by Robert Greer
Only when my mom ran toward us, shouting, “Got through to 911! Help’s on the way,” did I momentarily stop trembling.
“Great,” Dad said, turning his attention to Rodue. “You okay, Rodue?”
Rodue’s response was a guttural, “Aaaahhh.”
Dad checked Rodue’s pulse, then examined his pupils. The only sense I had that Dad might have been nervous were the beads of sweat peppering his forehead. “I’m pretty sure he’s got a concussion, but he’s breathin’.” Glancing up at my mom, he said, “Stay here with him ’til someone from Fire and Rescue or Sheriff Woodson gets here. Keep him talkin’ and conscious, no matter what. Dance for him if you have to, Marva, but keep him awake.”
“Okay,” Mom said, kneeling to slip in behind Rodue and take over for Dad. Her face was beet red, her hands absolutely pale, and I could tell from the way she was breathing, taking quick gulps of air, that she was at least as nervous as me.
“We’re gonna have to put that fire out before it gets any kind of toehold,” Dad said, coughing from the smoke. He glanced around at the cache of heavy equipment before standing and eyeing each piece one by one. I could almost see the Seabee wheels turning in his head. Rubbing his hands together expectantly, he said, “Spoon, I want you on one of the backhoes.” He looked at me. “TJ, think you can handle that little dozer with the muddy blade over there?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll work the other backhoe. We’re gonna trench us out enough dirt to suffocate that fire.”
“What if we can’t?” I asked. I could feel my heart thumping as I asked.
Dad winked and flashed me a look of pure confidence. “Don’t worry. We can.”
Beckoning Spoon and me to come closer and looking not the least bit apprehensive, he said, “Spoon and I’ll trench out and berm up as much dirt as we can with the backhoes, ten feet or so on this side of the mouth of the fire. We’ll build up a berm that’s five feet high and forty or fifty feet long, then either dump or doze it into the crevice and down on the fire. We might have to open up the mouth just a bit in the end; we’ll just have to see.” He glanced toward a fire that was now burning so hot that my clothes had started to stick to me.
As I watched plumes of fire and smoke erupt from the gouge in the earth, I asked, coughing and wheezing from the fumes, “What about things caving in? If you open up the mouth of the fire, I mean?”
“It’s a possibility,” Dad said. His words were almost serene. “But we got no other choice.”
“One last thing, TJ,” he said, eyeing the fire pensively. “If you see the ground between me and Spoon and the mouth of that fire move the least little bit, you lay on the horn of that dozer you’ll be nursemaidin’. That’ll be our signal to move back.”
“Okay,” I said, trying my best to hide the fact that I was shaking again.
“Then let’s get at it.” My dad glanced at Spoon. “You’re the one in the predictin’ business. How do you measure our chances?”
“’Bout fifty-fifty,” said Spoon, coughing and rubbing his eyes. “But since we’ve got a lucky charm here in TJ, I’d say we might rate just a tad better. Bottom line is, no matter the game, fifty-one to forty-nine generally wins.”
I looked at my dad and saw the same proud look in his eyes that always surfaced when he talked about Jimmy. There could be no mistaking that at the moment that look was meant for me.
“And TJ, no matter what you do, stay back from the mouth of that fire, you hear me?”
My feet and hands felt numb as I nodded and glanced toward where my mom was tending to Rodue. She’d propped him up against the tree, and he wasn’t moving. I glanced down at my trembling hands, momentarily lost on an imaginary battlefield until I heard the two backhoes begin to crunch their way toward the fire. Still trembling, I ran toward the dozer to carry my share of the load.
Twenty-Two
My dad’s heavy-equipment-handling skills had been honed during his time as a Seabee. Where Spoon’s skills had come from, I didn’t know for sure. But from the time Spoon first arrived on the ranch and landed the job with his all-night hay-cutting marathon to the time I’d helped him construct the levee that guaranteed our annual hay crop, I’d realized he was the kind of person who mastered just about everything by jumping headlong into it.
