After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  “Ta bueno,” Call said. He tipped his old Stetson back on the crown of his head and his eyes traced the sunlight waver from a rushing cloud. He added, “She’s a fighter. She’ll be okay. She’ll . . .” Call let his words fall. “She’s doing her best. It’ll take some time before she realizes that she’s moved on, before she can live with her past enough that she can start to see her future again.”

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  Call laughed, “Where the hell were you a dozen years ago when she needed you?”

  “Probably kicking around in the smoke of some fire.”

  Neither said anything. The line had been crossed. It was unmarked, no line in the sand, no chalk line on the cement. But both men knew vaguely that they had crossed some line. The sun’s warmth turned hard as sheet metal. They had woken into the realization that the past was impossible to forget, that it could and would return in the innocence of a passing comment. And Barnes fully realized in that moment that the pull of the past could reach him at any time.

  “I had best check on Grace,” Barnes said. He stood and walked past Call toward the steps leading down to the sidewalk. He patted Call on the shoulder as he passed. The movement joined them for a moment, like a handshake joins two men, but neither man looked at the other out of a passing embarrassment.

  Before Barnes could retrieve her, however, Grace was running, followed by Harp, a black Lab with a face as good as the early morning. Barnes stood on the top step and watched as Grace and Harp played a quick game of tag and chase on the grass. Then they settled into a serious game of tug-of-war before each decided to search out something different. Grace found a stick and began punching holes on the lawn, which was still soft from the spring rains. Harp paced between the front yard’s two sections. The soft pad of his feet on grass was interrupted by the click of his toenails on concrete when he crossed the sidewalk leading to the front steps.

  Barnes returned to his chair and sat back down across from Call.

  “You’ve got to face it,” Call said. He looked hard and straight at Barnes, his eyes flat and narrow but not unkind. “You have to face it,” he repeated.

  “I know,” Barnes said, looking from Call down at the painted wood of the floor. Since last summer, since the fire that killed half his crew, he had felt left behind, a remnant left by life.

  “It’s not easy,” Call said. “It will be the hardest thing you ever do, but you have to face what happened and accept that you did not cause it.”

  “I just keep asking the same question, though,” Barnes said. “I keep asking ‘Why?’”

  “Barnes,” Grace said from the lawn. Her body looked tiny and fragile.

  “Yes,” Barnes answered.

  “Just think about it.”

  With Ruth in the kitchen and Call upstairs reading stories to Grace, Barnes stood in the familiar theme of Call’s office. Although Call held a doctorate, he did not keep his diplomas on his wall. Hung there were photographs of his time—his family and his war. He had returned from Asia with medals and wounds and dreams and nightmares, then returned to teach history at the university in Fort Collins. After retiring from teaching, he continued to read and write studies of the past in hopes of understanding the future. Mostly, though, and in the last handful of years, he listened for his granddaughter’s song.

  Barnes stood in the arcs of light tossed haphazardly by the room’s floor lamps and studied the photographs hung on the office wall. The room was neither lavish nor ostentatious, nor was it naked or impersonal. Like Call, there was no single striking feature in the room, but everything, the oak desk to the photographs to the dark cherry bookcases filled with hardcover editions, was right, and each accented the others in simple dignity. The single set of double-hung windows looked out onto the front porch and from there toward Mountain Avenue, a much quieter street when Call first moved his family into the house.

  A wardrobe-sized cabinet held rolls of maps in its cubbyholes, each map detailing elements of some European battle Call had written about. The two leather chairs Barnes and Call often sat in to share Bushmills showed the dimpled impressions of their bodies. A single book waited between a stained pair of leather coasters on an end table. A filled magazine rack sat next to Call’s chair.

  Barnes studied the photographs, one in particular that cast a small group of soldiers inside a grained haze. Call was one of the soldiers barely distinguishable from the others in their T-shirts and helmets. They huddled together with all of the braggadocio of youth. Barnes knew from past talks that the photograph showed Call on Christmas Eve of 1965 in the jungle near Cu Chi. He looked into the photograph and felt as though he were inside a synthesis of moments, the memory of those moments becoming more real than the present.

