Falls Like Lightning

by Shawn Grady

  But Caleb . . .

  It was a weird dynamic having Pendleton on the ground with them for the first time in a long while. Caleb Parson was jumper in charge, and though Pendleton was technically the boss, Caleb carried an unspoken weight of authority with the crew and had, Bo believed, a stronger than normal influence over Pendleton’s decisions.

  Perhaps that lent some explanation to the indirect line they were cutting. But even so . . .

  Bo shook off the thoughts. He was a working man. Let the men in charge make the command decisions. Bo would keep his head down, grubbing at the soil, unceasing in the repetitive motions of clearing the line.

  He let his mind fill with the atmosphere of the forest. The scent of woodsmoke and turned earth. The chatter and singsong of birds. The rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers and the skitter of Rodentia. The swirling and changing of the wind and the temperature and the humidity.

  His musing reverie was soon interrupted by the rest of the crew.

  Richard “Rapunzel” Strothesby, with his fuzzy beard and long braided ponytail stretching to his midback, scraped the earth one tool length in front of Bo. Beyond him worked a sinewy twenty-two-year-old Mississippi native named Jason “Sippi” Fines.

  Rapunzel grinned at the dirt. “Sippi, what’re you going to do when you get married?”

  Sippi spit from a golf-ball-sized chaw in his lip. “Who the—Who went and said anything about getting married?”

  Rapunzel shook his head. “That ain’t what I asked you.”

  “And you’re not answering my question. Ain’t nobody here been talking about getting married.”

  “Sippi, for once, just use your imagination to envision the future.”

  Sippi ran his tongue under his lip, stopped and looked up at the crown of the trees, and then nodded. “Yep.”

  “Yep, what?”

  “Yep, I see it.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see a mansion with seventy virgins waving the confederate flag.”

  Bo almost broke his rhythm. But he’d known these fools too long to let something stupid like that get to him. He knew exactly where the comment was rooted from. Unlike these veritably illiterate members of his crew, Bo’s reading interests swathed far and wide. And it was somewhere between Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi, and The Old Man and the Sea that Rapunzel and Sippi had witnessed him perusing a copy of the Koran. Since then he had been a Muslim to them. If he so much as knelt to lace up his boots, he might as well have been facing Mecca to pray. He wondered how he would’ve been labeled had they seen him reading Mein Kampf.

  Let them think what they wanted.

  Rapunzel grubbed away in the dirt. “Sippi, you’ve gone and upstaged my joke already.”

  “You ain’t told no joke.”

  “It’s amusing enough just listening to you.”

  “If it was about mister and misses Sippi again, you can listen for my fist to come upside your head.”

  Pendleton glanced down the line. “Bump it up.”

  He moved down the line with his half-shovel, half-pick combi-tool in hand like a walking stick. “We aren’t yet halfway to the ridgeline, and light is waning. Unless you want to dig into your MREs in the dark, I suggest you keep your heads down and your tools in the dirt.”

  Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Bo had a chicken pasta with marinara sauce sitting in the top of his pack. He could eat it now or in five years, would still taste the same. Couldn’t be healthy.

  A voice came from farther up the line. “How much line we cutting?”

  “Forty chains.”

  “Total?”

  “Forty chains more.”

  A collective groan let out from the crew. Forty chains meant half a mile. Half a mile of three-foot-wide line cut down to mineral soil. Eight guys dropped from the sky, fighting fire without water. It’s what they did. But this indirect route had the feeling of a fool’s errand. Why weren’t they in the thick of it—felling trees and backburning to halt the fire’s progress?

  This felt like underutilization. They were the best at what they did. Or at least the stupidest to work so hard for GS-5 pay.

  Sometimes Bo wondered.

  Like the other guys, Bo didn’t have a family of his own. But unlike them, he worked to support his two little sisters in college. Since his dad’s death he’d taken something of a fatherly role. With overtime and hazard pay, the job brought home enough to pay a big part of the girls’ tuitions. They still had to cover their room and board.

