Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  “No lap for you,” Anna said as she and Lindstrom went back for the tent poles, pulled up and piled neatly beneath their sheltering tree. Nearby were the jump kit and emergency gear that would remain until the last of the crew rode down in the evening.

  “A fella’d want to wear rubber gloves just to hold hands with that little number. I don’t know where she’s been but I bet it wasn’t clean enough to eat off of.” Stephen tossed his head in a good imitation of Paula Boggins. “A boy’s got his reputation to consider.”

  In mutual and unspoken accord, he and Anna flopped into the shade where their medical unit had been. Lindstrom propped his head against his hard hat and folded his arms across his chest. “Old fire-fighting maxim,” he said. “If there’s time to stand, there’s time to sit. If you can sit, you can lie down. If you can lie down, you can lie down in the shade.”

  Anna folded herself up tailor fashion, one foot on the opposite thigh in a half lotus. She’d never managed a full lotus, though there’d been a time she thought it worth pursuing. The difference between a half and full seemed the difference between complacency and spiritual awakening. The first was comfortable. The second made one’s bones ache.

  The wind had shifted, blowing in from the northwest ahead of the storm. Smoke veiled the sun until it was a blood-red ball. Anything obscuring the sun made Anna uneasy. Had she been an aboriginal she had little doubt that at the first signs of an eclipse she would have been in the vanguard sacrificing virgins to appease the gods.

  To the west she could see the barren domes of Chaos Crags and the ragged thrust of Lassen Peak. Drought had plagued California for three years without reprieve and no snow clung to the volcano’s flanks. Pines draping her sides showed a hint of rust: drought stress. Dry as tinder.

  Beyond the peak was a wall of dirty white. The front pouring in across the Cascades. The blessing of rain, but most assuredly in disguise. Thunderstorms, spawned along the leading edge, were lit from within by lightning. “It better be a wet one,” she remarked. “Or it’ll light more fires than it puts out.”

  Stephen opened one hazel eye. His lashes, like his hair, were short and very thick. It gave him a dreamy look Anna was a sucker for. “Cloud to cloud. Stuff’s not reaching the ground.”

  Anna studied the oncoming clouds. “It’s moving right along though.”

  In unexpected ratification, her radio began issuing a warning to expect gusting winds. All morning voices had scratched over the airwaves. Crew bosses talking to squad bosses, and air to ground communications. Everything winding down. Anna’d pretty much quit listening. Now she turned it up.

  “Maybe LeFleur’ll pull the squad,” Stephen said. “We can get off this mountain a couple hours early. I could stand that.”

  “Spike medical unit, this is the San Juan.”

  “John must have heard you.” Anna pulled her radio off her belt. “I bet he’s ordering a bus.”

  “Spike medical,” she answered.

  “We’ve got an injury. A log rolled down on Newt Hamlin. Looks like a busted knee. Closed but bad. He’s hurting. We’re going to need you, Lindstrom and the litter to carry him out.”

  “Affirmative.” Anna got an exact location from him and signed off.

  “Looks like we’ve got to work for our suppers today,” Stephen said.

  “Who’s Hamlin?”

  “A swamper with the Forest Service out of Durango, Colorado.”

  “Brown hair, buzz cut, looks fresh off the farm?” Anna asked cautiously.

  “That’s right. The big guy. The really, really big guy. Monstrous. An ox.”

  “Any place to land a helicopter below the line?” Anna radioed.

  “Too rugged,” LeFleur replied.

  Anna made two more radio calls requesting a chopper at the heli-spot near spike. “Looks like we haul him up the hill,” she said.

  Lindstrom groaned. “We should’ve gone into pediatrics.”

  SPIKE CAMP WAS located on a ridge that ran north and south. To the east the slope was relatively gentle and the vegetation thinned from an old burn. Partway down a heli-spot had been cleared on a natural shoulder in the hillside. A wide sandy creek bottom, dry this time of year, cut a white ribbon through the valley floor. The west side fell away steeply into a narrow canyon. Near the bottom, about a mile from camp, the San Juans were building line. The Jackknife had burned most of the opposite slope. The new line was to stop it once it crossed the gully.