  He saw his face reflected on the glass fronting that photograph. Inside the frame of his reflection he saw himself standing on a hastily constructed helispot above the Tempest Ridge Fire the previous August 14. Dust and smoke flew and hovered around him like a dry fog. The ground smelled baked and the air’s heat was intense to the point that he imagined his walking caused a dry wake in the parched air.

  His first thought as he walked to the side of the helispot was that the fuels were far less sparse than they had appeared from the recon flight, that what had looked like a predominantly rocky slope was actually covered with dead and senescent scrub oak as high as twelve feet. He wondered quickly whether the diamond area, the crew’s safety zone on the side of the hill, was also different than it had appeared from the helicopter.

  He had dialed his radio to crew net and called Chandler. When Chandler answered, Barnes calmed his voice before speaking, “Where are you?”

  “Head of the line.”

  “I’m on H-2, but I can’t see you or the crew. Where are you in relation to H-1?”

  “From H-1, the line drops down the ridge about a hundred yards, then cuts west across the top of the burn. We’re about another hundred and fifty yards along that. It’s slow going. The fuels are more dense, more continuous than we thought, a lot more cutting with the saws, but we’re making headway.”

  The wind blowing up the drainage where Barnes’s crew worked pushed steady and dry. Barnes could feel the wind drying even more as it warmed and quickened up the canyon’s chute. He felt his lips begin to crack from the wind and his sweat dry even before it could begin to roll down the sides of his face.

  The air that blew against and across him was only the bottom of a mass of dry, cold air that had poured across Colorado’s Western Slope as a fast-running stream follows its fluvial bed. Thousands of feet above the ground, the air flowed smooth and straight without a hint of turmoil. Lower it eddied across the topography of valleys and ridges, swirling in its own turbulence until funneling as a torrent through the gaps along the western edge of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, and eventually, and soon, and without Barnes or anyone else knowing until too late its full ability, the wind would blow like a great bellows to push the fire across and up the slope and over his crew.

  “I’m not so certain I like what’s happening here.”

  “Why’s that?” Chandler was breathing hard, and the staccatoed breath over his radio did little to ease the tension Barnes felt.

  “This front we’re getting feels stronger than a little wind change. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, so this little front they told us about is one dry mother. The winds are still from the south and are already picking up, so we’re getting an increase in the wind speed and the front hasn’t even hit us yet. I don’t like it,” Barnes said, his words as dry as the wind. Barnes understood the possibility for tragedy riding with the wind, but he did not know how completely his world sat uncertainly on the forward edge of that wind. At any moment, the wind could break and his world could tumble.

  “We’re okay, Barnes.”

  “Talk with Max. See what he says.” Barnes wanted to just order Chandler to start the crew off their line and back to the safety of a helispot but he also did not wish t
o break Chandler’s spirit.

  “Max is out front scouting the fire.”

  “Rest everyone where you are and have them gather their gear. I’ll call Max and talk with him.”

  “Barnes, we’re fine. The fire isn’t doing anything.”

  “Just rest the crew until I get back with you.” He wanted his voice to form in calm determination, but the clenching tone of anticipation snagged his words.

  Barnes turned his radio to fire net and called Max Downey. Eddies of dust pirouetted around the ridgeline where Barnes stood and he knew with certainty that the cold front predicted for that afternoon was something greater than he had been told. Barnes could see a column of grey smoke building in the canyon’s bottom but its origin was covered by the ground’s roll and a series of small spur ridges.

  Barnes spoke rapidly after Max answered, “I don’t like this, Max.”

  Max laughed, “Don’t get soft on me, Barnes.”

  “This is no joke, Max. Things can go south real quick. I think you should hike it back to the ridgetop on the double.”

