Falls Like Lightning

by Shawn Grady

  “Couldn’t forget it.” He knelt again by the bike and put the wheel-and-gear-chain assembly back together.

  As much as Elle hated to admit it—having grown up near the McCall base and not being willing to date firefighters—her options had been limited. And here was just another smokejumper. A charming one, no doubt. But was anything really different with him? She had debated the best way to find out more about him without it seeming that she was too interested. And as he set the wheel in place, she knew she was about to lose her chance.

  “So, are you here for a while?” Elle rolled her eyes at herself the instant it came out.

  “Funny you’d ask,” Surfer Boy said. “Our base is getting a massive remodel, and instead of relegating us south to the Shack, we’ll be located here the rest of the summer.” He set the chain and stood. “There you go—like new.”

  Southern Idaho. The smokejumper shack. . . . “You were the one who showed me around the new Twin Otter.”

  “And you were the one in the summer dress.”

  She felt her cheeks burn hot. “Well, thank you, again.” Brushing off her hands, she grabbed the handlebars and seat to guide her bike down the wooden steps.

  “Hey.” He cleared his throat.

  She paused. “Mm-hmm?”

  “Maybe we can do this again . . . sometime.” An awkward smile creased his lips.

  She bit her bottom lip and smiled.

  ———

  Elle’s cell phone rattled on the nightstand.

  She snatched it up and silenced it. Maddie turned in bed and mumbled.

  Elle held the cell to her ear and stood. “Hello?”

  “Elle, this is Weathers.”

  She eased the door handle loose, edged it open, and squinted with the brighter hallway lighting. “One second.” She slid through. “Can you hear me okay?”

  “You’re a little scratchy. How am I coming across?”

  “Fine. Fine. What time is it?” She searched for the wall clock and found one far off, though the numbers were too fuzzy to read.

  “Ten to four.”

  Elle arched her stiff back. Strange that Weathers would call her so early. “What—” She cleared her throat. “What’s up?”

  “We need you here.”

  “Where? At the base?”

  “You’re scheduled to fly a crew out in two hours.”

  “What? They were talking about nine o’clock.”

  “The fire blew up again. Big time. They estimate it spread another thousand acres since nightfall.”

  Elle rubbed an eyebrow and pinched wiry hair strands back. She didn’t know what to say. “Chief, I . . . I can’t. I’m still here with Madison.”

  “I know. I’ve got Carol on her way right now.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t leave her.”

  “Elle, you are the only one who can fly this mission.”

  “There are a dozen pilots on this fire. You can’t tell me every single one of them is unavailable.”

  “It’s not that they’re unavailable. It’s the conditions and the terrain. This thing is creating its own weather, Elle. I’m shutting down all air attack today. Grounding everything we’ve got. Nothing flies after the start of the new operational period at oh-seven-hundred hours.”

  Elle pinched the bridge of her nose.

  The line rustled. “If we don’t get another jumper crew on that eastern flank, it’ll make an unrestrained run straight for the residential communities in South Lake. We’ll lose hundreds of homes.”

  She tilted her head against the wall.

  “Elle, I need you for this. No one knows these mountains like you. I watched you pore over those topos every night for three weeks. I’m willing to bet you’ve logged more immediate flight time over that particular patch of planet Earth than anyone alive.

  “Let’s turn your father’s passing into something positive. Something that can help save lives and homes. What do you say?”

  Elle covered her mouth and nose. A tear trickled down to her finger. She peeked in Maddie’s room. Her daughter lay in the same position she’d been in. The double doors opened at the end of the hall, and Carol walked through with two sleepy-eyed children still in their pajamas.

  “Okay.” Elle took a deep breath. “For Dad.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  Silas studied the grim faces seated in the crew compartment. Their expressions beyond game faces. Scowls. Gnarls. The bulkhead vibrated against his arm. The whole plane reeked of B.O. and acrid smoke. He leaned back from the bulkhead and sat beside Elle in the cockpit. Her eyes danced between flight gauges and the cauliflower expanse before them, anvil-shaped thunder cells building on the horizon.

