“What a man,” she would tease as she squeezed her fingers tight around his thigh.
Barnes would smile again, a smile colored with some embarrassment.
“What?” Claire would ask, serious now.
He would look at her.
“What?” she would repeat. “Why did you call me up?”
“It didn’t always end good.”
“What happened?”
A shrug weighted heavily with memory.
“Do you not want to talk about it?”
“I do, but let me catch my breath.”
“Okay. Take your time. I’m not going anyplace.”
Barnes had nothing to hurry him. So he drove leisurely through the falling afternoon. No hurry. The air blowing inside the truck’s cab was cooling but the box heater had somehow turned on. Barnes made a note to fix that thing again before it burned him up in the heat of the approaching summer.
Barnes turned onto Prospect, heading east and away from the mountains. A half-dozen college students waited at a bus stop. They all wore shorts and ballcaps and colored T-shirts and carried daypacks over their shoulders. Their mouths moved but, as though they were in an old Japanese B-movie, no sound came from them. A couple of them laughed and one punched another on the shoulder. Barnes thought it must be about three-thirty and the kids were waiting for the bus to take them to their four o’clock finals. Business majors or pre-vet students, something safe and sustained like that, Barnes thought. For a moment he envied them for that.
He thought he might ask, “You want me to tell you about Warner? He was the closest to the ridgeline, close enough that he probably could see the blue of the sky looking straight at him as the fire rolled over him. You want me to tell you about him?”
“If you want to,” Claire would say. She would have turned to face Barnes, her hair loose and alive in the wind.
“He would have lived had he used his fire shelter. The official report says so, but I knew it as soon as I saw his body, bent over on hands and knees with his forehead touching the ground as if he were praying. Next to him, like it was ready for use, lay one of his plastic water bottles . . . with water still in it. It wasn’t melted. It was good. His hardhat was only partially melted. Except for maybe a quick blast of heated air, the temperature couldn’t have gone much above four hundred degrees. Under his shelter, he could have made it easy, like lying in a loud sauna.”
“But you can’t be responsible for him not having his shelter out.”
He neared a girl on her bicycle. She wore bright biking shorts, a running bra and visored cap. Her movement was certain and steady. Barnes could see as he pulled up behind her that beads of sweat had formed around the elastic rim of her top. He whistled, but the wind caught his sound and dispersed it like color into the sky.
“If I would have checked him, though, I might have saved him,” Barnes would say to Claire. He imagined squinting at her through the sun’s blaze which would be, as the sun was then, staring through the truck’s rear window over his shoulder.
“How? Checked him how?”
“I made everyone carry their shelters on their pack belt. Warner liked to put his shelter in the back of his pack and put an extra canteen and some munchies in the shelter pack on his belt. I’d caught him on the fires in Idaho doing that and made him give me twenty-five push-ups on the line in full gear. We joked about it, and I knew he’d switch them again if I didn’t bite his ass about it. If I would have checked his shelter case while we were at the base heliport, I’d have caught him. And that would have saved him.”
“But still . . . you can’t be expected to think of everything.”
“But I did think of that. I saw him stacking his gear and yelled to him, asked him where his shelter was. He said, smiling, ‘For Christ-sake, Barnes, I already got a mother—it’s where it’s supposed to be.’”
“So he lied.”
“I knew, though. I knew. Two minutes of my time, a walk of twenty-five feet—that’s all. I just didn’t want to hassle with it, is all. I was just too tired to save him, and, goddamnit, I even thought that. I thought, ‘Go ahead and burn up, you stupid bastard.’ I thought that.”
The sun had lowered as he turned left again from Prospect onto Lemay. The high blast of a siren startled Barnes and he realized that he could not remember driving the entire length of Prospect Road. He slowed his truck to the side of the road and watched as the ambulance passed him on its way to the hospital, nervous lights stabbing at him as it passed. He sped up again and drove on through the siren’s receding wake.
