Once.
Twice.
I quickly thought back to the Spam sandwiches we’d wolfed down at noon. Yes, we’d eaten lunch. No, it was too early for it to be supper.
Another ring. “Oh no,” I said, staring at the door, waiting for the fourth ring that broke through the air, loud and clear, the signal for any available smokejumpers at the camp to report for duty.
Someone in our region had called in a fire.
“How . . . ?” Sarah Ruth said, her eyes darting toward the phone resting snug and silent in the receiver on her desk. Fire reports always came through the ranger station.
No time to bother about that. Charlie was already halfway out the door, his camera abandoned by the hearth, and I followed him, yanking on my coat as I charged into the gray afternoon.
We gathered around the flagpole in the center of the cluster of forest property buildings, the usual meeting place for a fire signal. Behind us, the rope hanging from the bell pull swung eerily . . . but the ringer was nowhere in sight.
A sick feeling overtook me, a certainty that something was wrong, the way the forest gets quiet as a grave when a predator comes near.
“Hello, fellows!” Shorty, emerging from the cookhouse with his apron from kitchen duty still tied around his waist, jogged over to meet us. “What’s going on?”
I shook my head. “I wish we knew.”
Charlie nudged me. “If it’s only a two-man jump, Shorty and I can take it.” He’d been there the time I got caught in a tree and never once teased me about it or told any of the other fellows.
“Says who?” Shorty hollered. “Don’t you go drafting me, now, Charlie—the army tried that already.”
I glanced around. The others must have been too deep in the forest to come yet, assigned to trail clearing or fence building. Once we got our orders, the ones selected would change into the fire-resistant uniforms from the storage garage, grab and check our chutes, and wait near the landing strip for the plane.
“Here he comes,” Shorty said, pointing.
The Forest Service pickup truck, Morrissey’s pride and joy, rumbled down the trail toward us, and I felt a moment of relief. Morrissey must have rung the bell, then run to the garage to get his truck. That was all. Now that he was here to give orders, everything would be all right.
The driver’s door opened, slammed shut. All joking stopped as soon as we saw Morrissey’s face, taut and pale.
“How many do you need?” I called.
“All of you. Anyone we can find.” His voice strained with tension. “Boys, it’s here.”
Charlie’s voice was tentative, clearly as rattled as I was by Morrissey’s change in demeanor. “Sir?”
I saw the answer in Morrissey’s wild eyes, thrown out of their strict regimentation. Genuinely afraid. He pointed to the sky, and where I’d once seen only stormy clouds, I noticed a darker stain against the sky: smoke.
“The fire. It’s in our forest.”
You’d think you’d get used to it after a few fires, but you didn’t: the way the flames raced through the underbrush, the terrible splinter of falling branches, and most of all, the heat.
Not only did you feel the heat, but you also saw it wavering in the air, heard it in the cracks and pops of sparks, smelled it thick and heavy in your lungs like a summertime fever, tasted it in ashes and sweat for hours. The fire became your entire world, taking every sense captive till you thought you’d never know anything else.
And as soon as the fire bell rang again, you remembered what that was like, no matter how hard you tried to forget.
Instead of a Travel Air or Trimotor plane, we jumped into the bed of Morrissey’s truck, along with Les Richardson and a couple of the fellows working out by the woodpile. We rattled down the trails—too narrow, really, for this duty—but it was faster than hiking in.
By the time the smoke in the air made it hard to breathe, Morrissey had thrown the truck into park. “Grab the supplies,” he ordered the five of us smokejumpers, slamming the door, “and start digging.” Richardson followed him as if on a silent signal, and they were gone before we could ask what they were up to.
“They’re inspecting the damage. Seeing if they need to radio in another crew,” Charlie guessed.
“Or,” Shorty theorized sourly, as I shoved him out of the truck, “they want us to do all of the digging.”