  Silas seated his headset and positioned the microphone. “You sure we got a crew of jumpers and not a con-crew?”

  Her lips drew upward. “You’ve never flown with any of these guys?”

  “Have you?”

  She peered over her aviator glasses.

  “Right. I guess there’s not a jumper in the continental U.S. you haven’t flown with at some point, huh?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe this spotter thing’s just got me out of my element.”

  “Just think, ‘What Would Warren Do?’ ”

  “I’ll make a wristband.”

  “You learned from the best.”

  The cockpit rattled. Flashes of lightning lit the horizon. Elle took off her aviators and hooked them on the shell necklace dangling from the feet of the hula dancer on the dash. Wrinkles of concern tightened at the corners of her eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  She opened her mouth to speak and then paused and looked out her side windows. Greens and browns dotted granite ridgelines.

  “This is the first time I’ve flown over this territory. . . .”

  “The first?”

  She shot an impatient look. “Since . . .”

  Silas nodded in realization. “Since your father.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Elle bit her bottom lip and worked up a smile. “You don’t have to be.”

  A lightning salvo struck a mountain peak in the near distance.

  Silas squinted, discerning a thin black column rising into the air. “I think that last one might have taken out the radio tower.”

  Elle glanced between the smoke and her radio equipment. She depressed the transmit button. “South Lake Tower, this is Jumper 41. How do you copy?”

  Silas listened. “Press the button again.”

  She complied. Silas watched her press it but heard nothing. “You’re not hitting the radio repeater.”

  “No.” Elle flipped toggle switches and angled the plane toward their ten o’clock. “Probably best we fly around that active cell. When we approach the drop zone, we can see if we’re able to hit the next closest repeater.”

  The plane leveled. Silas fidgeted in his seat. What was he doing in the cockpit anyway? This was Warren’s job.

  Elle pointed to a stretch of land beyond the windshields. “I must’ve flown over that patch of earth fifty times.”

  “Is that where you think he went down?”

  “Best guess. Based on his flight plan, last radio contact, fuel, and . . . I don’t know, just hunches.”

  “The way you sensed he would fly?”

  She seemed to consider his words and nodded. “Yeah.”

  Silas readjusted his headset. “I remember him well. Like the time you brought me over to your house for dinner.”

  “And he showed you his gun collection.”

  “Classic. He oiled his shotgun barrel, all casual like, right there in the living room while we chatted.”

  She laughed.

  “He was a good man, Elle. I flew with him once. That next summer, I mean.”

  “After we . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  Thunder boomed, rolling across the clouds like a freight tr
ain.

  “Where?”

  “On the east Alaskan complex.”

  “Did he—”

  “Recognize me? Oh yeah.”

  “No. That’s not what I was going to ask.”

  “Sorry. Did he . . .”

  “Tell you to meet him out behind the hangar?”

  Silas laughed. Scattered rain pelted the windshields.

  Elle’s expression remained unchanged.

  He drew in his smile. “No. No. He was very amiable. But he held my gaze long when he shook my hand. His hands were rough and strong like a vise grip. I had the feeling he was only shaking with a fraction of his strength. That he could’ve broken the bones in my hand if he’d decided to.”

  A comforted expression warmed her face.

  Silas scratched the corner of his jaw. “Glad to see that pleases you. The thought of my metacarpals being shattered.”

  She threw him a sideways glance.

  “He asked how I’d been. I told him I’d tied in with Warren Adams in Alaska and was committed to going where he went.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said commitment is a powerful thing.”

  The cockpit shuddered. Elle glanced at the gauges.

  “He told me you were married.” Silas studied the mushrooming smoke column on the horizon. Half a dozen smaller gray pillars billowed from the earth around them. “And I asked him to tell you something. I don’t know if he ever did.” He drew a deep breath. “You know that I didn’t have a family growing up, that the San Mateo Home for Boys was the only home I knew.”