  The decision to become a wildland firefighter had saved him years earlier. When at a community job fair Pendleton talked Bo into applying for a seasonal position on his hotshot crew, little did Pendleton know that he had thrown a drowning man a line.

  No college degree, between minimum wage jobs, scraping just to keep from being evicted out of his ghetto apartment. He never imagined he’d soon be out in the West, jumping out of planes and scraping through the dirt with a rabble of rednecks.

  But he’d learned hard work from his father. Even after his mother left, his dad didn’t fall into the bottle or take it out on the kids. He always found a way to get food on the table. Lots of rice. Lots of unglamorous portions of animals boiled twice over. But food for the stomach.

  “I can get you through high school,” he’d once said. “Then you gots to be providing for your own self. You understand? You a man, now.”

  Not long after that his dad’s heart refused to keep working as hard for his own body as he always had for his kids.

  At eighteen years old, Bo labored to finish school and make enough money to pay the house rent. Before long they were evicted—sending him to a studio apartment in the projects, his twin sisters, much younger, to their aunt’s to finish out school. Bo found himself cannonballed into life, the structure and familiarity of home and family unraveled. It all filtered away through the colander of existence, leaving him alone with a dim and desperate view for the future.

  Dust rose and swirled in a cloud by his knees. Sunlight angled through the canopy across the fireline. They’d covered another sixty-six feet. One more chain.

  Forty lashes minus one.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Caleb finally found the chance to slip away. To hike without an entourage, using his combi-tool as more of a walking stick than a device to cut line. An hour before dusk, the sun painted a hundred different colors across cumulus thunderheads, mammoth vessels in the sky like nature-wrought warships.

  Even though Pendleton had made the jump with them, Caleb was first on the jump list, first out the door, and that made him the jumper in charge. Fact was, he could size up circumstances and situations quicker than Pendleton. And where Pendleton deliberated—an attribute perhaps advantageous behind a desk—while holding a coffee mug and looking at a map, Caleb knew how to act decisively. It gave him an edge, despite the fact he was outranked by Spotter Pendleton. Caleb knew that the balance of respect in the crew swung his way.

  While the guys set up a simple camp, he’d used the excuse of needing to put eyes on the greater perimeter of the fire to hike off toward a nearby hill. He palmed his GPS, walking toward the coordinates Chief Shivner had given him behind closed doors.

  The crew had grumbled about cutting indirect line so far from the fire. Fortunately, their belief in the ability of the brass to make effective tactical decisions was already cynically skewed. Who were they to argue with Incident Command? Wouldn’t be the first time things on the ground appeared much different than they did in the war room.

  Shivner had been right about the timing. Mother Nature had in fact provided a huge opening for them. All Caleb had to do was confirm the find and report back.

  He drew a deep breath of pine and sweet smoke-tinged air. It was nothing like working the ambulance in San Francisco. He did not miss the blood spills and bleach bottles and exposure reports. The constant drunk calls. He had been an underpaid people-mover, occasionally able to exercise
the authority of an emergency-room physician.

  Caleb climbed atop a boulder and drew a deep breath. The air held the feel of electricity. Beneath broadening smoke columns, the land beyond rose and flattened with the organic lay of eons. Natural. Without the hand of man shaping it into something concrete and linear and lifeless.

  He’d become a paramedic to spite his father. His financial-advising, stock-brokering, disinterested, and uncommunicative father. He didn’t regret the day he walked from the overpaid and insultingly low-responsibility brokerage internship he held. Dad wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and to stay in his shadow as he did so.

  Caleb lost himself in paramedicine, forgetting for a time that he had no real intention of pursuing it as a career, until one evening, after scrubbing his forearms with surgical soap to remove the blood of their latest patient, it all returned in one vehement tide. Who had he really spited? Who had he triumphed over?

  Vexing one’s father was a fickle endeavor.