John Miller—an Amish man who we called First John because we had three men by that name among us—hauled out the pack of tools from the bed of the truck, handing one to each of us. “We should pray for rain,” he said, looking up at the threatening sky.
And pray I did, but as we jogged closer, a quick glance told me we wouldn’t need help from Missoula. Maybe we wouldn’t even need to bring in more of the men from camp. It was a small fire, but the ground was scorched and covered in burnt debris. Juniper bushes and groundcover, twisted and tangled, glowed orange with flame, and around the boulders that dotted the terrain, I couldn’t see a single rabbit or squirrel. The animals always knew when to dart for cover.
The five of us stationed ourselves apart but still within line of sight, starting at our anchor point, a boulder that would block the spread of the fire. “Always watch each other’s backs,” Morrissey often told us, and you could almost see flashbacks of the Great War in his eyes. “Never leave a man behind.”
With a small crew, the step-up method was best, with Shorty at the head because he had the loudest voice. He’d shout out in intervals, and we’d each scrape away a layer about two feet wide before moving on to finish up what the person in front of us had started: first greenery, then roots and loam, finally exposing the mineral earth, where the fire would find nothing to burn.
As I dug, falling into the familiar monotony, I couldn’t help but wonder. Why hadn’t Jack, up in the fire tower, called to report the blaze before it got even this bad? I’d have thought he’d see the smoke and report it immediately, especially during stormy weather, where we’d been lectured to trace every visible lightning strike to the ground and watch for signs of fire.
That said, our blaze sure wasn’t the Dante’s Inferno I’d pictured from Morrissey’s reaction. With all of us working, we’d have it contained in an hour or two, especially if it started to rain.
I’d just stopped to wipe a trail of sweat away from my face when I heard sticks crack off to the west and caught a glimpse of—was that the outline of a man disappearing behind a rocky outcropping within the fire’s border?
No. I rubbed my throbbing head and realized I hadn’t grabbed a canteen from the truck to loop around my neck. Stress and dehydration were making me see things.
Could be Morrissey or Richardson.
But why would they go into the fire? Smokejumpers were drilled against that. Keep one foot in the black—the safe zone where the fire had burned away all fuel—but always stay on the perimeter. If the flames spread faster than we could dig, then we fanned out with them, looking for rivers or creeks if needed. Surrounding the fire was one thing. Running into it was quite another.
I squinted into the woods, trying to see movement past the sting of smoke.
“Get back to work!” Shorty called, using his Pulaski to cut a groove in the earth. So I did, forgetting everything but the fire line in front of me.
Without so much as a drop of rain to help us, we pounded the ground with the Pulaskis, furrowing a trench like the devil himself had started the fire and meant to spread it across the whole state of Oregon. Morrissey and Richardson had to be watching from somewhere.
Why aren’t they digging with us? Sure, Morrissey was in his early fifties, but he was fit, which we learned the day we challenged him to join our game of basketball and he dribbled circles around us. It couldn’t have taken them this long to patrol the perimeter of the fire and radio for backup.
I paused and looked around again, pretending it was to stretch my sore shoulder muscles. No shadowy figure inside the wavering heat of the fire. Had I imagined it?
&n
bsp; Soon, I could feel the heat inside me from the physical exertion and the heat in the air as the fire licked closer to us. When I glanced behind me, I could see a trail of flames racing down a patch of dead moss . . . and then fizzling out along the frayed, exposed roots and dirt heaps of the fire line I’d just dug.
That’ll teach you to try to burn down a forest filled with CPS smokejumpers.
“Hey!” Shorty cried, and when I followed his pointing finger, I saw Morrissey and Richardson emerging from the smoke behind me, lugging something wrapped in one of the tarps we used to haul equipment. They were headed for the truck.
“Need help?” I called, setting down my Pulaski. The others had it under control by now. The fire line almost circled the charred patch of forest, and I’d felt the first few sprinkles of rain, a welcome relief.
“No,” Morrissey snapped, but I watched Richardson stumble under the weight, coughing roughly.
