He dressed quickly and left his house without turning on any lights. From the recessed shadows of his dark windows he could feel the eyes of his apparitions upon his back. They did not follow him, but they waited for his return.
Large American elms planted a century ago bordered the cemetery on the west and east; the north was boundaried by Laporte Avenue and the south abutted a golf course. Barnes approached through the golf course. The concordant rhythm of water sprinklers and a smell of fresh-cut grass surrounded him in cool pleasure. Barnes knew the way, even in the dark, and jumped the short fence behind the seventh hole and into the cemetery. He stood for a moment listening to his own breathing and the distant sounds of a small city not quite asleep. He watched the choreography of shadows cast from the moon and trees, filters of clouded light weaving through the elms with their leaves full and heavy.
He walked across the grass until he came to the dirt and cinder road and followed it west until he found the large monument that marked her row. The old stone monument had been engraved in 1912 with a now-fading inscription: “Little Lamb of God, Bless Thee.” The monument marked another grave a mother had provided for her daughter who had died too soon. He stepped close, within arm’s reach, and stood for a moment to read the inscription, then walked into Maria Lopez’s row.
Barnes felt a certain, sudden unease, a tiptoeing fear as he walked through the cemetery. It was not a fear brought on by ghosts, for he lived with ghosts. It was one of judgment.
He found where Lopez lay—a small rectangle of polished gray marble surrounded by wet grass and a single empty metal vase. Barnes stood away from the grave and watched it. He could not distinguish the marker’s inscription which he knew read “FATIMA MARIA LOPEZ” and beneath that “OUR BLESSED DAUGHTER” and the last line “Born 9-1-72 / Died 8-14-02.”
The moon threw zigzag shadows across her grass, the relative newness of which cast a dark green boundary for her reliquary. His legs felt uncertain. He heard the engine of a car and the crunch of its tires on the cemetery road. The car stopped a hundred feet from him, the lights dimmed. He could see inside the car the silhouetted figures of two people join together and disappear, a slight rocking of the car, and then silence.
He bent and wiped a hand across the marble. His fingers traced the cold lettering. He knelt at her grave, one knee on the ground as though attached, and his fingers swept across the stone in slow, extended arcs. He knelt for a long time, long enough for another wildness to rock the car and then another silence and finally the car’s leaving. He said nothing although he wanted to. He felt his lips not moving, but he wanted to move them as in prayer.
He thought quickly and without intending to of Lopez taking the place of White. White, whom Hunter had caught with whiskey in his water bottles. Needing to send another pulaski for Chandler’s line, Barnes sent Lopez. White remained in the staging area, Barnes flew to the upper helispot, Lopez walked into her death. He kept himself from damning White but still could think of nothing to say to Lopez.
He had walked down the hill past the stunted bodies of Warner and Doobie and Sully and Horndyke. The fifth body from the ridgeline was smaller than the others, lying alone and away from everyone else and huddled like a flower that had closed into itself with the end of day. Even before he saw the silver inlay on her knife, he knew it was Lopez. Her body, almost too small for a firefighter and then made even smaller as death parched and wizened her body, curling it into itself. Her head lay uphill with her hands and arms tucked in tight. Her fire shelter lay four feet up the hill from her body. It was partially opened as though she had fallen to the ground and then tried to cover herself with it and then the wind had blown the fire shelter from her hands, leaving her with nothing. Of her clothing, only her shirt collar and leather belt remained. Not even her boots were left. Her entire body had charred. She lay alone, nobody else near her. She lay face down, her head uphill but tucked in as though she had tried folding herself around herself. Her daypack lay six feet downhill, so Barnes thought she must have taken a few steps before falling. Maybe, he thought, as dust and ashes filtered about her body, maybe she had recognized a better place to deploy the shelter but just did not get it open in time. When the gust of wind hit her, knocking her to the ground just before the flames would arrive, she must have realized what was about to happen, she must have seen her death in those seconds and prayed or lost her mind or cried out. And left alone with nothing else in her suddenly primal world she pulled into herself.
