Falls Like Lightning

by Shawn Grady

  “Got it.” Silas pulled a notepaper and pen from his shirt pocket. He jotted down, MREs and Shelters. “Hey, when things cool down, we’ll make sure Pendleton gets a proper funeral procession and service. Give guys a chance to pay the proper respects.”

  “Sounds like you have a plan, Mr. Kent.”

  “Please, it’s Silas.”

  Caleb flashed a quick smile and brought out his hand to shake. “I think we’ll get along just fine.”

  ———

  Silas strolled onto the tarmac, the sky the color of sliced grapefruit. A fresh and erratic wind lifted heat from under his arms, wicking the sweat from the bridge of his nose. The smell of fire hung in the air like the ominous cloud bank over the nearby hills.

  Elle had finished securing the plane in the hangar for the night. Silas watched her kneel down to kiss Maddie. An older woman standing next to them took Maddie’s hand and led her away. Maddie clutched a bulging backpack with a doll’s upper torso sticking out between the top zippers. She walked backwards, staring at her mother and stretching a hand out for her. Elle waved and nodded and smiled, aviators atop her hair.

  Elle.

  Compared to her, fire was easy.

  Predictable. Impersonal. Silas could watch a fire and see the course of the land and the laddering of the fuels and their moisture content and know what the fire would do. How it would suck wind into canyons like a chimney and puff the smoke out like an old man with a pipe.

  Silas understood fire. He knew it like one knows when it’s about to rain.

  But Westmore . . .

  She could navigate erratic air as well as anyone Silas had flown with. Some pilots handled the aircraft with impersonal calculation, executing a succession of algorithmic steps with geometric and mechanical precision. The job got accomplished. The plane took off and made its drops safely. And at the end of the workday the plane was chocked and tied down for the night in the cold dank recesses of a hangar or lined up along the edge of the tarmac.

  But for Elle, the plane was like an extension of herself. Its movements became as fluid as her walking, like a dancer knows how to control a hundred different muscles in the course of her movements. Elle flew with the elements. She became one of them, at home in the sky.

  Silas only felt at home falling from it.

  He pocketed his hands and strolled out to her. Her eyes stayed fixed on Maddie. He stopped beside her and waited until her little girl disappeared from view. “Grandmother?”

  Elle seemed to just notice him. “Hey. No. Carol Weathers.”

  “IC Weathers’s wife?”

  She nodded then brought a hand to the bridge of her nose.

  Silas cocked his head. “You going to be okay?”

  She took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just emotional. She’ll be fine. They have two grandchildren for her to play with. She’ll be fine.”

  “Of course. She’ll be in good hands.” What did he know about it? Silas kicked a pebble across the blacktop. “You know, they’ve got dinner fired up. You feel like grabbing a bite?”

  She pulled her glasses off her head, careful to thread them out from tight strands of hair.

  “Sure. Maybe that’s what I need.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Logistics had converted an old airport restaurant into the fire-camp mess hall. A twenty-person hotshot crew filed along the buffet, faces soot streaked and dirt lined. Silas learned that they had just arrived, coming off the radio tower fire. Elle found a place at the back of the line and kept quiet for the most part.

  Ceiling fans waved, circulating air conditioning just cool enough to take off the heat’s edge. The last slivers of sunlight glinted off windows facing the runway.

  “You know . . .” Silas started. “You’ve done well.”

  Elle folded her arms, listening.

  Silas glanced at the tiled floor. “I mean, Maddie’s great. You’ve done a wonderful job. It must be tremendously difficult—trying to work a job like this and build a home.”

  “What do you know about building a home?”

  Ouch. “I know. Right? I guess I’m saying that I just imagine it’s got to be a difficult thing.”

  “You don’t have to feel guilty or responsible.”

  “Right. I mean, I don’t.” He exhaled and looked away. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

  “Don’t stress yourself out about it, all right? It’s not your concern. Maddie and I have our life, and you’re free. Just like you always wanted.” She stepped forward with the line.