I stared closer at the bundle they carried. Wait. It couldn’t be . . .
I lurched forward, boots kicking up ash, toward the men and the burden in their arms.
“Get back to the fire, Hooper.” Morrissey’s voice cut through the choking smoke, loud and clear. “That’s an order!”
But I didn’t, couldn’t. Something about the limp but solid form of that canvas-covered bundle, the way it took two grown men to carry . . .
I ran straight up to them, ignoring Morrissey’s shouts, and pulled the corner of the canvas away.
It was hard to tell at first, the burns were so bad. But I knew.
The rangers were carrying a body.
Jack’s body.
CHAPTER 6
Gordon Hooper
January 12, 1945
Nobody had to tell us to gather around the rusty metal barrel of a fire pit by the cookhouse that night. Instead of joking and making plans for our day off, we sat on the damp log benches in silence, staring down the path toward the ranger station.
He’s not dead, I reminded myself. It was the only coherent thought I could muster, so I repeated it. He’s not dead.
Not yet.
The other fellows told me a plane had landed on the airstrip on the other side of camp a half hour earlier, while I’d been out in the rain finishing up the fire. As usual, Jack went into the plane first. But this time, he wasn’t hustling the rest of us over, telling us we’d already checked our parachute packs eleven times, so why make it a dozen? This time, they’d carried him inside to the metal bench against the fuselage and strapped him down, limp and smelling like ash and smoke. Just another cargo load going up into the sky.
Will he ever come down?
I blinked. Sweat or tears—something salty—dripped into the corner of my mouth as I stared at the ranger station door. Waiting for word of what had happened to Jack.
When Morrissey finally came out, his posture was military-manual erect, as always, but as he approached the ash-filled pit, I could see dread in his face, aging him a decade with each step.
Please tell us something hopeful.
Please.
Morrissey stopped dead center in front of us, and the other COs and I waited, wanting news and fearing it at the same time.
“As some of you have likely already heard, Jack Armitage didn’t walk away from this afternoon’s fire.”
“But . . . but he’s all right now, isn’t he?” Shorty asked, worry shading his usually confident voice.
“He’s critically burned, Schumacher. Unresponsive.” Morrissey frowned even deeper, then pushed on. “There’s no easy way to say it. Armitage is still unconscious, and he might never wake up.”
Shorty tightly shut his gaping mouth, Thomas looked unusually grim, even for him, and the rest of us just stood in silence.
“Never wake up.” What a terrible way to think about dying. But that was Morrissey for you, not one to mince words. And today, of all days, I didn’t want him to.
“What happened?” It wasn’t until I heard the raspy tone of my own voice that I realized how dry my mouth was.
“Armitage went in too close to the fire without a team around him or the proper equipment.” Morrissey delivered the facts almost mechanically, like the voices on the radio who’d been given the news report about Pearl Harbor to read and hadn’t yet processed it themselves. “A snag was burnt bad enough to fall on him. It trapped him until Richardson and I pulled him free, already unconscious. A terrible accident.”
An accident.
Sure, they’d told us all along, even in the application brochure, that smokejumping was dangerous and unpredictable. Your parachute cord could get tangled around your neck. You could break your leg on a landing. A conflagration could flare up unexpectedly, cutting you off from help.
An old dead tree could crush you.
But it had all sounded so abstract, like the numbered diagrams in the training manual or a problem from one of Jack’s statistics classes.
If you followed all the steps, if you obeyed orders and did everything right, if you prayed every night before you went to sleep to a gracious God . . . none of that could happen.
Except I knew from looking at Morrissey’s face, exhaustion scoring every line even more than the mixture of sweat and grime, that it could. It had. And to Jack.
When I closed my eyes, I could see him, the awful, burned arms and neck, the gaping mouth, the chest I didn’t realize was still breathing, but only barely.
I hadn’t gotten there in time.
