Rollo sniffed in disgust.
“Yeah, water is OK.”
Lani remained unmoving on the sofa, her arms still folded. After a long 30 seconds of snubbing an empty room, during which time Rollo and Scott chatted in the kitchen and Champ flopped on the tile floor in disappointment, she sighed, hopped off the sofa and turned on the stereo beneath the TV set in the knotty pine entertainment center.
In the kitchen, Rollo sat on the floor, staring in dismay at the doorframe. The frame was truly a mess, with the brass lock plate hanging free and a spray of splinters where he’d shoved the bolt through the wood. His head hurt too. He knew he shouldn’t have had that last beer.
“Damn, I’m strong.” He raised his right arm and flexed his bicep. He accompanied the gesture with a weak grin.
Scott, standing over him, grunted. Then he sipped at the glass in his hand.
“Y’know, you’re making me nervous standing there. And isn’t that my water?”
Scott handed the glass down, but didn’t budge an inch.
With the edge of a putty knife, the seated mountain man pried open a can of wood putty and scooped out a generous blob.
“No,” Scott said.
“What?”
“No. You’re not gluing that mess back together with wood putty.”
“Well, what the Hell do you want me to do?”
Scott stared around the kitchen, tapping his foot at the same time.
“Hell. Tomorrow we’ll go get some lumber and reframe the door. You’ll earn your keep fixing this the right way.”
Rollo sighed.
“Fair enough.”
With a patter of bare feet, Lani burst into the kitchen.
“Guys, there’s something about a wildfire on the radio. It’s out near Williams.” She glanced at Rollo.
“I told you!” Rollo yelled, jumping up. He was happy to be free of his locksmithing duties. “Those bastards burned me out. Now it’s out of control.”
“They say they think it was started by a vagrant,” Lani added, still looking at Rollo.
Rollo turned to face Lani, then wagged a finger and spoke softly. “Lani, I am a lot of things. But I’m not so dumb that I’m going to set fire to my own back yard.”
The room was silent for a long moment, then Scott took Lani by the arm.
“I believe him,” Scott said. “Vagrants may start fires, but Rollo isn’t a vagrant; he’s a feral weirdo. He knows what he’s doing. Let’s see what else we can find out.”
Chapter 8
Leaping from treetop to treetop, the flames roared across the land. Sucked dry by years of drought, weakened from infestation by bark beetles, and crowded by well-intentioned but ill-considered fire-suppression tactics that prevented small fires from burning brush and thinning the press of trees, the ponderosa forest of northern Arizona had become, potentially, the world’s largest barbecue pit.
The fire was reported only after it had burned for several days—unusually late, considering the close watch kept for smoke and flames that could herald a catastrophic wildfire. When firefighters finally arrived, they quickly established lines intended to keep the fire away from populated areas and set back-burns meant to consume fuel that would otherwise become part of the wildfire.
Line after line was breached, with fire inexorably jumping ahead and establishing new beachheads. In an area of thin habitation, the flames moved, almost as if with a purpose, through open forest, then outlying settlements, toward the town of Williams and its roughly 3,000 residents.
Far from the office of the red-faced, excitable chief ranger, Jason felt at-home. There was nobody here to screech and point fingers. He was in his beloved forest, which he expected would heal from the flames that were already driving out the human invaders.
Smudged from head-to-toe, Jason surveyed his half-dozen equally sooty colleagues. There were Ray and Tim, in matching crewcuts and aviator sunglasses. Both men nursed aspirations to work for the FBI, but had somehow ended up in the Park Service instead. They might not actually be G-Men, but they could act the role, which was sometimes a little disconcerting—especially when they were leading children’s tours at the Grand Canyon. Even so, they were really good at taking orders and viewed any civilian off pavement as a potential security threat.
Terry was a fellow Forest Service ranger who shared Jason’s proprietary view of wide-open spaces.