Standing above her, Barnes felt an immoral imposition upon her.
All he could think to do was place his fingers to his lips and then down on the marble slab. Then he left the way he had come.
He could see her pick up her line gear to join Chandler on the helicopter, not looking back at Barnes as they flew to the fire. He could see her walking into the cache with Budd. He could see her asleep and naked in his bed.
She was dead. He knew that. He had seen her ruined body. He had placed a kissed finger to her mouth.
Chapter Four
THURSDAY
Barnes woke an hour before sunrise. He began reviewing the previous August as though he could bid time to return, as though he held it within the sub-light of a computer screen and could revise it all. He could only lie there and watch again as the world skipped a beat. The moon’s light, like prevenient ghosts, bent through his open bedroom window. Softly falling shadows separated and joined on his walls. His morning had become another roil of moment and memory.
Even after nearly a year, the memory remained hard and pungent, circling counterclockwise in his mind.
They had arrived in Craig sometime near midnight and bedded down at the high school football field. At four-thirty, Barnes woke with Hunter and Chandler and met with the BLM officials planning the complex of small fires in the Craig District. By five, the sun was still only a possibility on the horizon and Barnes knew his crew’s assignment.
Barnes had already bested the five-hundred-hour mark for the season’s overtime and was dog-tired. A chronic bronchitis had taken root in his lungs. His neck felt like one long ache, and the fingers of his right hand took longer to unravel each morning. Altogether, a season to dream about. One to take to the bank in a big cart, but also one with a price tag attached. In the last week of eighteen-hour days on a stubborn blaze near Fort Collins that had burned a good part of the university’s mountain forestry camp, Barnes had felt his body unwind like the mainspring of an old Seth Thomas and he knew his mind was following suit.
He had been waiting for a fire on which he could allow one of his two squadies to supervise, maybe let Chandler take the crew—Chandler needed the experience and Barnes wanted to spend a couple of days with his head in the dirt. Barnes enjoyed having a crew, having a group of nineteen charges, but sometimes he wished he could just lose himself inside the group of twenty and dig line or cut trees or mop up like a poge rookie. Days and nights spent doing nothing but the immediate always recharged his body and mind.
This fire, still unnamed, barely forty acres and leisurely grazing at the piñon-juniper, sage, and Gamble oak of a southwestern aspect, would become Chandler’s—still uncontrolled but not burning with any great intensity, a plan of attack already developed from the previous day yet still in the initial attack stage, a load of jumpers on the hill since the previous morning led by a man Barnes had known for several years.
Walking back from the trailer being used for the command post, Barnes asked Chandler, “You listen to everything they told us?”
“No,” Chandler said. A moment later he added, “Hell, Barnes, of course I listened. It’s only the beginning of August.”
“It’s the middle of August,” Hunter said.
“Hell. I don’t need to watch the calendar until November. Until then there are only two types of days—days off and days on and the forest circus tells me which day it is.” Chandler raked a finger behind his lower gum to rid his morning jolt of Copenhagen.
They stopped f
or a moment and Barnes asked, “You want the crew on this fire?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Barnes appreciated attitude, he liked when his squadies wanted more responsibility than he had afforded them. He knew that Chandler had wanted the crew since finishing the classroom courses necessary for Crew Boss but had waited through Chandler’s insistence for a fire that he felt certain the man could handle. He said to Chandler, “Like the IC said, Max Downey will fly down with the first helicopter flight and then him and us will go up for a recon look while the crew’s gearing up.”
“Sounds good.”
“Max is a good man, a bit headstrong, but still a good man. Don’t let him bull you, though. He only knows one way, and that’s his way.”
“Don’t worry.”
“He’ll start ordering your sawyers around like they’re his and—”
“Damnit, Barnes, I can handle it. Don’t worry so much.”
“I’m not.” Barnes turned to Hunter. “Tell Monterey that we’ll take all four saws—”
Chandler interrupted him, “Wait a minute, boss.”