“The noise never stopped,” he would say to Claire. “When I was in the fire shelter waiting for the fire to pass us by, it never stopped. And I couldn’t stop it or the sounds I couldn’t hear except as they yelled in my head.”
Claire would not say anything then. She would have nothing to say, no way to talk with him, no words that would be more than words. She might look at him or she might look straight forward through her side of the truck’s split front windshield.
Then he would tell her about another fire, a fire on which nobody died—the fire in Alaska when Leonard, his crew boss, was treed by a yearling black bear. Leonard had taken a couple of men with him to retrieve some cases of rations from a cache dropped by helicopter. Only problem was that this black bear had found the cache first.
“Usually,” Barnes would say, “a black bear will run if you make enough noise, except this particular black bear either didn’t understand the rules or just didn’t care. Anyway, she had the poor taste to actually want to eat this stuff and was willing to fight for it. I saw Leonard and the others stand on a rise and start jumping up and down and waving their arms. Then, like someone had hit a pause button, they stopped all that, and for a second they were stuck in time. They ran into a clump of paper birch and over the rise came this black bear into the birch stand. Well, one of the guys, a big guy, climbed about the smallest birch tree and he was up there swinging back and forth like he was on the tip of a metronome. The bear chased him from side to side and just as he hit the end of his arc and started back up, the bear nearly reached him. He swung like that a couple of times before he caught another tree and climbed into it. The bear paced between the three trees holding these three guys, stopping under each tree to gaze up at its inhabitant. I let them hang for a few minutes before I gathered up my sawyers and we made enough noise to scare off the bear.”
He imagined that Claire would have liked that story. It was a safe story, a happy ending story that let you feel good. It would have been a good story for Claire. Not the typical story of a fire; most fires were too nondescript for Barnes to remember. His fire record listed more than two hundred fires but he could only remember a third of those for something other than dirt and ash. Then there were the dozen fires when he had seen the possibility of death, and another half-dozen on which men had died, and the one that had killed half his crew. That story was not a story Claire would like. But she would listen.
He might have told Claire that he had paused, unable to say anything while his finger keyed his radio’s mike. That for a few seconds he had watched the fire begin its run up beneath his crew and all he could say was, “God.”
He remembered the terror in his voice sounding far away. He had heard and seen the fire ramp and tear at and above the land, the heat and smoke bite at the short scrub oaks and huddling bunches of piñon and juniper, and the small forest of brush and trees crack as if under a great weight. Those seven seconds of mute dislocation probably would have saved Warner, the man nearest the ridgetop, and might have saved Doobie and Stress and Horndyke and Lopez and maybe even Freeze.
He knew, as he drove past the city’s hospital, how seven seconds, the distance of a full breath as he drove, might have saved some lives. That would have been hard to tell, and she would not have wanted to hear that.
Barnes took the turn easily and smoothly from Lemay left onto Riverside. The turn arrow had switched green just as he approached and he coasted
around the corner as his truck creaked and groaned from its shifting weight. To his right were the railroad tracks. A lone man walked with his head down and a full and dirty pack on his back. The man’s studied gait matched evenly with the track’s ties. The man moved his hands and bobbed his head as though he were talking. As Barnes passed him, the man suddenly stopped and rotated his hand above his head in continuing counterclockwise circles, then just as abruptly he quit circling his hand above his head and pointed across the road, across Barnes’s path and up as if he were pointing at a defining tower.
Barnes slumped to look beneath the rim of the truck’s metal visor but he saw nothing other than treetops and soft cumulus buildup. When Barnes looked back at the lone man, the man had returned to his singular walk, head bent and bobbing and hands nervously dancing in the air ahead of him.
He passed a white Ford Mustang in the right lane. The Mustang’s driver, an aging hippie, flipped off Barnes as he passed. Barnes felt this should be his last revolution around the city.
He felt like having a drink. He really felt like having half a dozen drinks, but a couple bottles of cold beer on the porch as the sun rested behind the Front Range sounded good.