He and my dad had been digging and moving dirt for a good fifteen minutes while I sat with my right palm nervously planted on the dozer’s horn, dripping sweat and choking on smoke. When my dad leaned out of his cab and shouted over the roar of the fire and the groan of diesel engines, “TJ, get that dozer of yours a little closer if you can and line it up parallel to the fire,” I moved the dozer twenty feet closer to the fire and prayed.
Dad and Spoon, who’d initially positioned themselves at opposite ends of the fiery crevice, were working their way toward the middle. Although the fire was so intense I thought their tires might melt, both machines were still moving as they scooped up bucket after bucket of soil and dropped it at the edge of the crevice. I watched them dig and dump and dig and dump until there was a five-foot-high, four-foot-wide berm of dirt stretching almost the entire length of the crevice.
From thirty feet away the fire’s intensity was so great that the hair in my nostrils seemed to be on fire. From Dad and Spoon’s vantage points, fifteen feet closer, I imagined it was suffocating. But neither man slowed his pace as they marched their machines closer and closer to one another.
They were less than two car lengths apart when I heard a loud, heart-stopping pop that sounded like a tree limb breaking. When I realized the noise had been the windshield of Spoon’s backhoe exploding, I mouthed, “Shit.” As both backhoes, their bucket arms nearly kissing, dropped their last loads of dirt and headed away from the fire, I could see that my dad’s rear tires were smoldering. The nauseating smell of burning rubber quickly filled the air as the canted backhoe wobbled toward me.
As the two damaged pieces of equipment lumbered my way, I had the sudden strange sense that both men had retreated from similar hellholes before. When my dad pulled his backhoe to a stop a few feet from me, I could see that his face had been seared a dark, apple-butter brown. Absent a protective windshield, Spoon’s face had fared worse. His eyebrows were singed, his left cheek was charred, and a shotgun spray of burn holes peppered the crown of his Stetson. Seemingly oblivious to his burns and with his injured arm hanging loosely at his side, Spoon jumped from his backhoe. Side by side, he and my dad raced in my direction.
As Spoon climbed up onto a dozer track and into my cab, the smell of burning hair filled the air, and I realized that the hair on both of his arms was completely gone. When he yelled, “Hop out, TJ,” I didn’t budge. “TJ, get out!” he screamed. “I gotta use this thing to bury that fire.”
Shouting no, I watched my dad climb into the cab of the second, larger dozer about thirty feet away. When he waved for Spoon to move out, I was still sitting at
Spoon’s side.
“Damnit, TJ! You could get killed,” Spoon grumbled, taking over the dozer’s controls.
“So could you. Let’s go.”
Spoon shook his head and nosed the dozer forward. Running parallel to and less than the width of a car from my dad, we headed for the center of the berm and the crevice.
“Sure hope your pa’s right about puttin’ this s-o-b out,” said Spoon. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ but followin’ his lead.”
Coughing and wheezing, I glanced across the gap between the two dozers. As I watched my dad maneuver his machine into place, I wondered if we’d succeed.
As we pushed the first load of dirt over the lip of the crevice and down onto the fire, I thought I heard the wail of sirens in the distance. When the two dozers backed away from the fire and as Spoon and Dad each took more acute angles on the berm in preparation for delivering a second payload, I realized that the sounds were for real. Two red and white pumper trucks out of Hardin were headed our way. Rather than feeling a sense of relief, however, I felt what could o
nly be described as panic. Panic brought on by the fact that I knew Sheriff Woodson couldn’t be far behind.
For the next thirty minutes my dad and Spoon, running side by side, dozed blade after blade of dirt down onto the stubborn fire. In that same space of time, half a dozen county firefighters came to our aid, but their powerful streams of water only turned the fire into a geyser of ash, flames, and mud. Even in the face of calls from the firefighters to back off, Spoon and my dad never stopped. With each new mountain of dirt he’d doze onto the fire, Spoon would look at me as he backed the machine away and say the same thing: “It’s now or never, TJ. Just like Elvis always said.”
During one of our assaults, amazed by Spoon’s skill at the controls of the dozer, I shouted, “Were you ever a Seabee?”