  There was a dry pause before Downey answered. “We are close to tying off this line,” he said. “I’m out ahead of your crew and I’m not worried.”

  “I can’t see the fire from H-2 but I can see a small column building below you.”

  “I see it also. It’s within the fire’s perimeter.”

  “The winds are getting bad up here and if your fuels are anything like up here, you could be heading into trouble.”

  “Listen, I talked this over with your squadie, Chandler, and he and I agreed that we can dick this mother.”

  “Max, if this wind keeps picking up, all hell’s breaking loose. Your line won’t hold even if you can tie it off.”

  “It’s my fire, Barnes.”

  “It’s my crew and I want them heading out now.”

  “You want this fire, Barnes? Damnit, do you think you can run this fire better than me? You want this fire?”

  “Yes. Now. Double it back up the line to H-1. We’ll finish our pissing match there.”

  “It’s still my fire,” Max said. “We can tie it off and line out and catch any spots. But if you or your crew can’t handle it, then I’ll call in some Type-II crew that will.”

  “Max, damnit, listen to me—”

  “You worry too much, Barnes. You’re like a mother hen clucking over her chicks. We’ve scouted the line and with you and a couple of jumpers as lookouts, we’ll have plenty of time to get out if we need to.”

  Barnes flinched when Ruth touched his shoulder. She left her hand there. After a moment under the warmth of her touch his muscles loosened. Sweat that had formed on his hands and neck cooled.

  “Dad refers to this as his rogues’ gallery,” Ruth said, stepping next to Barnes and slipping an arm inside his to hold him close. “One day when my mother was still alive, Dad said he was going to take all of the photographs down and cover the wall with another bookcase. She told him ‘No.’ That was all, just ‘No.’ And he didn’t. She said that her disagreement had nothing to do with the books that needed a place other than in boxes. What she did not want to see happen was Dad lose his footing, her words, lose his footing by forgetting the man he was.”

  Barnes leaned toward the photographs. “Your mother was a smart woman.”

  “Yes, she was,” Ruth agreed.

  “I wish I could have known her.”

  “I wish I would have known her longer.”

  Barnes straightened one of the photographs that had rested off-level, forcing the half-dozen men to look as though they were being emptied into the side of the frame. From upstairs there came a delighted peal of a little girl’s laughter.

  Ruth giggled. “He does that sometimes,” she said.

  “What?” Barnes followed Ruth’s eyes in looking toward the stairs and the light shrouding the landing in softness.

  “He sometimes tickles Grace just enough to wake her up so he can read another story to her before she falls asleep. I’ve told him that she needs her sleep more than another story or she won’t be able to stay awake during the day. He just puffs on his empty pipe and smiles.”

  “He’s earned his little chicanery.” He looked back at the wall of photographs. “I bet he was a fun son of a bitch to know back when he was young, like here.” He pointed toward the photograph.

  Again Ruth scanned the photographs on the wall. “That one,” she said, pointing at the grainy image Barnes had been studying when she joined him in the room. “That one is my favorite, always was. I used to look at it and wonder what he was thinking. In the corner, if you look, you can see ‘Christmas 1965, Cu Chi.’ I still come in here every Christmas to look at it. He once told me how scared he was then, how scared he was every minute he was at war, but especially how scared he was then, over Christmas. I would sometimes come in here and look at him there because I never believed my daddy could be that frightened.”

  “We’re all scared sometime.”

  “I suppose we are. I guess we just don’t realize how scared everyone else is.”

  Barnes nodded and glanced across the room. A wall of filled bookcases stared back at him. The corners of the books had whispered frays from being read, and gold book darts marked significant passages. The room between where he stood with Ruth and the opposite wall of books was large, but there was no feel of emptiness nor of randomness. Here was a view of the man who used the room.

  “You care for a cup of tea or are you drinking whiskey with the old man?” Ruth smiled as she spoke. She often referred to Call as the old man and sometimes mimed his habit of naming a shot of whiskey a “snort.”

