Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  Every three to five minutes the fireworks continued, and the light shone brighter as she drew steadily closer, allowing her to focus on her markings and footpath. Relying on her adrenaline, she moved deftly around the rocks and sandstone and the eleven patches of snow between the rock wall and the fencing. A loop of wire had been wrapped around the top of two metal fence posts to keep the gate shut. She squeezed the posts together and removed the wire, then opened the flimsy gate. She tossed the coil of rope onto the ground and removed her coat. She wrapped the coat and tied it around the flat end of the crutch. She would hobble the rest of the way without her crutch if she had to, not worrying at this point about the pressure on her foot. The fireworks continued to blast through the sky. The light allowed her to see more clearly and let her know there was still someone out there. Again, she called out, emptying her lungs, and then her body felt more depleted from the effort.

  Bird netting covered the opening to the pit but was loosely secured, and when Amy Raye pulled out her knife and released one of the corners to peel it back, she saw a dead swallow with a broken wing whose feet had gotten tangled. The waste level was a couple of feet from the surface and the stench so strong Amy Raye almost gagged. She reached down into the pit with the crutch, dipped her jacket into the thick sludge, and swirled it around to make sure the fuel had soaked into the cloth. If the people shooting the fireworks couldn’t hear her, at least they’d be able to see her with this torch, and she’d be able to see her path and cover the distance more quickly.

  —

  I was more than halfway to Rangely and within miles of the turnoff for Highway 139 when I heard Dean over the radio: “Seventeen, Dispatch, I’m at the scene of the report. We’ve got a couple of boys shooting fireworks. Over.”

  “Dispatch, Seventeen, copy. Are there any weapons involved?”

  “Seventeen, Dispatch. No firearms.”

  I knew Dean didn’t have a cell signal. I wouldn’t be able to get him on the phone. I picked up my radio receiver. “Alpha One, Seventeen.”

  “Go ahead, Alpha One.”

  “Can you describe the boys?”

  “Driver of the red and silver pickup has blond hair. Blue eyes. Six feet. Over.”

  Dean was describing Joseph. He knew I would know that. We were on public radio. He wouldn’t be able to say the boy was my son. I decided to continue on to their location. “Alpha One, Seventeen, I’m about twenty minutes en route. What is your location? Over.”

  “Seventeen, Alpha One—” Static.

  I was unable to make out what Dean was saying. “I didn’t copy that, Seventeen. What is your ten-twenty, come back.”

  Static.

  “Deputy Scholtz, do you read me?” I said.

  “Command, Seventeen, what is your location?” Colm was now on the radio.

  Static broke over the line again, the wind blew against Dean’s receiver, and from the sounds that did carry I could tell he was still on foot. There were different voices. And then Dean’s. “We’ve got smoke coming up out of the east. Over.”

  “Command, Seventeen, copy.”

  And then, “Command, Seventeen and Dispatch, do you have a read on Seventeen’s location?”

  “Seventeen, Command and Dispatch, we’re maybe a quarter mile northeast of last location. Smoke is coming in out of the canyon. We’re heading back to our vehicles.”

  Static.

  Joseph’s voice came over the radio. He was telling Dean something.

  “Come on, boys. Get out of there,” I said out loud to myself. Had their fireworks started a fire?

  “Seventeen”—static—“Jesus Christ”—static, and then silence.

  “Command, Seventeen, do you read me?” Colm said. “Command, Seventeen,” again. “Deputy Scholtz, do you read me?”

  I was certain I had heard Joseph’s voice. “Joseph, can you hear me? Joseph, if you’re there, pick up the radio.”

