I forced a laugh through tightness in my throat. “Is that all? I’ve said things like that before.” To Jimmy, actually. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.”
But what if it did? What if I’d sent Leland out with a hotheaded teenager, completely loyal to his family, who had just learned that his father might be accused of treason?
“He seems to be taking it seriously.” Sarah Ruth stopped pacing, desperation in her eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m worried Jimmy’s going to do something he will regret.”
CHAPTER 31
Gordon Hooper
January 26, 1945
Sometimes, when Nelson woke up hungover and apologetic on a Saturday morning, he’d let Mother “rest” and would make soup. Not out of a can, but hearty meat-and-potato stew, bursting with flavor, the kind that would weigh your spoon down and warm your body up. Even so, Nelson’s soup always tasted like boiled-over guilt to me.
The stock of tomato soup at the watchtower mostly tasted like tin, but heating it up in the saucepan still brought back memories I’d rather forget. I tried to crumble them up with a handful of crackers on the top. At least preparing an early supper gave me something to do other than stare at the forest for hours at a time.
Outside, the snow had gotten worse, and with lookout windows all around, it was like I was trapped in a souvenir snow globe. I blew on a spoonful of soup and let the warm steam rise toward my face.
Creak. Creeeeeak.
Strange. It almost sounded like someone was climbing up the wooden steps to the platform.
But that didn’t make sense. It was the wind and my imagination, picturing the escaping slaves who made the perilous journey to Clara’s door and . . .
Knocked.
Yes, someone was really knocking. Now I knew how Sarah Ruth felt, startled by visitors to her lonely forest outpost.
I dribbled soup on my hand in my hurry to stand. Throwing the door open, I saw Jimmy Morrissey next to a stranger swaddled to the upper lip with a scarf that might have doubled as a blanket. Above that, I could see that his skin was darker than even Charlie’s.
“Gordon Hooper?” the man asked, his voice stern in a way that reminded me of my gym teacher asking me why I had bruises on my legs again.
“That’s me.” As if he might have gotten the wrong fire tower by accident.
Behind him, Jimmy shook his head. Or maybe he was just knocking snow off his knit cap.
“I’m Lieutenant Vincent Leland of the US Army.”
So that was it. Dorie had been found out, and they’d sent someone after her.
But why was he here?
The question must have been on my face, because the lieutenant added, “I wanted a chance to talk to you privately about a . . . sensitive matter.”
He looked beyond me into the lookout, and I threw the door open wide. “Sorry, Lieutenant Leland. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just not used to company here. Come on in.”
They performed the usual buffalo-stampede tromp of snowy winter days on the braided rug, and I shut the door behind them, shivering from the cold they’d let in.
“I can make more soup if you’re interested,” I said, noticing Lieutenant Leland eyeing my bowl. I’d figure out soon enough why they were here, so why not all pretend this was a social call in the meantime?
“We’re hoping to head back to the camp shortly, before the snow gets worse.” Instead of looking at me as I spoke, the lieutenant’s eyes roamed the small room, like he was taking in every detail. “Any chance of a wildfire with a storm like this?”
“It’s highly unlikely,” I admitted. “But Earl Morrissey—that’s our district ranger—is always cautious.”
“Hmm,” he said, and his expression told me he didn’t buy my halfhearted explanation.
Trouble was, neither did I. This wasn’t caution. It was an exile.
“My fingers are near frozen,” Jimmy piped up, fumbling at his collar. “Help me get this off, will you, Gordon?”
Strange. Jimmy had never asked me for help with anything, not even his parachute gear.
“Sure.” I came closer and reached for the clasps on his coat. He caught my arm and gripped it tightly.
His voice tickled my ear with a harsh whisper. “Do you have the papers?”
My first thought was to play innocent and say, “What papers?” But of course, if he knew about them, Dorie must have told him for some reason, so I nodded.