“What?” Barnes asked.
“Remember who’s the top dog today,” Chandler said.
Barnes smiled, “It’s your show. Take it.”
“All four saws,” Chandler repeated, “and extra water for everyone—the weather report says hot and dry. Double lunches in our line gear and have Aggie get a couple extra cases of MREs from supply to stage on the helispot in case we coyote tonight.”
“Four,” added Barnes.
“Four,” said Chandler. “Also the same number of cubitainers of water. Get the crew lined out for the helicopter shuttles, but backwards—my squad goes first with me to H-1 and you and Barnes with your squad fly last to H-2.”
Barnes again interrupted. “We’ll already be on the hill. You and me with Max.”
Chandler thought for a moment. “Have Warner line out my squad. You take your squad on the last flight.”
Hunter nodded. He checked the list he had written in his pocket notepad.
They walked in silence back to where the crew slept. Seventeen bodies cocooned inside paper sleeping bags, a sonorous melody of necessary sleep rose with the morning. Barnes smiled, then said in a tone slightly lifted from conversation, “Good morning, little darlings.”
A few people stirred. Ira stuck his head out from the opening in his bag like a turtle and squinted toward Aggie, who sat in her bag next to him.
Aggie said, “Go away. You’re just a bad dream.”
“I’ve got your bad dream right here, Aggie,” Warner said from the other side of her.
She turned. “What you got is nothing more than a fleeting thought.”
“All right. Listen up,” Chandler said. “Right now let’s get breakfast, gear up, and hit the line. We’ll have a picnic lunch on the hill.”
“Who died and made you king?” asked Aggie.
“I’m king for a day, king for a fire. This puppy’s mine.”
Aggie looked to Barnes. He nodded. She said to Chandler, “You just better not make me carry any damn piss pump. We got rookies for that shit.”
“Where we’re going there won’t be enough water to fill a dew bead much less a bladder bag,” Chandler answered.
“Every day’s a holiday, eh Hunter?” Kapell said.
“And every meal’s a picnic,” answered Hunter.
“Hit it hard and keep it small,” Doobie added sarcastically.
“Every time I hit it hard, it just gets larger,” George answered.
“Shut up,” Freeze said as she slipped on her boots. Like the rest of the crew, she had slept in her pants, T-shirt, and socks to allow for every extra moment of sleep possible, but still she woke in a bad mood. She shook her head and looked at George, “Can’t you ever say anything that isn’t about your damn penis?”
“He’s a man,” said Aggie. “That’s the only thing he knows. First thing in the morning for most of these guys means draining the blood from the primary appendage back to their brains.”
“Kind of like jump-starting a cold engine,” added Lopez with a laugh.
“A hand crank on an old car,” said Aggie. The three women laughed.
“What in the hell did I say?” asked George.
“Too much,” answered Barnes as he nudged White’s sleeping bag. “Wake up, sunshine. You joining us today?”
“Barnes, if I thought I had a choice, I might just exercise it.”
Chandler answered, “Whitey, you’re a hot shot. You gave up your freedom to choose in May.”
Monterey sang out in a raspy voice, “Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to my FMO.”
Barnes and Hunter stood away from the crew’s awakening to watch the cadence of seventeen people waking from five hours of sleep on a hard ground. Chandler strolled through the men and women, stopping to nudge anyone still asleep. He pulled a snoose can from his back pocket, tapped the lid with the tips of his first two fingers, opened it, and deposited a two-finger pinch between lip and gum. He stood above White as White pulled a long drink from his canteen.
“Sips,” Chandler said and reached out for White’s canteen.
“You better not,” White said, “I got a cold.”
“Man, you always got a cold.”
“Yeah, maybe I should just stay here in bed and die.”
“If you wanted to die in bed you shouldn’t have become a hot shot.”
The crew slowly gathered around Chandler. They knuckled their eyes, they stood hunched with hands in pockets, they leaned unconsciously against each other. They put off waking as long as possible. Many of those who would not live to see the day’s sunset were reluctant to open their eyes to greet their last sunrise.
