by Alicia Scott
Later, he saw the lights go on in the arena and went out to find Victoria working one of her horses. He stood in the shadows, not wanting to interfere. She rode like an extension of the beast, going around and around, teaching the horse to stop with a click, turn left, turn right, back up, move forward. He'd never seen anything like it.
The air grew musky and hot with the scent of sweating horseflesh and human exertion. He remained watching, wishing there was something he could say to reach this woman as she flew by.
He slept poorly that night, with too many dreams he woke up unable to recall.
In the morning, he made himself get to work. In twenty-four hours, the hotshot training would start. For the first two weeks, they'd have daily doubles, workouts in the morning and afternoon. In between they'd have classes as well as routine forestry service work. Hotshots were guaranteed forty hours of work a week—clearing brush, digging fire lines, repairing fences or trails, whatever needed to be done. Once fire season hit, they would all work a hell of a lot more.
He needed to get equipment. He should stock up on food. He should make sure he had enough clean socks and underwear. He should get focused.
When he came out of his cabin Sunday morning, Victoria's truck was gone. He hiked into town rather than risk his rent-a-wreck. The walking stretched his legs. He bought a better backpack from the general store, fresh hiking socks with the extra thick toes and heels, loaded up on canned soup and powdered milk and hiked to the ranch.
He ate another fine meal of minestrone soup, sitting on the edge of his bed and reading the firefighter's handbook on wildland fire fighting.
Later, he sat on the front porch and stared at the sky.
When Victoria's rusty truck barreled into the yard, he was pathetically happy. Randy darted out first, wearing his good jeans, which were still dark blue, and a fancy Western dress shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. He raced to Brandon's cabin, saying, "How are you what are you doing can you help me with my homework now?" in one big rush. "Mom said I wasn't supposed to bother you too much," Randy stated. "You gotta get ready for tomorrow. Charlie says the first two weeks are hard, and then you guys'll be traveling all the time. I wanna be a hotshot some day."
Brandon gazed over Randy's head to Victoria, who lingered by the truck, her features obscured by twilight. Her blond hair was down, forming a pale, silky curtain around her shoulders. Like Randy, she wore her good jeans, combined with a nice red silk blouse. He should've known she wouldn't wear dresses even to church.
He should've known that he'd find her even more attractive this way. He dropped his gaze to Randy,
"I can help you finish the problem set tonight," he said soberly. "After that, I don't know. Charlie is right. The next few weeks are going to be very busy."
Randy seemed to accept that readily enough. In his mind, hotshots probably spent their free time flying to the rescue and leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
"Cool. Come on." Randy dashed for the house.
Brandon walked, taking the time to casually stroll by Victoria. This close, he could see the shadows the falling night had dusted over her face. Her light eyes glowed more gray than blue.
"You look very pretty tonight," he said somberly and walked away.
Behind him, she expelled her breath sharply, and for the first time all day, he smiled.
Chapter 4
« ^ »
Superintendent Coleton Smith was a tough son of a bitch. Late fifties, whipcord lean, he had a fanatical gleam in his dark eyes and the fire stamped into his face. His left cheek bore a flat, shiny brand, as if he'd been struck by a hot iron. Tendrils of scar tissue dug furrows through his cropped gray hair. His left ear was gone completely, the flaps of skin rebuilt just enough to channel the sound waves into his eardrum. Down his neck, across his collarbone, down his left arm, the fire had oozed like rivulets of lava, searing away the man's skin and leaving its own particular kind of smooth, plasticky scars in its place.
On Coleton's left hand, only three fingers remained. They were clumped together as if they were still hiding from the encroaching flames.
"Mann Gulch, 1949," Coleton Smith barked at oh six hundred Monday morning, pacing before their seated forms, "twelve Smokejumpers dead. Storm King Mountain, 1994, fourteen firefighters—nine Prineville hotshots—dead. This won't happen again, and in the next two weeks, I'll tell you why. I'll pound it into your brains, I'll squeeze it between your eardrums until the next time a slow moving creeper blows out, you people will know exactly what to do." Superintendent Smith slapped a red hunting cap on his head, obscuring half his scars. "Now get off your asses, and let's see what you got."
