Whatever it was he needed to say next — and she dreaded it — it was poisoning him. It was killing him, minute by minute, and he needed it out. He was like an animal in a trap. He could either lie down and wait for death, or he could start gnawing off his own leg. She had the impression that up until this moment, up until this night, he’d been resigned to death. Had been waiting for it, in fact. Might even have welcomed it. But something had changed in him tonight, something she’d triggered somehow, and now he was circling the idea of living instead. Sniffing at it, gathering his courage for the unspeakable violence he’d need to do his own soul to earn it.
And that violence was swirling and growing, snapping and snarling in the air like an impending storm. And Willa was the lightning rod. She only hoped she was strong enough to bear the strike.
“What happened?” she murmured, and tipped her head onto his shoulder. Rubbed her cheek against the living fact of him, breathed in the scent of sharp pines and clean man and unbearable sorrow. “Tell me.”
He paused for a long moment, so long she wondered if he was going to go on. Then he spoke.
“We had talked about it, me and the guys. We’d talked it through all day and we all agreed. When the fire turned, we weren’t going to trot over to the black and wait there like good little boys for the fire to blow by us so we could get on its tail and start heeling again. Not when there was a high-dollar development not a mile behind us full of people standing on their million-dollar roofs live-streaming the action. Not when, with the help of a little conveniently timed radio trouble, we could be the kind of steel-balled motherfuckers who were already cutting line for the cameras before any of the other crews — including Black Canyon — even showed up. All we had to do was get to that development before the fire did.”
His voice was thin, far away. She knew he was back on some sun-baked mountain in the southwest, dripping sweat and breathing smoke. “I hiked over to this knob of rock off to the north where I could have eyes on both my guys and the fire. I watched the smoke column grow this ugly, lightning-streaked mushroom head, then I saw it drop out of the sky onto the fire. It was goddamn textbook, and it shoved the fire right back the way it had come.”
“Toward your crew.”
He nodded, cleared his throat. “I was on the radio the instant I saw it turn, gave my guys the go. Two seconds later, the radios fucking blew up. I didn’t even have to fake radio trouble. If Ben or Vic tried to order my crew to the black, I never heard him. Every captain, every supe, every squad boss was trying to raise his own crew to confirm that they were executing their exit strategy. It was chaos across the channels but I had gotten the jump. I’d already put my guys in motion and I could see them doing exactly what we’d talked about, exactly what we’d all agreed on. They were hauling ass for that fancy development. Except I could also see the fire, and it was moving fast. Too fast. Faster than I’d ever seen a fire move.”
He laughed then, short and bloody. “Twenty-seven years old and I thought I knew how fast a fire could move. Jesus, I was an arrogant little dick. Nobody has any idea how fast a fire can move. You can’t possibly imagine it. But maybe I’m still that arrogant dick, because even now I believe my guys could’ve outrun it. They were beasts, and they knew they were running for their lives. They should’ve won.”
They hadn’t won. Willa didn’t need to hear him say it. He didn’t need to hear her speak that ugly truth, either, so she stayed silent. Eli didn’t notice. She would’ve wondered if he was even aware of her anymore, except that her fingers were crushed inside the vise of his own.
“There was a set of tennis courts right on the leading edge of the development, and we’d IDed them as our worst case scenario option. If worse came to absolute worst, if the fire was right on our asses, we could deploy our fire shelters there. It would be humiliating — the idea is to never be stupid enough to have to deploy — but at least we’d be alive.” He paused, and the silence was so awful Willa didn’t know if she’d survive it. “They were less than two hundred yards from the courts when the fire caught them. Later on, when they sent a crew up to retrieve the bodies, they found eight fire shelters deployed, feet toward the flames, just like we always practiced. Eight shelters, Willa, but I had nine men on my team.”
She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder again, this time to wipe away her tears. His voice was dry as the desert floor, raw as an open wound.