  “That’s not what I wanted.” His voice came out louder than he intended, drawing curious glances from the firefighters in front of them. He lowered it. “I mean, look at you. Here you are telling me it’s not my concern and you’re doing it with a guilt trip.”

  “You call this a guilt trip? Oh, you haven’t even seen a guilt trip. You want one of those? How about you taking me on a ride in a car called ‘I love you and want to always be with you’ and then bailing out before even the next fire season comes around? What kind of guy says he wants to be with a woman for the rest of his life and then takes an E-ticket ride to Alaska first chance he gets?”

  They had an audience now. Silas’s cheeks flushed. Amusement lit faces in the hotshot crew.

  He snapped at them. “Like you guys never got this talk before.”

  The firemen averted their gazes, clearing throats, scratching heads, and studying ceiling tiles. The firefighter next in line for the buffet turned and picked up a tray.

  Elle followed suit, her voice still elevated. “You know how many cocky bad-boy smokejumpers I pick up and launch into the wild every summer?”

  He knew her question was rhetorical. He had to just stand and take it.

  “Of course you don’t. You know why? Because you think you are the crème de la crème. You can’t fathom that there could possibly be more just like you. But you know what? There is. And you know what else? They’re all the same crop of corn again and again, every summer.” She ladled soup into a bowl on her tray. Her voice quieted. “By the end of fall they’re gone.”

  Silas saw hurt in her anger. And hurt wasn’t hardness, and that meant hope. Hope for what? He didn’t know.

  He went with his gut. “I know what you want.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Yes. It’s simple.”

  She spun to face him, her expression giving him ten seconds to explain himself.

  He grinned. “You want to change me.”

  She huffed. “Of course.” She moved down the line. “You think it is about you. You know what, Silas? As a pilot I need to intimately understand physics. To the untrained eye, it seems like I’m defying gravity every time I leave the ground. But I’m not. I’m using lift and aerodynamics and speed.” She picked up a pair of stainless steel tongs at the salad bowl and pointed them at him. “In other words, I don’t deal in impossibilities.”

  “So you have considered trying to change me.”

  “You are impossible.”

  “Since we’re on the subject of impossible . . . How about eight guys stopping a thousand-acre fire with no water, just hand tools and chain saws? Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “Are you really going to play the Butte Fire card again?”

  “Worked well the first time.”

  She glanced at him sideways, a hint of gentleness in her expression. “The Wing Stop?”

  The buffalo-chicken wing joint at McCall’s air base. The second time they met. But she had not recognized him then from their first encounter at the Shack—a blow to his ego.

  She squinted and smirked. “Probably not the first time you used that line.”

  Admittedly, Silas had in the past found it quite effective to open up conversations with attractive women by saying, “Who would have thought a thousand-acre fire could be stopped with only eight guys and no water?”

  Most acted impressed. Not Elle. She had just stared at him—appeari
ng more amused than anything. But he could tell she liked the fact he was trying. He had won her over with his show of confidence.

  She had won him over by seeing right through it.

  ———

  Elle sipped her iced tea. Sweet tea with lemon. She fought to keep from smiling too much. How did he do that, anyway? She’d gone from being so mad at him when they stood in line—incensed, really. And here she was, twenty minutes later, giggling like a giddy college girl.

  Her ability to hide her feelings was slipping from her grasp. She was exhausted. Overwhelmed by the sense that she didn’t have a home, frustrated over the puzzle of Maddie’s seizures, and angry at God for letting her little one suffer.

  Compound those emotions with the fact that this marked the first time she had returned to the Desolation Wilderness area since her search for her father’s plane. Her defenses were weakened. She’d have been lying if she said she didn’t long for a companion. Someone to lighten the load and to hold her and to know her.

