The man kept his distance from the firefighters. At first, Barnes thought the psychiatrist might have smelled death or fear on them, then he realized that the man smelled the pungent odor of a dozen people who had not taken a real shower for weeks and had not changed their clothes for almost as long, and had been bathed in smoke and dirt as well as the death and fear.
The psychiatrist walked across the room, traversing the front as though caught on a line, telling them about the stages of grief that they would encounter. He never loosened his tie nor did he roll up the sleeves of his white shirt.
As the man walked and talked in front of him, Barnes could feel himself tighten. He felt his fingers rub the muscles of his thigh, and the back of his neck went very rigid. He sat in the front row of the room and could not see how the others were reacting but he could feel their tense response to a man who had read a lot of books about dealing with death.
Barnes heard very little of what the man said. He was still on the hill. He could watch the turmoil surround him and the clouds and the column mix into a hovering presence and the land boil on the edge. And he saw again Warner, who had died nearest the top of the ridge, bent as though praying like an anchorite lost in ashes.
They might have been with the psychiatrist for an hour or two or more, and by the time they left the meeting room for the hotel bar the sun had fallen and the world was dark. Nobody spoke as they walked from the room, nobody even looked another in the eyes. They left with a blindness and muteness that stranded each.
The heavy padding of their boots on the hotel’s carpeting echoed distantly in the fluorescent silence. Barnes stood for a minute at a corridor window to look out on the darkness. Aggie passed him, she reached out to quickly and gently grasp his hand. Just as quickly, she turned his hand loose as she continued down the hallway, never looking at Barnes.
“Do you good to have a beer with us, unwind some and maybe help you get to sleep.” Hunter had walked up next to Barnes in the corridor and placed his hand on Barnes’s shoulder.
Barnes did not turn to look at Hunter. He shook his head and said, “I’ll be by in an hour or so. I have another meeting with the investigation team.”
Hunter coughed from the minor case of bronchitis he had been carrying for half the season. He said, “At least they know what they’re talking about.”
Barnes grunted, “If that shrink thinks he knows what’s best for us, he’d buy rounds for the night and let us fight out our pain.”
Hunter nodded. “You’ll stop by before you hit your bed?”
“Just as soon as I’m done with this meeting.”
Hunter began to walk away, stopped and turned back to Barnes. “Don’t let them pin this on you, Barnes. It wasn’t you that caused this.”
Barnes nodded but did not answer. He continued to stare out the window while Hunter walked down the corridor. In the distance, Barnes could hear the music of a jukebox.
Barnes knew some of the investigation team members only by reputation, some through fire assignments and some not at all. Barnes shook all of their hands as they each expressed their condolences and grief before the questions began. The questions, prefixed by the team leader’s statement that they were not out to hang anything on anyone but to find the truth, were primarily technical. They discussed the weather reports, the red flag warning that was not passed on, the reconnaissance flight, the fire size-up, the fuels, the topography, the strategy for attack, the diamond as a safety zone, the ridge as a safety zone, the communication between firefighters, the strength of a chain-of-command structure.
They talked for three hours and Barnes felt a certain relief from having talked about the fire with people who would have some understanding. They all shook hands again and told Barnes that he would have to stay in Craig for a few more days, his crew would stay at least through the next day when they would be debriefed, but he might have to stay longer.
Besides the blare of the jukebox, the first sound Barnes heard on entering the hotel bar was that of two bodies striking each other at some measure of force. The slap of skin followed by a blasting exhalation like that of two great bellows and then George screaming, “I got you, you bastard. Any takers?”
Barnes stood for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then he looked into the bar with some disbelief. Aggie sat at a table nearest him, her shirt sleeve rolled up, a pile of dollar bills in front of her and her hand engaged in an arm-wrestling battle with some male firefighter off another crew. George, stripped of his shirt and with his chest a hard pink, crouched outside a makeshift ring of tables as another firefighter readied himself for some sort of punk-sumo-mosh pit wrestling match. They ran at each other, leaped in the air, and slapped their chests together. The one who landed on his feet and within the ring was the winner. Hunter and Kapell and Ira sat at the bar with a row of shot glasses in front of them, some still full. Kapell tossed one down and shouted as loud as the weather’s wind. Ira set a match to the drink in his shot glass, lighting it on fire before downing it and shouting to match Kapell’s yell. Hunter laughed drunkenly, almost slipping from his bar stool. Monterey stood in a corner of the room next to the jukebox, nursing a pint and smiling at the saturnalia taking place on the floor between him and Barnes. A yellow-shirted woman from the Pike Hot Shots dropped four quarters into Monterey’s pint glass. He fished them out and dropped them in the jukebox’s coin slot, playing first George Thoroughgood’s “Bad to the Bone.”
Barnes had expected to find his crew passed out in grief, walking car wrecks, frail and shaking uncontrollably as though they had been stripped naked and stood in a cold snow. He expected to find them apart from humanity. He expected to see them sitting in the cool wind of the bar’s air conditioner with the soft flutter of the hotel’s other patrons surrounding them in the dark. He expected them to be overfilled with self-pity and a fiction that life should have no miseries such as what they knew now so intimately.
