Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  “Fireline’s no place for a woman.”

  “Did she screw up?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  The crew boss laughed. “You’re not going to drag me into that. You know what I mean.”

  Anna did and quelled an urge to bite the man. Anna had served her time on firelines and knew quarter was given to no one. On her last three project fires she’d gone out as a medic or security or, as in the case of the Jackknife, both. The work was less backbreaking and more challenging, if not physically, then cerebrally.

  “Jennifer kept up,” LeFleur said finally.

  “Don’t dress it up on my account,” Anna said dryly.

  LeFleur laughed. “She’s okay. Works right along. She’s got blisters on both her hands but never complains about anything but how big her butt looks in NoMex,” he said, referring to the baggy, fire retardant wool pants all firefighters were required to wear.

  “A wolf in femme fatale’s clothing,” Anna said with satisfaction. Abruptly, she asked: “Are you married?”

  “Are you offering?”

  Anna squirmed figuratively, if not literally. She was tempted to tell him the information wasn’t for her but knew whatever she said at this point was bound to sound lame. “Just making conversation.” Letting it go at that, she watched the reds deepening into night. Darkness was brought on early by smoke. Sparks of orange, just hinting at the vastness of the burn before sundown, pricked the sides of mountains in three directions.

  The coming of night had hushed the constant growl of retardant aircraft and the helicopters that chopped into the helispot below camp. The small sounds of raccoon, deer, owl, coyote and cougar had been silenced for eight days. In its infancy, the Jackknife had made a name for itself by taking two newsworthy sacrifices: a young man camped out near Pinson Lake and his dog. Tabloids had made hay with photos of the charred remains of the pooch while thousands of wild things lost went unmourned.

  Anna didn’t mourn them now. Tiny corpses left behind by fires—squirrel, fawn, bunny—didn’t sadden her as they once might have. Wildland fire returned many needed things to the earth.

  An icy breeze was sucked down through the trees. Fire raged over thirty thousand acres of prime timberland. Creeks boiled dry, birds fled, fledglings died in the nest, smoke hung in the valleys for a hundred miles, and still Anna could not get warm. She buttoned the top button of her shirt and turned the collar up. Soon she would have to go in and get her coat but she was not yet ready to move. The folding chair and ground cloth felt like home. Marooned as it was, an island of life in a sea of black and flame, the tent village seemed cozy.

  Three twenty-by-fifteen-foot tents, their white canvas reflecting the evening light, were clustered around a central clearing. Time Keeping operations were housed in one of the big tents. It was there hazard pay, overtime and wages were recorded. The LeFleurs of the world might fight fire for the love of it, but for most it was a living, a way of making ends meet.

  The San Juans were housed in the second tent and Anna and Stephen shared the last with medical supplies and emergency gear. East of the main tents—and hopefully downwind—was a slum of blue Porta-Johns. The honey-pot industry was one place Anna was against unisex application. Privately she believed the Shoshone lost to invading armies because they had such lousy aim.

  Between the tents and the toilets was the mess area; twice a day meals were trucked in from base camp. A long table lined with basins and soap for washing was just beyond. Cubies—square, plastic five-gallon containers for water—were stacked in a translucent wall on the far side of the table. Basins and table alike were smudged with the ubiquitous soot that tinged the hair, nails, skin and clothes of everyone in spike camp.

  Down at Incident Base, showers housed in semi-truck trailers with their own generators for hot water provided the crews with some relief from the endless grime. In spike camp dirt not removable with basin and towel remained for the duration. Long-haired firefighters—and at this camp they were in the majority, with twenty men from Sho-Rap and four women including Anna—kept it braided back. After an hour on the fireline, hair took on the consistency of cotton candy.

  LeFleur finished his second Pall Mall. Night was upon them. He handed Anna back the spent cold pack. “Bedtime for this boy.”

  “Watch out for doors,” Anna said as he left.

  Laughter from the medical tent lured her from the night. Jennifer and Stephen were wrestling with an uncooperative Coleman lantern. Providing more laughs than light, they argued about the perfect number of pumps required to create the ideal pressure in the lamp’s fuel chamber.