“Hide them.” His voice was so urgent that I felt like Clara with a runaway slave to stow in the root cellar. “Better yet, get rid of them. You can’t let him find them.”
Before I could ask what was going on, Lieutenant Leland stood from where he’d been stooped to remove his black boots. They were taller than most, with thick, stiff leather . . . the kind all the smokejumpers had been issued for fire drops to protect our ankles from twisting on landing. “Not much of a place, is it?”
Jimmy let go of me and peeled his coat off just fine on his own. I wondered if the lieutenant noticed.
Destroy the papers? After his father had gone to all the work of gathering them? And why would this officer want them, or even know about them?
Something wasn’t right here.
I realized Lieutenant Leland was waiting for me to answer, or at least react. “It fits what we need.” With a scrape of old wood, I yanked the bench near the south observation window and pulled it nearer the fire for him to sit on.
Jimmy stayed standing, shifting from side to side like a fellow on fence duty with a powerful need to use the latrine.
I glanced at my watch. Almost four o’clock. During the summer, there would still be another four full hours of daylight, but January squeezed out even the dusky twilight that had leaked through the snow clouds. Nothing but steadily graying skies and a whirl of snow out the window. “It’s going to be hard for you to get back down safely tonight. I can’t imagine what would be so important that you’d have to come all the way up here just to talk to me.”
“Oh, I think you might.” And there was that tone again, even down to the way the lieutenant leaned just slightly closer. “I need to know what you know, Mr. Hooper. Everything you know.”
CHAPTER 32
Dorie Armitage
January 26, 1945
They should have sent me to Alaska.
That’s where we WACs thought we were being sent at first, traveling by train all the way across the country. We had heard of the Aleutian Islands campaign, making attacks on Japan and protecting the cities of the West Coast, and the daring exploits and perilous weather had sounded like the best sort of lark. If they’d shipped me another leg of the journey north, I’d be used to struggling through the snow.
But no, I’d been rolled under the carriage of jeeps in Seattle instead of developing my survival skills in the sunless winter of Alaska. Skills I now found I desperately needed.
While Sarah Ruth and I had been hiking in the forest, the boughs had sheltered us, blocking the wind and filtering the worst of the snow through their branches. The mountain trail, though, left us unobstructed, to be flayed by stinging pellets of ice.
“Are you sure this is the way?” I called to Sarah Ruth ahead of me, even though I knew Lewis and Clark probably hadn’t nagged their guides about things like that.
The wind, aimed bracingly against our backs, must have carried my voice well enough. “Just keep moving. We’ve got to hurry.”
To convince Sarah Ruth to let me come along, I’d told her everything. About the papers we’d found. The bomb. Leland and the army’s involvement. Gordon and the evidence up at the lookout.
Earl Morrissey was still in town, for all we knew telling the mayor about the bomb and committing treason to boot. The phone line was down, so we couldn’t send a warning to Gordon that way. Running to the barracks to tell the other smokejumpers would only complicate the situation.
It was up to us.
Which is a sentiment far more exiting and noble when you’re watch
ing it play out in a movie while clutching a box of Cracker Jack and not while stumbling up a mountain in a blizzard. I hadn’t reckoned on the smell of mothballs heavy on the collar of my borrowed coat, or the raw rubbing of wet wool socks in boots, or the growling of my stomach—it was nearing time for supper, wasn’t it?
But on we pressed. While I knew Leland and Jimmy had gotten a head start on us, I couldn’t say for sure how much. Thirty minutes? Forty? More?
“How much farther?” I called out, unable to help myself.
“We’re more than halfway.”
Halfway. That meant there would be no turning back. I pulled my roomy coat tighter against the onslaught of snow pellets.
Every now and then I’d look down, trying to find footprints, but even though there were only a few inches of snow on the ground, it was constantly shifting in the wind. A herd of elk might have trampled up the mountain ten minutes before us, and we wouldn’t see a trace.