Instead, there were no other patrons in the bar besides his crew, the handful of jumpers who had been on the lee side of the hill with Powell, and part of the Pike Hot Shot crew and a helitack crew and local BLM firefighters who had helicoptered to the ridge soon after the fire passed over in the vague hope that they might be able to help someone do something.
Barnes walked to the bar and sat next to Hunter.
Hunter closed his left eye to look at Barnes. He said, “I only see two of you this way.” He drank the last of his whiskey and called to the bartender, “Barkeep, another for me and something here for my buddy. What’ll you have, Barnes?”
The bartender stood in front of Barnes. A wisp of blonde hair fell across her eyes and the way she pushed it back in place behind her ear reminded Barnes of someone.
“What do you have on tap?” asked Barnes, watching the woman’s movements, watching the tips of her slender fingers push a coaster in front of him and how she wet her lips before speaking.
“They got Fat Tires,” Kapell interrupted, leaning over Hunter and almost knocking him into Barnes.
“I’ll take one of those,” Barnes said to the bartender.
She nodded and drew a pint of the beer for Barnes. It overflowed and ran in amber rivers down the side of the glass and dropped on the bar top as she placed it on the coaster in front of Barnes.
“This on the doctor also?” she asked and smiled.
Before Barnes could answer, could ask her what she meant, Hunter slurred, “Yes. The doc’s picking it up tonight. A damn good man, that shrink.”
“To the doc,” offered Ira in toast. Hunter and Kapell raised their glasses to meet Ira’s. “To the doc,” they both said.
“He must have one helluva nice expense account,” the bartender said as she walked to the bar’s other end to serve Powell and another jumper.
Barnes looked at Hunter. He felt the question forming in his mouth also wrinkle his brow. Before asking, though, he needed that first cool sip of beer.
Hunter yawned, “He said he was here to hel
p us.” He took a drink from his shot glass. “And you said that if he really wanted to help us that he should buy rounds.” He took another drink. “And so’s I put two and two together and agreed with you, Barnes.”
“And everyone is charging to him?”
“Not everyone. Just us and the jumpers. The others have to pay their own way.”
“And what do you plan on doing tomorrow when he doesn’t pay up?”
Hunter leveled his voice and spat, “Fuck him. Fuck him and his steps to recovery and his grieving process and his fucking limp wrist.”
“Yeh,” said Kapell, again leaning hard into Hunter. “Fuck the fucking fucker.”
“All right.” Barnes drank from his beer. It tasted better than he thought it should.
White, who had been sitting by himself at a corner table and who should have died on the hill instead of Lopez, walked over to stand between Barnes and Hunter. “Barnes,” he said, “we have to talk.”
His skin had drained to a shallow pall and his fingers shook where they held on to the bar. Unlike any of the others from Barnes’s crew who had gathered in the bar, White did not carry any burn blemishes or scrapes or heat discolorations on the skin of his hands or face. He tried holding Barnes’s eyes but could not and looked down at the bandage on the back of Barnes’s hand covering a burn received during the run.
Barnes felt the muscles along his jaws tighten and blood rush through his eyes and ears. He took hold of his beer glass and said, “We have to talk, but not tonight.” He breathed hard and felt a red heat burn behind his eyes. He continued, “What I’m going to do is take a drink from my beer and if you’re still standing there when I put the glass back down, I’ll kick your ass.”
He did not wait for White to answer but drank a long, full pull from his beer, and when he replaced the glass, White had left.
“He ain’t such a bad guy,” Hunter said with surprising lucidity.
Barnes flashed in anger toward Hunter but restrained himself. “No, but I just didn’t need to deal with him right now.”
“Lopez didn’t die because of White, you know. White has that to live with, though. He’ll carry that weight with him for a good long while. But he couldn’t have known.”
“I know that. But I still don’t know if I can . . .” He let his sentence trail off. “I don’t know.”
In the middle of his beer, Barnes began watching the bartender again. She seemed leashed to the beer taps, looking at him and smiling from time to time and then returning to the taps to fill another pint. He watched her fingers move with grace and subtle strength and he watched her eyes as they surveyed the bar and crossed his looking back at her. Her face was soft and white. The hair somewhere between blonde and cornsilk and long enough to be held in a knot behind her neck, except for the errant strand that kept falling across her face. Barnes continued to watch her while he drank his beer.
When she noticed that his glass was empty, she asked if he needed another.
He nodded and said that he did.
She filled it. As she placed the pint in front of him, she said, “I’ll get this one.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled and Barnes met her smile with his own.
She leaned across the bar and said, “I heard what happened on that fire. That’s terrible. I don’t see how you can do it, fight fire. That’s just too scary.”
“Sometimes,” Barnes said. “Sometimes, but not often. It’s usually pretty simple stuff.” He could think of little else to say that could say anything at all.
Kapell, however, leaned forward and said, filling his voice as full of Chandler as he could, “If you want to die in bed, don’t become a hot shot.”
“Fuckin’-A,” George said from behind. He had put his shirt back on, but a trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
The bartender smiled again and left.
