After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  Barnes felt as though he were eavesdropping on the corners of intimacy and even though he thought of looking away, he watched Ruth embrace her father under the cool yellow light above the table.

  Finally and slowly, she lifted her head and kissed Call again, then said, “You’re too good, Daddy.”

  A smile crossed Call’s face, pressing lines out from and around his mouth and eyes. Barnes saw in those lines and folds on the old man’s face a map of history—mornings and evenings and starless nights, mysteries never unraveled, battles within the walls of that house and wars fought on the foreign soil of another continent, knowledge of the necessary tools needed by the next generation and the questions and fears of how to pass on those tools, connections with a past that was lost other than in him and the acceptance of a legacy he hoped to have formed, exacting fires of love, illnesses and accidents and leavings and returnings and quests and initiations—a breath drawn and a life lived.

  “You two go,” Ruth said. “I’ll clean up this mess.” She swept her hand around to indicate the table of dishes and silverware. “You go and discuss your baseball game.”

  Barnes began to say something, to offer help, to at least cart the dishes into the kitchen, but he was suddenly captured by a tear that traveled down from Ruth’s eye. He nodded and followed Call from the room.

  They sat in the front room with the television off. Barnes heard a gust of wind push against the windows and looked out to see leaves blowing down the street. As suddenly as the leaves were blown one way, they were blown back. The capricious winds of a cold front.

  They sat in large, overstuffed chairs turned at angles to face both each other and the television set across the room. Call sat with a groan, easing himself downward by pressing both hands onto the arms of the chair. He had an unfinished look to him. Even though Call had made his life studying books and histories, Barnes only saw a completeness when the man stood outside with his Stetson shading his eyes and his boots scraping an arc of dirt.

  “Windy?” Call asked.

  “Front’s moving through.”

  “That so? The game going to get rained out?”

  “No, it’s a dry front, or so Ed Green said this morning.”

  “That’s good. I like to end a summer day with a baseball game. Life doesn’t get a helluva lot better than that; although, I’d rather be down there in the stands where Hurdle can hear me when I yell at him.” Call placed his unlit pipe in his mouth and breathed around the pipe’s stem as though he were smoking. “Baseball doesn’t translate all that well to television. It’s not technological to begin with. It doesn’t have an MTV sort of quickness, like violent advertising. Baseball is meant for a stadium under the sun and played on grass—you don’t have to listen to an announcer tell you about miles-per-hour fastballs caught on the radar gun or a manager who manages with one eye on the computer screen.”

  “Thank you, Ring Lardner,” Barnes said.

  “I don’t know that Ring Lardner talked in metaphors, but baseball is something like what we wish life were like.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Within all that repetition there exists the constancy for accident. You never know what’s going to happen and when it does, you suck up and go to the next inning. The next day, though, begins everything new. Yesterday’s score is as important as last week’s mail, and in a single swing we can atone for the previous day’s strikeout or dropped fly. It’s clean and it’s clear in that way. Nothing like it. You’ve got to know that God’s a baseball fan.”

  Grace skipped into the room. She had changed into pajamas with images of ballerinas dancing across her chest and down her legs, and she ran into the room with an airish explosion of delight, running to and jumping on Call’s lap.

  “Oh-my-God, hija,” Call groaned as he encircled Grace within his arms. “You’re no longer a light little girl, are you?”

  Grace hugged her grandfather and said, “Nope. I’m growing up, aren’t I?”

  “That you are, darling, and I wish I could stop it.”

  Grace looked at Call with a singular tilt to her head, considering, it seemed to Barnes, whether her grandfather meant what he had said and whether he could actually keep her from growing up.

  Barnes knew, though, what Call had meant. He had no children of his own nor any nephews or nieces, but he had fostered a certain relationship with Call’s family. He had first seen Grace when she was less than two days old, her eyes shut tight like a little kitten’s as she slept inside the cradle of her mother’s arm. He had seen Grace fall from atop the fence, watched her skin both knees when Call took the training wheels off her bicycle, swallowed a choke when she cried after a boy at day care had told her that she was not pretty. He felt that he was as close to her as any person other than Call or Ruth.