  —

  She pulled out the small canister of matches, flipped off the lid, swiped the match against the thin strike pad, and lit the edge of her jacket sleeve. And the thick wick saturated with the mixture of crude oil and waste exploded into a ball of flames. She did not know how long it would burn, and she had not anticipated the sparks flying. She moved as quickly as she could from the pit and to the opening where the flimsy gate flopped over on the ground, but she had not had practice running without her crutch, and her left leg was at least two inches shorter from the break, and she had not foreseen dropping her boot, or the worn stitching of her wool sock catching on the wire and tripping her, and more sparks flying from the tied jacket as she fell to her knees and caught herself with her right hand, holding the torch six inches from the ground, but it was too close, and the jacket was melting fast, larger pieces of fabric breaking away, hot swaths of thread floating and being tossed like ashen leaves. She looked back only long enough to pull her foot out of her sock that was still snagged and to see the trail of light blossom into orange and red as the entire pit went up in flames. Before she was on her feet, intense heat pushed her forward like an explosive. She scrambled to pull herself upright and to run, and as she tried to run, she felt the bone of her left ankle cutting into tissue and tendon with each step, felt stones and brush burning against her bare skin. Smoke and ash like a parapet around her coated her eyes, making it more difficult to see. She dropped the torch when its heat had begun to melt her shirt and sear the hairs on her arm and blister her skin. And what once had been patches of snow was now mud, and twice she slipped, a sharp branch tearing down her left sleeve, warm liquid collecting in her palm. And somewhere in front of her another flare, faintly lighting her path, exposing another landmark, the large rounded boulder that only hours before she had thought looked like a meteorite that had dropped from the sky. The mile seemed shorter, her gait like that of a broken deer, her body stumbling forward, away from the direction of the flames, the direction of the wind, and toward the voices from where the fireworks had come.

  A steep face of sandstone was to her left. The smoke smelled sweeter, a mixture of ash and explosives like the Fourth of July. And there were voices somewhere far above her. She called out again, the effort leaving her dizzy and weak, so that she leaned over for a moment, resting her hands on her knees. Her legs quivered. Her head still felt light. She would need to climb. She was too far below the ridge for anyone to notice her. And what if they had left? She did not see any more fireworks. “Help me,” she said again, her voice not much louder than the night wind. She reached for the rock wall, lifted her right leg against the stone. But her boot was heavy and slick on the bottom and covered in mud. She bent over, unlaced and removed it, removed her sock. She raised her torso and looked up the cliff wall again, and as she did, the blood drained from her face, the ground seemed to shift beneath her, and her balance faltered. Her fingers gripped a small ledge in the rock face to steady her; the toes of her right foot dug into the only crevice she could find. She pulled and pushed herself upward and over the narrow edge, maybe six inches of sandstone that jutted out, a ringing in her ears. She reached for another handhold, tucked her right foot beneath her, pulled and pushed again, and then sweat and cold and nausea, and somewhere in the distance she might have heard voices like those from her childhood, and the night air closed in on her, the sky around her a blur as if everything were spinning, and the sensation of falling, and something as sweet as sleep.

  —

  From a distance it’s difficult to see smoke in the nighttime. It can appear no different from a storm moving in. It’s the air that is different, and the soot that falls on a person’s windshield and clothing. And sometimes it’s the great, loud popping sounds and the whoosh of heat wind.

  I smelled the fire before I heard Colm call it in to dispatch. I had turned off 139 and was about ten minutes south of BLM 23, driving at high speed with my lights flashing on top of my vehicle.

 
“Dispatch, Command, ten-seventy-two, wildfire. Ignition spot estimated at 20-Charlie and 36-Quebec. Subjects are in the area, exact location unknown. Request full assignment, Code Three.”

  I picked up my radio speaker. “Alpha One, Command and Dispatch, can you give me a ten-twenty on Deputy Scholtz and the boys? Over.”

  “Dispatch, Alpha One and Seventeen, evacuate the area, do you copy?”

  “Alpha One, Seventeen, do you have the boys with you?”

  But Dean didn’t answer. I continued en route. Engines and medics were responding to the scene, working channel F3. Because Dean and the boys were on foot in the area, and because Trip Mortenson’s ranch abutted the canyon to the southeast, the area had become a mandatory fire exclusion zone. Alarms went out to BLM fire dispatch offices in Rio Mesa and Rangely. Within hours the fire could be suppressed, but the winds were unpredictable. And there were the oil pits to contend with. I could only wonder if Joseph and Corey had inadvertently started the fire, but there was no way I was going to evacuate the area without those boys.