He slowed to let a pedestrian cross Mountain Avenue into the shops and bars of Old Town. Barnes thought of Claire and their winter evenings spooning in darkness after the wildness had passed, of how they talked about living in a cabin somewhere without roads, of having no one but each other. An old dream worth carrying.
He could have told Claire how he stood in the ash and stubble surrounding Warner’s body. He knew Warner was dead when he saw the man lying, crouching almost, thirty yards from the ridgetop. As he approached Warner’s body, he saw Warner’s yellow aramid shirt had been burned from his arms and the skin discolored and charred. He watched the rigid body for movement but saw none. He thought of how still, how stiff the body remained as a light wind blew ash in tiny swirls. Warner looked like he was hiding his eyes with his hands, like a kid playing hide-and-seek, but his hunched body stayed so stiff. Charred shreds of the shirt and T-shirt rimmed the singed nylon belt at Warner’s waist. His hardhat lay a dozen feet away from him, most of the painted red feather had been burned away but the quill pointed uphill with the hardhat’s bill toward Warner. His green fire pants had been stripped from butt to boot top and the man’s legs were stained with death.
Barnes had circled the body and found Warner’s left glove still on his hand. Warner had already told Barnes that he would be leaving the crew at the season’s end. “One last summer of fun,” Warner had said one afternoon in Idaho as he and Barnes mopped up a stump hole together. Warner had graduated from Colorado State that June and would begin law school in Boulder that autumn.
He would tell Claire how, on that day in Idaho when they mopped up together, Warner had seen a squirrel stumbling over twigs and through the ash. They both watched for a few minutes before going to the animal and Warner picked up the squirrel. Its eyes had crusted over from tears mixed with ash. Warner carried it to the fireline, where Barnes opened his water bottle and poured some onto the squirrel’s head. Warner rubbed the water into its face until the layer of ash screening its sight dissolved and washed away. Warner set down the squirrel in the green outside the line and it quickly scurried up the first spruce. Neither man had spoken during those fifteen minutes, and they remained silent as they walked back to the stump hole they were digging out.
That would have been a good story for Claire, Barnes thought. That would have been a story she could have hugged him for.
He turned the corner from Mountain onto Loomis and slowed to a halt against the curb. The afternoon had turned calm and lazy, a dignified idling he could feel on his closed eyelids as he sat in his truck’s cab in front of his house. He opened his eyes a slit and could see inside the dust swirling in his front room the figure of Warner watching him.
He saw Ruth alone in the near corner of her porch, the same afternoon light transient around her. Barnes traced her shape against the backdrop of budding lilacs and red brick, watching even at the distance of tens of feet her breathing, or imagining her breathing.
Ruth’s husband, Robert, walked past her like a stranger straggling through the week, neither looking at her nor turning to speak to her. And Barnes could see that she also did not acknowledge him.
Robert took the front steps two at a time. At his car, he turned and waved, a brief smile on his face, before he drove away. Ruth answered his wave with a tentative wave of her own. Then both hands returned to her cup. She watched Robert’s car disappear around the corner. She took a sip from her cup.
Ruth did not watch Barnes as he walked to her house. She offered him no recognition as he neared her. She stood with her hands around her coffee cup, looking down toward the age cracks in the porch.
During his last revolution around town, he had stopped at Steele’s for some groceries. He self-consciously swung the bag between his hands as he approached her.
“He’s leaving me,” Ruth said.
“Robert?”
“Yes. He’s leaving me.”
Ruth placed her cup on the porch ledge and brought her soiled hands together to rub them as though the day had suddenly turned cold. Barnes watched her eyes dart across a planter that had been recently turned and weeded, as though she were forcing part of her mind to concentrate on something other than Robert, searching out new dandelions or bindweed or snow-on-the-mountain creeping in to strangle out her columbines and cosmos.
