“I’m going to court,” said Downey.
“I heard.” All of the newspapers along the Front Range as well as the Missoula newspaper had called for interviews. Barnes had ignored their queries and wished he could ignore Downey’s.
“I want you to testify,” Downey said. It was not a plea yet not quite a demand either, closer to an insistent suggestion.
Barnes brushed his hand through his hair. He said, “I don’t know that I can help you, Mr. Downey.”
Downey protested immediately as though prepared for some reluctance from Barnes. “By God, they want to crucify my boy. You knew him. He was as good a man as there is, and these sons of bitches have blamed him for what happened on that mountain. Blamed him, damnit, blamed him.”
“I can’t help you,” Barnes answered again.
There was a dry pause through which Barnes could feel himself and Downey fall into opposing silences. Barnes had read the newspaper articles that blamed him for the deaths and the articles that placed blame on Downey and the articles that placed blame nowhere. Some of them were right. He saw no reason, though, to go to court over those that were wrong or those that were right and someone wished were wrong. All he could see coming from that action were more heartaches for the families of those who died. So he kept his mouth shut, talking only to the official investigating team. The only other person he talked to in depth about the fire was Call, Ruth’s seventy-year-old father next door.
“You won’t help,” Downey said. There was no resignation in his voice, as though he had known what Barnes would say and had resolved to carry on in spite of Barnes. Maybe, Barnes thought as he stood with Downey in the day’s increasing heat, Downey preferred it that way. Barnes became the villain, the man who had made the wrong choice.
“I can’t help you,” Barnes repeated. “I don’t see any good purpose in going to court.”
“I see. You want people to think that Max fucked up so they won’t blame you.”
“No, sir, I don’t want that. I just—”
“I know what you want, but this isn’t just about you.”
“What you’re doing is—”
“Don’t tell me what the hell I’m doing. I know what I’m doing. I’m saving my boy. I couldn’t save him then but I sure as hell can save him now.”
“This isn’t going to help anything.”
“You mean it won’t help you.”
A hard silence separated them. Neither man had moved from where he had begun.
Downey’s jaw muscles twitched. Barnes could feel a tightening in his own fists and arms, but neither man stepped into the no man’s land between them. Barnes knew that a violence would most certainly follow such a closing. He kept his body as open as he could and his eyes tight on Downey’s to keep that violence from occurring.
Barnes felt a weight of absence. In the weight of absence, he also felt his ghosts walk along that fireline with the trust of the blind.
“You got nothing to say,” Downey said. Barnes thought whether the man meant it as a question or an accusation.
“No,” Barnes said.
“We’ll talk again.”
Barnes said nothing.
“You’re a coward and a son of a bitch. I’d haul your worthless ass into court if I didn’t think you’d lie like the rest of them. You and all them office bureaucrats who wrote that damn report, you’re all alike. Save your jobs, save your hides. Not a one of you is worth half my boy . . . not half, goddamnit, and you all know it.”
Tears welled in the old man’s eyes, and his entire body shivered with rage before he turned and walked back across the street to his car.
After Downey had driven off, Barnes gathered the day’s mail—credit card applications, a Victoria’s Secret catalogue that Chandler had gotten him a subscription to, his bank statements, and his Fidelity IRA statement. He sat at the dining room table with a bottle of Fat Tire. He opened the mail, but did not consider it carefully. He no longer kept a monthly track of his retirement accounts and investments. As had a great many other things, that practice had ended the previous summer.
He was tired. Downey’s visit had drained him, and the previous night’s sleep had been short and unfinished. He had woken from his dream drenched in his own sweat to lie naked on his back and watch the moon’s light push shadows across his ceiling.
In that night’s dream he was not down with them. Nor did he stand on the ridgetop above them nor hover in an unattached distance. He stood in the dirt of the fireline no more than fifty feet from the first of them, half the distance between that man and the ridgetop. He watched as a rush of heated air pushed them forward into the ground and the closest of them, Warner, knelt as in prayer while the fire rushed over him, melting his face like wax.
