‘Oh … it was about standard for how it goes these days. The trees are so dry by this time of the year. Even so, we were making good progress on containment till it got into Grizzly Gulch. A steep canyon like that, it’s just like a chimney … as soon as we saw we couldn’t stop it at the mouth of the canyon, we sent word down: anybody left in Hastings, get ’em out, that canyon’s going to explode.’
‘Well, you called it soon enough – all the crews got out.’
‘Yeah, they pay attention to their radios – we saw ’em all run for their trucks and skedaddle. There was one vehicle, though, right there at the end … did anybody tell you about that?’
‘Tell me about what?’
‘The big pickup that drove up the two-track above Hastings while everybody else was driving out.’
‘No. Why would anybody … who was in it?’
‘I don’t know. The storm was moving in fast, and we had to get our three helicopters out of there in a hurry because it was getting gnarly up where we were … We needed to get down ourselves. So I only got one glance at that pickup.’
‘Was it a Forest Service vehicle?’
‘Don’t think so. I couldn’t see any insignia on the doors. It was just a standard heavy-duty ranch truck – Ford, I think, dark blue or black. Dual wheels in back. Long bed, probably three-quarter ton. Small load, though, maybe a few hay bales, covered in a tarp.’
‘You’re sure it drove right up the road above Owl Creek and into the mountains?’
‘Yup. Right into the smoke and I never saw it again. Hasn’t been reported missing, has it? Of course, that was close to the north edge of the fire there. So it must have gone out through Robbins Pass and from there it could go … anyplace in Montana, I guess.’
‘Why would anybody go into the fire that day?’
‘Very good question, which I can’t answer tonight.’ He drank the last of the one beer he had allowed himself and walked his badly chewed moccasins out to his car.
At midnight, Alice stood up, rubbed her back and said, ‘Enough. I can find time tomorrow to do the rest in the newsroom. Do you still have ads to sell?’
‘A few. But I’ve only got two pictures left to trim. Then I’ll ask for your help with layout, please. I’m sorry this was such a big job, but wow, Alice …’ His grin covered his whole face – even his ears looked happy.
‘Yep. You done good, kid. I’m going to take a handful of vitamins and sleep fast. We gotta be strong tomorrow.’
SEVEN
First thing Tuesday morning, Stuart and Alice made up the teaser page, and Mort pulled up his address list of out-of-town customers and began the folksy down-home chirping with which he had shown he could sell piles of newsprint.
Alice could not abide listening to it. To shut it out, she retreated to the farthest corner of the newsroom, behind the folding table, to make calls for the week’s church notices. Brow furrowed with concentration, Stuart trotted out and sold the three remaining ads he needed for Wednesday night.
When Alice put down the phone for a minute to rub her ear after the long list of Catholic services, she heard Mort crowing happily to a subscriber, ‘So you’re enjoying our little mystery story, are you? Yeah, just one more great feature from the Clark’s Fort Guardian.’
When he got off the phone, he said, ‘We gotta keep this story going, Alice. People are just drooling over that dead body.’
Alice looked out a window, waiting for that image to go away. But Mort wasn’t finished with it. ‘That was our new subscriber in Santa Barbara. She says she’s crazy about all the insights she’s getting into small-town life, and she gave me an idea. Why don’t you see if you can track down one of those firefighters who found the corpse? Maybe we could get their story.’
‘Well … let’s see. Who was that? I think I did hear the name of one of them once. If I can think who—’ She scrolled through her notes, talking to herself. ‘I think it was that day we—’
‘What? You’re muttering, Alice, speak up.’
‘Never mind.’ She waved him off, saying to herself, It was Judy, of course. Isn’t it always? Two phone calls later, she had Frank Navarro on the phone. She had barely caught him; he was just beginning a three-day leave. Alice said, ‘OK if I buy you lunch and ask questions?’
‘Sure. I just got off work, though. I need a couple of snorts before I eat.’ He suggested a bar near the railroad depot.