“Nope,” he yelled above the crackle of the fire and engine roar before taking a quick gulp of air. “Never ran anythin’ but a machine gun durin’ ’Nam. But Bertha and I covered for some Seabees who were rebuildin’ bridges a few times. Tough bunch of buggers, them Seabees. No question,” he said, taking a new angle on the berm.
When my dad yelled, “Spoon, squeeze your damn dozer over here next to mine and this hot spot,” Spoon grinned and said, “See what I mean?”
Spoon dozed a couple of loads of dirt onto the hot spot before he and my dad worked for the next five minutes to plug up the far south end of the crevice. Singed and sucking in sulfurous air, we worked until Dad, waving us off, pushed a final blade of dirt down onto the smoke-billowing gap in the earth. The gap no longer spewed flames. He sat there for a moment before backing off. He brought the dozer to a stop, eased out of his cab onto the step-up, and yelled, “I’m thinkin’ we can shut ’em down now, Spoon.”
I listened to the earth pop and crackle for a few seconds before, following Spoon’s lead, I jumped from the dozer and trotted with him toward my dad. We’d just about reached him when I saw my mom running toward us. All of our eyebrows were gone by then, and to a man we were covered from head to toe with a papier-mâché coat of gray ash. Mom hugged my dad tightly before reaching around him to squeeze both Spoon’s hand and mine in hers. “It’s out, it’s out,” she said, teary eyed.
“For now. Or it’s still burning underground,” my dad said, looking back toward the smoldering crevice. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Mom stepped back, looked us each up and down, and shook her head. “The three of you look like you’ve been in a war.”
As we walked down the hill toward where I could see Sheriff Woodson standing, I asked her, “What happened to Rodue?”
“They took him to Hardin to try and stabilize him. If they can’t, they’re going to airlift him to Bozeman. The paramedics who hauled him off said he had a concussion and maybe even a fractured skull. Claimed it was the same kind of injury you’d get from a grenade exploding. Lucky he’s not dead is what they said.”
The looks on Spoon’s and my dad’s faces were suddenly mirror images as they eyed one another as if to say, We know.
As we continued toward the Four Corners survey pin, my mom let out an exhausted sigh that as much as said, I’ve had enough. A few feet from the pin, twirling his smoke-covered Stetson in one hand, stood Sheriff Woodson. “Nice work you did on that fire,” he said to no one in particular. “Guess it’s one time you’re thankful for your navy stint, huh, Bill?”
Scrutinizing Spoon, he said, “Were you a Seabee too, Witherspoon?”
“Nope. A .50-caliber machine gunner.”
“I see.” Woodson slipped his hat on and said, “Afraid we need to talk, Bill.”
Ignoring Woodson and turning his attention to Spoon, my dad asked, “How’s the arm?”
“Think I got myself a minor shoulder separation. But it works.”
“Did you hear me, Bill?” asked the sheriff.
“I heard you, Cain,” Dad said, stepping over to check Spoon’s injury. “And I’ll get to you as soon as you get a paramedic over here to have a look at Spoon.”
The sheriff waved at a paramedic who was seated on the hood of an ambulance about twenty-five yards away. “Got an injured man for you to tend to, Lonnie,” he yelled. The paramedic jumped to the ground, grabbed his gear, and rushed our way.
“Soon as your hired man’s tended to, we’ll talk, Bill,” said the sheriff.
“Absolutely,” my dad said, flashing Spoon a supportive grin. “Absolutely.” He placed his hand on Spoon’s shoulder and they shared a strong silent glance and then a smile.
We did talk, all of us, and not just at the fire scene. We talked there, and at the mouth of Burn’s Ditch, where the sheriff had us explain to him in detail how everything had unfolded, and finally, hours later, at the sheriff’s insistence, on the front porch of our house. We talked about everything from trespassing to landowners’ rights, strip-mining to underground coal fires. Eventually we even discussed Dwayne James, the cigar-smoking dead man who’d started the fire.
We talked about waging battles and winning wars, about early Montana landgrabs and landgrabs back in Ohio, and when we were done, exhausted from the sheriff’s grilling and still caked from head to toe with soot and ash, Sheriff Woodson, satisfied at least for the moment that he’d gotten to the bottom of what had happened at Four Corners, got up and left.