  Stephen started down, litter on his shoulder. Anna, wearing the yellow pack and hard hat required on the fireline, carried the jump kit. There was no trail to speak of. At six thousand feet the mountains were choked with ponderosa, Jeffrey, sugar pines and white fir. The few open areas were nearly impassible with manzanita, a sturdy bush with tangled arms clothed in red bark and shining green leaves.

  Facing west, the slope caught the full force of the afternoon sun. Needles, twigs, downed timber, gooseberry, ceanothus: the mountain was solid fuel and so dry the dust pounded up by each bootfall tickled Anna’s nose till it ran. Deer flies, fat and sluggish in the heat, took bites from thigh and back, the protective clothing apparently no deterrent. Anna swore under her breath, afraid to open her mouth lest one crawl in. Though it would’ve been poetic justice: a bite for a bite.

  Trees grew close with dog-hair thickets of young sugar pines fighting for sunlight in the patches of land that in past years had been montane meadows. But for dust and the all-pervasive smoke, Anna could smell very little. Too many summers without rain had baked the juices dry. All that remained was the faint smell of vanilla given off by the burnished bronze bark of the Jeffrey pines. To be in the midst of a conifer forest and not breathe in the heady scent of pine put her off balance. As if one stood at the seashore and couldn’t taste the salt air.

  A thick blanket of duff crackled underfoot. Coupled with the racket of breathing it was deafening. In places the hillside was so steep Anna slid down on her butt, preferring the occasional stickers to falling.

  Suddenly Stephen stopped and she smacked her head on the end of the litter. “Signal, for Christ—” she began, but he cut her off.

  “Lookie there.” He pointed to the base of a sugar pine. Still as a statue in the almost realized hope of going unnoticed was a ringtail cat. Wide, dark, lemurlike eyes stared up from a little triangle of nose and ears. Its long striped tail was curled in a question mark behind it.

  “First one I’ve ever seen,” Stephen whispered.

  Anna had seen a couple when she’d worked in Texas. They were nocturnal and terribly shy. It was unsettling to see one so close and in the light of day. Unnatural.

  “Displaced by the fire,” Stephen said.

  “‘The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.’” Anna quoted from Hamlet.

  “Cut that out.”

  “Right.”

  The cat seemed paralyzed and a man with a broken leg was waiting, so they pushed on.

  Halfway to the canyon bottom, maybe three-quarters of a mile from spike camp, Anna and Lindstrom found the fireline, a six-foot-wide trail rudely scratched into the landscape. On either side trees had been clear-cut and thrown back. Duff and scrub had been scraped away by pulaskis, the double-duty tool with an axe on one side and sharp hoelike blade on the other that most firefighters carried.

  To the left, Joseph Hayhurst, his squat frame and strong back suited to the work, was swamping for a sawyer Anna recognized but didn’t know by name. As trees fell and were bucked up into manageable chunks, Joseph dragged the pieces clear of the line. Anna recognized the Apache by his hair and stature. Both men were faceless behind handkerchiefs tied bandit-style over the lower half of their faces in an attempt to screen out dust and soot. Surgical-style painters’ masks were far more effective filters, but every culture bows to fashion. Firefighters would no sooner trade their bandannas in for white conical masks than Texans would trade their Stetsons for parasols.

  “Joseph!” Anna called
when the chainsaw gave them a moment’s peace. He pointed farther up the line and Anna and Lindstrom headed north toward the head of the canyon. After the slide and scramble down the hill the “improved” surface was like a stroll in the park. Long after grasses flourished and trees returned the cut would mar the hillside, growing more rutted, wider, as rain and snow runoff took the easier course they now followed.

  Dust and smoke were held close by the trees and the air in the ravine was stifling. Rivulets of sweat tickled between Anna’s breasts and shoulder blades. Salt drops burned her eyes and puddled at her temples—wading pools for the deer flies.

  “Wait up,” she told Stephen.

  Obediently he stopped while she pulled off her stiff leather gloves and mopped beneath the band of her hard hat.

  “Our nose getting a wee bit shiny?” he asked.

  “Fuck you,” Anna said amiably.

  Radio traffic interrupted with another bulletin on the cold front forecasting high winds.

  “I wish it’d get here,” Stephen said as Anna screwed her hard hat back on. “We could use a break.”

  “High winds. LeFleur’ll be pulling the squad out.”