‘That’s kind of a rough neighborhood,’ Mort said when she told him. ‘I should probably be the one who goes there. But I’m doing so well with these extra sales, I feel like it’s my lucky day. Do you think you could … I know it’s not your kind of a place, but—’
‘It’s a working-class bar in Clark’s Fort – what’s ominous about that? I’ll be fine.’
He gave her his assurance of an immediate reimbursement if she met the firefighter and bought him drinks. Anxiously, trying to make it sound like a joke, he said, ‘Can I count on you not to get drunk?’
She gave him the English teacher look that had brought silence to rooms full of eighth-grade miscreants for a generation.
‘OK,’ he said, showing her the palms of his hands. ‘Make him happy and get the interview. This is the story everybody wants to hear.’
She met Frank Navarro at the Gandy Dancer’s Saloon, two doors from the railroad station – pool tables in the back, a jukebox playing. Retro and very noisy, she thought, but probably peaceful enough for a man who had just walked away from towering flames in a steep canyon.
She watched him drain his first foaming draft in two long swigs.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said, waving away his offer to buy the next round. ‘It’s the Guardian’s pleasure.’
She was perched on a high stool next to an attractively hard-bodied man in his forties, with the tight black curls and strong jawline of his Basque heritage.
‘Have you met my friend?’ he asked Alice, indicating the bartender. ‘His name is George, and he lives to bring you pleasure. He’s already brought me this fine, foaming glassful of pleasure, as you can see, and he’ll do the same for you if you put your index finger in the air and do this.’ He showed her how to twirl her finger, laughed happily and set his empty glass back on the polished mahogany bar alongside its dripping replacement.
‘George,’ he said, ‘this lady works for the Clark’s Fort Guardian. Isn’t that something? She’s an honest-to-God journalist.’
‘She was a teacher when I knew her,’ George said. ‘She taught all my kids. How are you, Miz Adams?’
‘Very well, thank you. I’ve retired from teaching, so you can call me Alice now. All the drinks are on me, OK? And anything else he’s having.’
She got a surprised look and then a Diet Coke from George, who, being a bartender, was never surprised for long. Settling on her stool, she told her capable-looking new friend, ‘It’s kind of you to let me share your lunch hour. I’m hoping you won’t mind telling me how you happened to find the body in all those acres of ashes.’
‘Yeah, it does sound kind of curious, now that I hear you say it.’ He took a generous swallow of his second draft, put the glass down and sighed. ‘We found the shoe first.’ He seemed a little manic, rearranging the napkin holder and saltshaker, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and pulling them down again. ‘We’d been back and forth past that spot all morning and never saw it before. A red shoe in all that black, once I saw it I wondered how we ever could have missed it. We were working a hotspot a quarter mile above there and another one about nine yards down. We’d put ’em out, the wind would come up and away we’d go again. Dragging that filthy hose up and down in steep terrain, we were both sweating like hogs.’ Thinking about it, he stopped and drank half his second beer in one thirsty gulp. ‘I kept wiping my face, but some of the time I had so much sweat in my eyes I could hardly see.
‘Clarence always manages to sweat a little less than I do – not that I’d ever try to claim he’s a slacker, you understand.’ He laughed, a brittle cac
kle. ‘So he was the one who spotted the sneaker. Started yelling, “What in hell’s that shoe doing up in the tree?”’
Alice said, ‘I thought everything on that slope burned to the ground.’
‘Everything else did.’ He emptied his glass, twirled his finger aloft and told the bartender, ‘’Bout time for a visit from Grandpa, too.’ George brought a third glass of beer and a shot glass. He filled the heavy-bottomed little glass to the brim from a bottle of Old Grandad. Smiling at the tall glass and the small one, Frank said, ‘Now isn’t that a pretty sight?’
He lifted the shot glass in a salute to Alice, then to the bartender, and said, ‘Nice to have seen you.’ He downed the liquor in a gulp, then sat very still, staring at the old, oak-mounted clock on the wall behind George for twenty seconds. Alice could almost feel the burn. After the pause, he went on calmly – maybe to prove he could, Alice thought, ‘But you know how a fire will sometimes sweep up a draw very fast and leave two or three clumps standing, looking like they never been anywhere near a fire?’ He put the shot glass down empty and turned it slowly in his fingers. The color of his cheeks went up a notch while he fondled the glass.