  As Anna came in the Coleman roared to life and the peace of the evening was pushed aside. Obnoxious though it was, the harsh light was necessary. For the next couple of hours Anna and Stephen bandaged cuts, handed out analgesics, mole foam, nasal spray, hand lotion and, when called for, sympathy.

  Near midnight they crawled into their sleeping bags, laid out on the unheard-of luxury of army cots. In less than five hours they’d be back at it, packaging feet for another day on the line.

  In soft beds and climate-controlled bedrooms Anna had trouble sleeping. At fire camps the nightmares left her alone. Exhaustion claimed mind and body during the brief respites allowed.

  From the modest confines of her yellow fire-issue sleeping bag, she squirmed out of her underwear: plain, white cotton; underpants that wouldn’t melt at high temperatures and adhere to the flesh. The western forests might burn but Anna’s underwear shouldn’t ignite.

  “Got the scoop on John LeFleur’s lip,” Stephen said as Anna dropped the maidenly garment to the floor. Lindstrom loved to gossip. One of his endearing qualities, as far as Anna was concerned.

  “Do tell.”

  “Welllll,” he said, drawing out the word in exaggerated confidence, making her laugh. “Jennifer said—”

  “Wait,” Anna interrupted. “In my exalted capacity as spike camp security officer–cum-medic, am I going to have to take any action on this tidbit? Because if I am don’t tell me.”

  “Jennifer said,” Stephen pressed on, “that John got into an altercation that led to fisticuffs. Wish I’d been there,” he sighed dramatically. “I do so love violence. That other BLM guy, Leonard Nims, took a swing at John. Connected on the second try.”

  Anna vaguely remembered Nims. He was a GS-7 supervisor from the Bureau of Land Management in Farmington, New Mexico. Prematurely white hair and a black mustache gave him striking looks and the hard muscled body of an athlete belied his age—late forties, she guessed. Nims would have been handsome if he could have dropped his Napoleon complex. At five-foot-eight or-nine he hadn’t earned it. The chip on his shoulder reduced his stature.

  “Jennifer said Joseph broke it up,” Stephen went on. Joseph Hayhurst was a Mescalero Apache born and raised in the foothills of California, educated at Berkeley, a latecomer to his Indian heritage. The juxtaposition of cultures had created a fascinating mix of New Age artist and Indian rights fundamentalist. He wore his hair long and tied back, as did most of the Shoshone and Arapahos, but it was cut short in front and curled around his face. A fashion a multitude of white artists strove for in closet trysts with their girlfriends’ curling irons.

  “Jennifer said he threatened to spank the both of them if it happened again because darned—‘darned,’ don’t you just love it? ‘Dagnabbit, you motherfuckers, now quit that…’”

  “Anyway…” Anna was too tired to enjoy a ramble, however entertaining.

  “Anyway, darned if he was going to get sent off the fire before he’d paid for last winter’s vacation.”

  Joseph was a squad boss for the San Juans. A crew consisted of twenty firefighters divided into two squads. The crew boss was responsible for all twenty, the squad bosses for eight to ten firefighters each. If anyone got into trouble, the troublemaker wasn’t the only one sent home. All twenty were demobilized.

  “What was the fight about?” Anna asked.

 
; “Back in Farmington John works for Nims. Now he’s Nims’s boss and Nims is working for him. I guess it wasn’t sitting too well. Jennifer says they haven’t got on from the git-go. Nims is the crew boss trainee, so LeFleur is training his own replacement, so to speak. The Bureau of Land Management is grooming Nims for better things. In lieu of LeFleur, is my guess. By the by, was you and LeFleur a-sparkin’ out there in the gloaming?”

  Anna whistled a few bars of “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof. “Firefighters hate sparks.”

  “Do you know why Smokey the Bear never had children?” Stephen asked.

  “Because every time his wife got hot he hit her with a shovel.”

  “Old joke,” he apologized.

  “Old jokes are the best.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “About damn time.”

  “Darn time, please.”

  Headlights raked across the canvas wall, chased by the growl of a diesel engine.

  “Oops,” Stephen said.

  “I’ll get it.” Anna sounded as if it were a doorbell ringing at an inappropriate time.