  Howard Black Elk, a pulaski held loosely in his downhill hand, walked down the line toward them. “We’re bumping back up to spike,” he said. “I’m passing the word. Everybody’s bumping up. John doesn’t like the forecast. John, Jennifer and Lenny Nims are waiting with Newt. He’s a hurting unit. Soon as I get word out about the bump, I’ll grab somebody and come back, help with the carryout.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said. “Hamlin’s big.”

  “Damn big. Not far.” Howard raised a massive arm and pointed north. “Just outta sight, maybe two hundred yards.” He squeezed onto the uphill side of the line to let Stephen and Anna pass.

  Hard hats and gloves off, Jennifer and John knelt on either side of Newt Hamlin. Leonard Nims stood up the line leaning on a shovel, looking like he couldn’t decide whether to stay or go. Hamlin, a beefy, square-headed boy, maybe nineteen or twenty, sat rigid, his face white and his lips pinched into a thin line. The muscles in his broad jaw worked constantly. Grinding his teeth, Anna noted. Probably to keep himself from crying. Tears made his eyes glitter but not one fell.

  The boy’s right knee was bent backward, the lower leg pushing up at about a twenty-degree angle from anatomical position. Short or LeFleur had immobilized it, splinting from hip to ankle joint with branches trimmed for the purpose.

  Anna dropped to one knee. Hamlin’s boot was unlaced. Evidently the pain of removing it had been so intense, leaving it in place had been deemed the lesser of evils. She reached as far into the boot as she could.

  “So what happened?” Lindstrom asked as he began unslinging the litter.

  “Len was cutting. Newt swamping. Got downhill of a fall. A log rolled and nailed him,” John said.

  By the careful neutrality of the crew boss’s voice, Anna guessed one of the two had been careless. Negligence on the fireline was not taken lightly. There was too much at stake. She glanced up at Nims. His face was crimped into defensive lines. Mentally he was digging foxholes, falling back. Newt was either unaware he could fault anyone but God or too wrapped up in his pain to worry about placing blame.

  Anna’s fingers found the posterial tibial pulse behind Hamlin’s ankle. It was strong and his skin was warm to the touch. “Good job,” she said to LeFleur and Short. “Let’s leave it like it is and haul him out.”

  Lindstrom had the litter down, the straps laid out to the sides. “Did you get tired of working and fake a fall just to get a free ride out?” he asked Hamlin.

  “How’d you know?” the boy said with a ghost of a smile.

  Stephen said: “Me and John will lift Newt. Anna, you and Jen move his leg. On three.”

  In one smooth motion they slid the kid onto the litter. A barking cry escaped the press of his lips.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Lindstrom said. “Trying to get sympathy from the women. Some guys’ll do anything to get laid.”

  “You got me figured out,” Newt managed.

  “John, take the head. I got the foot,” Lindstrom said. “Anna, Jen, take a side as long as we’ve got the room. Len, get the tools. When Howard gets back we’ll switch out every few minutes. On three.”

  “I’m sorry I’m so big,” Newt said as they heaved up the litter.

  The apology brought a lump to Anna’s throat that annoyed her. “Not a problem,” she said. “We can field amputate that leg right here. What do you figure that’d save us, Stephen?”

  “Seventy-five pounds easy. Cut it off high.”

  “Go ahead,” Newt said. “I don’t think it could hurt any worse. Just leave the family jewels.”

  “Sure,” Stephen agreed. “They couldn’t weigh more than a gnat’s Adam’s apple anyway. Little enough I bet even old man Nims could carry them up the hill without breaking a sweat.”

  Even with the joint immobilized it was clear every jolting step they took was causing Hamlin pain. It was equally clear the boy would staple his lips shut before he’d let on.

  “He’s big as a horse,” Anna said to Jennifer. “And his leg is broken. Think anybody’d care if we just shot him?”

  A gust eddied up the trail, a vortex of ash and dirt whirling in a tiny tornado. Dust devils, Molly and Anna called them when they were children. They moved like sentient creatures, the tails tracing patterns in the earth that could be tracked only to see the creature that made them disassociate, dissolve into nothing but air.