“I made me fifty dollars,” Aggie said, leaning heavily into Hunter’s back. She tossed a wadded ball of bills onto the counter, then turned around and surveyed the crowd of firefighters. “Shit-all-mighty, there isn’t a good-looking piece of meat in this bar. I need me some blinders.”
She pushed away from the bar in the general direction of the jukebox. She walked as though she was maneuvering through a maze, circling tables and staggering from side to side with unsteady grace. She scanned the musical offerings, her head and body bobbing and swaying with absolutely no discernible beat. After finding what she wanted, she plugged in the numbers and stood back to wait for the song to begin. Two songs later, during which she stood and watched the room with predatory concentration, Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” slid across the bar’s dance floor. Aggie followed the music and found a man off the Pike crew to dance with. She buried her face in his neck and Barnes could see her head move in sobbing convulsions.
That song ended and Flogging Molly captured the dance floor with “What’s Left of the Flag.” Aggie wiped her eyes and tossed her body into the song. The dance floor filled. Even Ira and Kapell stumbled from their seats to find somebody to dance with.
Halfway into the song, Ira flung himself to the dance floor and began to flop on his back. Kapell joined him, and the two finished the dance with what they called the hot tuna.
The wake oscillated between gloom and joy, a ride and tie of tears of laughter. An hour after last call, with the beer taps shut off and all of the bottles stored in boxes and a threat from the local police chief, Barnes finally shoved the last of his people out of the bar.
“You need someone to talk to?”
Barnes looked at the blonde bartender. “All I’ve been doing is talk since the fire.”
He started to walk away.
She said, “We don’t have to talk.”
They made love in the shower with his body pressing against hers and him holding her by the curve of her butt against the shower’s wall tiles. The water, as hot as he could stand it, pelted his back, and the steam surrounding them while they engaged cast the shower stall in a swirling fog. They made love again in the bed with her on top, her back arching and him reaching to embrace the round of her breasts. She folded herself back onto his chest and remained there for a long time after he had gone soft and slid from her body. She left an hour before sunrise, kissing him softly on the forehead and lips after dressing in the room’s darkness while he silently watched.
After she left him, Barnes stayed awake. He wished that he could wake up and be over with his nightmares, but knew that it was only his dreams that had been lost. He wondered why he had not cried and why he had not punched someone or something or why he had not yet drunk himself into a stupor.
As he lay with the covers bunched around him and the sun’s morning light spreading across the room, his ghosts first came to him. They spread in a cloistral circle around the foot of his bed and watched his eyes swell with recognition at the advent of his dead.
Chandler might have been the first of them to die, but dying only a matter of seconds before the others perished. He was the farthest down of Barnes’s crew and as their leader he would have been the first in and the last out. His full name was Walker Chandler and he had come to the Red Feather Hot Shots after a year of helitack in Yellowstone and two years on the Entiat Hot Shots. Twenty-eight years old, a college degree in sociology and an interest in eventually joining the FBI. He stood on the left of the circle naked except for the left sleeve of his shirt from elbow to wrist which was charred ocher.
If Chandler could have talked, he would not have forgiven Barnes, for there was nothing to forgive Barnes for. Events decide themselves, Chandler might have said, and that is the mystery Barnes could not know. Even in his sublimity, Chandler could not offer absolution nor could he tell Barnes of the simple acts of expiation. He could not answer “Why?” A fire, he might have wanted to say, is dynamic. It cleanses some and destroys others.
The sun continued to light the room until the ghosts were removed. And when Barnes saw them the next morning a
nd every morning following, Chandler, like the others, was recast without the charred body Barnes prayed over on the ridge.
Barnes spent Saturday evening arranging his war bag, making certain that everything he needed for the coming fire season would find its place. It formed a ritual that he took comfort in, something similar to a homecoming. He ticked through the mental list of necessities, from the seven pairs of new cotton socks to the extra vitamins. He first laid everything on the floor to inspect it before putting it in its proper stuff sack.
With The Mavericks on his stereo offering songs from paradise to hell, Barnes filled the backpack that served as his summer home. He then checked his line gear. For a moment he felt the presence of his ghosts observing him as he removed his new fire shelter from its bag and fingered the plastic wrapping protecting it.
He oiled all three pairs of White’s loggers, his primary pair in their second season and his two backups, both of which had been reworked at the White’s shop in Spokane. He chose three sets of Nomex fire clothes from his private stash. Over the years he had collected a dozen old-style shirts and would not part with them. The new polyester-looking shirts did not suit him well at all, so he kept his own. He rolled and taped two sets of shirts and pants for his war bag, and folded a third set on top of his line gear.
Just before eleven o’clock, the telephone rang, startling Barnes as he sat on the front room floor surrounded by his equipment.
“Barnes, pick up.” Ruth’s voice was edged and erratic.
He felt a cold deadening as she said that Grace was missing. At first she spoke unhesitatingly, stringing the words together in mercurial quickness, and then slower a second time as though transferring her words.
He knew he said something in response and that she answered him, but exactly what he could not say. He hung up the telephone and stood for a protracted second inside the silence of his house. An echo beat and beat again before he left for Ruth’s home next door.
After the Fire Page 18
