Summer of Fire (9 page)

Looking at a mass of greenery topped by spiky red flowers, Clare tried, “Your cannas are doing well this year.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Constance persisted. “You were too young to know your Grandfather Cordon before he died, but he told me they broke ice in the water buckets in June. The homestead was in Jackson Hole, just by the Snake River.”

“With the drought and the fires, I hardly think I’ll get cold.”

In the back of the truck, Clare had time to regret her smug assurance, pulling on rough gloves and flexing stiff fingers to soften the leather. The cotton bandanna issued with the fire uniform did not keep her ears or neck warm beneath her hard hat.

The truck jerked and swayed on the rutted track. It was strange to be on the way to a fire at such a slow speed, without the strident sirens and the klaxon of the air horn parting traffic.

Clare clamped her teeth against the opening of the instant replay of Frank’s death. Reliving the experience did no earthly good. Both the psychologist and the guys at the station had made that clear. She focused instead on what she’d seen the day before yesterday at Grant Village. For sheer force and power, no fire she’d ever seen compared to the Shoshone.

As her chest stayed tight, Clare reminded herself that despite Garrett Anderson’s pessimism, this unusual fire behavior and weather weren’t likely to last. According to historic data, it usually rained more in late July and August.

The truck rounded a bend and braked.

“Deer,” someone said. A dozen soft-eyed does stared at the intruders from the dappled shade. One leapt high, and like the quick communal reaction of a school of fish, the others exploded and shot across the track in pursuit. Clare thought of
Bambi,
how at five she’d cried in the theatre when the forest fire sent the animals fleeing.

The truck moved on, rocking, as the track grew fainter.

A young man who appeared no older than Devon studied Clare. Probably a college linebacker, his broad shoulders pressed against the boards. Like many of the fire crew who eschewed shaving during the season, he sported a shaggy brown beard. A faint smile played at Clare’s lips. Back in Houston, her routine was set in a way that did not include meeting new men. Here the faces were as fresh and different as the land.

Last night she had enjoyed talking with Deering. He seemed friendly and open, although she’d detected complexity below the surface. He had promised to leave a message for her at Fire Command, so they could have dinner when she had the chance to be in West Yellowstone.

As the truck negotiated the broad expanse of Little Fire-hole Meadow, Clare started to feel warmer. Dry golden grasses stirred in the vehicle’s wake. Ahead, a gray shroud hugged the ground, and in another minute, she had a view of the fire front, six-inch flames licking their way through the undergrowth.

The sight of their adversary reminded her of the night she’d made her decision to fight the summer battles of the West.

It was at Frank’s wake in a popular Irish bar, and she’d been pretty well into the Guinness Stout. Raucous male laughter surrounded her as the acne-scarred young man tending bar turned on the television. Male swimmers backstroked, competing with honed bodies for spots in the October Seoul Olympics. Clare paid attention, for she had swum competitively in college and kept up with the new generation of men and women in the sport.

The bartender changed channels, flipping past local news and the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. Behind Lehrer’s shoulder, a forest fire raged.

“Hold it there,” Clare ordered.

Lehrer read his copy. “Wildfires have burned over fifty thousand acres in five western states. In this driest summer in park history, several fires are burning out of control in Yellowstone under the Park Service’s
let burn
policy. This allows fires started by lightning to run unless they threaten life or private property.”

“I heard they’re gonna be bringing in help from all over the country.” Javier Fuentes set his brew on the table littered with dead soldiers.

The TV showed a line of firefighters walking up a forest road. Dressed in olive trousers and yellow shirts, they wore hard hats with bandannas tied around their foreheads as sweatbands. Clare recognized their heavy tools as Pulaskis, a combination axe and hoe, heavier than her crash axe at the station. Smoke swirled around them.

She drew a deep breath. Fire was sweeping across the land of her ancestors. She felt as though she could smell the smoky tang of pine forest and feel the comfortable heft of the fire tool. The decision that her job with HFD could go on hold hit her with the swiftness of a blow. Devon could stay with her father for a while.

“I’m going out there,” she told Javier.

“Count me in,” he had agreed. The miraculous thing was that after they had slept on it, neither they nor the other guys who’d sworn aboard had changed their minds. After her mandatory consultation with the department psychologist, the station chief had agreed to let her go. She and the Houston crew had worked the line together only a few days before she was called to be a trainer.

Clare snapped out of her reverie when the truck driver cut the engine. The only sounds were that of a crow’s caw and the brisk crackling of the North Fork. Then the firefighters moved, piling off the tailgate, their boots making hollow sounds on the metal. Voices rose and they passed tools.

Clare felt the odd person out, having come to observe so she could direct others later.

The hotshots’ assignment for the day was to cut a three-mile line along the southeast flank of the North Fork, while aerial bombardment with retardant liquid was used on the most active front. Before they got to the place where they were to work, Clare felt the first trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades.

To build a fire line, the sawyers started, revving up their chainsaws and felling trees over a fifteen-foot wide corridor. Afterward, the hotshots with Pulaskis cleared a two-foot wide swath, careful to hack out every vestige of roots that could keep a fire smouldering.

Clare had thought she was in shape, but the crew had been digging line since mid-June. As the morning wore on, she found that she was only able do about fifty feet an hour, while the others managed to clear at least a full chain, or sixty-six feet.

Toward noon, she fell farther behind. Her back and arms ached from bending and wielding the heavy Pulaski. She stopped frequently for water breaks, figuring that if she got dehydrated, she would be worse than useless. When lunch was finally called, she was torn between whether to sit and risk stiffening or to stand and eat. The sight of the crew lolling on the ground decided her.