  This—the mountains, the growing firestorm, and the building thunderheads—this held the flavor of freedom. And if Shivner’s coordinates were accurate and his story held water, then it would be Caleb’s unique portion of poetic justice.

  He removed his helmet, letting the wind wick sweat from his brow. He estimated three miles lay between them and the main body of the fire. Cloud-to-cloud flashes of lightning lit off. The sound of thunder followed. About a half mile below his position, a line of thin wispy smoke wove into the air. He glanced at the handheld GPS and then back to the smoke trailing skyward. Not far from his goal.

  It was too close to be a spot fire. Could be a single tree struck by lightning. Or . . .

  He looked behind him. He wouldn’t be missed. Pendleton was no doubt caught up in planning and mapping out their route for tomorrow, trying to figure out why Chief Shivner had told Caleb but not him which direction to cut line.

  The sunset faded into the melding hues of dusk. A full moon brimmed on the horizon, but the main fire’s mushrooming column threatened to overtake it. He could make it to the wispy smoke source before nightfall, but it was going to be a dark trip back.

  ———

  Caleb expected the scent of woodsmoke, but not roasting meat.

  His stomach tightened. He swallowed a fresh burst of saliva, lifted his canteen and shook it. The water tasted warm and stale.

  He drove the handle of his combi-tool into the dirt atop the last rise before the smoke source. With a step he cleared the knoll and peered down upon a tiny but stout log cabin resting about a hundred feet from the bank of the creek. A river-rock chimney rose from one corner, the smoke now dim and hardly visible from it. A dim light flickered inside a small-paned window beside an open front door.

  A strange, indistinguishable sound drifted out from it.

  Plucking? Caleb leaned his ear. Not just plucking. Twanging. A banjo.

  He huffed. Great.

  Mountain people. He always thought the sound of banjos ought to be the nineteenth Watch Out Situation.

  Shivner hadn’t said anything about people in the area. Caleb leaned back against a tree and tilted his head. He would’ve felt safer if it were a spot fire.

  The music stopped, followed by the sound of rustling and footsteps.

  An old man in overalls stepped out. Wild, straight salt-and-pepper hair fell to his shoulders. He retreated inside and then returned with an oil lantern in one hand and a metal pie tin in the other. He closed the door behind him and set off on a narrow path into the forest.

  Right in the direction of the GPS coordinates.

  He disappeared into the trees. Caleb cursed. The man’s presence could throw their whole plan off.

  Caleb shuffled down the knoll toward the cabin and at the bottom leaned over the pathway, staring into the darkening forest. A tiny glow swung in the distance. He clicked on his helmet LED, cupping his hand over it to give just enough light to walk by.

  Gnats swarmed. He kept his distance, careful to stay out of earshot. The man moved on target toward Shivner’s coordinates. Caleb paused and clicked off his light. Long drops of sweat rolled down his spine. The sounds of the forest intensified. He wondered if he too was being followed. Ahead, the old man’s lamplight disappeared. The distinct sound of creaking hinges followed.

  He was close.

  Another sound. This one like metal rapping on wood.

  Caleb inched forward, willing his pupils to adjust to the night. Faint detail materialized. Tree bark. Branches. The moon peeked through the clouds and the tree canopy.

  His boot struck a rock. He reached down to feel it and struck his helmet. His hands felt a coarse rock wall. Clicking on his helmet light and funneling it to a pinhead, he saw that he stood in front of an enormous granite boulder, twice his height and five times that in length.

  Keeping a hand on the helmet light and another on the boulder, Caleb sidestepped to the edge of the rock face. He clicked off his light and peered around the corner.

  A stone’s throw away in a small clearing he saw a faint glow shining from a timber-framed entrance to what looked like a mine or a bunker tunneled at a shallow angle into the ground. From it he heard whistling and the sound of small rocks clacking down, one by one.

