The line went along like that, with some talking in short flurries of words followed by long silences in which the only noises were the strains of pulaskis and shovels scraping at the ground, the muffled sounds of the chainsaws ahead of the crew, the rushes of the fire like that of a storm moving closer, the disembodied voices on the radios, and the insistent “Bump”—a mantra-like word constantly moving from the line’s rear to the front telling each digger to move up as the person behind tied in their piece of line. The line crawled along like an inchworm, stretched out with each person eight to ten feet from the person in front and behind until someone completed that small section of line, three feet wide and down to mineral soil, to the line of the person in front. Then they said “Bump,” not too loud for it was only meant to be passed ahead one digger at a time, and then the crew bumped forward another ten feet and dug some more.
Stress, a tall, thin man who ran track at Colorado State during the school year and always boasted about his four-percent body fat, stood once to yell toward the line’s front, “Hey. Aren’t you guys digging up there? Hell, I’m digging ninety percent of this line. Get your lazy butts in gear.”
George answered, “Harness the energy of your mouth and you can dig a hundred percent of the got-damn line.”
The second night on the fire, they lit off a two-mile stretch of line, igniting their own fire in short, controlled strips to burn into the main fire. The line between a firefighter and a pyromaniac is as thin as a whistle and Barnes knew everyone on the crew wanted to handle the drip torches, no one more than him. Part of being a crew boss, however, was letting others learn to make the decisions, so Barnes told Chandler to run the fire show.
Chandler smiled, “I’d like Aggie and Freeze to burn with me. Freeze torch the line and Aggie ten yards in and ahead of her. I’ll be another ten in. If we need to do any jackpotting, I’ll let Barnes know and he’ll hold everything up.”
The two women nodded. Aggie had burned several times in her years on the crew, but Freeze, a rookie, had never burned before. She watched and copied Aggie as Aggie unscrewed the lid to the drip torch, filled the metal container with fuel, replaced the lid, drained some of the gas-and-diesel mixture onto the grass, lit that with a match, then lit her torch from that fire. Chandler lit his torch and Freeze did also.
“Let’s burn, baby,” Chandler said.
“Chicks have all the fun,” Budd said to Horndyke as they watched Freeze stand in the glow of her drip torch.
“No shit,” answered Horndyke.
Twenty yards inside the fireline, Chandler turned and called Barnes to make sure the crew was spread out and ready. Barnes could see the flame of Chandler’s drip torch and the man’s indefinite outline in its nictating light. He answered that they were set. Chandler held the torch out to his side, a yard of flame arcing from its ignitor wick, and sang, “I am the god of hellfire and I bid you to burn.”
Aggie answered with her own song, “I got lightning in my pocket, thunder in my shoes. Have no fear, I have something here I want to show you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chandler cried. “Burn her up.”
Freeze smiled excitedly and waited until Aggie had burned a dozen yards before beginning her strip. Only, in her excitement, when Barnes called out for her to go slow and steady, she swung around to answer him and sent an electric arc of flame across the line and into the green.
“Shit-oh-dear,” said White. “Freeze is burning the whole damn forest.” He stumbled drunkenly over a log to get to the tiny flame Freeze had begun outside their line.
The little spot lasted only a couple of minutes but Freeze’s name was added to the Chase Hentzel Award list for the person who committed the biggest screw-up of the season. Doobie had won the previous year for having a fusee ignite in his backpack while taking an extended break too close to the fireline down in Arizona.
The second fire they were on that season, Barnes remembered, was in the River of No Return Wilderness Area in Idaho. They had flown straight out of Redmond from the Oregon fire on the Deschutes National Forest to Boise and then by bus to some small town he could not recall except as through a sleepy haze, then by helicopter into the wilderness area.
The fire’s plans chief told him before he boarded the helicopter that more food and water would be packed in by horse and would arrive in two days. They landed in a small meadow of high grasses, unloaded their gear and enough food and water for three days—Barnes knew that the only certainty on a fire is that you can’t count on things going as planned.