He had woken then with that image of Warner looking up at him. For the next two hours until dawn, he had remained almost motionless, his hands crossed under the back of his head and his feet searching cool places on the bed’s sheets. Mostly, though, he had stared at the ceiling as it moved through a spectrum of sober colors from black through the grays to flat white.
For almost another hour after, he had continued to lie in his bed and stare at the spidered cracks in the plaster of his ceiling, sifting through black-and-white stills in his memory.
The one he had stopped on was a mental picture from the season’s first fire, nine weeks before the fire that killed half his crew. They had assembled along a fallen Douglas fir log—some of them sitting on the dirt and dried pine needles on the ground in front of the log, some of them sitting on the log, and some standing behind it. Some slept, some ate apples or candy bars, some talked in slow whispers, some stared in mute exhaustion at Barnes as he walked toward them.
The faces on the sixteen men and three women looked out from behind various shades of dirt, their eyes heavy and drawn, their yellow Nomex shirts and green pants stained from dirt and sweat. They looked like warriors, and they looked like beggars heavy with age.
The fire stayed in the background—a serpentine line of black ash on the ground, charred fingers of blackened bark reaching up the sides of the trees, an unnatural brown to the needles of some of the pines, a lone lodgepole naked and bare of foliage with its skeleton standing like a lance.
Hardhats and chainsaws and Dolmars and daypacks and orange five-gallon water canteens and work gloves lay spread along the ground and log. Tools were stacked in neat piles of pulaskis and shovels. There was no hint of moisture on the ground nor in the air. Everything—the trees, the bushes, the ground, the firefighters—was parched.
The night before had been warm and dry with an inversion keeping the fire’s heat in, and the fire had spread through the night in slow crawls and occasional quick surges. The crew had kept along, digging their fireline with a steady sureness. The sawyers in front of the diggers had cut a twenty-foot-wide swatch through the trees and high brush. The diggers followed, cutting their fireline three feet wide and bare to mineral soil.
A few times in the night, the shovels hurried to the front to knock down some flame. But mostly the night passed with the simple routine of a fire at night. The crew tied in their line as the morning began to warm and then were relieved by a hot shot crew from Oregon which would begin to mop up the fire.
The men and women of Barnes’s crew, the Red Feather Hot Shots, rested against the log and waited for Barnes to join them before returning to fire camp, hot food, a few hours’ sleep in the antiseptic light and heat of the eastern Oregon sun, and then on the line again that evening.
That, however, was never the picture formed in his dream. That image of his crew, tired and dirty after twenty-three hours on the line, was what he wanted to remember. The dream, though, drew a dozen of his crewmembers in death, a fire burning over them as they ran for the lost safety of the ridgetop.
Chapter Two
TUESDAY
Barnes had slept the night through with only the memory of his fire dreams. Memories that formed dents in his dreams, that scarre
d his conscience. With his morning coffee and newspaper in front of him on the dining room table and a suggestion of morning sunshine filtering across the window, he remembered dreaming of death but also of life. But he could not remember the dreams, just a sense of them as if they had been mailed and returned to him marked “Return To Sender—No Longer At This Address.”
He read in the Coloradoan newspaper about an early-season fire in Alaska near Fairbanks. Although the newspaper gave no specifics on the fire other than an estimation of size, an estimation of containment, and the hysterics of civilians who lived near the wilderness yet wanted none of the wild, Barnes could visualize a tundra and black spruce fire burning behind a large column of gray-black smoke spiced with orange fingers of flame. He could see the members of the two Alaska hot shot crews, Chena and the Midnight Suns, going direct on the fire’s flanks, standing ankle-deep in the water of a tussock field and beating out the fire’s flames with gunnysacks and spruce boughs. Matier would be out front of the Suns and Thiesen in front of Chena watching the fire and their crews, directing a PBY-2 on where to make the next retardant drop, and scouting the line for the safest attack.