‘Yes,’ Alice said, to keep the conversation going while his throat recovered, ‘like a tornado. Blow right past one thing, destroy everything around it.’
‘Yeah, like that.’ More relaxed now but still a little scattered, he wiggled his butt around to get more comfortable on his stool, and sipped his beer. ‘God, this tastes good, thanks. Are those pretzels in that dish?’
She slid them along the bar and he grabbed out a fistful.
‘Anyway,’ he said between crunches, ‘there was this tree standing in the ashes, and for some reason, about the third time we walked past it dragging that heavy bastard of a hose, Clarence looked up and saw the red sneaker hanging from a limb. I climbed up a couple branches and used my Pulaski to fish it down.’
‘What did you do with it?’ She signaled keep ’em coming and the bartender brought another shot.
‘Gave it to my incident commander. Eddie, uh … lemme think, what’s his last name?’ He searched his cell phone files for some time. ‘Eddie Parrish, that’s it.’ He read off the phone number and email address. His voice was beginning to sound as if the numbers might need a little checking.
‘But before that – when we found it – I told Clarence, “This shoe didn’t get here by itself, it musta been on somebody.” So we started walking around the tree, looking for …’ He sat still, blinking for a long minute. Alice, feeling an urgent need to scratch her nose, forced herself to sit quietly and wait.
‘I didn’t really expect to find a body,’ Frank said finally. ‘I was just walking around that fuckin’ tree looking down, so I could tell my incident commander we looked for the mate for that shoe but couldn’t find it.’ He stared at the fresh shot of bourbon that had appeared by his hand, but took a sip of beer instead and did some more blinking.
‘The body was downslope from the tree, in … not exactly a hole, just a little swale, with a pile of burnt logs on top of it. It looked like all the other burnt logs at first. But then I noticed that one of the logs underneath had le-legs.’ His voice broke on the word legs and he made a small sound like a sob. Alice realized then that all the blinking had been an effort to hold back tears, and now the effort was failing. The bartender handed him a clean, soft bar towel and he wiped his face for some time. When he put the towel down, he picked up the shot glass and emptied it.
Thinking to ease his embarrassment about weeping, Alice said, ‘It’s funny we don’t know each other, Frank. I grew up here. Did you?’
‘Oh, hell, yes. Navarros have been here forever. Well, five generations, anyway. My great-grandfather came here from the Pyrenees to herd sheep.’
The change of subject seemed to steady him; his voice had lost its wobble and he’d quit blinking.
‘His name was Francois Navarro. I’m named after him, but in Montana? Please. I would’ve had to fight my way home from school every day. The family’s always called me Frank.
‘I never knew Francois but my grandad told me he loved that high border country between Spain and France, never quit telling his kids it was the best place on earth. But he left because he got sick of the fighting. Said he wouldn’t have cared that they could never decide if they were French or Spanish, if everybody would just shut up about it. He worked hard after he got to Montana and finally saved enough money to start a small ranch of his own, a few miles east of here on the river.
‘Montana was good sheep country then. All the men of my family worked that sheep ranch and kept adding to it, until the big recession in ’eighty-seven. That time it was bankers and the taxman they got sick of fighting.
‘I was eight years old the year my dad and his brothers sold the ranch. Dad took the little equity he had and moved to town. I hated it. Turned surly, got in trouble in school. It wasn’t just me; my folks had trouble adjusting, too. We were country people, used to plenty of room around us.
‘So my Dad took a job on a ranch and we’ve all lived in the country ever since. That’s why we don’t know each other, Alice. I got all my schooling in dinky country schools – took two years of high school in Butte before I gave up on education.
‘The Navarros couldn’t hold onto the land, but we couldn’t really let it go, either. Been doing whatever we can to stay in the country ever since. I do odd jobs on ranches when I’m not fighting fires – lambing, calving. Lotta my cousins work for the railroad – we’ll probably see one or two of them in here before long.
‘I been fighting fires every summer for, oh … fifteen, sixteen years? It’s good pay and I don’t mind the hard work. I stay in shape. But this is my first fatality and it kind of gives you a jolt, you know? Makes you think.’
