Hotshots (14 page)

“We're not exactly hiking,” I replied.

“No?” The shorter woman had the bright eyes and musical voice of a wren. It trilled up the scale and pinged back down. Every word had a couple of notes and every sentence a melody.

“I survived the blaze,” I said.

They were suitably impressed. “Wow,” the wren chirped.

“You did?” The taller woman looked down as she talked and her head bobbed like a crane searching for fish. “I watched that fire through my picture window. It was fierce.”

“Do you live in Mountain View Estates?” It would be a convenient place for bird-watching, and, lately, fire watching.

“Yes, I do.”

“Did you glass the fire?” I asked. I'd picked up birder talk from my Aunt Joan.

“I did, but all I could see was smoke and flames. I never saw any people, but I heard a Forest Service employee died up there.”

“
That's right.”

“What were you doing on Thunder Mountain that day?” asked the wren.

“I'm a lawyer representing the family of one of the hotshots who was killed in the South Canyon. We flew in to look at the site. A Forest Service official and I got caught in the fire on the way down. I made it out; he didn't.”

“We were birding in the drainage that day and we heard the helicopter taking off and landing,” the crane said. “It sounded like a war zone.”

“It's hard to ignore a helicopter,” I agreed.

“You were lucky you survived.
Very
lucky,” said the wren.

“I know.” The Kid had heard all this before and was poking at the ground with his running shoe. If he was wondering how much mileage I intended to get out of my part in the fire, the answer was as much as would help me uncover the cause.

“If it hadn't been for us they'd have let the South Canyon fire burn,” the crane said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really. When I heard about it I got on the phone and called my senator and my representative. And Emily”—she nodded at her friend—“called the head of the Colorado office of the BLM.”

“You know those people?” I asked.

“Every one of 'em,” she said. “We're on the board of the Colorado Audubon Society. We vote. We contribute to political campaigns. I'm not going to sit by and wait for my house to go up in smoke.”

“Who would?” I wondered. Few people—no matter how environmentally aware—would let their own house burn, unless, of course, there was an ulterior motive.

Emily trilled, “The slurry bombers roared through the valley right above Margaret's house. We were standing outside. If they'd known we were the ones who called, they might have dropped the slurry on top of us!” She laughed.

“That fire would have burned itself out eventually,” I said. Some houses might have been lost, but lives would have been saved.

“We wanted to be sure,” Emily said.

“You said you were in the drainage the afternoon of the second fire?”

“We were birding, but when we smelled the smoke we drove to Margaret's house and got on the phone again.”

“Did you see anybody else here that day?” I asked. Birders, after all, are known for their sharp eyes.

“We saw a hiker sitting under the cottonwood tree,” Margaret, the crane, said.

“Male or female?”

“
Female. A young blond woman.”

“How young?”

“Forty-five?” Emily asked.

“Fifty,” Margaret replied.

“Was she alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did she have a pack with her?”

“I didn't see one,” Margaret answered.

“Did you see any cars in the parking lot?”

“A red compact.”

“And we saw the brown truck,” Emily said.

“That's right. Driving like a bat out of hell. We've seen vehicles before on the old logging road. After Thunder Mountain was declared a wilderness area, all vehicles were banned from entering the forest and from ever using the logging road. They should have bulldozed it shut, but they never got around to doing it. If the Forest Service catches a vehicle in a wilderness area, the owner has to disassemble it and have it towed out by horses. Technically, even flying the firefighters in was a violation, but we didn't say anything about that, did we, Em?”

“No, we didn't.”

“What kind of license plate did the truck have? Did you notice?” I asked.

“Colorado,” Margaret said.

“Was the person driving it a man or a woman?”

“Couldn't tell. Could you?”

“No, but he or she wore a cowboy hat,” Emily said.

The Kid was looking longingly down the lonesome trail. I only had one more question and that was “How do you feel about the spotted owl?”

“We believe in the preservation of species through the preservation of habitat,” Emily said.

“Absolutely,” Margaret agreed. “We're members of Forest Sentinels. We monitor the Forest Service to make sure they uphold the Endangered Species Act.”

“Go for it,” I said.

“See you later,” said the Kid.

A squirrel bitched as we continued down the sun-dappled path. We were intruders on its turf, but we left it behind, following a yellow butterfly that darted in and out of the shadows like a flying flicker of flame. The trees began to show char on their northern side. I stopped to examine the thick, scaly bark of an alligator juniper. When I touched the bark it crumbled and tinged my fingers black. Some fluke of fuel,
wind,
or fusees had kept the fire here from burning with the intensity it had higher up. Green trees mingled with black snags and trees that had partially burned. A tiny pink flower bloomed at the base of a half-dead piñon. The yellow butterfly flew as far as an upended cottonwood, fluttered around the root system, and turned back. We kept going until there were no flowers blooming, until we were surrounded by char and ashes, by good black, safe black, black without the potential to reburn—except in my memory and my dreams. My heart skipped a beat. All the oxygen seemed to have been depleted from the air. I was getting light-headed. We were stepping on ashes, stirring up ghosts. I'd gone about as far as I wanted to go.

“You want to continue, Chiquita?” the Kid asked.

“No. Let's get out of here.”

When we reached the parking lot, the big sky opened up. I watched the clouds drifting into the shapes of fingers and mouths. One cloud formed an S curve, reminding me that, for a firefighter, lightning can be dollar signs in the sky. But firefighters, I knew, weren't the only ones with the potential to profit from fire.

“Let's drive up the mountain. There was a house there and I'd like to see what's left.”

“Okay,” said the Kid.