  He understood why Call hovered over her whenever she played in the park, why he walked past a window every two minutes whenever she played in the yard, why he replaced the short picket fence on the side of the house with a six-foot picket fence. The world, Barnes knew, was not a logical world. One could plan and prepare for the accidents of life, but not for every accident—not for a man toting a rifle through an Asian jungle or for a scolding wind that blows too strong or for an evil.

  “Did you kiss Grandpa good-night?” Ruth asked. She leaned against the doorway’s frame with her arms crossed. That errant strand of hair fell across her face and she tucked it back behind her ear. She smiled at the scene of her father and daughter in such obvious enjoyment of each other’s presence.

  Grace said, her eyes squinting and her mouth forced into a tightness, “Grandpa said that he won’t let me grow up.”

  “Well, you tell your grandpa that he can pick up after you from now on, then.”

  “You making a mess?” Call asked as though he could not believe it.

  Grace shook her head but lost her tight face within a smile. Call tickled her side and she laughed and squirmed on his lap.

  “Give Grandpa a kiss and say good-night to Barnes,” Ruth said. She pushed herself from the door frame and stepped toward Grace.

  Grace kissed Call on the cheek and, after crawling from Call’s lap, said to Barnes, “Good-night, Barnes.”

  Barnes said good-night and Grace followed her mother from the room. Barnes could hear Ruth’s voice fade as the two ascended the stairs. “You warm enough in those pajamas?” Grace must have nodded. “Teeth brushed?” “All of them?” “What story do you want to hear?” “You want your grandpa to read to you tonight?” “You sure?” “Okay. You crawl into bed and I’ll ask him if he’ll read a short one to you. But if you want any more than one then I’ll read them. He wants to watch baseball with Barnes and anyways I haven’t got to read to you all week.”

  Grace’s slight footsteps receded up the stairs while Ruth’s turned and grew louder. She stood again in the doorway. “Grace wants you to read to her again tonight,” she said. “If you would rather watch the game, then I’ll tell her that she’ll just have to make do with me.”

  “Ta bueno,” Call said with a smile. “Are you kidding? Read to that young lass or watch television?” Call slapped his knees and rocked forward in his chair. As Call pushed himself from his chair, he said over his shoulder to Barnes, “I’ll be back in a whip, Barnes. Don’t let those Rockies get too far down.” He limped from the room, turning on the television as he passed it and then patting Ruth on the shoulder on his way.

  Ruth sat in Call’s chair and sighed as she slumped back into the hollows left from Call’s body. She closed her eyes and suddenly tightened them as though a galvanic thought had crossed her mind, maybe that she had wrenched her heart in some way or that the way ahead of her that had once opened in light now receded into shades of darkness. With her eyes still closed and her face framed within the folds of her hair, she asked, “You know what I wish, Barnes?”

  Barnes had nothing to say but did not want to say nothing. “Peace on earth,” he said.

  She smiled and shook
her head.

  “The Rockies would get some starting pitching?”

  She shook her head again and laughed a smokey laugh.

  “What then?”

  “I wish A&W would put their cream soda in those little plastic bottles like Pepsi. It would make such a pretty amber color.”

  “Wishing for the moon, my dear.”

  Her voice softened into a whisper then as though they sat together in church, “Aren’t we all at times wishing for the moon?”

  Barnes did not notice that she had opened her eyes and was looking at him. He had looked at her mouth, at the soft curl of her lips as she spoke, at her words whispering out in sibilant circles.

  She said, “We don’t get rehearsals in life—the big things happen only once and too often the important part is not what you do but how you deal with what you have done. Daddy and his war, Robert and me, you and that fire. We have to deal with what we’ve done.”

  “Or didn’t do.”

  “Or didn’t do.”

  “You sound a good bit like Call.”

