Hotshots (15 page)

“This is Karen,” Roland said. “Karen, Neil. Neil, Karen.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said.

“
Hi,” said Karen. Her eyes were red and mascara was running down her cheeks.

“It's just a house, Karen,” Roland said. “I can build another one.”

“I loved it here.” She sobbed. “It was so peaceful and quiet. The deer would practically eat out of my hand.”

“Karen is an animal lover,” Roland said.

“It was horrible when the fire burned,” she continued. “The hawks were circling overhead waiting for the animals to escape from the flames. I watched it from the deck.”

“She wouldn't leave till the last minute,” Roland said. “She stood on the deck with the garden hose spraying down the roof.”

“You were here when the fire started?” I asked Karen.

She nodded. “I was sick and I came home early from work. I'm a waitress at Winter's. Ken was in town. The fire was a wall of flame and it came up so fast. It was terrifying. I tried to save the house.”

Ken put his arm around her and began rubbing his hand up and down her bare arm.

“I love it here. I love the woods.” Karen said.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Kansas. Ken and I met when I was ski-bumming at Aspen.”

The Kid's patience had run out and he started the engine. “I gotta go,” I said.

“Adios,” Ken Roland said.

17

W
E SPENT THE
night in a motel on the highway outside Oro where the tractor trailers barrel through all night. It could have been New Mexico, it could have been New Jersey. The bedspread was shiny and smooth. The rust-colored carpet was so shaggy you'd need a Weedwacker to level it. The drinking glasses were wrapped tight in plastic, the ice bucket made of Styrofoam. It was the kind of room that some people find sterile and stifling but I used to call home. You could be anywhere in a room like this. You could be anybody. The TV was at the foot of the bed and the remote was on the end table. The Kid lay down on the bed and clicked the TV on.

I went to the bathroom and when I came back the Kid was watching baseball, which I find about as exciting as watching a praying mantis climb the wall.

“Good game?” I asked.

“It's okay.”

“Who's winning?”

“Braves.”

It took about five minutes for the ball game to put me to sleep. Some time after that it put the Kid out, too. The game was followed by news and later by snow. I know that because I woke up a couple of times looking for the remote to turn the thing off but it had gotten lost among the sheets. The screen was a change from what I'd been dreaming about anyway—fire and smoke.

In the morning we had breakfast at the McDonald's in Oro. The Kid let me off downtown, took the truck, and went looking for Oscar Ribera, a guy he'd known in Mexico who was working the Colorado ski business. I walked down Main Street looking for Jim Capshaw.

There's a kind of surreal clarity in these Rocky Mountain high towns. Oro has the solid brick buildings and busy main street of an old western town and the latte bars of a new tourist town. The small towns in this part of Colorado are isolated enough to still have independent bookstores. Oro has Maria's. It looked interesting, but it wasn't open yet, and besides, I had work to do. I found Capshaw's office in a brick building with a half-moon window looking down on Main Street. He had a large oak desk, wooden file cabinets, and a musty antlered deer head mounted on the wall. There was probably a time when you wouldn't have been able to get an insurance policy in Oro in hunting season, but that was before the Old West became the new and the big money started moving in. It took me a while to figure out where Jim Capshaw figured in the old/new scheme. He was a burly guy with dark hair forming spirals on his arms
and
whirlpools on his chest. He wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt open at the collar, cowboy boots, and Wranglers, known in New Mexico as big-ass jeans. Levi's are popular with new Westerners, but Wranglers are the jeans old cowboys wear; there's more room in the butt. Were the Wranglers a calculated move on Capshaw's part or had he grown up among cowboys? He had the kind of folksiness you'd expect from a small-town insurance agent, but he didn't overdo it.

“Jim Capshaw,” he said, extending his arm across the pool-table-sized desk.

I reached over and shook his hand. “Neil Hamel,” I said.

“I had an uncle named Neil.”

“So did I.”

“What can I do you for?” he asked.