Chandler repeated the information presented at the morning briefing, telling them of the fire’s specifics, the present and expected fire behavior, the topography, the weather. Hunter then read from his list of what additional gear the crew needed.
“A cold front?” Freeze asked Aggie as the crew lined out. “Does that mean it’s going to get real cold?”
“You really are a rookie, aren’t you?” answered Aggie.
“What?”
Aggie placed her hand on Freeze’s shoulder, “While we’re eating breakfast, I’ll tell you what you should remember from your S-190 class. After that you can come with me and pack water. Whitey and Kapell, you guys come too.”
Like a farm truck warming to the day’s work, the crew’s movement quickened. People rubbed the sleep from their eyes or stretched their bodies or bent and spit parts of their lungs into the grass of the football field or sat as in trances with one boot on and the other held loosely between fingers that did not yet want to work. Before Chandler and Barnes left for their recon flight, the crew had all dressed and lined out behind Hunter. They walked in line to the mess area for breakfast, and Chandler and Barnes walked side by side to the heliport.
Chandler and Barnes waited near the edge of the heliport for Max Downey to arrive from the fireline. They each held a cup of coffee they had picked up in the helitack tent. Barnes had both his hands wrapped around the Styrofoam cup, warming arthritic kinks from his joints. He held it close to his mouth and blew softly across the coffee, forcing a warming steam to swirl and rise to his lips before he drank. The coffee tasted terrible, too weak.
He remembered the fire-coffee he enjoyed when he was on the Chena Hot Shots in Alaska—a couple handfuls of coffee tossed into a stripped-out coffee pot filled with boiling water, let the coffee boil for a couple of minutes, then splash some cold water on top to sink most of the grounds and drink. That may not have been the cognac of coffee, but at least it was hardy and hot. The coffee he picked up from the helitack tent was soft and lightweight. But he drank it anyway, allowing its warmth to heat him.
He stepped to his side to catch the sun’s opening rays. In that movement from the night’s last attachment to meet the coming day, he knew the day would be
as hot as the briefing had promised. He tilted back his head and closed his eyes and drank in the radiant heat. He let the sun thaw him. His body, as it had done on late-summer fires for the past fifteen years, began to respond slowly to the warming. He stretched and felt the kinks and knots from long days on the line and short nights on the ground begin their fight against loosening.
He heard the helicopter approaching from a long way off, sounding like a small grouse thumping its breast. The sound of a Bell 206 Jet Ranger. He turned his back to the heliport to protect himself from the helicopter’s rotor wash which spread in dusty waves around him and across the landing field, blowing papers and leaves and hardhats across the field to be captured against tents or trucks or bushes.
Before he turned back around to look at the helicopter, he let it rotor down. Max Downey stepped from the right side of the helicopter, said something back in to the pilot who nodded his head in affirmation, then more out of habit than necessity stooped down to avoid the rotors turning above his head, and walked to meet Barnes and Chandler.
“Say, Barnes,” Max said as he reached out his hand.
“Max.” Barnes took Max’s outstretched hand. They shook as old friends do.
“You don’t look so good,” Max said, placing his hand on Barnes’s shoulder. The men turned and walked back toward the helitack tent and away from the noise of helicopters arriving and departing.
“That’s still a helluva lot better than you look.”
“And that’s a helluva lot better than the last time I saw you. Alaska, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Max had been the division boss on a fire near the Gateway to the Arctic Wilderness Area, and Barnes had taken a squad from his crew to catch a finger of the fire as it burned up and over a ridge, threatening to ignite a stand of dog-haired black spruce and taking off on a run that would not have stopped until it reached the glaciers. Max had set the plan in action and told Barnes what he wanted. Barnes took his ten people and went head-on with the fire along that ridge for six hours before they finally contained that section. It had twice jumped his line and they scrambled to knock it back. Once the fire made such a rush through the black spruce that he had to call his people to a hastily constructed safety zone to wait out the run.
After the Fire Page 11