Thiesen had mentioned to Barnes over the winter that he hoped to leave the line and move into a management position. Barnes had thought then, and thought again as he sipped his coffee, about transferring to Alaska and taking the Chena crew. He knew then, however, as he knew that morning in his dining room, that turning his back momentarily on the questions of chance and death and terrible mistakes did not mean that those questions had fallen away; it just meant that they grew darker and deeper until he again would be forced to confront them.
The doors onto the second floor deck of Ruth’s house swung open. Through his window, Barnes saw Call take one quick step onto the deck. Barnes could not see all of Call but could see enough to know that he was naked except for a pith helmet and a Red Ryder pump-action BB gun. Call stood in the morning’s opening rays of sunlight, surveying the elm trees near Loomis Street and the eaves under his house’s roofline.
The sight of a naked seventy-year-old man with his gun in his hand had suddenly arrested the morning’s motions. Barnes, holding his coffee cup in suspension between table and mouth, watched Call take aim and pot a pigeon that had roosted on his house. Barnes could see Call shake his finger at the dead bird and yell to Harp, his dog, as the bird tumbled into the lilac bushes lining the fence. Call laughed and moved his finger in the air to chalk up another one for himself.
Barnes left his coffee cup on the table and called Ruth. She answered on the third ring and he told her about Call.
“Naked?” she asked, mystified.
“Except for the pith helmet.”
“Pith helmet? Naked and wearing a helmet and shooting at pigeons with a BB gun.”
“Got one, too.”
“Killed a pigeon?”
“You got the picture.”
“I’m trying hard not to.”
“It’s all, and I mean all, right there in living color.”
“Why does he do that? He wakes up and shoots pigeons because he thinks they’re the reason he didn’t sleep well that night.”
“Maybe they are.”
“Maybe.”
“Whatever the reason, you had best get him inside before one of the less understanding neighbors calls the police.”
“Oh, hell.”
“You want me to come over?”
“No. I don’t relish the idea of facing a naked old man, especially my naked old man, but I’ll talk him in.”
Minutes later, after Call had returned to the house and Ruth flashed a wave down at Barnes, Barnes reread the article on the Alaska fire. He liked reading about fires. The stories filled him with a sense of immediacy and expectation, something like what Chandler had once said as they helicoptered into a fire in the Bitterroots. The snow-feathered mountains had stood in angular defiance behind the fire which was large and mean enough to send two separate and distinct smoke columns roiling toward heaven. Chandler had leaned into Barnes to yell over the humming-thump of the 214’s twin engines, “Kind of makes your nipples hard, eh Barnes?”
Barnes did not need to read about fires to remember the previous summer’s fire season. He only needed to close his eyes and he could see each fire flash before him, from the tragedy fire that killed half of his crew to the minor fire that began the season, an Oregon fire nine weeks before half his crew had died in that consumptive flame. That first fire in the Deschutes Forest near Sisters, Oregon, had been a good first fire—uncontained but slow-moving, mostly lodgepole and fairly flat. A fire they could work all the way through from the line construction of initial attack to gridding the burn searching out the last smoke.
Twice during the first night of that fire, someone, one of the crew’s rookies—Freeze, Budd, or Horndyke—asked how much farther to the line’s tie-in. Aggie, the crew’s lead pulaski because she knew how to keep the line straight and fast, answered the same both times, “One hundred yards.” After the second time of this, a couple of the crew’s veterans mocked their rookies, asking how much farther.
Aggie answered, “You writing a book?” She lifted her head to look forward toward where the sawyers had cut the general direction of the line, then returned her gaze to the ground in front of her feet. She kept her back as flat as possible to minimize the strain of bending over for a dozen hours with little rest. That was her fourth year on the crew, and she hoped that the next fire season, if Chandler or Hunter moved on, she would become one of Barnes’s squad foremen.
“I’m writing one,” answered George, who worked the first shovel to clear the line following the four lead pulaskis. “You want to hear what your chapter is called?”