  “I am his daughter, you know, and I can think of a lot worse people to sound like. He has a knowledge that I’d just like to tap into sometime.”

  “He knows things.”

  “He knows things,” Ruth agreed.

  Neither spoke and they sat together in the room within their sphere of silence. The baseball game faded in front of them until the voices of the announcers became distant.

  Barnes remembered the view from the lifeless bodies of his crewmembers up toward the helispot where he had waited out the fire’s eruption. The hill looked like a ruined cathedral and he had, at every body, kneeled and prayed. He had expected to find an anarchy of bodies discarded like trash along the slope, but they looked calm as if cast in bronze and placed with care along the old fireline. He tried not thinking of them. He tried thinking of anything else, but always remembering his fire. And each night since, his dreams had laid him host to the violent orchestra of that afternoon.

  “I miss you sometimes,” Ruth said.

  Barnes nodded. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he also missed himself. Saying that, however, would have left him hobbled, feeling exposed as even thinking it left him breaking apart.

  “Grace said that once to me,” Ruth said.

  Barnes looked at her.

  “She said that you sometimes seem to be away even though you’re right here.”

  “Grace is a perceptive girl for five.”

  “All kids are perceptive at five. They know a whole lot more than we think. Growing up is a process of unlearning some of the stuff we naturally know.”

  “Kids are something.”

  “Children are the only second chance in life. She’s my chance.” Ruth looked around the room, as did Barnes. Unlike Call’s study, this room belonged to more than one person. Photographs of Grace dominated the walls, but in those photographs stood Robert and Ruth and Call. Grace formed the jewel center of each one around which moved the others. Western art hung on the walls which held no photos. Most of them were Taos prints by Gustave Bauman or ranching scenes by Arthur Mitchell, Call’s favorite from Southern Colorado. Earth tones, leather furniture, a distressed coffee table, old clocks with heavy hour sounds, a floor ashtray spirited from Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel.

  When he looked back at Ruth, he could see that she was looking intently at a photograph of her with Grace and Robert, a studio photograph made in black-and-white with the three of them smiling and sitting close together.

  She said, “What’s funny is that in some ways I do still love Robert, and I don’t at all and I won’t ever again. All of them at once—it’s so damn confusing. I didn’t want what my parents had but even more than that, what I really wanted and needed was exactly what they had while my mother was still alive. I knocked myself out running away from that and that was all I ever wanted. Eventually I searched for that. But things don’t work out like that anymore, do they? Happy endings.”

  “Except now for Grace.”

  Call walked into the room, smiling, cutting off Ruth before she could answer. His gray eyes held steady and clear with a brilliance to them that showed he had seen as much in his one life as most men could only hope for if they lived twice. And that now, after it all, he was happy with his life. Barnes wanted that, what Call had, another couple of decades of decisions and wonder and the very real possibility of a happy ending.

  “You two look lost in a conspiracy, sitting here in the dark,” Call said.

  “Just talking,” Ruth answered. She rubbed her eyes with the palm of a hand.

  “That’s all well and good, but your little girl says she needs a good-night kiss from you.”

  Ruth nodded. She placed a hand on Barnes’s knee to help her stand. She gave her father a kiss on the cheek before mounting the stairs to Grace’s room.

  Call turned on a floor lamp and sat in his chair. The leather chair exhaled comfortably when he sat. He took his pipe and lit it, puffing peacefully.

  “You’re going back, I trust,” Call said without looking at Barnes.

  “Yes,” Barnes said.

  “All of the questions answered?”

  “Not even close.”

  “They never will be. Trust me on that.”

  Call took his pipe from his mouth and looked at it. He smiled, “Life ain’t always good, you know, but it’s far better than the alternative.”

  “I have to agree with that,” Barnes said.