  The full moon disappeared behind the cloud cover. Caleb checked his GPS. He’d arrived at Shivner’s coordinates. The opening to the bunker sat recessed between granite boulders on one side and a steep hill on the other. It was situated in such a way that, even with the coordinates, had Caleb not followed the old man’s exact route there, he would’ve likely walked right past the bunker without seeing it, regardless of whether it was night or day.

  Caleb fidgeted his fingers on the handle of his combi-tool. The old man had looked unarmed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a firearm inside the bunker or somewhere on his person. Maybe it would be better to wait until daylight. Approach him with the crew before they set out in the morning.

  How had Caleb gotten himself in this predicament anyway? He should have known the plan wouldn’t go as smoothly as Shivner had presented it. Regardless, he walked forward. Step by step.

  The whistling stopped.

  Caleb held his breath. Sweat, salty and stinging, rolled into the corner of his eye. He blinked blurry halos. The methodical clacking resumed, the metered sound of rock upon rock, this time accompanied by the old man’s voice. Caleb moved closer. Each step in silence. The voice became clearer.

  “Twenty-one. Twenty-two . . . Twenty-three? No, no, no. You didn’t do it right. Start again.”

  Caleb heard the sound of small rocks tumbling onto wood. The flickering glow spilled out the entrance onto his pant legs. The lantern-lit room was bordered by wooden wall slats with bare earth in the cracks. Crates labeled Explosivo lined a wall. The old man was bent over a small pile of pebbles beside the circular tin in the center of a plank floor. Beside him lay an open wooden chest and a metal pipe railing that guarded something mechanical out of view. Small glinting veins striped through some of the pebbles, perhaps small extractable amounts of gold. Perhaps pyrite. Nothing impressive.

  The man arrived to the count of twenty-three again and then rebuked himself and dumped the pebbles onto the floor before proceeding to count them off again.

  The scenario repeated numerous times before the old man ended at twenty-three, having counted off to his satisfaction. He poured the contents into an open wood chest. From his vantage point, Caleb couldn’t see what else lay inside of it.

  The old man looked up at the doorway and Caleb froze. The old man stared out into the darkness, then broke his gaze and walked out of view toward a near corner of the room. Caleb waited, listening to what sounded like boots descending a metal ladder.

  Inching toward the threshold, Caleb peeked inside. Sure enough, a ladder descended through the floor on the near wall. An antiquated dumbwaiter pulley system sat inside a square of pipe railing. The large wooden chest, appearing to be over a century old with splintering wood sides bound by
iron framework, rested open beside the dumbwaiter. Inside it lay a pile of much larger rocks, all of them glittering with thick veins of unprocessed gold.

  He blinked and smiled. Shivner, you son of a—

  Metal clanked, striking alarm in his chest.

  Rusted wheel squeaking followed, moving the pulley system into motion. Caleb shot a glance down the hole and saw the old man walk out of view, headed toward the ladder. Against the basement wall, Caleb noted at least half a dozen wooden chests similar to the one beside him. Boot steps echoed off of metal. Caleb hid himself just outside of the entrance.

  He knew from his internship at his father’s firm that gold, once processed, could easily bring a thousand bucks per troy ounce—making a single pound of it worth sixteen thousand dollars.

  It was a dense and weighty metal. A full chest had to hold at least two hundred pounds of rock. Minus maybe a hundred pounds for extracted ore and that still left a hundred pounds of gold. Multiply that by sixteen thousand . . .

  The whispered words left Caleb’s lips, “One point six million dollars.”

  The pulley squeaking stopped. Boots shuffled across the wood planks. The old man muttered something to himself and slammed the chest lid shut. He groaned and Caleb recognized the sound of vertebrae popping. Wood and metal slid along the floor, accompanied by the old man’s grunts.

  How many of these chests did the old man have in there? How long had he been living out there, searching for gold and adding trivial amounts to this enormous stash?

  The man suffered from dementia, no doubt. Caleb had seen it too often in many elderly he responded to on the ambulance. Could even be Alzheimer’s. Would the old coot even notice if most of his stash went missing?