And then came Bob, Rena and Samantha, volunteers from the Center for Floral Supremacy who’d bicycled all the way up from Tucson under orders from Rupert Greenfield, their group’s bearded, cult-like leader. The trio had recovered from severe dehydration, suffered during their ride through the desert, on the floor of Jason’s conscripted living room while Greenfield, Van Kamp and other people Jason didn’t know cooked up the plan that Jason insisted on calling the Carthage Option. Bob, Rena and Samantha were so pure in their dedication to the shared vision of a human-free wilderness, and so neglectful of mere civilized concerns, such as hygiene, that Jason found them a little intimidating.
All of them wore Forest Service uniforms like his, to discourage questions about their presence near a wildfire.
Would there be room for them all in the new wilderness? Jason suddenly wondered. They were good, earnest people, but he hoped they wouldn’t crowd him in the world they were making. Maybe he’d have to do something about that; he’d pick and choose among his allies.
Like Samantha. He could imagine sharing the forest with Samantha. She was almost doe-eyed … He lost himself in thought, gazing once again down at the hypnotizing flames.
The members of the small group all stared, slightly wild-eyed, from the temporary safety of a ridge to their ravenous handiwork below.
It’s not easy being radical green, Jason thought to himself.
Chapter 9
Two days after Jason looked out over his handiwork, Martin Van Kamp sat sweating and uncomfortable in a stuffy motel room. The diminutive Forest Service administrator sipped at a paper cup of tepid tapwater while trying to find a non-lumpy spot on the bed. His feet barely touched the floor, giving him little leverage to shift his position. So, in his search for a soft perch, he had to hop on his buttocks from position to position, probing for a few square inches that didn’t feel like a sack of old laundry. The room in the low-rent motel jammed in along Flagstaff’s Route 66 strip of cut-rate conveniences for travelers on a budget certainly smelled like a sack of old laundry, or at least like a high school locker room.
Looking equally uncomfortable, Van Kamp’s counterparts from the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service leaned back in the small room’s two rickety chairs. In rumpled uniforms pasted to their bodies by the ongoing heat wave, and unrefreshed by even the slightest breeze—the room’s one window was sealed tight, with the blinds closed—they glanced occasionally at the TV whispering softly on its veneer tabletop, but clearly preferred keeping an eye on Van Kamp’s acrobatic antics.
Surrendering to the inevitable, Van Kamp ended his search for a soft spot on the mattress, preferring a measure of dignity to a quixotic quest for comfort in a room that seemed to stand as a shrine to the motel management’s relaxed attitude toward housekeeping.
His colleagues were clearly disappointed, and the three turned their gazes to the television.
The screen was occupied by a lined, bearded face haloed by a spray of graying hair and partially obscured by the word “LIVE” in excessively large, fire-engine red letters. He looked like a biblical prophet who’d been tracked, sedated, and stuffed into an off-the-rack Sears sport coat.
The screen briefly flashed to a pretty, redheaded interviewer who appeared to be crowding the upper end of her teen years, then switched back to the bearded face.
“Absolutely!” the face said in a voice that, even at the volume’s lowest setting, caused the three men in the room to glance warily toward the door. “The tragedy in Williams proves that there are places where human habitation is doomed.” He dragged out the “oo” in “doomed” like an ac
tor in a late-night horror movie. “The high desert is no place for crowds of people in their houses and SUVs. The forest needs to burn to refresh itself, and it will burn no matter who is there and no matter what is in its path.”
“So, do you expect more wildfires like this—?”
“Nobody can predict the future,” the face answered, leaning forward and shaking his head with the certainty of his prophetical demeanor. “But the human population of Arizona’s rural areas has hit critical mass and that means more fire started by nature and by people who have no business in the wilderness, and more homes to be burned by that fire. Nature will take its own course, and that portends an end to mammalian dominance in northern Arizona.”
“Oh shit,” the BLM official muttered in the fetid motel room.
The interviewer blinked blankly with her mouth half open. The moment drew out, uncomfortably long.
“Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Greenfield. Now, back to—”
A few seconds later, the motel room door opened inwards, revealing the bearded man and a brief glimpse of the TV interviewer chatting with a cameraman in the motel parking lot. The three men in the room all leaned forward for a glance at the interviewer’s legs below her skirt, Van Kamp almost toppling from the bed in the process.
“Holy shit,” the bearded man said, stripping off the sports jacket and tossing it toward the head of the bed. “If the TV crews around here get any younger, they’ll need diapers and a changing table in the van.”
“They’re college kids,” Van Kamp explained. “The station saves money—”
“Never mind that,” the BLM official said. “What’s this ‘mammalian dominance’ crap? I thought you were going to can the weirdness and stay on-message.”
“Stuff it, you little bureaucrat. If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have had the balls—”
While the prophet and the BLM official argued, Van Kamp and his Park Service counterpart peeped through the blinds to see the television crew loading their equipment into a van prominently marked with the local TV station’s logo. Free from fear of discovery, they wrestled the room’s two windows open and gasped for fresh air.
Revived, Van Kamp turned to face the room. “Enough. All Greenfield was supposed to do was set the tone. How he does that is his business.” He turned back to the window for a quick breath, then faced the room once again. “With Williams burned out, people are already on edge. Greenfield’s little performance will scare the shit out of them.”
“So the next step—” the BLM official began.
“The next step is the next fire. My office has already put out an alert about a small blaze west of Flagstaff. That gave us a reason to seal the roads out there. I’ve assigned a trusted crew to make sure there is a fire. In no time at all, the highway will be clogged with panicked families looking for a soft, safe hidey-hole far from the dangerous forest.”
His eyes burning into his colleagues, Greenfield nodded his head and spoke.
“And all of this beautiful country around us will return to the wilderness it was meant to be, untroubled by wrongful incursions.” After a pause, he added, “Except for the damned mammals.”
“And the people assigned to protect that vulnerable wilderness are likely to get a lot more money and power than they’ve had in the past,” Van Kamp added.
Greenfield, Van Kamp, the BLM official and the Park Service man all glanced at each other, then smiled. Visions, respectively, of a human-free utopia and of supplementary budgets danced in their heads.
Finally, the Park Service man spoke.
“Can we please turn on the air conditioner?” His voice betrayed a slight whine.
Van Kamp and the BLM official nodded in relief, each happy to not be the one who broke first.
Greenfield looked at them all in disgust.
“Wimps.”
Chapter 10
The restaurant at the Weatherford Hotel was unusually crowded for a weekday lunchtime. Three families shuffled around the small, history-laden lobby, glancing at photographs of Flagstaff in its timber-driven heyday and waiting for tables.
Scott caught the manager’s eye.
“What’s going on, Ron? Some kind of university event?”
Short and slim, with dark hair graying at the temples, Ron shook his head.
“Lani, Scott, good to see you guys.” Then he leaned in close and spoke in a barely audible whisper.
“They’re mostly Williams people. The Red Cross has them camped out in the high school gyms, and they’re wandering through town looking for something to do.”
Ron backed up and grabbed two menus.
“Hang on. I’ll get you guys a table.” He disappeared into the main dining room.
“Is he actually setting up another table for us,” Lani asked.
“I think so. Hey, he has a major crush on you. It comes in handy.”
“You don’t know that,” Lani answered. But she blushed.
“I have a pretty good idea. It’s OK. I take it as a compliment to you—and to my taste in picking you.”
“Oh, so you picked me.”
“Or maybe it was the other way around. Which would only go to show that you have excellent taste yourself.”
“Speaking of taste … Today’s meal is on me. Let’s call it a freedom-from-employment lunch.”
“Well … sure. How can I turn down a celebration of imminent destitution?”
Ron reappeared with the menus in his hand.
“Come on guys.”