As we watched the taillights of his vehicle disappear in the night, my dad turned to Mom and asked, “Think he’s satisfied?”
“As satisfied as the man who’s still got a couple of missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle can be,” she said.
“Think he’ll leave you alone now?” Spoon asked in a voice that had a worrisome, unsettling ring of finality to it.
“More than likely,” my dad said.
With his left arm in a sling, Spoon brushed a thin layer of mud from one leg of his jeans with his right arm. “Good, ’cause I’m callin’ it a day.”
“Me too. And a night as well,” Dad said with a quick handshake. “We’ll start over in the morning.”
Spoon nodded and without answering rose and walked across the porch, down the steps, and down the drive to disappear into the darkness. When I couldn’t see him any longer, a sudden sense of loss and a strange sadness overpowered me. It was a feeling I imagined Spoon had experienced scores of times. I couldn’t explain where the feeling had come from or why exactly it had descended on me at that moment. All I knew was that it was there, gripping me, refusing to let me go, leading me in a direction I clearly didn’t want to go. I wondered if what I was feeling would linger or whether it would turn out to be only momentarily unsettling. My mom would have called it a premonition. Dad, at least now, a reasonable hunch. Deep down I knew, however, as I stared into the darkness, exactly what it was that I was feeling—recognized it for every bit of what it was. I could almost see Spoon spelling the word charm out in midair as I struggled with the knowledge that by the next day’s sunset, Spoon would
be gone.
I didn’t prod Spoon about his plans, nor did I discuss my premonition with him the next day as we worked side by side, setting fence posts in a pasture we used for yearling bulls in the spring. When Ricky Peterson stopped by at lunch to inform everyone that because a subsidence fire had started on our land he’d more than likely be able to get a permanent injunction against mining on our property forever, Spoon seemed elated.
I didn’t say a word about my suspicions when Spoon excused himself from our dinner table that evening to head for his tack room quarters, claiming he needed to get something Harriet had given him for Mom. When he hadn’t returned fifteen minutes later for his favorite dessert of peach cobbler and homemade vanilla-bean ice cream, Mom insisted that I go check on him. As I walked slowly and sadly toward the tack room, the sun had begun to set. The air was cold and clear and still, and I could hear coyote pups yelping in the distance.
The instant I pushed open the door to the tack room, a hollowness overcame me. As I surveyed the room and drank in the familiar surroundings—the saddle blankets and the boots, the neatly arranged r
ugs, even Malcolm—I knew that Spoon had packed his belongings and
was gone.
I slowly walked that room from corner to corner, not once or twice but three gut-wrenching times, fighting back tears all the while. Choking back my sorrow, I walked to the middle of the room, where the final ebbing rays of the sun beamed through the only window to form a muted burnt orange square on the century-old heart-pine floor. It was then that I saw them. Sitting right in the middle of the floor, caked with mud and soot and ash from the previous day’s fire, heels clicked together in some strange terminal salute, were Spoon’s boots. Standing at attention, the boots stared up at me in the sunlight as if Spoon were still wearing them.
I walked over, picked up one boot, and thought about that night more than a year earlier when we’d shared miniature tenths of Bacardi and told each other who we were. Thought about how Spoon had rescued that very pair of boots from a discard pile and for the first time told me about his gift.
I picked up the other boot and pressed both of them tightly to my chest. The only thing I could think of, the one thing I could see as I blinked back tears, was the distant shadow of the part-Indian, part-black clairvoyant cowboy who’d once said to me, “Shoes can be excess baggage when a man’s in a hurry.”
Twenty-Three
I never, except in a roundabout way, heard from or saw Spoon again. A month to the day after we put out the fire at Four Corners, Harriet Rankin dropped by the ranch to let us know she’d received a postcard from Spoon. The card, which bore a Washington State postmark, had been neatly printed in Spoon’s hand. He mentioned that he was in the high timber country north of Spokane in the Colville National Forest searching out a new lead that he was certain would finally take him to his roots, and that he knew things were just fine at Willow Creek. He’d signed the card with a simple S.