  She nodded.

  “I never told you about a lady who would visit there. Every other Friday. Everyone called her Grandma Jo. She read to us. She remembered all our birthdays and would give us gifts. Little things, now that I look back on it. But we barely had any toys of our own. So her gifts were treasures to me. She had eyes that smiled. You know what I mean? Rich, earthy. With rosy freckled cheeks beneath them. Long after she finished reading, I’d find reasons to stay by her and talk. She’d listen to my stories about baseball and whittling wood, and she would ooh and ah over my rock collection.”

  “She sounds like a true grandmother.”

  “She was, for me. Sort of like a mother too. The closest thing I’d known to one.”

  Elle glanced at a peak at their ten o’clock. She angled the wings slightly westward.

  “It wasn’t right for me to leave you that summer, Elle. I know that. I can’t change what I did, or what all came of it. But I was scared. I felt like our relationship was on a precipice, and . . . too many times in the past I thought a family would work out for me only to find out that I wasn’t really worth the people’s time.” He ran his hand across his mouth. “I had no idea what it was like to be part of an actual family. And at the end of that summer, right when I was teetering on all those fears, I got word from a caretaker at the San Mateo Home—Grandma Jo had suffered a stroke and was in the ICU.

  “I know it wasn’t right to leave you. It’s no excuse. It was the worst possible timing, the worst decision I’ve ever made.” He swallowed. “I freaked out. I made it my reason to leave. The season was winding down and the base manager gave me leave to visit her.” He drew his fingers over his brow. “I shouldn’t have left like that.” Shouldn’t have even left. “I tried so many times to call but ended up dangling pay-phone receivers every time.”

  They flew in silence for a while. The buzzing hum of the engines behind them. The wind whistled through thin crevices in the window seals.

  Elle depressed the radio’s transmit button. “Air ops, this is Jumper 41 with a location update.” She waited, turned the radio-frequency dial a notch and tried again.

  No response.

  “Hmm . . .” She flipped a switch and leveled the plane at a new altitude. “He did, you know.”

  Silas cast a curious glance.

  She caught his eye. “He did tell me.”

  A bright light burst.

  The plane banked hard. It groaned and roared. Smoke ribbons flailed over the windshield. Elle gripped the rattling yoke one handed, grasping the throttle with her other.

  Silas clutched his seat. “What’s happening?”

  “We lost an engine.”

  Altitude sank. Silas’s stomach jumped. The other wing engine roared at high RPMs. The horizon thunderheads appeared higher than before.

  Bo barreled through the bulkhead. “We got an engine on fire.”

  The ALT gauge spun counterclockwise. Silas threw a look to Elle. “How close are we to the drop zone?”

  “What?”

  He shouted. “How close to the drop zone?”

  “Eleven, maybe twelve miles.”

  Silas stood, grasping the seat back, and said to Bo, “Toss me that topo map.”

  Bo fetched the rolled cylinder and handed it to him without letting go. He stood face-to-face, staring at him, and unzipped the front of his jumpsuit. From it he produced a compact square canvas pouch bound by thick straps. “Don’t lose this.”

  An emergency chute? Why did Bo think he needed a backup to his existing chutes? He’d strap them on when it was time to make the jump. He’d gone through everything that morning, like he always did. But the man wouldn’t let go of the topo map until Silas acknowledged him, unzipped his own jumpsuit, and placed the chute inside.

  Bo released the cylinder and stood back. “We can reel it out on the floor here.”

  A panel screw rattled loose and tumbled across the floor. Silas pried open the cylinder and fished out the map. Bo smoothed it out on the floor. The lines levitated with the vibrating floor. Silas blinked them into focus and let his fingers find the airport and then traced the route he’d penciled in the night before. He had scribed estimated time signatures every five miles. Just like Warren always did.

  “That puts us around . . .” Silas tapped the paper. “Here.”

  “By Crystal Lake?” Elle yelled over the din.