One of the men in the lobby, decked out in boots, a cowboy hat and brown, leathery skin, looked like he was going to protest. His wife, in blue jeans and with an outdoorsy complexion to match, put her hand on his arm. The man’s gaze dropped to the toes of his boots and his entire body seemed to sag. He looked like a deflated balloon. Scott nudged Lani ahead of him and brushed by as quickly as he could.
“I can’t even imagine,” he said. “That fire took everything.”
“I can’t either.”
Ron escorted them through the dining room to the outdoor seating area along Leroux Street. A tiny two-top crowded a corner, partially projecting under the light chain that separated the area from the public sidewalk.
“Thanks, Ron.”
The manager’s eyes were spot-welded to Lani as he helped her wriggle into a chair between a post supporting the upstairs balcony and another diner. A goofy grin clung to his face as the woman writhed inside her tight t-shirt in an effort to take her seat.
“I said thanks, Ron.”
“Oh, no problem. I’ll have Pam out to take your order.”
Scott chuckled as the manager disappeared into the dining room.
Lani blushed again.
“OK, you’re right. Just shut up about it.”
Still chuckling, Scott turned his attention to the street. After his conversation with Ron, he viewed the street traffic with a different eye. The usual tourists and college kids still prowled the few scant blocks of Flagstaff’s downtown area. Middle-aged couples popped in and out of trinket shops; teens and twenty-somethings wheeled bicycles along the sidewalk under the bored gaze of two city police officers. But another element was added to the mix.
Concentrated in Heritage Square, whole families clustered and wandered about. They mostly had the leathery, sun-soaked look of people who spent lots of time outdoors as a matter of course. Cowboy boots and hats abounded, as did belt-buckles large enough to eat off of and facial hair that proudly spurned any restraint.
These were Williams folks all right.
Scott didn’t know a lot about Williams, but he knew it was an old railroad town that, in recent years, relied on Grand Canyon-bound tourism to keep itself from drying up and blowing away. He doubted the scorched town’s refugees had much in the way of resources to fall back on with their homes and possessions burned.
He started as Lani’s hand closed over his.
“What do you want to eat, hon?”
“Oh. Navajo taco, please.
And a wheat beer.” The beer was brewed just down the street in one of the town’s three brewpubs.
Lani ordered a chicken sandwich and an iced tea for herself.
Ron reappeared with the drinks in his hand. He set them down on the glass tabletop to which streams of condensation instantly flowed to form tiny moats.
“Hey, I meant to tell you earlier.”
“Yeah?”
“Your hobo friend—”
“Rollo?”
That’s him. Rollo. Anyway, he was in earlier, and things got a little ugly in the bar.”
“Rollo was born ugly.”
Ron emitted a short giggle, his eyes on Lani the entire time. She shot him a brief smile, then sipped at her tea. She flashed a quick wink at Scott.
“Ron, I’m over here. So there was a problem in the bar.”
“Uh huh. Some of the Williams people recognized him—I guess he spends some time in town there. Anyway, the word is out that he might have started the fire, and a guy who’d had a few decided he wanted a piece of Rollo.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“The drunk, but not badly. Rollo’s pretty tough. We hustled them both out of the bar.”
Scott sighed.
“Thanks. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“It’s probably not a great time for him to be wandering around Flag.”
“I’ll let him know.”
For moments after the manager walked away, the table remained silent. Scott sipped at his beer, and Lani watched.
“You really watch out for him, don’t you?”
“Rollo?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody has to. He’s half feral; he can just about barely function in modern society. If it was 1850, he’d be fine wandering back and forth between town and the forest. But people today like things squeaky clean and tightly regulated. Rollo doesn’t have a regular job or address by choice—he’s not a charity case. That makes people nervous.”
“Me too, I guess.”
“Well … you and he have never gotten along. I think at some level you resent him doing what he damned well pleases, and at some level you’re afraid that I’m going to disappear into the forest with him to hunt elk and live like Daniel Boone. I’m not, you know. I like electricity too much, and I love you.”
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