  “No, not tonight,” Barnes answered. “Tea sounds good, though.”

  She walked past him and he followed. Fragrance from Ruth’s perfume drifted lightly behind her. Barnes inhaled it, holding it for a second longer than necessary. As he passed the stairway, Barnes could hear the muffled voice of Call reading a story to Grace. He concentrated for the slight moment before he moved beyond the man’s words, but he could not make out what story was being read. Just the melody of Call’s voice, however, was enough for Barnes to smile. He could see that voice hover softly and wrap around the closing eyes of Grace, kissing her eyelids closed and enveloping her in a warm embrace of sound.

  The suddenness of the kitchen’s light was bright and intrusive. Barnes blinked as he entered the room. He stopped just inside the doorway and rested his back against the door’s frame. He watched Ruth take a cup from the cupboard and thought how beautiful she was. He could see a danger in her, a wildness harnessed but a necessary wildness nonetheless. In the angle of her smile and the light of her eyes he saw the hints of what was not tamed. She had never acted the role of a temptress, never invited him in that way, yet she formed his temptation. Even when he had almost fallen in love with Maria Lopez, he had still felt the vague and distant tug of Ruth. And since the death of Lopez on Tempest Ridge, Barnes had wakened at nights from dreams of one woman to thoughts of the other. His legs would search out remnant cool spots between his sheets and his head would roll onto the fresh unweathered folds of his pillow, and he could feel and smell the women who were not there.

  They had never admitted it nor spoken of it, but Barnes knew they had both acknowledged a longing in their glances. Watching her then, as she stretched to take hold of the cup, he wondered at what point does the wrong thing to do suddenly become the right thing to do.

  “I already made a cup for me. The water’s still hot.” Ruth turned and said, “What do you want?”

  “Earl Grey.” He crossed his arms and looked down at his feet. He felt himself blush like a kid in junior high just caught dropping his pencil so he could bend down to see what he might see.

  Ruth reached into another cupboard to take a box of tea bags. “Milk and sugar or honey?” she asked.

  “Raw sugar.”

  “I like that.” She poured his tea water and scooped a spoonful of sugar into it before offering it to Barne
s.

  “You like it that I asked for raw sugar?”

  “No, no, not that. That you didn’t say, ‘Whatever,’ or something like that. I hate it when I offer something to someone and they say, ‘Whatever.’ Like they think they’re doing you a favor by not being specific. That saying, ‘I don’t care,’ is anything less than acknowledging their non-interest.”

  “Well, you asked, I answered.”

  “I know. It’s that simple, but some people. That was one of the first things that made Daddy mad at Robert. He came over for a barbecue and Dad asked him what he drank. Robert said whatever he was having was fine. Polite, but noncommittal. I asked him how he wanted his salad, and Robert said, ‘Whatever.’ Finally Dad asked how he liked his burgers, and, of course, Robert said, ‘However.’ So Dad burned the burger black as new charcoal.”

  “I can see that.” Barnes held the cup of tea close to his face to let the steam frame his mouth and cheeks.

  “To deciding,” Ruth said, holding her cup at arm’s length toward Barnes. He lifted his and nodded his head.

  Ruth drank from her cup, then said, “I haven’t seen you leave for work this week.”

  “No,” Barnes said. “I decided to take the week off. Hunter can handle anything that comes up at the office, and I need some time to get prepared.”

  “But you are going back?”

  Barnes, without looking at Ruth, knew she was studying him. The scenes in his mind played out in mixed fashion. Although not as certain about his words as he was about how he wanted them to sound, he said, “Yes. I just needed a break before the season begins, before things start rolling.”

  He met Ruth’s smile. Hers was the smile of understanding and knowledge. They looked at each other for a long moment before Ruth turned toward the refrigerator. She took out a plate of cinnamon rolls and set it on the counter next to her teacup. The rolls were inviting, topped with a glaze of icing.