After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  Barnes looked at Hunter. His head was definitely throbbing, his hands could not hold the coffee cup the waitress had just filled, and the welt under his eye had ballooned into a baseball.

  “Well, maybe you don’t feel all that good physically, but it had to have been cathartic—smacking that son of a bitch. Haven’t you wanted to hit someone since the fire? A reporter who doesn’t know shit about forest fires but passes some judgment anyway, that asshole lawyer getting ready to sue your ass, White, Max Downey, Chandler, yourself. Somebody?”

  Barnes tried breathing hard, but he must have taken a punch to the chest and the storage area in his lungs had been reduced. He patted the sore spot on his cheek and felt its tenderness and warmth extending around his eye. “It did. It was still stupid, but, man, I could see a handful of faces I’ve wanted to hit all flash in front of me when I punched that big bastard. If he weren’t so damn big and tough, I’d have killed him.”

  “At least you got to do something,” Hunter said, grave and convinced.

  Barnes nodded in agreement, feeling that some small amount of the frustrations of will he had fought for months had been lifted. Nothing had changed. A dozen of his people had still died, a handful of families had or would name him as a related party in lawsuits, many more people still thought him a coward of some kind. He had felt himself sliding into an inevitable weakness. Hitting Cuesta was hitting a lot of people.

  He also felt an embarrassment that he needed to hit someone to make himself feel better and tried reconciling that in his mind, which through the throbbing was having enough difficulty just focusing on the coffee cup in front of him.

  “Downey’s father and his lawyer stopped by my house today after work,” Hunter said. “He implied that if I help him out in court my name will only be mentioned in favorable terms. His implication was that if I don’t help him, I’ll be cast poorly. I could have kicked his ass.”

  “Downey’s only trying to save his son.”

  “By ruining others.”

  “He doesn’t see it that way.”

  “I told him. I told him what happened. I told him that his son didn’t kill anyone, but actions have results. It was, ultimately, Max’s decision to dig that line. I told him that, but he wouldn’t listen to any of it.”

  “I think his lawyer has tried.”

  “He didn’t try while I was there.”

  “He’s supporting his client.”

  Hunter snorted, “He’s an asshole, a bottom-feeding fish. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, just so long as he makes his roll and walks out of the courthouse clean and well-pressed.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Asshole.”

  “You eating?” Barnes asked.

  “No. I need some serious sack time. You need a ride home?”

  Barnes told Hunter that he would walk home to clear the mind and stretch the already aching muscles. He took a warm shower after he got home. His body had stove up tight, and he could see in the shower’s shaving mirror that his eye would swell but not discolor. After the shower, he lay in bed and drifted in his loss. He fell asleep to the hushed sounds of shadows moving across the wood floors of his house.

  Chapter Three

  WEDNESDAY

  Only his ghosts stood in the room. They had lined themselves along the far wall and watched silently as Barnes studied each of their faces. Barnes stood tense and motionless except for the movement of his eyes and his head. His tension loosened when he came to Horndyke’s face with the almost-dumb smile.

  They had returned from the Idaho fires the previous summer looking forward to a couple of days off. A couple of days to reattach themselves to lovers and friends and children. Run a load of wash, shower two or three times, and shampoo once more to scrub the last few weeks of fire from their bodies. Eat a meal with friends and be able to enjoy the taste and not simply consume the food. Pay the overdue bills and clean the refrigerator of soured milk and composted vegetables. In White’s case, come to find his girlfriend had cleaned out the joint bank account and had split to Los Angeles with her previous boyfriend. Or in Hunter’s case, come home to find that his wife, unable to withstand the temptation of a single three-thousand-dollar check floating softly inside the grasp of her fingers, had bought a new Ford Thunderbird.

  Most slept on the plane ride home and almost all slept on the bus ride from the airport south of town. They unloaded all of their gear, gathered for a short discussion between Barnes and Chandler and Hunter about the crew’s performance in Idaho, refilled their water bottles in case they were called out in the night, exchanged worn tool files and head lamps and gloves for new ones, and left for the showers and a beer or ten. The sawyers stayed for an extra hour to strip and clean their Stihls. They cleaned the tracks of their bars with the cutting edge of P-38 can openers and blew the housings dry with an air hose, exchanged their worn files for new ones, and replaced the chains and spark plugs and air filters on their saws. Then they also left the crew’s cache and compound a couple blocks from the university for home or the bars.

  Many of them met that evening at the Rio for margaritas and Mexican beer. Barnes walked in about seven o’clock thinking much of his crew would be there and having something of note to tell them. He heard a shout as he opened the restaurant’s door, Chandler’s shout following a tequila screamer, what Chandler named a Jose Cuervo hooker chased with a cathartic yell. The usual din momentarily ceased in the bar except for Freddie Fender singing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” over the stereo system. The yell’s echoing waves subsided and people returned to their drinks and conversations. Barnes weaved his way between college girls in tight skirts and fraternity boys in muscle shirts toward the scream’s epicenter.