  Matthew 6:33. She knew it by heart. The promise had encouraged her ever since she’d become a single mother. The Lord knew what she needed. Seek first His kingdom, and the things she needed would be added to her as well. If Silas still wanted a chance with her, he’d have to show that he had the right priorities.

  She never released her feelings for him. They just got bottled and stored away and, she had thought, left to ferment in the recesses of her heart. She knew when she married Seth that at some point—decades later, if she’d had her way—she’d have to open that bottle of memories. She planned to wait until time brought it beyond any intoxicating sweetness and then pour out the pungent vinegar it had become. No longer a risk. No longer too much of a heartache.

  But Seth had been a lie. And here she was, drawing from cellared emotions. Sitting with Silas and twisting the corkscrew into the walls she’d put up. The ensuing bouquet, at first pungent, now decanted and relaxed.

  She realized she had been silent for a while. Silas smiled, eliciting a grin from her. She looked down and cut a bite of pork. Breathe. Get a grip.

  A familiar man’s voice, tense and short, came from behind her. “Captain Westmore.”

  She turned to see Chief Weathers. Concern etched his brow.

  “Chief. Hi. Is everything okay?”

  He shook his head.

  Madison. “What’s happened? Has she had another seizure?”

  He lifted a palm. “She’s stable right—”

  “Stable? Is she at the hospital?”

  “Barton Memorial. In the ER.”

  Elle placed her napkin on the table. “Silas, I’m sorry. I need to go.”

  He rose. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. I mean . . . thank you, but I think I need to go on my own.” Disappointment and disquiet filled his face. But she wasn’t ready for him to share any more of her life. It was all she could do right now to not fall apart.

  Her eyes turned hot. She turned to Weathers. “Can you drive me?”

  “Absolutely.” He nodded to Silas. “Mr. Kent.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Bo had never touched a needle and spool before becoming a smokejumper. Funny how something like your life being on the line, literally, made one acquire and master a skill.

  He’d found a seat at a table in the far corner of a classroom area set aside for jumpers. Old steel lockers lined one wall, an ancient blackboard on another with a reeled map above it dangling a cord. Over that hung a circular, black-rimmed clock that clicked with every movement of the minute hand. Monte sat with his feet up on a table watching a corner-mounted television broadcast the evening news—flashes of hundred-foot evergreens engulfed in flame and wide-angle shots of staggered lightning bolts striking ground. Sippi and Rapunzel played cribbage at another table. Their conversation was quiet but not particularly guarded and was well within Bo’s earshot.

  Rapunzel inserted a peg into the cribbage board. “He’s got a plan, Sip. That’s what you’ve got to understand.”

  Sippi shook his head. “I still don’t get how it’s all supposed to come together.”

  Bo threaded his needle along a seam in his secondary backup chute. He kept his ear inclined. Caleb had kept a distance from him since returning from the field. And Bo remained quiet. No waves. No protests. With Cleese sharpening his knife at every opportunity, Monte looming in the shadows, and these two cackling hyenas prowling about, it didn’t give him much choice. None of those guys had the safety of their families to worry about.

  Rapunzel drew a card. “We’ve got a small window of opportunity to jump. Then conditions won’t allow anything near us for a bit.”

  Sippi spit tobacco in an empty soda can. “Sounds like it could be good cover.”

  “Long as we don’t get surrounded and burned over.”

  Bo stretched. “I’m about to get some dinner. You boys heading over?” He hoped not. He wasn’t even particularly hungry. Not since the other night.

  Neither of them looked up, simply grunting “no” replies.

  Bo put away his sewing kit, took a moment to admire the stitching on his reinforced seam, and then stowed the backup chute, only half listening as he prepared to leave.

  Sippi laughed.

  Rapunzel, irritated, said, “What’re you guffawing about?”

  “You sit there and you think you know everything, but you ain’t even got the slightest clue what I been doing all afternoon before this, do you?”

  Bo turned slowly toward the conversation. A look of consternation tightened Rapunzel’s face. “You were sharpening your shovel in the hangar. With Cleese.”