‘I bet,’ Alice said. ‘You think maybe it’s getting too dangerous, doing what you do?’
‘I’m not worried about that. When it’s too dangerous they won’t let us go out. That policy is clear now.’
‘That policy didn’t work very well for this fellow you found.’
‘Oh, well, but he was off the reservation – he had no business to be where he was. All the rest of us got off that hill when they told us to; where the hell was he? Not with any crew.’
‘Sneaking around for some reason?’
‘Well, Jesus, who sneaks around in a forest fire? That makes about as much sense as body-surfing in a typhoon. No, whoever this charred guy is, trust me, he must not have been dealing from a full deck.’
‘But you seem to find his death very disturbing.’
‘Well, yeah, because it’s just one more thing. Everything about living in the west is getting harder, isn’t it? I’m starting to wonder, where the hell are we going? Every year a little hotter, a little drier, better for the beetles and worse for the trees. Half those trees we were fighting to protect are already doomed, turning gray. They’ll be dead in a few years anyway. How long till we can’t fight these fires at all except from the air?
‘I been trying to talk my son into getting a job on a crew. He’s a good kid but he got to running with a rough crowd a while back and did a couple of years in juvie. My brother, Tony, helped me – took all our spare cash but we hired a good lawyer and got him paroled. Since then it’s been a struggle for him, though – hard to get a good job after you’ve been inside. They say they wipe the record clean if you cooperate but word gets around. In a small town like this, everybody knows.
‘I keep urging him to take the tests, go for the training. I told him about the good pay and the flexibility it gives you. I said, “Steve, you can go back to school in the winter, get a degree in something you like. Or alternate with a job in a winter resort and have time in the spring and fall to travel and play.”
‘I still think it would be a good spot for him, but after this fire, I don’t know … if we don’t do something about global warming pretty soon, how much longer will we even have these big western forests?’ Navarro stared int
o his half-empty beer glass and said, ‘And what will save the likes of us when there’s no forest left to save?’
Alice said, ‘But don’t you think something will— Hey, do you want some popcorn?’ George had just made a fresh batch, and the bar was flooded with the smell of hot butter over freshly popped corn. Alice became too captivated by the wonderful aroma to remember her next questions. She trotted over to the bin, scooped up a heaping bowlful and brought it back to share.
‘Oh my …’ With her mouth full, her words came out muffled; she had completely forgotten that too much salt was bad for her blood pressure. ‘There’s just nothing like melted butter and salt, is there?’
Frank grinned at her indulgently and she realized she was behaving like a greedy child. She grabbed her pen and said, ‘Let’s see, now, where were we?’
‘Saving the forests. Putting my son to work.’
‘Right! Doing something to fight global warming,’ Alice said. ‘Which I’m ready to do as soon as you tell me how.’
‘OK.’ He cleared his throat, put on what he imagined was a teaching face – my God, did I look like that while I did it? – and said, ‘Quit driving your car – ride your bike or walk. Don’t heat your water – take cold showers. Eat raw fruit and vegetables. Oh, and tofu. Lots of tofu.’ His face showed what he thought of the meal plan.
‘I suppose I could get used to it.’
‘Good! Because everything else we do is irrelevant until we solve the emissions problem.’ He took a long swig of beer, put the glass down and belched.
‘I’ve enjoyed hearing your ideas, Frank,’ Alice said, getting ready to go. ‘You’ve given it a lot of thought, haven’t you?’
‘Indeed. If only I could remember it all in the morning.’ He let out a hard bark of derisive laughter and curled up around himself on the stool. Then he straightened, shook his head mournfully, leaned closer to her stool and told her, as if in confidence, ‘What I really can’t stand to think about is giving up my old pickup. I mean, it’s got this high-torque diesel engine, dualies on the back … She’s not much for looks but she’s hell for go. Damn, but that baby can tow a boat. Me and my brother bought it off this old Honyoker up in Plentywood … we keep it at Tony’s ranch that he manages and it carries all our tools … I bet you drive one of those little PC farters, don’t you?’
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