  Chandler, Aggie, Kapell, Ira, and Horndyke stood hunched over the far end of the tiled counter that divided the bar in half. Five empty shot glasses and five bottles of beer in various states of emptiness and a scavenged platter of chicken nachos scattered the counter in front of them.

  Aggie saw Barnes first. She waved. “Barnes, you rutting around with the grunts tonight?” She pulled an empty stool next to her for Barnes to sit on.

  “Just a couple of beers to drown the Idaho dust.”

  “A Sol, right?” Chandler asked and waved down a waitress. “A Sol and a shot for my friend.”

  “As long as I don’t have to listen to another scream,” the waitress answered.

  “From Barnes?”

  “From anyone.”

  “Just cutting loose a little, sweetheart.”

  The waitress leveled her eyes. “Don’t sweetheart me, Chandler.”

  “Okay. No screamers, unless of course you’re free after your shift.”

  “Chandler, you’re lucky you’re cute,” the waitress said.

  “Oh, darling, you’re making me blush.”

  “Shut up and order.”

  “A Sol for my friend.”

  “And another round here,” Horndyke added.

  “Of shots or beer?” the waitress asked.

  “Beer,” said Aggie.

  “And shots,” added Horndyke. He wore his lucky T-shirt, BALL-U printed across its front. He was a forestry student at Ball State in Indiana.

  Horndyke was the only one besides Barnes not wearing a crew T-shirt—cream colored with a red feather on the left breast and RED FEATHER HOT SHOTS printed in an arc above it. Another feather caught in the blaze of a flame stretched across the shoulder blades of the shirt’s back with the single word FIRE stenciled beneath. Barnes wore a white button-down shirt and, like the rest of them, Levi’s. He only wore his crew T-shirt on duty.

  Chandler had pushed the sleeves of his T-shirt up on his biceps, as he tended to do when he became serious in his drinking. On his right arm, he wore a thinning tattoo of a poker hand, aces and eights.

  “How many shots you guys have?” Barnes asked.

  “One,” Kapell answered. “Two for Chandler. He’s figuring he may need tequila goggles tonight. Beer goggles just won�
�t do it.” He pointed toward a couple of women sitting nearby with hair a couple of stories high and denim dresses a couple sizes too small. The combination made them look as though their dresses had squeezed their bodies up through their hair. The amount of make-up they wore made it nearly impossible to tell exactly how they looked, but, as Kapell whispered confidentially, “Those two are long on ugly.”

  “The man’s a pig,” Aggie said, shaking her head.

  Kapell looked at her as though she had meant him.

  “Yeah, you too,” she said.

  “Just be thankful he ain’t studying you,” Kapell laughed. He nudged Aggie with his elbow, but not hard because Aggie stood his height and carried his weight and packed a much meaner punch.

  “If he were studying me,” she answered, “that would be the last book he’d ever open.” Aggie drank from her beer. She could match any man other than Chandler at twelve-ounce curls, as the rookies all found out during the crew’s end-of-training party in May.

  “They’re beginning to look awful nice,” Chandler said. “Just a few more and they’ll look like my dreams.”

  “Slut,” Aggie said.

  “Can’t deny it,” Chandler said. “I’m sleeping in some sweet baby’s arms tonight,” he added and lifted his glass over the counter between them.

  Kapell raised his glass to meet Chandler’s and said, “Here’s to the Red Feather, those hardy sons of bitches. They wipe their ass with broken glass and laugh because it itches.”

  Barnes smiled as the five drank the rest of their beers.

  The waitress put the refills on the counter. “To your tab, Chandler?” she asked.

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “I had a good day at the office, honey. And if these guys don’t pay me back, I’ll work it out of them in sweat and tears.”

  Ira, not the most experienced person on the crew but still the oldest besides Barnes, nodded toward Barnes, “I’m not so certain us old boys can keep up.” He tipped his bottle toward Barnes.

  “I’m not so certain this old boy wants to,” Barnes answered and met Ira’s bottle top with his own.

  “It’s going to be a good night, Barnes,” Horndyke said, wearing the smile Barnes swore signaled the man was a couple of Milk Duds short of an entire box. Horndyke’s eyes hid under the shadow of his ballcap and behind the round of his reddened cheeks. He added, “Budd and Doobie and Dago are coming down later.”

  “I wouldn’t go too hard,” Barnes said.

  “Why’s that?” Chandler asked. His tone dropped a notch into the serious. He had been with Barnes for four years, two as a squad foreman, and recognized certain signs in Barnes’s voice.

  Barnes sipped his beer, then placed it back on the tiled counter. He wiped his mouth and wished that he had time for a couple more bottles. “I talked with dispatch a half-hour ago,” he said. “Eastern Washington has a red flag warning posted, five good fires already in Chelan and the Entiat Valley and dry lightning hitting the area again tonight. She said from what she’s heard that we can expect a call.”

  “Ka-ching, ka-ching,” Aggie said. “I hear my bank account registering big bucks.”

