Wildfire at Larch Creek

by M. L. Buchman

  Tim wasn’t hungry. The thought of one of the Doghouse’s monster mushroom and bacon burgers with a smokie barbeque sauce—a Smokejumper Deluxe, just didn’t do it for him.

  Then he thought about a moose burger with onion rings back home at French Pete’s and wondered if Carl had changed the grease in the fryer since the last time Tim had been in Alaska. It had been years, so the chances were at least fair.

  “Thanks, buddy, but no thanks,” Tim looked down at his friend. “It’s time I went home. I’ll call you from Alaska.”

  “Alaska?” The look of shock on Akbar’s face just made it all the sweeter.

  Chapter 3

  Macy could feel the onion rings roiling in her stomach. The date had been holding its own until halfway through the meal.

  Then Brett had laid the bomb that she would never escape as long as she lived in Larch Creek—no! It would survive right past her death and go on into town legend.

  “So, Macy, why the hell did you bloody Billy at the altar anyway?”

  Like she was supposed to have a good answer to what was wrong with her not with Billy. The list was manifold and she wasn’t about to share even if she knew where to begin, which she didn’t.

  “I mean you’re one of the prettiest girls in town. What the hell happened?”

  Most of the town had been in on the public scene a mere six months ago. Macy arriving at the church thinking she’d found true love, Billy’s busted nose spilling red all over her white dress, and no wedding. That’s the part everybody knew.

  The part that she’d kept to herself was Billy standing with her at the altar and asking her in a soft whisper, during the middle of the ceremony she’d written on her own because he’d been too busy to help, how she felt about “three ways” because there was this hot Russian chick who’d come across the Bering Sea in a small boat and was currently in Fairbanks fishing for a green card and—

  Thankfully Mrs. Harada had taught her well in the twice weekly Kung Fu classes at the Grange Hall; Macy hadn’t just bloodied his nose on the altar, she’d broken it bad. She hoped that the Fairbanks “hot chick” didn’t like men with crooked noses and two missing front teeth for that was how Billy had left town with a dirty rag pressed to his face and a blown cleaning deposit on his rented tux.

  Macy staged a wedding-dress funeral; a bonfire event held in the deep tundra for a party of one. She’d flown her Bell LongRanger helicopter out past Monkey Hot Springs, gotten good and drunk, had a major cry, and burned the dress.

  She had returned to Larch Creek red-eyed, hung over, and done with men.

  Word was, Billy had wisely moved on from Fairbanks to Juneau, which was more Lower Forty-eight than it was Alaska. No one expected him ever to return.

  So why was she sitting here with Brett?

  He was a nice enough guy. Had always been decent to her, even when she was busy being a pain-in-the-ass teenage girl in high school. But that’s where it had always ended.

  “You know what, Brett?”

  “Why do I get the feeling I should take back my question about Billy?”

  “No, it’s not that. You’re okay,” never burn a bridge in a small town, at least not unless it was really deserved. “But this is so not gonna happen between us. How about we just enjoy the meal together?”

  Brett nodded carefully, looked disappointed for a moment. Then, thinking about it, smiled for the first time that evening.

  The rest of the meal went much more smoothly.

  # # #

  Tim had forgotten what a total pain-in-the-legs it was to get home. It was the sort of thing you did your best to block out, and he had succeeded. If he’d remembered, he might still be at the Doghouse.

  He always had a kit bag behind the seat of the truck, so that had saved him driving back up to camp. An hour later he’d arrived at the Portland airport.

  Smokejumper planes weren’t really made for guys who were six-foot-four, but they figured you had a lot of gear. As long as he watched his head there weren’t any real leg room problems.