  The BLM road I was driving would be the same exit route of Joseph and Corey and Dean. The smoke swept back toward the fire, as if a vault had been opened, sucking in the air. The winds were now blowing from the northwest and would be pushing the flames into the draws south of Bowman Canyon. I watched the smoke, tried to gauge the wind. Heat sources created their own currents, and an explosion in the area from one of the oil pits could change the course of the fire’s path.

  “Come on, Dean,” I said out loud. And all the while I peeled my eyes for some sight of Joseph and Corey.

  —

  She heard the breeze. She smelled fresh burning wood, like the Douglas fir she and Farrell used to heat their home, like campfire, but her head felt dizzy, and she did not know where she was, and the ground was rocky beneath her. And then she remembered the cave. She must have awoken in the night, because above her she saw the faint etching of white birds, and she was thankful that she was warm and the fire was still burning and she could sleep longer, because all she wanted to do was rest. But she was dizzy and her head ached. Perhaps she should eat something, or drink water, but her pack was not there. She rolled onto her back, and above her was sky and stars, and a beautiful moon; had the moon ever looked so beautiful before, like a sickle of God, separating the chaff, and the night was unimagining all those things that she had become. She was the young girl counting raindrops on the window, and loving her mother who used to laugh and wanted nothing more than to bring life into the world. She was the daughter of the doting father, broken by the pain of a woman whose grief he could not comfort, whose body he could no longer hold, a wife he could not bring back, and the daughter who had betrayed him and reminded him every day of a larger betrayal of himself. She had become the mirror of each of them. And then she saw Van Gogh and Hemlock; and Saddle, who’d found her on a dark street on that windblown, snowy night in January. A stray dog, fur matted, and leg permanently crippled, who led the woman whom he had followed to the man whom she would never have found, to the only man who could love her most.

  And then it came back to her, the canyon that stretched out before her, the oil pit, the flames and smoke that somehow she had outrun, or was it the wind that had kept the fire away? But she was so tired, and her body limp. Her left foot was numb. She licked her parched lips, her throat and tongue dry.

  —

  Colm and I had continued to talk to each other over the radio. Then Colm called my cell phone. We had not yet lost signal. “Pru.” That was all he said.

  “My son is out there,” I told him.

  I knew where the boys had gone. They would have parked the truck at the base of the hill and hiked the rest of the way up to the exposed rock surface where Joseph and I had camped. They would have been setting off their fireworks from there. I knew how to get to them faster than the route Colm had taken. But Colm had started out with at least a twenty-minute advantage. A little farther in, and I lost cell signal. I radioed Colm. “Alpha One, Command. I am taking a different route. Will keep radio on.”

  I hit the turnoff road too hard, was thrown against the ceiling of the cab, and the smoke drifting in was making it difficult to see. I tried to anticipate the turns, avoid the washouts and boulders that jutted into the edge of the four-wheel dirt roads. Another five minutes and I saw the flashing lights on Colm’s truck, then his brake lights. I pulled up beside him, saw Farrell in the passenger seat. Colm and Farrell got out of Colm’s truck. I climbed out of my Tahoe.

  The last word we’d had from Dean was that they were about a quarter mile on foot northeast of their vehicles.

  “Stay with the truck,” Colm said to Farrell.

  Colm grabbed a spotlight from the cab, and we took off, making our way over rocks and deadfall and washouts. About five minutes in we heard someone yelling.

  “Over here!”

  “It’s Joseph,” I said. And so Colm and I veered to our right, through a grove of pinyon and toward the ledge I knew so well.

  “Joseph!” I yelled. “Corey!”

  I saw Dean’s flashlight through the trees, and then they were there, right in front of us.