  Bo unfolded and refolded his chute, buying time.

  Sippi shook his head, still laughing. “You just figure me for an ignorant backwoods hick, don’t you?”

  “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

  Sippi leaned forward, forearms on the table. “You know I was a journeyman apprentice electrician before I started fighting fire? I understand amps and voltage. I know how to wire things.”

  Rapunzel’s chair creaked. “What kind of things?”

  Sippi grinned. “Devices.”

  Rapunzel straightened.

  “The kind that go—” Sippi arced his hands away from each other with spread fingers.

  Bo finished folding his chute and stored it in a bag at the corner. The attention of the two meandered toward him, their eyes following him as he walked out of the room.

  He nodded. “See you jokers when I see you.”

  Bo strode down the shadowed hall, the unsettling feeling of daggers being flung at his back. He avoided the cafeteria, his stomach still twisting from the previous night’s horrors.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Caleb would take an MRE any day over the jerky and slop in front of him. Who was in charge of logistics, anyway? Dry pork chops and pea soup. He sipped ice water from a paper cup. At least that was decent. Clear, pure Lake Tahoe snowmelt.

  He eyed their new spotter across the room. Sitting alone after being ditched by the pilot.

  Shivner sat several tables down, stuffing his face, hobnobbing with Command staff. Looking for ways to build himself up in their eyes. He was supposed to get them out of having a replacement. The desk jockey obviously wasn’t up to the task. Caleb was holding up his end of things—had already secured transport out for them and their cargo. The shirt buttons across the guy’s belly looked like they were about to shoot off. From over a shoulder his eyes met Caleb’s. He chewed, wiped his face with a napkin, and broke the gaze. Caleb shook his head and dunked a slice of pork in the soup. He held it there, impatiently, hoping to instill some kind of moisture back into the irradiated meat.

  This plan was supposed to be his break. He’d been waiting for it for a lifetime. Everything had led up to it. And now, on the cusp of attaining it, he had to deal with the incompetence of a pear-bodied coward. Shivner’s two redeeming values? The spot-on latitude and longitude coordinates he’d related to Caleb—a
nd his wisdom in choosing Caleb to be his point man.

  How the fat slob ever survived a team-building Forest Service backpacking expedition through the Desolation Wilderness still escaped Caleb. It was highly probable that Shivner was struggling to keep up and was too embarrassed to be left behind, but being arrogant, stubborn, and a poor team player, he had broken off from the group of high-ranking individuals to “show them.” A foolish move, but were it not for his excursion off of the established trail route, Shivner would have never wandered eighteen miles into veritably untrod wilderness and stumbled, literally, into the find.

  Shivner had fractured his ankle in the process, and hiking out on it caused irreparable harm to the joint. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to make a return trip to the cache deep in rough National Forest Service land, Shivner couldn’t figure out how to furtively gain the treasure. But when the recent dry lightning cells stormed through and the Desolation Complex blew up, he saw his chance.

  He’d called Caleb into his makeshift office, locked the door, and reclined in a squeaking seventies-vintage chair behind an avocado-and-mustard-colored metal desk. He played his game like a man who only had one good card to play, drawing out the story of his prized knowledge of an invaluable secret. He claimed he wasn’t inclined to divulge it to just anybody—only to a man like Caleb, who was cunning and shrewd and capable enough on two good ankles to deliver the goods.

  Caleb remembered almost getting up and walking out at that point. Shivner’s posturing bordered on ridiculous. And Caleb was sure that whatever the man had discovered was probably ancient news on the Internet or the substance of native folklore.

  The pompous bag of wind must’ve seen impatience in Caleb’s face, because the moment before Caleb was about to rise, Shivner blurted out the secret.

  “Gold.” His irises quivered, lips testing the air to form the next word. “Chest after chest of raw gold. A hidden nineteenth-century cache of it.”

  Barely holding back incredulous laughter, Caleb stood to leave.