  “Yes. But Crystal Pond is more like it. Pretty tiny. Any meadows around?”

  “Still a ways off. Mostly hillsides and tree stands. Here.” She stretched a hand back. “Show it to me.”

  Silas folded the map to isolate their location and held it in front of her. Sweat beaded at the bridge of his nose. “Can’t you limp her back to South Lake?”

  “No. One engine can’t hang at this altitude.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Set her down in that puddle.”

  “Can you reach—”

  The plane dropped altitude again. Silas sucked in a breath.

  Elle adjusted the throttle to a buzz-skip sound from the remaining engine. “I’ll have to. Have your boys make the jump now.”

  “Too forested. We’ll wait ’till you’re over—”

  “No way. I’m heading in at too steep an angle as it is.” Then, under her breath, “Be lucky if I even clear the ridge.”

  Silas hesitated.

  “I got this, Kent. Here, show me the map again.”

  He held it up.

  “There.” She pointed to a patch of light green. “We’ll be over that in about forty-five seconds.”

  “Too small.”

  “It’s all you got.”

  Caleb shouted from the bulkhead, “Let’s get off this bird.”

  Silas stumbled back into the crew compartment. He grabbed Caleb by the chest harness. “Line up for the door. No time for paracargo, so everyone take a hand tool. Let’s move.”

  Jumpers scrambled. Last second gear adjustments and the linking of yellow tether lines for chute deployment. They gathered by the jump door, and Silas cranked it open. An immediate blast of heated orange and choking black smoke poured in. Silas ducked low, holding his breath and hiding his face in the crook of his elbow. He crouched beneath the smoke and peered downward for the drop point. He spotted a dime-sized patch of green between the trees.

  Three separate smoke columns bordered the area. Even with a successful jump, they
could be hemmed in by the fire.

  Sunlight glinted off a creek bed. His eyes traced it through the forest, winding like a snake down a nearby ridge from Crystal Lake. Could work as a safety zone when things got hot.

  It was as good as they were going to get.

  Silas waved Caleb forward and pointed out the landing zone. Caleb glanced at Silas’s chute pack still hanging from the fore bulkhead.

  Silas waved. “I’ll be fine. You see the spot?”

  Caleb nodded and placed his hands on the doorframe. Silas counted off with a hand in the air. One. Two. Three.

  He patted Caleb’s leg. He shot like a cannonball through the smoke. Silas strained to track him through the sky. A broad white chute popped into view.

  Cleese stood next in the doorway. The plane shifted, and Silas caught balance against the wall. He pointed, got the nod, and gave the three-count. Leg pat. Second jumper out.

  Silas repeated the sequence until all five were off. He stood and exhaled.

  He didn’t plan on joining them.

  The plane angled steeper. Silas caught himself at the jump door, partway out in the slipstream. He clawed his way back in and clambered to the cockpit. “How long do we have?”

  “What’re you still doing here?”

  “The jumpers are off.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Your duty is with them.”

  “My place is with you.”

  Her hands flurried between the yoke, the throttle lever, and panel switches.

  Silas braced a hand on the ceiling and the other on the seatback. The groaning descent loudened. He caught a view of a large mountain ridge approaching fast.

  “I’m not going to leave you again.”

  She stared into his eyes. The plane dipped. “Go shut the jump door.”

  “Got it.”

  The cabin seesawed. Silas staggered through the bulkhead and slammed against the wall by the door. He reached out for the latch handle, nearly reaching it when the plane tipped to the opposite side.

  He tumbled, smacking into the porthole windows. The remaining engine blared. Tarry smoke and flames rolled past the open door. The plane dove and tipped back to the jump-door side.

  The earth spun into view. Silas’s feet flipped out from under him. He fell across the cabin and snagged the edge of the outer door handle. His legs dropped outside, raging wind pulling at his calves. He clawed, fingertips slipping from the handle. Smoke billows engulfed. The door slammed shut and the slipstream caught hold, sucking him into the sky.