“I'm thinking about buying a lot in Mountain View,” I told him.

“Great development,” he answered with an enthusiasm that made me wonder if he wasn't a partner.

“It's a beautiful spot.”

“Sure is.”

“But I'm worried about the danger of forest fires.”

“Well, we've had two this summer and Mountain View escaped both of 'em. We couldn't be unlucky enough to have another for a long time. The next time lightning strikes, it'll hit someplace else.”

“I took a ride up to see Ken Roland's place. It's nothing but a pile of ashes. I'd hate to see my house end up like that.”

“It's a tragedy, all right,” Capshaw agreed, “but Ken wasn't hurt and he did have good coverage.”

“He recommended you.”

“That was neighborly of him.”

“Do you live near Thunder Mountain?”

“No, but I like to think of everybody in the county as my neighbor. It's getting harder these days, but I keep trying.”

“Does Ken intend to rebuild?” I asked.

“Far as I know.”

“I hope he'll use a metal roof the next time.”

“It would be better from an insurance standpoint,” Capshaw concurred. “When you get a fire of that magnitude, being in the next county could have saved Ken's house but a metal roof wouldn't have made any difference.”

“Are wildland firefighters available to protect houses?”

“That depends on the BLM and the Forest Service. Their firefighters aren't really trained to fight
house
fires and the Feds won't be so quick to call 'em out after the South Canyon incident, but you won't have to worry about that at Mountain View. Those houses aren't in the woods and, like I said, I don't think we're gonna get another fire in this area for a long while.”

“Would I get a better rate if I cleared out the brush and used a metal roof? You do better where I live in Albuquerque if you install a burglar alarm.”

“We may be headed in that direction,” Capshaw said, “but it hasn't happened yet. You wouldn't be able to use a metal roof at Mountain View anyway. The restrictive covenants limit the roofing to cedar shake.”

“I've heard rumors that the fire that burned Ken Roland's house down was caused by arson.”

Light darted from one of Capshaw's eyes to the other like lightning jumping from cloud to cloud. Small towns are always full of rumors and I figured he'd heard every one of them. Fire, after all, was his business. He paused for a moment to consider what was good for that business, whether Oro's expansion would be threatened more by a natural disaster or one that was man-made. He came down on the side of the natural. Man-made disasters were what everybody was moving here to get away from. “Arson? That's news to me,” he said.

“Karen told me that Ken insured his truck through you, too. Maybe you could handle my Nissan.”

“Karen? Do I know a Karen?” Capshaw's thick eyebrows formed a caterpillar arc.

“She's Ken's girlfriend.”

“I thought
her
name was Deb.”

“Straight blond hair? Long legs? Early twenties?”

“Nah, Deb's a redhead. She does have great legs. I guess that goes with owning a ten-thousand-square-foot house.” He laughed. “What were you sayin' about a truck?”

“Karen told me you insured Ken's truck.” The lie was getting smoother with practice. The words were rolling off my tongue like polished gemstones.

“Ken doesn't own a truck. I insure him for his Blazer and his Ferrari.”

“Where does he get all his money from anyway?”

“Venture capital. He invested heavily in Silicon Valley. There's a guy who can live anywhere he wants with anybody he pleases. Give these guys a modem and a cell phone and they can work anywhere. That's what's fueling Oro's expansion.”

I knew enough about venture capital and the computer business to know that sometimes you win big and sometimes you lose even bigger. Ken Roland might have been on a losing streak and needed the money a fire would bring in. The South Canyon fire had to have decreased the value of his house, but he did have good insurance, making it more profitable, perhaps, to burn than to sell.

“I suppose he has a large mortgage to pay off,” I said.

“
No mortgage,” Capshaw said. “It was a cash deal. Guys like him are reshaping the West. They've got the money to turn these small Colorado towns around. Ninety thousand Californians moved into Colorado last year. I figure you can fight 'em or you can join 'em.”