16

W
E TURNED NORTH
as we left the parking lot, driving through the green area, then the burn. After about a mile the road swung east, leaving the drainage and climbing uphill. I figured this was the place where a wilderness gate had prohibited motorbikes from entering and where the sign marked the area as forbidden to all motorized vehicles, but the gate and the sign had gone up in smoke. Somewhere around here the old logging road had cut through the forest, but that path was hidden by fallen trees and ash. Would an arsonist have driven in and taken the risk of a severe penalty? Why not just hide the truck beside the road, walk in, and run out? But that was assuming the person in the cowboy hat who drove the brown truck like a bat out of hell was an arsonist. The driver could just as well have been a witness or someone trying to escape from the blaze and report it to the Forest Service.

The road up to the house, which crossed private land, had been cleared of dead trees. It was well maintained but steep, and the Kid had to downshift to climb around the curves. The fire had been ruinous to this portion of the forest. The trunks left standing belonged to ponderosa pines, and it was easy to imagine fire jumping from crown to crown to cedar-shake roof. It was harder to imagine fire engines chugging their way up here like the little engine that could. Anyone who lived on this steep, remote road expecting to be safe from fire was California dreaming.

We came around a curve and upon the remains of the trophy house. The pile of black beams and ashes was a sight to drive a stake through any homeowner's heart.

Even the Kid was taken aback. “What a disaster!” he said.

The only thing left standing was a massive stone fireplace with a chimney pointing up. The foundation could have easily accommodated most of the houses on my block. I tried to visualize how this place had been furnished before it burned down. Big leather sofas, I figured, Navajo rugs, and wooden coyotes with scarves tied round their necks. The privacy was complete, the view had to have been magnificent before it got scarred by the burn. A black Bronco was parked in the driveway and a tall, skinny man stood beside it staring at the remains of his multi-thousand-square-foot trophy. He wore Reeboks and Ray-Bans. His gray hair was slicked back into a ponytail. A silver ear cuff was wrapped around the edge of one ear. I would have guessed Santa Fe if I hadn't known California. I'd seen this dude before on Nancy Barker's tape of the Kyle Johnson interview. He was the guy who'd mouthed off about the government's responsibility to protect private property.

The Kid was already looking in the rearview mirror. “What do you want to do?” he asked me.

“
Talk to him,” I said.

“Okay, I wait here.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping out of the truck.

The property owner approached to within a few feet of us. He raised his Ray-Bans and I could see that his eyes were the same brittle blue as the turquoise in his ear cuff. “This is private property,” he said.

“Are you Ken Roland?” I asked.

“How did you know that?”

“I saw you on TV,” I said, figuring that would soften him up. Anybody who'd build a house this large would have to have an ego to match.

“Channel 7 or 12?” he asked.

“Twelve,” I said. “Kyle Johnson.”

“Asshole,” he mumbled.

“Excuse me?”

“The guy's an asshole. He was on my case about the urban/wildland interface. I'm sorry those firefighters died, but hey, it wasn't my fault.”

“You did build kind of close to a wilderness area. I hear the local property owners put a lot of pressure on the Forest Service to put that fire out.”

“Would you just sit back and watch your house burn?”

“Probably not.” But I couldn't afford to live at the edge of the wilderness either. I had a job and an office to get to most days.

“I'm on a county road. I pay taxes. I believe that entitles me to fire protection,” Roland said.

In theory, maybe, but in reality the nearest fire engine had to be twenty miles away. He'd built a house with a wooden roof at the edge of a vast and frequently bone-dry forest, and wildland firefighters are not trained to put out house fires. He wasn't the first western settler to want all the privileges of owning private property with none of the obligations.

“The Forest Service wouldn't let me back in until today.”

“They were conducting an investigation,” I said.

“So I've been told. Great site here, wasn't it?” he asked.

“It was.” Until he began looking at charred trees. “How far down the mountain did the first fire burn?” I asked him.

“About a third of the way.”

“That must have spoiled your view.”

“It did. I used to like to sit out on the deck in my hot tub and watch the sunset. It's no fun to be looking at destruction. This place developed a bad vibe for me after the firefighters died.”

How
inconsiderate of them, I thought. “Are you planning to rebuild?”

“I doubt it. It'll be a long time before this canyon grows back to what it was. I loved this place, but it was isolated. I'm thinking of moving closer to town.”

“Oro?”

“Telluride,” he said, where the median house goes for a cool million. A large insurance settlement would help if he intended to buy there.

“Did you come here from California?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“A native?”

“How'd you know that?”

“An educated guess.” Some Californians are always ready to move on, always searching for the perfect place. That type wouldn't sit around waiting for the trees to grow.

“What'd you say your name was?” Ken Roland's eyes narrowed like they were seeing me for the first time. He'd been too busy talking about himself to pay any attention to whom he was talking.

“Neil Hamel,” I said. A cough was crawling up the back of my throat. I tried to suppress it, but I didn't succeed.

“What brings you up here?”

“I'm thinking about buying at Mountain View,” I said, proving to myself that I could lie and cough at the same time. “I'm worried about the forest fire danger and I wanted to prepare myself for the worst. It's got to be agonizing to watch your house burn down.” But when you think about it, maybe less agonizing to a native Californian. It happens all the time there. Roland himself seemed more annoyed than agonized about the loss of his trophy.

“It helps to have good insurance, but I wouldn't build at Mountain View if I were you. That's a retirement community. You're too young for Mountain View,” he said, sizing me up from dusty running shoes to messy hair.

“Not that young,” I said, and coughed to prove it.

“You ought to quit smoking.”

“Right,” I replied. “I'll be needing a good policy if I do build at Mountain View. Could you recommend an insurance agent?”

“Sure. His name is Jim Capshaw; Capshaw Insurance in Oro. He's done all right by me.”

A woman had stepped out from behind the fireplace and was picking her way carefully across the fallen beams. Her hair was very long and very blond. She wore shorts, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots.