Summer of Fire (14 page)

He opened the cabinet beneath the sink. The last bottle in the house was the gin that had been on the coffee table when Moru came by. Steve preferred whiskey or bourbon, but he swallowed anyway, a deep convulsive contraction. And again.

Susan was ancient history, some black-and-white daguerreotype, no more alive than a picture of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce or the stark image of charred trees against the night.

Ashes to ashes. The liquor burned and he drank again. The pungent aroma was hot with alcohol and laced with the exotic licorice, lemon, and juniper that gave gin its distinctive nose.

Why are you doing this to yourself?
Clare’s eyes were pools of sadness that had reached to include him.

Susan would have wanted him to live, not to sleepwalk through his existence.

Steve gripped the edge of the sink with one hand while he poured, hearing the gin gurgle down the drain.

“Up early, Steve?” Ranger Shad Dugan said from behind his desk.

It was just past six. In full uniform, Dugan had probably been working since five, moving his mountain of paperwork. A big sandy-haired man with a ruddy face, Dugan had over twenty-five years in park management and told everyone that red tape was the worst part of his job.

“We need to talk,” Steve said.

Dugan removed his tortoise-shell reading glasses and indicated a chair.

Steve sat and held his coffee in hands that already trembled. That didn’t usually hit until noon, but pouring the booze down the drain instead of his throat came with the consequence. “Moru came to see me yesterday.”

Dugan nodded. “What’d you decide?”

This was going to be tricky. How to explain that he wanted to change, but the last thing he needed was one of those funny farm places. The ones where you were miraculously cured as soon as the maximum number of days on your insurance expired.

“I know I’ve got a problem,” he began, “and that something’s gotta give.”

“That’s a start.” Dugan might have been playing poker, for all the expression in his eyes.

“Here’s the thing, though . . . I want to stay in the park this summer. With the fires, I feel like I’m needed.” Steve tried to go slowly, but the words tumbled out. “I would hate to see the natural burn policy scrapped without a proper review.”

“There’ll be plenty of time to fight over that when this is over. Until then, you can consider it put aside.”

“We’ll need information about burn patterns and how they affect the different vegetation types. Some of the research Moru and I are starting on burns and their recovery should finally come to fruition.”

Dugan sighed and turned his mug in steady hands. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Fear clutched at Steve. That padded room was looking more real by the minute.

His boss swiveled toward the sun coming over the long shoulder of Mount Everts. Slanting cliffs of thick outcrop marked the face of the mountain that bordered the east side of Gardner River canyon. The river wound down to join the rushing Yellowstone in the gateway town of Gardiner. In 1959, the United States Geological Survey had settled on two different spellings for the river and the town.

Dugan steepled his fingers and let the silence lengthen. Then he cleared his throat before speaking. “I thought about what I’d do if you wanted to stay.”

Steve’s heart thudded. If he got canned, where would he go?

“I can’t blame you.” Dugan turned back to him, unsmiling. “Nothing like these fires has ever happened in Yellowstone and I wouldn’t want to miss it, either.” He stood and walked from behind his desk. On the wall hung a clipboard, holding the fire maps that had been released daily since July 25 by the Unified Area Command. Dugan put a finger on a spot in the northeast quadrant of the park, midway between Canyon and Tower Roosevelt. “I’ve got a man on Washburn that needs relief.”

Mount Washburn, southwest of Mammoth, rose to ten thousand feet, a natural vantage point for a fire tower. “You can go up,” Dugan offered, “but I need someone I can count on to call out every new smoke. Cold turkey on the booze.”

“I’ll go today.” Steve tried to sound confident.

Dugan clapped a hard hand on his shoulder. “Let me warn you. If anybody who talks to you on the radio thinks you’re drinking, I’m gonna send a chopper and pluck you off that mountain.” His broad face might have been carved of Mount Everts’ sandstone. “You won’t stop until you’re out of Yellowstone for good.”

Clare watched the troops from Fort Lewis dig line on their first trip into Yellowstone. If she breathed deeply, there was almost a hint of moisture in the air, but that was illusion, the last of the morning dew evaporating in a forest of ‘kiln dried lumber.’

On the North Fork front, the fire burned quietly through duff. Tendrils of smoke curled, the only sign that combustion was taking place beneath the carpet of needles.

There was no need for Clare to be on edge, but another bout of nightmares had her keeping a close eye on her charges. Garrett Anderson had chosen a training area that should be safe, even if the prevailing winds kicked up strongly. Her plan was to work through midday and be out of range when afternoon heat took the lid off the pressure cooker.

It was training, but somebody could still get hurt.

After Frank had been buried, Clare had not returned to the station, making only one weekend trip to work at the Texas A & M fire school. Since Buddy Simpson, her boss there, had made the call to Garrett Anderson, she felt she owed it to him not to plead the stress that was keeping her away from the station house.

Even so, she had awakened early on Saturday morning for the two-hour drive and hoped for a weather cancellation. When she arrived in College Station, the sky, blue-white with Gulf Coast humidity, promised a scorching day.

By the time she finished briefing the volunteer fire department of Toro Canyon, Texas, it was at least a hundred degrees. Each labored breath felt like the air was strained through a wet towel. Although she wasn’t going to fight the fire today, she dressed out alongside the others. Well-worn running shoes were exchanged for rubber boots, the fire coat of rough Nomex, snapped and clipped. Her short hair, already sweaty at the back of her neck, went under the Houston Fire Department helmet where it would swiftly saturate.

The loading terminal was only one of a number of scenarios used for training firefighters from all over the state. Behind the tanks stood the mock-up of a train. Down the road were authentic replicas of a ship’s deck, an eighteen-wheeler, and a faux apartment building. Each exercise had a staging area, an open-walled shelter used for lectures and storing the students’ gear.

Clare had done most of the exercises and she knew well the feeling that the dragon was about to bite you on the ass. She saw it now in the faces of the Toro Canyon team; a heightened awareness while trying to look like they could give a shit.

She steeled herself and turned the propane valve to light the loading terminal. With a whoosh of ignition, orange flames billowed around the metal tanks and catwalks, accompanied by the open-throated roar of escaping gas.

Six firemen wearing heavy canvas coats, turnout pants and rubber boots tightened up on the hose. The man in front popped the valve and a fog of spray kept the flames away from them.

The team moved forward in a phalanx with their helmeted heads tipped down. One step, two, they counted in unison, until they were almost beneath the tank’s overhanging catwalk. Fifty feet away, another group of firefighters wielded their own hose, focusing a stream on the rear of the tank.

No matter how many times Clare watched an exercise on the simulators, it was never the same. Even with identical physical equipment and fuel, the air temperature, humidity and winds made all the difference. Now, on the two-story control tower that overlooked Brayton Field, an orange windsock signaled a wind shift.

“Back it up, back it up,” she shouted to the first team over the roar of the fire. “Do it now!”

The group on the hose retreated, one steady, controlled step at a time, toward a flight of metal stairs leading fifteen feet up to an elevated walkway. Before they could get out of range, flames billowed down over the catwalk rail and enveloped the first three persons on the hose. The man in front jerked his head like a dog shaking off water.

“Power cone,” Clare ordered.

He twisted the nozzle from the fog setting to a narrower stream. Clouds of steam rose and wiped out her view of the team.

After what seemed a long time, but was really three seconds, the heavy-set fireman who had manned the front of the hose staggered into the open. Big Jerry Dunn, the Toro Canyon Chief, stripped off his hat with its clear acrylic face protector and dropped it. He clutched his hands to his face.

The exercise fell apart. Clare ran to shut off the valve and the last of the fuel burned more quietly.

The Toro Canyon boys helped Jerry to a wooden bench beneath the open-walled shelter. She bent to look at the burn that covered his lower left cheek and chin. “Second degree.”

Thank God. In the moment when she’d seen Jerry abandon the drill, she’d imagined the worst. Another man down on her watch, and these guys probably knew she’d been the one with Frank Wallace when he died. News traveled fast in the community of fire.

What could she have done differently? She’d turned the valves the prescribed angle to release the propane at the appropriate pressure, had called the change from fog to power cone when the wind shift called for a stronger stream.

Jerry got up heavily and took off his canvas jacket and turnout pants to reveal jeans and a navy T-shirt that proclaimed
Love a Firefighter
in white letters. He gulped water out of a paper cone Clare filled from an Igloo jug and dumped a cupful over his sweat-soaked reddish hair. Jerry was perhaps thirty-five, but he looked like a big kid.

Opening her emergency kit, she felt the men’s eyes on her back. She straddled the dusty bench next to Jerry and pulled out a piece of gel-soaked gauze. Everyone here was as qualified as she to administer this kind of first aid, even if her Houston training and experience outstripped being volunteers in a smaller town.

Gently, she swabbed the dust and sweat away from Jerry’s burn, being careful not to break the dime-sized blister that had swollen at the center of the reddened patch on his cheek.

Jerry looked at Clare. “Tell me more about what we should have done out there.”

“Like I told you in the briefing, communicate, communicate.”

“That fire was pretty noisy.” Jerry furrowed his forehead. Beads of sweat stood on his skin and Clare felt droplets trickling down her side.

Fifty yards away, smoke began pouring through chinks in the metal shutters of a two-story brick building. It made her think about her own trip through that sealed mausoleum, a place she’d gotten into and thought she would never escape. Suffocating smoke turned out the lights and a hand on the hose was the only lifeline.

“Think about the search and rescue exercise you did in the smoke house,” she told Jerry. “You and your teammate were in constant communication. ‘Checking the corner, nothing here, moving left, at the doorframe . . . ‘ Even though you could see the loading terminal better, it didn’t take away the need for shouting to the guys on the other hose.”

Jerry nodded, but he didn’t look like he’d heard anything except a platitude.

“Seriously,” Clare said, wondering again if they had heard she was the one with Frank when he died. Some of them might even have attended the funeral. “When you’re out in charge of your crew at Toro Canyon, remember that safety is the number one priority, just like the Red Cross teaches in their lifesaving courses.” Along with college competitive swimming, Clare had been a water safety instructor. She’d guarded at a Texas camp, watching kids and water moccasins mingle from a creosoted dock, rainbow slicks on the sluggish river.

“The last thing you want to do, Jerry, as a lifeguard, is to jump in the water and put two persons at risk. In fire, the same rules apply, even when there are victims in a burning structure.”

Straight from the manual. It sounded good in the bright summer sun, but when flames had licked the sky from burning apartments, she had felt the same spirit that always seized her before cleaving the water in a racing dive.

She and Frank had never considered leaving Pham Nguyen to die.

CHAPTER TEN

August 5

The next morning found Clare wondering how to spend a day off. She began by running a few miles on Old Faithful’s trails, but her restless energy did not dissipate. Caught up in the momentum of firefighting, she found time on the sidelines a waste.

Midday found her in the West Yellowstone Smokejumpers’ Base visiting with her new acquaintance Sherry Graham. One of a small minority of women in the elite rank, Sherry was putting the final touch to a parachute pack on a long waxed table when the base alarm sounded.

The first shock of the noise gave Clare a surge of adrenaline. She had to tell herself it wasn’t for her. With the outward calm she recognized from her own work, Sherry finished affixing a piece of masking tape with the date, her name, and certification number. She’d told Clare it took years of training before a Smokejumper earned the right to pack a chute.