“Every day’s a holiday, every meal’s a picnic,” Hunter said as the crew set up their spike camp. “Can’t beat it. Getting paid to camp out.”
“I could have used a shower before we left Redmond,” Freeze whined as she filled her water canteens from a five-gallon container left by the helicopter. She had placed her hardhat on the ground and her short blonde hair lay matted and mottled against her head like a plastic wig.
“Quit your bitching, girl,” Aggie said. Aggie disliked complainers, and even more, she disliked women who complained. She had been on the Red Feather crew for four seasons, as long as Hunter had been Barnes’s lead foreman on the crew, and she knew how others looked at a woman who complained—“a clucking chick” or “on the rag” or “hitting the downside of that PMS curve.” It’s hard enough, she had once told Barnes, to pull your weight without some rookie girl out of college thinking this is some hike in the woods.
Barnes and Hunter bushwhacked up the hill toward the fire, leaving Chandler to make certain the crew watered up, filled the Dolmars with premix and bar oil, and tooled out with all four chainsaws, ten pulaskis, and four shovels before following the ribbon line left by Hunter to the fire’s base.
They had their own ten-acre fire in a complex of fires stretched over miles along the Salmon River, the legacies of a dry thunderstorm that had followed the river’s course. That first afternoon and through most of the night, they dug line, encircling the fire inside a rope of dirt before resting for a couple of hours in the early morning. Barnes and Chandler and Hunter took one-hour shifts watching the fire while the crew caught a few winks. The terrain was too steep to sleep on comfortably, so Barnes ended up wrapping himself around a Douglas fir to keep from rolling while he slept. In the morning, after a breakfast of Meals-Ready-to-Eat, Army-issue meals designed for nutrition and weight but not for taste, they improved their line and began mopping up the fire. They spread out to loosely encircle the fire, then searched out every hot spot within ten feet of the fireline. Once certain they had cooled the fire’s perimeter, each crewmember began working another ten feet toward the fire’s center.
Barnes walked the fire, stopping to help Kapell, a second-year man from Michigan who wanted enough money from that fire season to spend the winter writing poetry in Prague. They took turns working at a deep stump hole, Kapell grubbing with his pulaski and Barnes mixing the hot ash and wood with dirt. He talked with Hunter and Chandler about the crew’s condition and how well they had worked the season’s first two fires and how the season was off to a good start—good fires, good experience, a pocketful of money waiting back in Fort Collins. He spent time with each of the three rookies, making certain they understood the things they had done over the past days, explaining to Horndyke that he had to work slowly when mopping up, leaving nothing hot that might later jump the line, turning around every so often to be certain of what he had worked, looking at a low angle into the sun for small smokes or hovers of no-see-um insects over hot areas, feeling every piece of wood for heat, grubbing out each stump hole down to cold sand. He helped Sully fell a widow-maker snag that had burned nearly all through. He walked the fire to see everyone and everything.
By evening they had returned to their spike camp at the base of the hill their fire had burned, having left Hunter and half his squad to monitor the fire through the night. They rationed their water and slept. When no food had arrived in the morning, Barnes sent Chandler’s squad to relieve Hunter, then
he along with Monterey and Ira walked back along a trail to look for the pack train.
A mile back they found an old man dressed in faded and dirty denim and a young woman dressed the same sitting on the trail eating Hostess doughnuts. The ridge there fell off quickly for a hundred feet before dropping off an even steeper cliff to the canyon floor. A hundred yards below in the canyon bottom Barnes could see a black horse, very much dead. Just above the point where the ridge became a cliff lay another horse, also dead. Three other horses stood on shallow benches between Barnes and the nearer dead horse.
Barnes and Monterey and Ira worked their way down to the dead horse a hundred feet below the trail, pulled off its saddle and blanket, and retrieved any food and water containers they could as they climbed back to the trail. The horse had tumbled down the slope and had landed upside down on a branch stob of a large fallen tree. The stob had penetrated the pack and blankets and impaled the horse, probably breaking its back and maybe puncturing a lung. It was a fairly long stob, eight inches or longer, and they worked a good while to roll the horse from it before they could remove the saddle and blanket.
After they walked the three scared horses that had survived the fall back up to the trail, Barnes shared an apple with the woman pack driver. She told him about spending the night on the trail and having to listen to the two dying horses as they cried all night long.
They left that fire the next day after being relieved by a Type-II crew from Utah. “Half-shots and half-shits,” Hunter called them as they emptied from the helicopter, their eyes open as wide as their smiles and their fire shirts washhouse clean.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” added Stress as he watched the Utah crew mill together like lost sheep.
A hard, insistent knock cowled the morning and withdrew Barnes from his daydream. He answered the front door following the second, even more insistent, knock. In Downey’s face, Barnes recognized Max—weathered, angular, lined with years spent in the winters of Montana. He shared the same color blue to his eyes as Max had, clear and hyaline like a glassy sky. He stood just under six foot and still held a textured strength in his body that looked old only in years. His jaw was set. His eyes were leveled straight on Barnes as he opened the screen door without saying anything.
“Barnes,” Downey said, flat and unemotional.
“Mr. Downey. Come in.”
Downey continued to hold his stare level on Barnes, as a man might contemplate a flat tire.
Barnes held the screen door open until Downey took it and stepped into the house, followed closely by a man Barnes did not recognize. Based on the man’s suit and briefcase, Barnes knew his office.
“This is my lawyer, Paul Ginrich,” Downey said, indicating the man with him.
Barnes nodded but did not offer his hand, nor did the lawyer offer his. Ginrich dressed in Brooks Brothers and Tony Lamas. Barnes could see the man as someone who drove a truck that never hauled a bale of hay nor touched a road surface other than blacktop, someone who called himself a country lawyer but who never once worked up a callous large enough to split, someone who thought “Skoal” meant a toast over a vodka martini, someone even who actually drank vodka martinis. Barnes took an immediate and intense dislike to the man.
Barnes pointed toward his front room. “We can talk in here,” he said. A shade of gray passed across the shadow of his vision. He turned to look briefly into the extra room but did not see anything.
Downey and Ginrich sat at opposite ends of the couch and Barnes sat across from them in a leather chair he had bought at auction over the winter. A woman had shot her abusive husband and then needed to sell their house and furnishings to pay for her defense. After buying the chair, Barnes offered to sell it back to the woman for half what he paid but she declined. “Thank you, no,” she said with a sparkle of light bouncing from a tear. “It was his and I don’t want it. I need the money more. Thanks anyway. But if you get that quilt over there, I’ll do it.” Barnes tried, but the wedding ring quilt went beyond his budget.
“You can guess why we’re here,” Downey said. He sat with his legs spread, feet flat, and his hands stable on his knees. His stare did not waver as he spoke. He pushed his Stetson hat back on his head so that his eyes were not left in shadow.
“I can.”
“I want to talk with you man-to-man,” Downey said.
“That why you brought him,” Barnes nodded toward the lawyer.
“He’s here—”
The lawyer interrupted Downey. “I’m here because I represent Mr. Downey and his son’s legacy. I’m here to make certain that certain things are presented to you so that we all understand where we all stand. I am here to help everyone involved facilitate an understanding that Mr. Downey’s son did nothing wrong on that hill and his name should not be denigrated further by any other involved party. I am not here to involve myself nor Mr. Downey in a situation that could become inflammatory.”
Barnes felt himself tick another mental notch against Ginrich. He said, “I hope you begin to speak English soon.” And regretted the words as soon as he spoke them.
Ginrich smiled a supercilious smile, practiced, Barnes thought, in front of a mirror. Ginrich’s face, even through the doughboy puffiness, looked something like a salamander’s.
Downey said, “Listen, goddamnit, I’m not here for a pissing match between you two. I want to talk straight with you about my lawsuit against the Forest Service and BLM and about some other people’s suits.”