It was good for the economy, bad for the sense of community. How you felt about the growth depended on how badly you needed the money, how much you cared about preserving the place you lived. There's a lot of resistance to change in the rural West, enough even to make me wonder if Ken Roland's house might have been torched by someone other than Ken Roland. “How do they feel about newcomers around here?”

“Depends on where you're from.” Capshaw grinned, straddling the line between real honesty and good business. Sometimes honesty works for you in business, sometimes not. “Are you from California?”

“New Mexico,” I said.

“That's right. You mentioned that, didn't you?”

“Yeah.”

“You'll have no problem,” he replied. “You'll love Oro.” New Mexicans are welcome most places; we're not rich enough or numerous enough to threaten anybody's way of life.

“You have a chapter of Forest Sentinels here?” It was the environmental group the birders had said they belonged to. Forest Sentinels was active in New Mexico and, in fact, was embroiled in controversy because loggers believed the environmentalists were preventing them from making a living.

“Well, yeah, we have a chapter, but you wouldn't want to be involved with them.”

“Why not?”

“They're troublemakers,” Jim Capshaw said.

“Well, thanks for your help,” I said. “I'll let you know if I decide to buy at Mountain View.”

“You do that.”

I bumped the nose of the deer on my way out and raised a cloud of dust. “Getting a little musty,” I said.

“I'm thinking of taking it down,” Capshaw replied.

18

T
HE
K
ID AND
I had agreed to reconnoiter at two, which left me plenty of time to track down the Forest Sentinels' office in a ramshackle Victorian house several blocks south of Main Street. The woman sitting at the reception desk had a fair amount of gray hair among the blond, but the hairdo was youthful—long and curly. She wore jeans and a Guatemalan
huipil
with embroidery all over it. She was older than many of the people I'd been talking to lately, but equally fit. On her desk sat several mugs with dangling strings of tea bags. The sun beamed in through a bay window, making it brilliantly clear that the walls of the office needed painting, the floor needed sanding, and the curtains were ragged. Environmental organizations tend to have minimal funding for office and staff. The woman might have been a receptionist, but my guess was she ran the place. This office felt like her nest. There were a couple of rooms behind her, but I couldn't see who or what was in them. The posters of green forests tacked to the walls and the framed photographs on her desk were bright and shiny spots in the shabby room. Another woman might have had pictures of her lover or her children; she had pictures of a wolf. I've never seen a wolf that wasn't magnificent myself. This one was sitting, standing, howling, sleeping. In one memorable shot its paws were on the woman's shoulders and it stared her in the face.

I know a wolf when I see one, but just to get her reaction I said, “Nice dog.”

“It's not a dog,” the woman replied. “It's a wolf.”

“What's its name?”

“Savage. Can I help you with something?”

“Maybe,” I replied, segueing into the lie that had been working so far. “I'm from New Mexico and thinking about moving up here. I'm trying to get a feel for the place.”

“Forest Sentinels has a chapter in Santa Fe.”

“I know.”

I also knew that their leader had recently been burned in effigy by loggers who felt Forest Sentinels' support of spotted owl habitat was costing loggers their jobs. I like forests and I didn't necessarily disagree with Forest Sentinels' goals, but my purpose here was not to join up, only to gather information.

“I'm sympathetic to what you're doing, but it would be nice to get away from controversy,” I said.

She laughed, showing spaces between her teeth. This woman didn't have the look of pampered
privilege
common to many environmentalists. She did have the determined look of someone who'd found a calling in midlife. “It's getting hard to avoid controversy in the West nowadays,” she said.

“True,” I replied. “So tell me what you guys are all about. What's your mission in Oro?”

“Preserving forests. Preserving wildlife habitat. Trying to prevent the Forest Service from caving in to ranchers, loggers, and other special interest groups. Many of our members are former Forest Service employees. We think the government's policy of fire suppression is a disaster. The forests were a lot healthier when fires were left to burn out naturally. Nowadays fuel buildup has turned Western forests into a tinderbox. The fires are bigger and hotter than they've ever been.”