  The Alaska Airlines Dash-8 jet was made for people smaller than Akbar’s five-six. Twelve-year-old kids wouldn’t fit in these seats. He’d barely survived the forty minutes to Seattle. The leg up to Anchorage on a 787 had been at least tolerable, but scrunching himself up into another Dash-8 puddle jumper to Fairbanks for another hour-plus had him near suicidal. By the time he was faced with the broken seat adjuster on the last SUV on the rental lot, he’d downshifted to a stony resignation. They offered him a compact—no way his legs or his head would fit—or a mini-van. No way his pride would fit.

  “That’s what coming home does to you,” he told his mangled legs as he drove out of the city and only took two wrong turns before finding the road out to Larch Creek; the new Goldhill subdivision threw him off and the small turn sign had gone missing as usual.

  But as he climbed up over Liga Pass and Denali shone like a white fist punching into the sky out of the dark green that coated the mid-summer landscape, something shifted in him.

  He rolled down the window and knew that smell. Not just the tall larch trees underlaid by a carpet of yellow daisy and bright fireweed, but also the bite on the air of the deep grasses going dry under the long summer days. The short Alaskan fire season was going to be brutal this year.

  As a smokie, he followed weather reports the way couch potatoes followed sports scores. And Alaska was running for a hot-and-dry record this year. High eighties in the heartland didn’t feel hot like the nineties in Oregon, instead it felt dangerous.

  Once he’d crested Liga Pass, the heat eased off to seventies and the grasses were greener. Even from sixty miles away Denali and the Alaska Range were making their influence felt.

  He twisted back down off the pass and rolled through Heinrich’s barley fields and hoped that the old man had finally taken on an assistant. Carl brewed the best beer in the fifty states with Heinrich’s barley, but the old German had to be eighty if he was a day. The crop looked like it was off to a good start this year at least.

  Town was on him before he expected. Not that there were new houses, but rather that there were so few outliers. When Denali was doing the other half of her job, the mid-winter half, a soul didn’t want to be too far out in the wind, except for folks like Clement who were all the way out in Tena.

  He spotted Mom’s truck out in front of French Pete’s and pulled in. It was a bright blue Toyota pickup like almost everyone else’s in town—the blue theme was something he’d never quite understood. But the bumper stickers were the giveaway. On one it said, I kill people for a living, with “Mystery Writer” in small print. On the other there was a large picture of a bright red fish and it stated, This is a red herring.

  Tim had left Hood River before lunch, traveled for too damn many hours and an extra time zone, and his stomach insisted that he needed to eat something more than a tiny bag of over-salted almonds and he needed to do it now. For a change his connections had been too good to hit a food court anywhere along the way.

  French Pete’s looked exactly the same outside and in.

  The Sunday gang was at the big corner table and he headed straight over. His mom actually screamed when she spotted him. She was a small woman, taking after her own Vietnamese mother rather than granddad who was still a big Oklahoma boy even in his eighties, jumped up on her chair and gave him a big hug. Most of his looks came from her, except every inch of his height and then some had come from granddad and his own French-Canadian father.

  He held her close.

  This was what it felt like to be home.

  # # #

  Macy’s date was dead and done.

  She was just saying goodbye and thanking Brett for being decent about the whole thing; her fiancé—prior to the broken nose and missing teeth—had been a very popular man in Larch Creek. It was on the verge of becoming awkward when there was
a shriek of delight that had both her and Brett stumbling out of their booth to look.

  Over at the table where Dad had been sitting with his writing friends—and where she’d expected to finish off this evening—a towering figure was hugging Eva Harada. Even standing on her chair, the woman was shorter than he was. There was no question who it might be. Tim Harada had passed five feet by third grade and six feet before high school. He’d made the Larch Creek Snow Angels unbeatable in basketball four years running.

  Tim and her big brother Stephen had been an unstoppable forward force, both on and off the court. The two of them had always swept the field whether the game was basketball, video, or dating.

  Macy was not going to think about Tim. When Stephen had died in Afghanistan, Tim had made it home for the funeral, but stopped coming home after that. It had hurt. She’d lost her big brother twice, in some ways.

  While she’d never thought of Tim as her big brother, not even a little, it was clear that was how he’d always seen his role in her life. He’d zealously guarded the outspoken girl who was always in trouble with someone about something. Tim had fished her out of even more scraps and scrape-ups than Stephen had. He was the one who had dragged her into his mom’s Kung Fu class, “If you’re going to be such a pain in the butt, you better learn how to survive it.” The guy couldn’t even swear decently, but he’d always been on her side.

  It wasn’t until he was gone that she’d missed him. Missed him like a hole had been chopped in her heart.

  On his last couple visits, she’d been off at college in Juneau and then flight school in Anchorage. She would come home and find that everyone was talking about Tim-this and Tim-that. His smokejumping had taken on mythic proportions. Actually, Mount Hood Aviation’s firefighting reputation had even reached up here and being on the lead stick meant that mythic might be about right.

  It had been a long time since he’d been home and far longer since she’d seen him.

  Well, she didn’t need him back now.

  She hooked her arm through Brett’s elbow.

  “If you want to walk me home, that would be nice. Just don’t think it means anything, Brett.”

  “Sure, Mace.”

  She liked that he fell back to her old nickname. It was comfortable, an old childhood nickname that rarely surfaced any more. And, she realized with chagrin, it was one that Tim Harada had tagged her with after she’d chased him around the yard swinging a two-by-four. She’d been six and he ten, and he’d teased her so far past tolerance that he would have soundly deserved it if she had caught him.

  “Like a rabid knight with a mace,” he’d told Stephen that night over dinner. She’d at least had the satisfaction of planting a hard kick to his shin under the table.

  She turned her attention back to Brett, “Didn’t Linda Lee always have a soft spot for you? Seems to me she did. She just divorced that guy from Talkeetna and is coming back. I bet she could use a friendly shoulder when she comes in next week.”

  She half listened to Brett’s surprised reply of “Really? She did?” as they stepped out through the door. Men just didn’t have a clue.

  The other half of her attention was noticing that Tim had sat right down at the table and was welcomed as if he’d never been away.

  Tim had always fit in.

  Well, she didn’t need to be hurt by him. She knew his pattern from the stories. Hit town for a few days, and then bail. Men so didn’t have a clue.

  She gave Brett her full attention as they headed down the steps and strolled together under the long summer sunset that lasted past midnight this time of year.

  # # #

  The pieces didn’t click in Tim’s brain until after she was out the door; he’d barely seen her silhouette just for a second, but the way she moved was so familiar.

  Mace Tyler.

  He almost rose to chase after her. Give her a hug, maybe dunk her in the old claw-foot bathtub that served as a horse trough in front of the Zani’s General Store. But his mom and her friends were so glad to have him among them that he stayed put. It was nice to know Mace was around, he’d missed her the last few times and was sorry for that.

  It had always been a pinch that he hadn’t been there more for her in the years since Stephen’s death. Hell, he even remembered when she was born. Stephen became a big brother at the age of four and had very seriously asked Tim to help him so he didn’t mess up. They’d made a spit-and-handshake swear on it, and here was Tim letting him down.

  It was hard, being in this town and expecting to bump into his best friend around every corner. It must have been worse for her. Stephen would be pretty darn ticked at Tim right about now.

  Well, he’d try to make it up to her this week.

  So, staying beside his mom, who had her hand clamped in his, he tuned into the latest stories about the changing world of publishing. He was always surprised at how many famous authors had gathered in this little town. Mom and her bloody murder mysteries had been one of the first. Her in-residence Mastermind Meetings for pros at Stephanie’s B&B had attracted others to make the change permanent.

  Tim had always preferred reading Kim and Sam’s action and adventure books to his mother’s bloody mysteries, not realizing until he was much older that the books they were actually romances. The bare-chested men on the covers should have been a giveaway, but he’d liked all of the helicopter and airplane stuff from Kim’s days flying Air Rescue with 920th Operations Group and Sam’s with the Coast Guard. As a kid, he’d always just flipped past the “weird” stuff…until he’d hit puberty. After that he kind of switched which parts he paid attention to.