With a care for her aching back, she sat and took off her hard hat. Dampening her sweat soaked bandanna in fresh water from her canteen, she attempted to wipe some of the salty grime from her face and hands before eating.

The day wasn’t half over.

After choking back a pair of dry bologna sandwiches, she leaned against a tree trunk and closed her eyes. Against the shifting sparks that decorated the backs of her eyelids, she saw Deering again, smiling at her with teeth that shone white against his skin.

But thinking of last night opened a darker dimension. When she had first seen Steve Haywood, she’d had a distinctly different impression of the park biologist. Going back into the lake after he’d fetched up on shore, he’d seemed a real trouper, not at all like the sodden wretch who had nearly fallen on the floor at the Bear Pit. Shortly after she’d been rude to him, she’d turned from her conversation with Deering to find him gone. Too late, she wished she’d done something to keep him from driving drunk.

Sitting against the tree, she found that even thinking used too much energy. It was just on the borderline between warm and hot, and rest felt so bonelessly wonderful. The sharpness of fresh-cut pine overpowered the undercurrent of smoke while insects droned around her head. Gradually, the voices of the crew muted, then fell silent . . .

She was inside an apartment complex that was burning faster than the Houston Fire Department could put it out. The wood shingle roofs were igniting from flying sparks so that the flames leaped from building to building. Sirens shrilled as more and more alarms were called.

Inside the smoky apartment hallway, Clare and Frank approached a closed door that poured smoke from around the edges. No other firefighters came from the opposite end of the building, leaving them alone to assault this cell of the larger conflagration.

“All for us,” Frank said through the mask on his air pack. She imagined the usual twinkle in his deep brown eyes.

Facing away from the door, Clare raised her leg and brought it back into a mule kick. The panel swung wide, back against the interior wall with a bang.

Light suffused the hall. Heat struck out and pounded. She crouched and turned to face the inferno. She’d been in worse situations, but couldn’t shake a bad feeling. Her rapid breathing hissed in her mask and she told herself she could stay the course.

Frank cracked the valve and sent up a power cone. Steam rose and hot water began to fall like rain, running down her helmet and into the neck of her coat. Over the fire’s roar was an overprint of snaps and pops that didn’t sound right.

She took a hand off the hose. Immediately, over a hundred pounds of pressure threatened to tear it from her remaining hand and Frank’s. Nevertheless, she clutched his arm, with the strength born of premonition. “Don’t go any farther!”

“Son of a bitch! Will you look at that?”

Clare jerked and her heart took off like a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit. She stared through open eyes at the afterimage of the flaming apartment. Gradually, she realized that she sat beneath a tree with the midday sun slanting through the branches, hoping she’d not called attention to herself.

“No shit, man,” someone replied to the request to ‘look at that.’

Clare swiveled toward the unmistakable crackling and saw what had happened. Not a hundred yards back, the North Fork had jumped the line, rendering the morning’s work useless.

CHAPTER SIX

July 27

"Randolph Mason.” The Secretary of the Interior greeted Steve Haywood. Mason’s entourage had stopped this afternoon on the road from Norris Geyser Basin to Mammoth Hot Springs.

The Secretary’s handshake was firm, his presence more commanding in person than through the filter of television. He carried his tall frame elegantly, his coal black hair lending a distinguished air to his jeans and chambray shirt.

“Pleased to meet you,” Steve replied, hoping Mason didn’t catch the tremor in his hand. He had slept in his truck last night at Old Faithful, too drunk to drive.

He looked past the Secretary at fire general Garrett Anderson, moving with startling agility down the steps of the TW Services bus. The big man wore a ball cap decorated with a flaming tree and the words
Rocky Mountain Incident Mgt. Team.
Last night after Clare had walked away, a firefighter had told Steve she was a friend of a friend of Garrett, who’d pulled strings to get her an employee cabin at Old Faithful.

Steve looked up from the roadside parking lot at Roaring Mountain, a bare, bleached slope that smoked from hundreds of steam vents. It always came as a surprise, after driving for miles through the unrelenting corridor of pine, to come upon the scar that looked as though it had been quarried.

A cluster of press piled off the advance bus. The Washington contingent looked as though they’d bought their stylish outdoor clothing at Abercrombie and Fitch just before boarding the plane. The press corps, mostly westerners, wore rugged jeans and scarred footwear that was suitable for rough terrain.

Secretary Mason smiled at the reporters.

A lanky cameraman with an untidy coffee-colored pony-tail stepped in closer. The stocky young woman with him thrust her mike at the Secretary’s face. “Carol Leeds, Billings Live Eye.” Her mane of red hair spilled over the shoulders of her denim jacket. “Is it true the Park Service made a serious error in judgment when they let the fires burn out of control in the park?”

Garrett Anderson murmured to Steve, “Cutting right to the chase.”

Mason studied Carol Leeds with sharp blue eyes for so long that the group of reporters broke ranks.

“Mr. Secretary . . . “

“Secretary Mason . . . “

“Do you support the Park Service . . .?”

Mason raised his hand and waited for quiet. “Certainly, I support the men and women in whose hands lies the stewardship of Yellowstone, our national’s crown jewel.”

Steve thought that he could never be a politician. He would have told them wildfire was natural, that in Yellowstone man had been just standing in the way of the inevitable since before the turn of the twentieth century.

For when Native Americans dominated the land, the Smoky Bear phenomenon hadn’t existed. They used fire to clear fields and forest undergrowth and early settlers followed their lead. How ironic during this season’s blowup that Yellowstone had been the first place in the nation with fire patrols, set up by the U.S. Army in 1886. Fire suppression for a hundred years had let the forests grow until the level of fuels was at an historic high.

“What’s going to happen at Old Faithful?” blurted the freckle-faced journalist Mason chose next.