  “The good stuff,” Call said. He turned and pointed his pipe at Barnes. “You have to remember to remember the good stuff. The bad will always find a way to interrupt your sleep, but the good needs a tad bit of prodding sometimes. You live with the parameters that life gives you. Some stuff you’re never going to get past. Some stuff is irrevocable. What you have to do is not let them work you too far down. That day on that fire is one of those days.”

  Barnes looked at Call. He could see that Call had long ago paid admission to the brotherhood Barnes had recently joined. They held each other’s glance for a moment before each looked elsewhere. They remained silent for a long time.

  Chapter Five

  FRIDAY

  From the death of his parents, Barnes had learned that certain moments divide our lives with an uncompromised boundary of past and present, a then and now of singular experience. One of these defining moments happened for Barnes as he walked across the dusty helispot to the edge of the ridge. He stopped there as though he had come to a wall or to a precipice.

  Something terrible began to happen then, at first slowly, then compounding in geometric quickness. Everything was coming wrong. When he first noticed the fire, its smoke columned up in distracted spirals, negligible wisps joining earth and sky. Within minutes, though, that immediate world of earth and sky would turn felon.

  Barnes saw a hawk on the wing high above the ridge as it pitched nervously in the vectors of wind, fighting against the steep currents to keep itself steady. The hawk dipped one wing to veer off and disappeared as it crossed the opposite ridge. The hawk’s erratic flight was Barnes’s first clue.

  The scent of burning leaves and wood grew strong, and Barnes looked down along the fireline his crew had followed and helped construct. He saw the work they had accomplished, a good three-foot line to mineral soil, a prohibitous scar that he feared would be lost. He imagined them in their movements hours earlier while he rested on the pad awaiting his helicopter shuttle. They would have walked single file, passively, with their heads down and their eyes on the boot heels of the person in front of them like a line of prisoners. Their footsteps deadened within the dust and dirt that floated around their White’s boots. Their bodies already tired from the three-week accumulation of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days stacked one on another, blurring distinctions of afternoons and mornings into falling confusions. Walking like dead men walking.

  Hunter came up to stand next to Barnes. “It doesn’t look good,” he said, then cleared his throat a little. �
�I hope that jumper’s mouth didn’t write us a check his butt can’t cash.”

  Barnes turned to speak with Hunter. He also cleared his throat as he coughed out the dust he was breathing. He pointed along the ridgeline toward the other helispot. “Okay, listen. Get everybody to H-1. It’s larger and a better safety zone.”

  “You want us to improve the line?”

  “No. Just walk along the jumpers’ scratch line. Quickly.”

  Hunter began to say something but stopped himself and walked back to his squad. They had all recognized an urgency, and none were sitting. Barnes watched as Hunter pointed along the ridge and began walking in that direction. Aggie followed Hunter. Behind her, Kapell and George fell into line with Ira and Monterey bringing up the rear, each with a Stihl chainsaw over his shoulder.

  Barnes yelled for Kapell and George to drop the cubitainers of water and boxes of MREs that they carried and for Ira to leave behind the Dolmar of fuel and oil. They did so without losing a step.

  Barnes looked back down on the fire. A few ash-white flakes floated around him. He reached for his radio to call Chandler but was interrupted by another firefighter walking toward him.

  “Heah, Barnes. We could have used you earlier. What kept you?”

  “Powell.” Barnes reached out his hand. The two men shook. For the first time that afternoon, Barnes felt comfortable. That one firefighter stood with him on the ridge meant the others must be on their way to the top.

  After drinking from his water bottle, Barnes said, “They took the helicopter for some tourist VIP who wanted a joyride around the fires. Where you been?” Powell was another smokejumper that Barnes had known for years. They had first met when Powell was a member of the Smokey Bear Hot Shots out of New Mexico and Barnes was a squad leader on the Pike crew. They saw each other on fires about every third year, mostly in the Montana area since Powell, like Max Downey, jumped out of Missoula.

  Powell’s face was a mask of dirt with sweat lines marking his temples. The bags under his eyes were made darker from the dirt and the shadow tossed by his hardhat. “I been working, man,” he said with a smile.