  “There’s someone out there,” Joseph said. “We thought we heard a scream.”

  “We called out a number of times,” Dean said. “We’re not getting a response. I’m not seeing anything either. We’d need a rope to get down there,” Dean went on. “Joseph thought he remembered a switchback. We tried it. That’s when I lost my radio.”

  “The switchback is farther down,” I said. “Another sixty yards or so.”

  I told Dean and the boys to stay on the ledge, to point Dean’s flashlight over the canyon so I could find my way back. Colm followed me as I took off toward the east, reading the ground before me like a well-studied map. I had never navigated my way to the switchback at night. And each time I thought I had found it, each time a clearing appeared near the footpath, I discovered only another steep dropoff.

  Someone whistled. I assumed it was Corey. I was familiar with how loud he could whistle with two fingers, remembered how he had tried to teach Joseph how to do it. None of us had our search-and-recovery apparatus with us. We’d left our whistles and other tools at our vehicles. Any moment the fire could turn unpredictable. Should someone be out there, we couldn’t afford to waste time returning to our trucks.

  “Everything okay?” Colm yelled to Dean and the boys.

  “Okay,” one of them called back.

  And then the ground changed, turned into what looked like a small, dried-up gully that ran over the edge.

  “I think this is it,” I told Colm. I knelt and slid my leg over the side of the cliff. My foot reached for the rock that I knew would be about three feet below me. I landed securely and climbed down to the next rock where the switchback began. The boys thought they’d heard a scream. Dean thought he’d heard it, too. Hundreds of people had gathered for the founder’s day celebration at Trip’s ranch. The boys had wandered out here. Someone else might have wandered out here, as well.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Colm asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Keep holding the light. I can see better with you shining it from above me,” I said.

  Maneuvering my way along the first part of the path was going to require the use of both hands. Without headlamps, we were better off with Colm remaining at the top of the ridge. When Glade and I had initially explored the site, we’d lowered our gear by rope to the shelter, and had then followed the switchback until we were at the lower ledge.

  —

  Amy Raye could not move her left leg so much as an inch. Her entire body felt limp. She tried to wiggle her toes, but if they moved, she could not feel them. She did not know if she had sustained another injury or if she was simply cold, or if the large rocks pressing into her hip were cutting off her circulation. She rolled her hip slightly, moved her arms
and fingers, tried to improve her circulation. Smoke swept over her like fog being blown in, and though she could no longer feel the heat from the fire, with each attempt she made to moisten her lips, she could taste the ash, like catching a snowflake on her tongue.

  “Help me,” she said, in a voice as anemic as she felt. “Someone please help me.”

  And then a whistle, muffled by the night breeze and the cliff wall, or was it a bird, and all around her the sweet waft of burning wood. And voices that sounded like thunder, but so far away. She tried to move again. If only she could stand, wave her arms, regain her voice and strength, climb the wall before her, but she could not will her body to move in the direction of the voices that sounded like thunder. And the longer she lay there, the more she shivered and her legs tingled, both feet numb now, as if her body were drifting off into a deep sleep.

  There had been fireworks. She had heard voices. Yet now, the fireworks and voices seemed so long ago, like a taunting in her mind. She knew then, she was dying. This was what dying felt like. She held her arms straight out to her sides, and in that moment she began to cry. She held her shame like a heavy cross.

  I love you, Farrell. She closed her eyes, imagined him fully, and beside him she saw the children, and Moab licking the children’s faces, and she tried to imagine her parents feeling proud of the family Amy Raye and Farrell and the children had become.

  As something close to peace moved over her skin and thoughts, she was sure she heard voices again, only this time closer. Her right hand pushed through the edge of sage needles and loose particles of sandstone until her fingers wrapped around a stick at least two inches in diameter. She opened her mouth, strained her voice once more, tried to emit a scream. She banged a rock that lay within two feet of her. “I’m here,” she cried. “Don’t leave me.” She gripped the stick tighter. She beat the rock as if it were a heavy drum.