  The truck driver, Polly or Sally—Anna floundered for the name—was one of the many local people hired to assist in the logistics of feeding, cleaning and fueling a city of a thousand souls appearing suddenly in the wilderness. The girl always seemed to avoid Anna. Whether the avoidance was personal or coincidental, she had no idea.

  “It’s late, I’ll have to stay over,” the driver said defensively as she bounced her plump little body out of the vehicle. Four of the six nights spike camp had been in existence she’d found some way to have to stay over. Anna suspected she had a sweetheart.

  “Makes sense,” Anna said amiably, and waited to see what reason would be given for the long trip up the mountain this time.

  “I got a thing here for you or John what’s-his-name, the crew boss guy.” As she leaned into the cab the girl’s head vanished behind a curtain of lush brown hair, clean and worn loose. After a moment’s rustling she emerged with a folded sheet of paper. She handed it over, and Anna was aware of a cheap but enticing perfume.

  “Thanks…Sally.” She hazarded a guess at the name.

  “Paula.”

  Anna’d lost a round. “Paula. Sure. Sorry. Breathing too much smoke.”

  Paula seemed anxious to get away so Anna quit muttering apologies. “If you want you can pitch your tent behind the medical unit,” she offered. “There’s a flat spot there.”

  “No. I got a place all staked out.” The woman bunched a tent into her arms and started toward the trees behind the Porta-Johns where the Sho-Raps were camped.

  Anna unfolded the note and read it by the light of her flashlight. “The body of the man found burned near Pinson Lake just outside Lassen Volcanic National Park has been identified as Joshua Short, brother of seasonal park ranger Jennifer Short, out of Mesa Verde, Colorado, now serving on the San Juan Plateau crew.”

  “Jesus.” Anna turned the page over in hopes of finding more information but it was as blank as it had been two seconds previously. Jennifer’s brother. Anna thought of her own sister, Molly, how lonely she would be were she to lose her, and tremendous sadness swept over her. Carefully she refolded the note and tucked it in her shirt pocket. This was not a bit of paper to be passed carelessly from hand to hand. That it had arrived so publicly bespoke a crassness or negligence Anna had trouble crediting the information officer with. On a hunch she shined her flashlight into Paula’s truck. On the second sweep she found it: a blue For Your Eyes Only envelope with her and LeFleur’s names on it had been torn open and hastily discarded. The spike camp’s inamorata was a nosy little beast.

  Clicking off the light, Anna stood for a moment in the silence and breathed the pleasant odor of pine smoke. The death note in her pocket was heavy as a brick. Moving slowly to put off the inevitable, she wandered in darkness toward the San Juan crew tent.

  One end of the tent was tied open for fresh air. The other closed off in complete darkness. In September, in the Cascades, nights were cold, and frost was on the ground most mornings. Anna looked down the row of inert forms. Several world-class snorers sawed at the air but no one was awake. Between the sleeping bags was a tangle of yellow fire packs. The packs were a nightmare of webbing and plastic buckles designed to hook together all the necessary components needed on the line: fire shelter, water, fusees, gloves, helmet, goggles, brush jacket and earplugs.

  Near the open end of the tent LeFleur lay on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. Joseph Hayhurst was curled next to him, his hands tucked under his cheek like an innocent. Anna spotted Nims by the white hair. His face was to the back of the tent. Jennifer was lost in the darkness somewhere between the sleeping men.

  After a moment, Anna turned and crept away. Tomorrow would be soon enough to tell Jennifer. This might be the last good night’s sleep she would enjoy in a while.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  “IT’S TIME.”

  The voice came through warm thick darkness and was most unwelcome. Anna retreated, curling deeper into oblivion.

  “We miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.” The same voice, sugary this time, but still odious.

  “Bugger off,” Anna grumbled.

  “Oooh, now there’s a thought…” A rough shake loosed Anna entirely from the comforting embrace of sleep. Stephen, sitting on the army cot laid head to head with hers, was lacing up his boots.

  “It’s still dark,” Anna complained.

  “And cold. The glamour never stops. You’ve got ten seconds to do girl things, then I’m lighting the Coleman and to hell with your modesty.”