Though we weren’t high on the mountain, we’d reached the section where the path narrowed. When I’d hiked up to the lookout with Gordon to visit Sarah Ruth, I’d almost refused to keep going, and that was in full sunshine, without a flake of snow in the air. I’d managed then by keeping one hand to the mountain wall, rubbing it reassuringly over the rock as I edged forward, so I tried the strategy again now.
That, of course, wouldn’t keep me within pace of Sarah Ruth, who seemed to be trying to beat a Kentucky Derby record, even without the horse. She looked back every few minutes with what I’m sure was—half blind though I was by my scarf—an exasperated expression.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I wanted to grouch at her. We couldn’t all be Paulette Bunyan.
We plowed on, winding along the trail, and soon Sarah Ruth got far enough ahead of me that she no longer heard my shouted questions about how far we’d gone. Either that or she just ignored them.
I shivered, stumbling toward a bend in the path. Maybe there we’d have a few moments of shelter from the punishing wind.
And just then, a human shriek joined the howling wind.
I can’t describe the feeling any better than ice the whole way down. Not like someone had shoved a handful of snow down the collar of my pilfered overcoat to slowly melt. Like a flash freeze down my spine.
And by the time I scrambled around the bend, pressed against the side of the trail for balance, all I saw was a place where snow had scuffled over the edge. Sarah Ruth was gone.
CHAPTER 33
Gordon Hooper
January 26, 1945
“Well,” I said, pacing a groove in the lookout floor past the cot and stove and back again, “that’s quite a story, Lieutenant.”
I’d refused to answer questions until I learned everything I wanted to know: why the army had pretended Jack’s death was an accident, how many people knew about the incendiary bombs’ existence, and why spreading information about the bombs was considered treason.
“War is full of complicated stories.”
I glanced at the windowed wall, where the gray sky grew darker and Jimmy was shivering by the door, looking out over the mountain. Leland had insisted on a private conversation, even if that meant exposing Jimmy to the harsh wind three stories in the air. Now I understood why.
“So why did the army come to Flintlock Mountain the night after the fire?”
He dipped a slice of bread into his near-empty bowl, sopping up the remains with the crust. “I wasn’t involved with that, but I imagine they took away the remains of the bomb to study them. Maybe disarmed any explosives that didn’t detonate.”
That explained the muddy boot prints we’d seen at the site of the fire. Too bad they didn’t know Morrissey had already captured the evidence with Charlie’s camera.
I rested my head on my hand for a moment, then sat on the bench I’d pulled over to the table, shivering as a cold draft brushed against my back. We’d cleared away the Osborne FireFinder to make room for our makeshift dinner, but my soup remained uneaten in front of me. “Where does that leave us?”
“I’ve got to convince you and PFC Armitage that, in this case, speaking the truth could cost hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent lives—and the destruction of the forests.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” We both turned to see Jimmy standing in the doorway, face pale and snowflakes melting away to drops on his face.
When had he come inside? “The forests,” he prompted when it looked like Lieutenant Leland wasn’t going to say more. “What do you mean about the forests being destroyed?”
“I thought I asked you to wait outside.”
Jimmy stomped over to the stove, shaking off snow and not bothering to remove his shoes. “I heard most of what you said anyway. Thin walls.”
That excuse didn’t hold, not with the howling wind. The only way Jimmy could have heard was if he’d cracked the door open to listen intentionally. Maybe I hadn’t imagined the chill on the back of my neck.
Lieutenant Leland watched the boy warily, then looked at me, as if waiting for me to vouch for him.
Could I? Whatever he meant about those papers, Jimmy was involved in this through his father, like it or not. He deserved to know. “Go on,” I finally said. “You can tell us both.”
The lieutenant inclined his head in a shallow nod. “If Japan finds out their balloons actually worked, they’ll start launching better, more effective balloons in spring and summer, when the ground dries out. And this whole country could burn.”