He ran them hard, ten men and eight women hitting the dusty, rocky trails and trying not to sprain an ankle. They were an eclectic mix of size and shape, age and sex. Some people had spent the winter outdoors or at least in a gym, and they were already lean, mean machines, sprinting to the front and setting the pace. Others had spent the last six months behind a desk and had a thin layer of winter insulation dulling their edges. In the coming weeks, that fat would be wicked from their bodies as if it was water.
Brandon hovered somewhere in the middle of the pack, knowing he didn't have the speed to play with the young bucks like Charlie, but having too much to prove to drop all the way to the back. Endurance was the ticket. He would never be as fast as the young people, but he was most likely the most aerobically fit person present. Hiking developed good lungs, and hiking up seventy-degree slopes at twenty-five thousand feet qualified you to blow up a balloon with a single, powerful puff.
All he had to do was ignore his tired leg muscles.
He focused on the trail, not the man stumbling to his right or the woman clutching her ribs behind him. He ran and tried to pretend he didn't feel Coleton Smith's black gaze pinned to his back, waiting for him to fail.
"Being a hotshot isn't about glory. It's five percent fighting fires and ninety-five percent hard work. Even if you beat a wildland fire in a matter of hours, mop up can take days—long, hard days trudging through a hundred acres of soot and ruin, seeking and extinguishing every last ember in every last tree trunk and twig. Welcome to the glamorous life."
After the six-mile run, Coleton passed out the Pulaskis, shovels and chain saws. He split the crew in half, sending nine off to build a trail while the remaining nine began thinning patches of the forest, pulling out brush, felling dead trees—called widow makers by the experienced crew—and hoeing grass, dead pine needles and old leaves off the ground. After an hour, Brandon's arms ached from wielding the chain saw and his face was streaked with sweat. Beside him, Charlie labored in silence, looking strained. A few of the others, however, joked and laughed, obviously at ease with the work.
At noon, Coleton showed up, inspected their efforts and informed them they were done. He'd heard the Redmond crew did aerobics to build endurance, and so would they. Fit firefighters better tolerate heat, he informed them. They acclimate faster, work with a lower heart rate and body temperature and don't become sloppy or careless with fatigue. And, if things got ugly, they had the reserves left for sprinting down the escape route.
"Before we post up," Coleton threatened the crew with a scowl, "you will be the fittest hotshot team in this state, or I'll send Richard Simmons to your house personally."
That scared them all into action. At twelve hundred, Charlie and Brandon were in the gym raising their hard-toed boots to the beating rhythm of Jane Fonda's smiling commands. Lift one, lift two, lift three, lift four, inhale, lift five, lift six, seven, eight…
By the time they showered and ate lunch, even the pros were dragging. Coleton gave them just enough time to down black coffee and high energy bars, then led them to the forestry service's tiny broom closet classroom to begin the required sixty-four hours of education in Crew Boss, Urban Interface Fires, and Intermediate Fire Behavior. Coleton started with fire behavior, his personal favorite, and they tried to stay awake. It wasn't easy.
"A
fire is nothing but a chemical reaction called rapid oxidation. For it to happen, three elements—heat, fuel and air—must be present in the right amounts. You want a fire to go away, then you yank an element. Hey, Meese, what are you yawning about?"
Charlie snapped to attention. "Uh…"
Charlie looked at Brandon, Brandon looked at Coleton. Coleton hunkered his scarred head between his shoulders, creating an extra roll of smooth, shiny skin that wasn't pleasant to look at. Coleton had lived in Beaverville for twenty years, and young children still refused to walk by his house.
"Okay, folks, listen up. Here are our two rookies, who obviously don't think they need to listen. So tell us, freshmen, the team is called into a fire. What do you do?"
"Follow the lead of the crew boss," Charlie said weakly.