By now, Charlie and a few others were crying openly, and Shorty looked like he was going to be sick. Only Lloyd seemed perfectly calm. “Where is he now? Can we visit him?”
“We flew him out to an army hospital. He’s getting the best care they can give him.” Morrissey looked right at me then, as if none of the rest of them mattered. “But, fellows . . . it doesn’t look good.”
I numbly raised my hand and waited to be acknowledged, like an awkward adolescent scholar. “Best case scenario, sir.” Morrissey frowned, as if it were against forest ranger policy to be optimistic. “Please,” I added.
The pause stretched out, and I didn’t even have the strength left to hold my breath. Finally Morrissey lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. “If Armitage wakes up—a few days, a few weeks, who can say?—he’ll be badly burned. Movement will be difficult, especially anything with his hands.”
I thought about the late nights Jack had scribbled in his journal, the way he’d twirled the pencil like a baton between his finger in the pauses. He’d never do that again. But even that was better than the worst, most likely scenario.
God, help him pull through.
To which the heretical part of me that had grown up under my father’s religious skepticism whispered, Wasn’t God the one who controlled the lightning fire in the first place?
Please, I added.
There wasn’t any answer, no burning in my stomach, no Scripture from the Apostle Tom, no Inner Light to guide me. Nothing but emptiness and the echo of the sound I’d made when I saw Jack’s body being loaded into the truck and driven away. A cry that felt like it would tear me apart.
Morrissey was still talking, and I forced myself to listen to the sounds coming out of his mouth. “. . . we’ve notified his family, of course. I’ll give you any reports I hear, but no one is leaving this camp to visit Jack. He would want you to be here.”
Convenient that what Jack would want is what the Forest Service and the US government want too.
“Are all the other snags cleared away from the site?” Lloyd asked, back to the newspaper-factual report. “Or should we get to that tomorrow?”
That simple question cut through my haze. How could he talk about work assignments as if what mattered most about this situation was a protocol check?
At least Morrissey shook his head. “The fire is completely out. No one needs to go back to the site.”
“Good,” Lloyd said, nodding curtly, and the word blew the embers of my anger into a flame. As if anything about this situation was good.
“Count slowly, Gordon. Think of hopeful things. Count them, and let the angry thoughts slip away.” My mother’s soothing advice, which I’d heard so often in my childhood, came back to me now.
One. Jack was still alive.
But he might die any second now, somewhere far away.
Two. I’d found an old towhee nest tucked in the bushes near the cookhouse, waiting for spring.
I didn’t make it to him in time.
Three. The sun kept rising and setting over the mountains, ignoring our small human tragedies.
There was nothing I could do.
“It’s no use, Mama. It’s not working. I’m still angry.” How many times had I said that, given up?
“Any man who would like to take the day off may do so. However, from my personal experience—” Morrissey’s voice caught, as if even saying the word “personal” was too much for him—“hard work is your best friend in times like these.”
We all remembered the way he’d thrown himself feverishly into work when the telegram announcing his son William’s death had arrived. Morrissey seemed to walk a bit heavier after that, shut himself away in his office more often instead of walking among us.
Without so much as a word of condolence or a prayer, he bolted briskly for the ranger station.
I jogged after him. “Mr. Morrissey, sir.”
He turned slowly, his expression empty and composed. “Yes, Hooper?”
“I think . . .” I paused, knowing what I was about to say would sound crazy. “I think there was somebody there. During the fire. I saw a person—a man, I think—duck out of sight inside the debris.”
“Hmm,” he said, and with his impassive face you couldn’t tell if he was surprised or skeptical or angry. “Did you see who it was?”
Even when I closed my eyes, the image didn’t come back to me clearly. “No. It was just a blur, really, with all the smoke. Movement, the shape of someone’s back. Did you see anything?”
Morrissey shook his head. “Hooper, weren’t you the one who about wet himself the first time you heard a cougar growling up in the hills?”
The Lines Between Us Page 6