  “I would have had a son about your age if I hadn’t drowned him at birth.”

  The EMT laughed. Anna could hear him groping for the lantern as she dragged on her underpants. Drafts, sharp as knives with the early frost, stabbed into the warm sanctity of her sleeping bag as she performed her morning contortions.

  Finally decent in a yellow NoMex fire shirt, she unzipped the bag. The new day hit her thighs like ice water. By the glare of a flashlight she watched Lindstrom battling the Coleman. Twenty-six or-seven, six-foot-two, strong, even-featured, with sandy hair so thick it stood out like fur, he reminded Anna of the boys who’d ignored her in high school. His hands betrayed his bulk with their long sensitive fingers. The hands of a flutist. Or a gynecologist. Once or twice Anna’d glimpsed a mean streak but it only served to make him more interesting.

  He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Anna?”

  “I’m awake. Don’t push me.” She dragged on the olive drab trousers one leg at a time like the rest of the world.

  The only people up earlier than the medical unit were the food servers and Anna blessed them in the name of Pele the fire goddess and half a dozen lesser gods as she poured her first cup of coffee. About halfway through the stumbling dark, back toward the medical tent, caffeine burned the remaining fog from her brain and she remembered her chores. Jennifer Short’s brother was dead.

  Remembering the dead, a fading image of Zachary wavered behind her eyes: a slender dark man, forever twenty-nine, brown eyes glowing across an electric candle in a Brew and Burger in Manhattan. “If you asked me to marry you, I’d say yes,” Anna had said. And he had asked.

  Zach had been dead for so many years she should have quit counting. There had been other men since, men to spend the days with, men to pass the nights, but none to soften the loneliness. One, maybe, she amended: Frederick Stanton, an offbeat FBI agent she’d worked with on two homicides, once when she was a ranger on Isle Royale in Lake Superior and again several months ago in Mesa Verde National Park. Dinner, a hike through Indian ruins, a kiss that reminded her the animals went two by two, then he was on a plane back to Chicago.

  Just as she’d been metaphorically dusting off her hands and consigning her emotions to a well-stocked Ships Passing in the Night file, a letter had come. Not a love letter, that would have set off alarms. Men who fell in love with women they d
idn’t know were prone to other easily abandoned fantasies. Frederick’s letter was funny. Laughter, like touch, was a form of pure communication, the funny bone an underappreciated erogenous zone.

  Anna touched her shirt pocket as if she carried Stanton’s letter over her heart. The death memo was still there, one of the perks of never changing clothes. The feel of the slick paper jarred her into the present and she cleared her mental decks for what lay ahead.

  Spike camp had awakened. Muttering firefighters, subdued from too little sleep, boiled out of tents like yellow jackets from a disturbed hive. Flashlights sparked off lemon-colored NoMex and the tramp of heavy boots scuffed the worn earth.

  A small woman, surrounded by three men so big that, in her white tee shirt, she resembled an egret among cows, chattered out of the dark woods beyond the Porta-Johns. Paula. One of the men was Howard Black Elk. The other two were strangers to Anna.

  “Wait up,” Anna shouted. The girl looked alarmed, her three bodyguards undecided, the desire to defend Paula against some imagined attack and the urge to flee battling in their brains. Flight won and the girl was alone when Anna reached her.

  There were those rare creatures who suffered from a phobic reaction to authority but finding four of them together was unlikely. Anna made a mental note to pry into Paula’s affairs when she didn’t have more pressing matters to attend to.

  “Hold off going down the mountain,” Anna said. “I may have a passenger for you.”

  Paula looked relieved and again Anna felt a flash of suspicion, an occupational hazard. Sometimes she had the sense of being a cat in a world of birds, some bigger and meaner than she. Small furtive movements set off her alarms but she was never sure whether she was predator or prey. “I’ll get back with you in thirty minutes or so.”

  Jennifer Short was in the breakfast line. In the name of nutrition, Anna put off telling her for another quarter of an hour. Then, having exhausted all delay tactics, she took Jennifer and her crew boss, LeFleur, behind the medical tent under one of the great old Jeffrey pines that shaded the camp.