Coleton narrowed his sights on Brandon. "What about you, Ferringer? I hear you went to some Ivy League school in downtown Philly. Learn anything good about wildland fires in downtown Philly?"
"No."
"No, huh? Big-shot Wall Street guy, fancy degrees, and all you can say is no?"
Brandon remained quiet.
Coleton approached, his black gaze narrowed, his three clumped fingers slapping against his thigh. "You're a bookworm, aren't you, Ferringer?"
"I read."
"You read about fire? You look at the textbooks? There are some good ones out there."
"I have glanced at a few."
"So tell us, rich Brit, what are the factors that influence fire behavior?"
Brandon kept his gaze pinned on the far wall. He said calmly, "Fuel characteristics, weather conditions and topography."
"You got a fire, a slow-moving creeper in a canyon. Midday. Sun is bright red, warm front hovers over the canyon, terrain is a forty-degree incline covered by light fuel. Narrow river runs down the center of the canyon. There is no wind. What do you do?"
"Call the national forecaster and ask about approaching cold fronts."
"You call. One is moving in. What do you do?"
"Get out."
"Get out? What do you mean get out, Ferringer? It's a slow-moving creeper. Why, I bet you and Meese could take it yourselves. Besides, there's a town at the end of the canyon. Gonna let all their homes burn? Fine federal employee you are."
"There's a town?" Brandon said. "Then evacuate it."
"Evacuate it?"
"Immediately."
Coleton stopped right in front of him. Those mangled fingers thrummed his thigh again and again. No one in the room spoke. No one moved. Abruptly, Coleton bent down. "Well, rich Brit, at least you read the right book."
The superintendent straightened and strode to the front of the room. "So tell us, Meese, why does your good buddy Ferringer want out of the canyon so fast?"
"Blowout," Charlie said quietly, giving Brandon a look of reluctant admiration. "The cold front will hit the warm front, kick up winds of fifty miles an hour, at least, the oxygen will hit the small grass fire and blow it up." The scenario was one all hotshots and Smokejumpers knew intimately. If they hadn't learned it from analyzing Mann Gulch, they'd learned it firsthand from Storm King Mountain.
"What do you do then?"
"Drop tools and run for the nearest safe zone."
"In that topography, where's the safe zone?"
Charlie paused, thinking hard.
"The other side of the water?" Coleton pressed.
"No, the wind will jump the fire over the water. The other side of the canyon will go, as well."
"What about in the water?"
"Too hot. You'll be smack in the middle of several hundred degrees. No good."
"Outrun it, over the top?"
"If you could get over the ridge, you'd be okay, but at that slope, the fire will move uphill at over a hundred miles an hour—not even Michael Johnson could win that race. You'd be overtaken before you were even halfway up."
"So what do you do, Meese, say your prayers?"
"Find the black. You'll always be okay if you keep a foot in the black."
"Finally," Coleton growled and flung his hands into the air. "This is what fifty years of fire fighting has taught us hotshots. You can predict fire, you can manipulate fire, but some days, you won't get it right. And then … you find the black, a burned-over area. It has no more fuel to feed a fire, so there you'll be safe. If you can't find one, start one. Light a cross fire, and as soon as a patch is burned, drop down, pull your fire shield over yourself tightly and weather the storm. When all else fails, find the black. Are we clear?"
Everyone was clear. Traditionally, wildland fire fighting wasn't that dangerous. Deaths were more likely to happen from helicopter or plane crashes on the way to sites than on the ground. But then there were the incidents such as Mann Gulch or Storm King Mountain, when the fire got out of control too fast. When whole crews lost their lives and whole communities got to mourn.
Those lessons were not forgotten.
"Okay, so let's talk fuel," Coleton snapped. "And let me show you all the lovely charts you get to memorize … before Meese falls asleep."
* * *
Thursday night, Brandon didn't crawl back to the Lady Luck Ranch until almost nine o'clock. He stood in the back of the stables, staring at the shower with longing. Yesterday, they'd started weight training. Brandon had never lifted before. Now his pectorals hurt, his deltoids hurt, his quads hurt, his biceps, his triceps, his glutes and his calves. If he had it, it ached.