Barnes did not know what to say. He watched the slight whiffs of steam rising from Ruth’s coffee cup. He knew “I’m sorry” was wrong, and he knew “Are you all right?” sounded trite because she obviously was not. He thought he might tell her that everything would be okay, but he did not know what would be right, and he sensed that she knew a more certain truth. He stood watching her eyes move and said nothing.
Then Grace walked through the front door with a cup of lemonade in her hands. “Hi, Barnes. What’cha doing?”
Grace was five years old with, like her mother, brown almond-shaped eyes but blonde, not brown, hair tinted by a blush when the sun lighted in a soft angle across her head. She was active and precocious, and Barnes liked her more than he thought he would like a little kid.
Barnes smiled at Grace. He had once told her that, no matter what, he would always have a smile for her. He leaned down toward her and said, “I was out for a drive and saw your mother over here, so I thought I’d come over and see what kind of trouble you’re getting into.”
“No trouble.” She held the lemonade in both hands as she drank.
“No trouble? Then what?”
“Helping.”
“You do that well.” He stood back up and smiled at Ruth.
“Right,” Ruth said, extending the word in sarcasm. “As long as it’s green and growing, she pulls it. She’s not just weeding parts of the flower bed, she’s denuding them.”
“Clean cut,” Grace said between drinks of lemonade.
“Clear cut?” Barnes asked.
“That.”
Ruth said, “A little more selectivity is called for here, sweetheart.” She shrugged her shoulders at Barnes in a sign of parental resignation, knowing that Grace probably would not register the difference between good green stuff and bad green stuff.
Barnes looked down at the sun bouncing from Grace’s hair, a new blossom on the stem. Grace looked back up at him with a smile somewhere between happy and trouble.
Breaking the silence, Barnes asked Ruth, “Aren’t you working at the library today?”
“I called in sick. Tomorrow too.”
Barnes nodded. He understood that slough Ruth seemed to have fallen into. He wished that he could help her find her way out.
Ruth bent to her weeds and said, “Talk with you sometime tomorrow?”
“Yes. But now I had better get this home before my ice cream melts.”
“Ice cream,” Grace sang. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for
ice cream.”
“You come over this evening and I’ll give you some.”
“Okay, Barnes.”
“We’ll talk later,” he said to Ruth, feeling something like a thief who had stolen a moment from her and left only an empty space in replacement.
Ruth let out a heavy sigh. Her eyes slid up from the ground to Grace and to Barnes. She gave him a somber smile. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow,” she said again in a tone that was closer to questioning.
“Yes,” Barnes said.
Ruth took Grace’s hand and led her back inside their house.
As he mounted the steps to his own house, Barnes heard the hard metallic sound of a car door being shut in anger. He turned and saw a man wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson walk toward him from across the street. Barnes had never met the man, but he knew immediately who he was. Even had he never seen the man’s photograph repeated in newspapers and magazines and on television, Barnes would have known that this man was Max Downey’s father.
“You Barnes?” Downey’s voice was heavy and condescending.
“Yes.” Barnes watched Downey’s eyes tighten. Downey stood tall and straight, his shoulders squared like a man who felt he could best life through his presence. He left his hands at his sides, and Barnes could see the tension in Downey’s jaw.
“I’m George Downey. We have to talk.” The man’s tone slid into demanding. He sounded like someone used to getting his way, a businessman who gave orders and offered no opportunity for excuses or questions.
“About the fire?” Barnes asked with some hesitation. He knew what about but he still asked, an attempt to draw off Downey for the moment in order to gather his own thoughts. Downey’s son, Max, was the smokejumper in charge when the Red Feather Hot Shots helicoptered up to the helispots above the Tempest Ridge Fire. Max had made the decision to put in the fireline, digging a direct line down the hill with the fire burning below the crews. Max had made the decision but Barnes had agreed. Max had died on that fireline along with Russell Fleming, another jumper, and the twelve members of Barnes’s crew while Barnes watched from a helispot further up the ridge.
After the Fire Page 2