“Not on your life,” Jimmy said, smacking the table, causing our bowls to rattle. “We could fight those fires. Us smokejumpers. That’s what we do.”
“Calm down, Jimmy.” How many times had Mother or Jack said the same words to me? And it rarely helped.
Anger. I could spot it in almost anyone like I had a birdwatching guide with illustrations detailing its every form. First Jimmy’s father, now the forests and his beloved smokejumping job. Leland was threatening everything he loved.
Lieutenant Leland shook his head wearily. “The army has been going back and forth with the Forestry Department for weeks now. I’ve been listening in, heard all the arguments. The rangers are short-staffed as it is, which is why they had to bring in COs like you two.”
“Jimmy isn’t a—” I began.
“We’ve got plenty enough to put out the fires,” Jimmy interrupted, folding his arms and defying Leland to challenge him.
Lieutenant Leland pushed his empty bowl away and sat back in the chair, eyes thoughtful. “And what happens if the COs refuse to continue, given . . . new information?” He turned to me. “Think about your friends, Mr. Hooper. Tomorrow, if Major Hastings tells them that this summer, they’d be putting out fires set by Japanese bombs and would have to undergo military training to defuse them . . . would they accept?”
I thought about it, repeated what he said in my mind. Disabling enemy bombs and fighting the fires they caused was purely defensive . . . and yet, we had chosen the path of absolutism, had refused to serve as noncombatants like medics, because we believed anything associated with the war was wrong.
What would someone like Thomas do if he knew he suddenly was doing war work?
What would I do?
I didn’t know, but the lieutenant and Jimmy were waiting for an answer. “You’d get a mix of responses,” I finally said. “Some would stay. Others . . . would request a transfer. Maybe many others.”
Lieutenant Leland nodded. “That’s what the War Department thought. That’s why they didn’t tell you the truth, even after Mr. Armitage’s death. They didn’t want you to protest and see over half of their smokejumpers organize ‘some kind of Gandhi hunger strike’ for the 1945 fire season. Their words, not mine.”
It wasn’t farfetched. Many of the men in the CPS had been inspired by tales of nonviolent resistance. Over in Wyeth, the camp Shorty was sent to, they’d threatened to stop work when one of their men, a Japanese American, was slated to be sent to an internment camp, and several protests a
gainst segregation or overworking in other CPS camps had nearly gotten some of the fellows arrested.
I met his eyes. “That’s what we do, Mr. Leland. We follow our consciences. We resist.”
“I know, and I respect that.” He raised a finger to stall my protest. “To a point. But we can’t have you fellows on this job anymore. We’ve got to bring in the army, and above all, we’ve got to keep news of the bombs silent.”
Silent. I remembered the list of options in the notes Dorie had lifted from Mr. Morrissey’s office. He was considering making information about them public. Maybe he already had.
Lieutenant Leland looked earnestly across the table at us. “Listen, Mr. Hooper, this isn’t personal. But we’re concerned about the fact that Earl Morrissey violated direct orders to investigate this bomb. If he’s reckless with that information—or if you are—it could ruin everything we’ve tried to protect.”
My eyes darted to the observation log, where the documents rested, full of incriminating information. Across the table, Jimmy looked at me pleadingly.
“I’ve put all my cards on the table, Mr. Hooper. Now I can only ask, appealing to your love for this country: Do you have those documents?”
I didn’t answer right away. What would Dorie do? Or better, what would Jack do?
That’s not the right question. What sort of a Quaker was I? I was supposed to be thinking of what Jesus would do. But he seemed so far away, in his robes and sandals, teaching about lost sheep and hidden talents instead of bombs and censorship.
He hadn’t helped Clara decide what to do. What made me think he would help me?
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” That was something, anyway. All I had to go on.
I may have made mistakes—not being there for Jack when he needed me, punching Thomas in anger, bullying Dorie to cover my own shame—but I always told the truth. It was what made me different from my father. It was who I was.
The Lines Between Us Page 27