And his mind swam with such stimulating charts as "Dead Fuel Moisture—Time Lag Relationship to Fuel Size," "Fuel Flammability by Time of Day and Aspect" and "Relationship Between Air Temperature, Fuel Moisture Relative Humidity and Time of Day." He was trying to remember how fast different fuel types burned, the differences between northern and southern exposure and the impact on fire behavior as the day moved from morning to noon to night.
People who thought hotshots were empty-headed thrill seekers had never glanced at the textbooks. The information was detailed, technical and precise, and the price for forgetting was high.
Brandon kept thinking it shouldn't be a problem for his analytic mind. If he could compute bond prices for purchasing after issue and selling before maturity, he ought to be able to handle fuel considerations and topography charts. No such luck.
Four days into training, he wanted to crawl under his bed, curl into a ball and sleep for a week. He hadn't felt so fatigued or overwhelmed since Everest, and at least then he could blame it on a mountain.
"Wow, you look like hell."
With effort, Brandon twisted his exhausted body from the shower and discovered Victoria standing in the aisle. She was leaning against one of the stalls, wearing blue jeans, a ratty gray sweatshirt and a grin. He hadn't seen her or Randy since Sunday night. He'd told himself he didn't mind. He'd lied.
"At least you're still standing," Victoria continued conversationally when Brandon remained too shell-shocked to speak. "Mom says Charlie comes home every night, wolfs down three servings of everything and keels over face-first onto his empty plate."
Brandon said, "I'm standing?"
Victoria laughed and moved closer. He caught a whiff of apple shampoo, and something tightened in his chest. Her hair was in a ponytail, swept from her face. He wanted to pull out the rubber band and feel the silky strands wave over his sore, bruised palms.
"So tell me, hotshot, how is it?" She stopped right in front of him. He swore he could feel the breath from her words whisper across his wind-burned cheeks.
"I killed my whole team," he blurted.
She merely cocked a brow, her eyes gleaming with gentle humor. "Not bad for a day's work."
"I keep forgetting they're there," he continued like an idiot.
"Want to start at the beginning?"
"Coleton Smith—the superintendent—"
"I know Coleton."
"He's split us into crews of four to five and given us various drills. To pass, everyone on your crew must succeed. We're learning teamwork, you see. Toda
y, we had to clear brush, dig a fire trail, then he shouted, 'Blowout,' and we had to run to the safety zone. I cleared. I dug. I ran. I made it to the safety zone. Everyone else fried."
Victoria winced. "Ouch."
"My teammates stopped talking to me, then Coleton yelled at them that they had no choice—a team was a team was a team. Then they certainly started talking, but I won't repeat what they said." He ran a hand tiredly through his hair. Bits of pine needles rained down, and he grimaced. "What a mess. Coleton thinks I've spent too much time in New York and I might as well give up now. This evening, he had me clear a quarter-acre patch of forest alone so I would learn to appreciate my team members. Rather like beating erasers after class, but more painful. Bloody hell." He sighed.
Coleton must have stayed late, too, because as the sun set and the world grew dark with dusk, Brandon became aware of someone's gaze pinned upon his back. It had been a lonely, eerie feeling in the middle of the rapidly darkening forest. He'd set up more lanterns than necessary and had still been so frazzled he hadn't inspected the chain saw before turning it on. The chain had been half off, and the starter motor ripped it from the gears with violent force, flinging it left and by the grace of God embedding it in a tree trunk instead of Brandon's leg. His hands had shaken for a long time after that. He'd waited for Coleton to materialize and lecture him, but Brandon had remained alone in the lantern's glow, his shoulders hunched warily and his gaze uncertain.
Victoria was speaking. "Well, do you think you'll remember your team members next time?"
Brandon hesitated. He'd been wrestling with that question since the incident without coming to an acceptable conclusion. He confessed quietly, "I don't know."
Her expression grew curious. "Why do you say that?"