  Macy’s mom, Lisa, was still writing science fiction with her husband—under his name. They’d just pulled down their third Hugo and fourth movie.

  “Got a question for you,” Tim spoke up when there was a lull in the conversation after analyzing the clause changes in Mitch’s latest thriller contract. “Does Larch Creek have the highest per capita rate of famous authors on the planet?”

  “Famous? Don’t know that any of us are famous other than your mom and the Tylers,” Kim had always been the humble one of the couple.

  Sam winked at him, “We keep a low profile. The wonders of pen names and a small community, everyone here knows not to reveal our secret identities to strays and out-of-towners.”

  Tim didn’t point out that he and his wife were wearing matching t-shirts that proclaimed, I’m a Romance Writer. What’s Your Superpower?

  “There are eight of us here every Sunday dinner; that’s over one in a hundred,” Mitch observed.

  “Don’t forget Dorothy,” his mom reminded them. “She may be getting on, and we don’t see her as much, but she certainly still turns out that dark urban fantasy stuff—hot, sexy, and bloody. Gives me the shivers.”

  Everyone laughed that it was the murder mystery writer who was creeped out by Dorothy’s tales. The woman was old enough to be Tim’s grandmother, maybe great-grandmother.

  “Maybe she’s part vampire. Does she still come to the winter meetings?” Tim asked.

  They all eyed each other and then burst out laughing. Dorothy’s preference for nighttime was notorious. “Daylight hours is for writing,” she’d always say.

  “This,” Mitch waved around his big hand and continued with a thick Texan accent, “is about as out and about as any of us want to be. That’s the problem with counting authors, we’re recluses by nature. Never was much a one for the social whirl of Austin. Always gave me the creeps a bit, meeting fans at signings and such,” his shiver was much like Tim’s mom’s. “Might even be a couple around we don’t know about. Carol said as how there was a package from a New York publisher she delivered to the new guy in the old Sharpton place.”

  Clement sat at the far end of the table and, as usual, didn’t say much, but he nodded in agreement.

  They were tight, Tim realized. Th
ey were as tight as the MHA smokie crew, but for different reasons. Rather than fire, adrenaline, and youth, this group shared a passion for stories. Some had arrived as Eva Harada’s students for whom she’d stood as mentor at some workshop she’d taught on the “outside”—typically Fairbanks. Others had wandered through and come to a halt in Larch Creek or Tena much to their own surprise.

  “Come for a week and stay for a lifetime,” Tim commented drily and earned a good laugh.

  “That mean you’re home for good this time, Timmy boy?”

  “No way, Mitch,” Tim held up both hands to fend off the idea as Carl brought him a fresh pint of barley beer, a venison steak, and a stack of honey-gold onion rings. “It’s rainy this week in the Lower Forty-eight. They gave us some days off for bad behavior and I decided I hadn’t seen Mom’s face in too long.”

  He let the pause hang while he sipped his beer.

  His audience, a crowd of storytellers, knew when a story was only half finished.

  “Of course if I’d known the first familiar face I’d see in town would be yours, Mitch…”

  The laughter was good. Made him forgive the airlines for folding him up like a pretzel to get here. At least a little bit.

  Chapter 4

  Coming off the fire, Tim should be out of it for another dozen-hour night of sleep, but the Alaskan summer light did things to you. Running on three to four hours sleep just seemed natural this time of year and even a half decade away hadn’t changed that old pattern. Of course if he’d remembered to close the blackout curtains in his childhood bedroom it might have helped.

  Three-thirty in the morning and he was wide awake. His old room faced to the east, so the sun punched directly into his face making him squint as he struggled to find fresh clothes in his kit bag. It was a good thing he’d left a jacket here, he’d forgotten that Larch Creek in the summer wasn’t all that much warmer than Oregon in the winter.