“They found Thomas in Ollie’s shelter,” he said quietly. “They were a sawyer/swamper pair, Thomas and Ollie, and I swear they shared a brain. They could clear a hundred-year-old ponderosa without a word and make it look like a fucking ballet. But here’s the thing, Willa. If you can get into a sleeping bag, you can deploy a fire shelter, but those things aren’t designed to hold two fully grown men. There shouldn’t have been two guys in one shelter, not even guys as close as Thomas and Ollie.”
“So what happened?” she asked. “Why would they buddy up?”
He shifted his shoulders, resettling the weight of those nine deaths like a hiker adjusting a heavy pack. “I’ve been asking myself the same question every second of every day since. And I don’t know the answer, not for sure. But Thomas had been sick the week before the fire with one of those nasty flus that leaves you on the bathroom floor, praying to die. When we got the call about the fire, he insisted he was totally fit, 100 percent.” A smile ghosted across his face. “He was probably eighty percent at best but for those three days we fought that fire, he made up the missing twenty with sheer grit. He’d be damned if he’d stay home watching Netflix while the rest of us were off covering ourselves in glory.” The smile died. “But that kind of grit doesn’t leave much in the tank, not even when you’re running for your life.” He dropped his head. “I doubt he did much running, though. If he was too weak to even deploy his own shelter, he was probably too weak to even hike at speed, let alone run. And that means nobody else was running, either, because my crew would rather die than leave a brother behind. They’d probably been carrying him by the time they realized they weren’t going to make it and deployed.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Willa said helplessly. “He worked for three days without flagging. He didn’t give you any indication—”
“I was the captain,” he said simply. “My job was to make the right call. My job was to honor grit like that. To protect it, even from the guy giving it to me. Instead I abused my position—”
“You think you abused your position?”
“I think I wanted to be the guy who showed the world — who showed my uncle — that the Silver Creek guys were heroes, not heelers. That when a fire turned nasty, we had the balls and the vision to get in front of it instead punking out and scampering for the black. I wanted Ben to show up with his Black Canyon crew and find Silver Creek already there putting a leash on that bitch.” He shifted again, still searching for some way to carry that load, and Willa’s heart bled for him.
“You said the fire moved faster than anything you’d ever seen. What if you’d been more conservative and run for the black? Would you have made it?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled his fingers from hers. Dropped
his elbows to his knees and released a shuddering breath. “I’d have been with my guys, though. If the fire caught us, it would’ve caught us together. Maybe we’d have died, maybe we wouldn’t, but it would’ve happened to all of us together.”
Willa’s throat clamped shut. He wasn’t just guilty or ashamed, she realized suddenly. Eli Walker was lonely. He’d been a cocksure, incredibly fit young man pursuing a dangerous profession in the company of other young men exactly like himself, and collectively they’d made a bad decision with terrible consequences. But Eli had gotten lucky. He’d survived, and his shame and guilt over that were immense. But underneath them both was a staggering loneliness. He’d lost his brothers.
“I was the captain, Willa. I was their leader and I failed them. If anybody had to die on that mountain, it should’ve been me.” He closed his eyes. “It should’ve been me.”
For a long time, Willa said nothing. She simply leaned into his shoulder and stayed with him. She knew what regret was. She knew how bitter bad decisions tasted, even if no good decisions had existed when you made the bad ones. Even if you weren’t making those decisions by yourself. She knew exactly the hell Eli was living in. And she knew that you didn’t find your way out of that kind of hell. You just learned to bear it.
She lifted a hand and placed it in the center of his back. It was tight under her hand, the muscles rigid with shame and pain. She moved her hand in slow circles, smoothed it over all that guilt and sorrow. Over the aching loneliness. “You didn’t make that decision by yourself, Eli, but even if you did, there’s no changing what’s done. Those men — your brothers — are gone, and you can’t buy back their lives with yours. No matter how much pain you bear, no matter how much you suffer, you can’t undo what’s done. And wishing yourself dead won’t change that.”
“How am I supposed to live with that?” His voice was tight, choked. He trembled under her hand, the storm gathering, flashing and howling. “If I can’t die, how do I live?”