“As I told you yesterday and on the phone several times before that, I don’t see a good purpose in doing what you’re trying to do. I don’t think you’ll accomplish what you intend to. You may even do more damage to your son.”
“Bullshit.”
They fell immediately into silence.
“What are you afraid of, Mr. Barnes?” Ginrich asked after allowing the silence to deepen. “If you’re afraid that we will somehow try to place all the blame on you, don’t be. Our purpose, as I stated at the outset, is to clear Mr. Downey’s son of any pall of wrongdoing.”
Barnes wished that he could get the lawyer out on a fireline for one day. Give the man a pulaski and start digging. It would either make him a man or put him in a hospital ward crying like a little boy.
“Listen,” Mr. Downey said. “We have a copy of a letter you wrote to the parents of Mike Warner. We want you to explain it to us.”
Ginrich opened his briefcase and handed over a Xerox copy. Barnes looked at the letter, remembering when he wrote it. Soon after the fire, he had sat down to write letters to the families of each of his people who had died. Each letter began the same, an offer of condolences, followed by memories of the person. Some of these were short, for he had known the three rookies who had died—Freeze, Budd, and Horndyke—for less than twelve weeks before they died. But he recalled some moment that might help a mother understand why her son or daughter would want to do something like fight a wildfire. Some of the letters were pages long, as with Warner’s and Chandler’s letters. Barnes had met Chandler’s family, red-necked white-bread blue-collared ranchers from Julesburg, and he wanted them to know that their son had always been nine-tenths tough as well as one of the best men Barnes had ever known.
He wrote the final part of the letters four times before he sent them. He wanted his account to be the same for each, he wanted no questions that could haunt one family or another. In his first attempt, Barnes had said that nobody could have foreseen what would eventually take place and offered the tragedy as an act of nature. In his next try, he wrote that a series of miscalculations and errors had resulted in the crew being placed in a position from which they could not escape. In the letter he finally sent, he described the fire and, as the crew supervisor, accepted responsibility, and asked the families to contact him if they wanted to know any more.
Barnes could see a slight tremble in his hands as he held the paper loosely. The tips of his fingers became hot and he handed the paper back to Ginrich.
�
��You say,” Ginrich began, then looked down at the paper to quote directly. He began again, a lawyers’ trick, Barnes thought. “You say, ‘I was responsible for the crew’s well-being.’ So, you are responsible for what happened.”
Downey quickly added, “But that’s not exactly what you told the inquisition, the investigating team, is it?”
Barnes took a heavy breath and looked at his hands again. They had steadied. He sat back in the chair and spoke. “What I told the investigation team is what happened. Exactly as I remember it, exactly as it took place.”
Both Downey and Ginrich began to speak at once, but Barnes cut them off with a short swing of his hand. “However, I am responsible for my crew. Nobody tells a hot shot crew what to do other than their crew boss. So, yes, in that way I was responsible. I accept that.”
“Goddamnit,” Downey said, “I knew you’d double-talk this. You tell one group that my son killed these people and then you slide up next to them like a little pup, your tail tucked and your leg lifted in submission. You’re a damn coward. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Downey began to stand, but Ginrich placed a hand on his arm and Downey returned to the couch. This time his hands were rolled into fists on his thighs.
Ginrich asked, “What will you say when you have to testify . . . for you will be testifying.”
“I will tell the truth.”
“And that is?”
“And that is that my crew was my responsibility and that a number of people made wrong decisions on that fire.”
“Shit-damn,” Downey spat.
“And what will your subordinate, Hunter, your squad leader who lived, say?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“I’m leaving,” Downey said. He rose from the couch and this time Ginrich did not try to stop him, neither did the lawyer follow his lead. Downey, the brim of his Stetson curled inside a fist, strode from the room and left the front door open as he left the house. Barnes watched as Downey walked to a rental car parked on the street, slapped the car’s top before sitting in the passenger’s seat. A haze of false rain clouded the view.
After the Fire Page 4