“If I thought you could write, I’d ask,” Aggie said.
Kapell said, “We all know hot shots can’t write or read.”
George added, “Brute strength and ignorance.”
A couple of people laughed, someone stretched out the bray of a mule, but most of the twelve crewmembers who composed the digging line just continued to dig.
Barnes spent the night well ahead of the crew, scouting the line and the fire, watching the progress of both and coordinating the movements of his Red Feather Hot Shots. Hunter stayed closer to the crew, streaming ribbons from tree limbs or brush stalks to mark where the fireline’s center would run. Every so often, Barnes would wait and talk with Hunter about the fire and the ridgeline, and Barnes would point the direction before walking back into the night. Then Hunter would set the line as straight as he could into the darkness, walking ahead of his markers twenty-five or thirty yards to be certain the line was good before tying his streamers back toward the line, then walking ahead again, often calling in specific orders to White, who held the radio for the sawyers, or Aggie, who as lead-P also carried a radio, or to Chandler, the other squad foreman, who was tail shovel at the line’s end kicking everyone in the butt to keep them moving along.
First to arrive at Hunter’s ribbon line were the sawyers moving in a short bumping line of their own, although stretched out over a longer distance than the diggers. Monterey, the head sawyer, led the way, then Sully, second saw, Ira, third, and Dago, fourth. They cut every tree and large bush ten to twelve feet on each side of Hunter’s ribbons. They felled every tree away from the fire to keep from adding fuel to it and sometimes walked an additional ten feet toward the fire to limb a dog-haired tree.
Following closely behind and sometimes with the saws were Budd and White, the swampers. They each carried a tool, Budd a shovel and White a pulaski, in case of a sudden flare-up near the sawyers. Swampers, or saw pimps as Chandler called them, were also mules as each carried a Dolmar, plastic containers with one gallon of premix fuel in one side and a quart of bar oil in the other. In their packs, besides the thirty-five pounds of gear that anyone else on the crew carried, they each had a couple of saw wedges, saw files, and an extra chain in case one of the sawyers broke his. Sometimes, as they did on that night, they
also each carried an extra gallon of water in plastic orange canteens in case a crewmember ran short. White usually worked with Monterey and Sully while Budd usually stayed with Ira and Dago, hauling their cut trees and brush away from the fireline, bringing the Dolmar when one needed to refuel, and sometimes spotting one of the sawyers for a few minutes on the chainsaw to give the sawyer a quick break for a meal.
The swampers carried five pounds more than most of the diggers but five pounds less than Barnes and his two squadies, Hunter and Chandler, who had the extra weight of radios and radio batteries and weather kits and fireline handbooks and maps and manifests and extra tools.
Like everyone on the crew, Barnes also carried the fire itself—the weight of his fire shelter, his last piece of protection against being burned; the powdery ash that covered his boots and worked up the insides of his pantlegs to give him black leg; the cuts from tree branches that healed slowly and scarred his wrists; the persistent cough that often turned into bronchitis by September; the retardant slurry that stained the back of his shirt.
And Barnes carried the potential for guilt. His decisions were based on a combination of training and imagination, what the fire was doing and what it might do. And he knew that every decision could carry the weight of a person’s soul.
Behind the sawyers and the swampers came Aggie with her lead-P, sighting her handline down the middle of the aerial line cut by the sawyers. Three pulaskis followed her—Kapell, Hassler, and Earl—then George on the first shovel and Warner on another pulaski. If the fire flared up near the front of the line, Aggie would call, “Shovel!” and George and Warner, as the first shovel team, would rush to the front to knock the fire back down. In line behind Warner came three more pulaskis—Horndyke and Freeze, two rookies buried in the line’s middle to keep them from trouble, and Stress. The second shovel team followed them—Doobie with the shovel and Lopez with the pulaski. Chandler stayed at the line’s tail, pushing everyone along and ready to lead the crew out in case they needed to retreat back down their line.
After the Fire Page 3