  This devil stopped a yard or two in front of them, its tail twitching restlessly in the dust. For a few seconds it hovered as if deciding whether or not to tell them something. Apparently the answer was no. The wind veered and the devil disintegrated into the grasping arms of a manzanita bush hacked out of the ground and lying close to the fireline.

  The wall of clouds that had been on the horizon when Anna and Stephen started down was on the horizon still but now the horizon was scarcely a mile above them. Anna was getting a bad feeling.

  LeFleur jerked his radio out of his belt. The litter rocked as he held it with just one hand and a tiny squawk escaped Newt’s control. Anna pretended not to hear but she moved her hand slightly on the litter so it touched Hamlin’s wrist, hoping the contact would give him some little comfort.

  “Black Elk, LeFleur.” The crew boss was shouting into the radio. His adrenaline level was rising too, Anna guessed.

  “Black Elk,” came back with a hiss of static.

  “Status?”

  “Everybody’s bumped up. They’re halfway up the hill by now. Me and Hayhurst are coming back for you.”

  “There’s enough of us for the job. Head on up. Keep those guys moving. The wind’s getting squirrely. No sense anybody getting hurt on this one. Clear ’em out.

  “Hang onto your hat, Newt,” LeFleur addressed the boy in the litter. “We’re going to head up the hill.”

  “Sorry I don’t have a bullet for you to bite on,” Anna said as they started up the incline and Hamlin’s weight shifted, forcing pressure on the ruined knee.

  “I got a lipstick,” Jennifer offered. “But I don’t s’pose it’s the same.”

  Newt was beyond banter. His face was the dirty gray of ash and sky, all his will needed to form a wall around the pain in his leg.

  The slope was close to thirty degrees but the forest was comprised of slightly older growth than farther up. Trees were six to eight feet apart and there wasn’t too much undergrowth. Anna’s boots dug deep in the duff as she hauled up, one step at a time, the side of the stretcher in one hand, the jump kit in the other. The position was awkward and she knew she wasn’t helping much with Hamlin’s weight.

  Across Newt’s chest she could see Short struggling to maintain her end of the bargain. Jennifer’s strength was all from the waist down, good wide hips and strong thighs like a figure skater. Anna knew her shoulders and arms would be aching with the strain as she fought to take some of the weight up for Step
hen and John.

  Cool air gusted from behind. Though it caressed her sweaty skin, it made the little hairs on the back of Anna’s neck crawl.

  “Dump the jump kit,” LeFleur ordered as he picked up the pace. “Len, give a pulaski to Anna. Keep moving.”

  Anna dropped the medical bag and used Nims’s pulaski like an ice axe, clawing up the hill. LeFleur’s breathing rasped deep in his chest, the cords of his neck distended and the flesh between the rim of his hard hat and his collar was a deep red.

  “Switch out soon,” she said to Stephen. He nodded. The foot of the stretcher weighed less and he was both bigger and younger than the crew boss. “Next flat spot. I take the head, Nims, you get the foot. Got that?”

  LeFleur grunted.

  The vegetation closed in, branches scratching at their faces and arms. The pounding of her heart was the only sound Anna was aware of. Oblivious to anything but the pain in her left shoulder from pulling Hamlin and the small square of real estate directly in front of her boot toes, she trudged on. Quite independently of conscious thought, her mind clicked through numbers trying to find a rhythm to pass the time, keep cadence. Waltz time: ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three.

  A place not deserving of the name “clearing” opened up slightly at the base of a ledge of volcanic rock about eighteen inches high and fifty feet long that formed a brow half a mile below spike. Long ago soil had laid down a blanket covering all but the lip and the rock was hidden by a dense cover of waist-high shrubs.

  Momentarily free of the trees, they stopped. Short fell to her knees, sucking in lungfuls of air. Hands on thighs, LeFleur tried to catch his breath. Even Hamlin was gasping, fighting pain and shock.

  “Sounds like a TB ward around here,” Stephen said. “Switch out.” The EMT grasped the front of the litter. “Nims?”

  Leonard Nims was sweating and his breath was coming fast but he was the freshest of the five. He handed LeFleur the tools and lifted the foot of the litter. Anna and Jennifer switched sides.

  “Got to stretch out the other arm,” Short said to Newt. “I’ll still look like a gorilla but leastways both sets of knuckles’ll be draggin’.”