  “I knew we’d hit a thousand hours again this year,” Kapell said. “What do we have now?”

  “More than two hundred,” said Chandler. “So we’ll hit a thousand overtime easy if Southern Cal burns this fall.”

  “Keep ’em coming. Papa needs a brand new car.”

  “Don’t get ahead of things,” Barnes said evenly. “Let’s just take what we get and enjoy the trip.”

  “Damn,” said Horndyke, pushing the ballcap up on his forehead. He frowned and held the amber bottle of Negro Modelo beer between his hands. “I kind of wanted a party night. I was feeling lucky tonight.”

  “Give me a break,” Aggie said.

  Barnes shook his head. “I’d finish these and hit the sack,” he said, then drank from his beer but left the tequila alone.

  “Hell, Barnes, I just came out here for a little fun,” Horndyke said.

  “I don’t take drunks on fires.” He spoke firmly but with a smile. He understood how enjoyable a night out after twenty days spent on fires could be. He had counted the flight between the Oregon and Idaho fires as a day of paid rest and when asked about how fresh his crew was he reported them rested and well.

  “Yes, boss,” said Kapell in a minstrel voice.

  Horndyke pouted a little more, then said, “I guess this just means we’ll have more money for next time.”

  “I’m getting something to eat, then heading home,” said Kapell.

  “Oh, hell,” said Aggie. “You can eat in November.”

  “And sleep when you’re dead,” Chandler added.

  Barnes left them then. He had hoped to find Lopez with them. She usually joined Aggie for beers at the Rio. They formed antithetical images when they entered a bar together. Aggie had swimmer’s shoulders as wide as a man’s and arms and thighs heavily muscled. She stood as tall as most men and wore her ash-colored hair down when not on a fire. She looked like an Amazon standing next to Lopez, who was small with soft brown skin and long black hair, turbid eyes, and a soft mouth that smiled.

  Barnes had not had the opportunity to be alone with Lopez since the season had begun to roll. He wished he could have spent some time with her that night.

  The dispatcher’s telephone call came a few hours later, after Barnes had fallen asleep, dreaming of the set of almond-shaped eyes and the slow curve of the mouth, the soft illusions which formed the parts of her face. He woke quickly and completely and sat on the edge of his bed to answer the phone. He kept a pad of paper and pencil next to the phone and his fingers automatically picked up the pencil.

  In a faint and low undertone, Barnes repeated the dispatcher’s words as he transcribed them: “Wenatchee National Forest. . . . Entiat Valley Complex. . . . Probably Oklahoma Gulch Fire. How large?” He clicked his pencil for more lead. “Two hundred acres and running in brush and pine and spotting. . . . Loveland–Fort Collins Airport at 4 a.m.”

  He read the information back to the dispatcher and thanked her for calling. He wrote down the time—1:12—from the luminescent numbers on his clock.

  “Hot-damn,” he said aloud.

  Before showering he called Hunter and Chandler. He also called the pager service. That completed the root habit following a fire call, the objective business that formed the first few minutes.

  A rush of adrenaline, wholly expected and welcomed, punctured his initially prosaic and methodical reaction and pulsed through him as he stood under the shower’s spray. He soaped his body quickly and rinsed, standing with his hands against the wall of the shower on either side of the shower head and letting the stream of water rain on him. He felt his body running like its choke had stuck open.

  Barnes loved his job. He loved fighting wildfires. Everything about it. The camaraderie of a hot shot crew, the adrenaline rush and the risk of tragedy, the long hours with his head in the dust and the dirt and smoke, the knowledge that a banker or a politician or a college professor could not do this and survive the first day, the end of the day and standing on a ridgetop and watching the fire creep or run toward you and your line and seeing that fire stopped then by what you did.

  As much as fighting a wildfire, Barnes liked the anticipation of one. Once on the fire, often things would again level out—the size-up, the attack, the mop-up. Every fire had its own personality and its own rhythm, but they seldom matched the sudden jolt from routine that immediately followed a dispatch. The world suddenly shrank in size and transformed with its center inside a fire’s flame.

  Barnes finished the shower, looked over his gear one last time to make certain he had repacked everything in his war bag. He checked the crew manifests. His world again slid into the ordinary of recurrent preparations. The adrenaline would return once he saw the smoke column rising into the air as a pillared stain against the sky.

  By the time Barnes had driven from his home across town to the cache, Hunte
r had already arrived and was seated at Barnes’s desk taking telephone calls. Hunter sat back in the chair and crossed his feet on top of Barnes’s desk. He wore green Nomex fire pants and his crew T-shirt, and his White’s boots hung unlaced. His red war bag braced the wall next to the desk alongside his line pack, his hardhat and yellow fire shirt stacked on top. The coffee pot grumbled across the room on Chandler’s desk with Stress and George seated nearby, empty cups in their hands and their heads dropped to their chests.

  Barnes nodded toward Stress and George after he leaned his briefcase against the desk.

  “Just tired,” Hunter said. “Stress said he’d just started taking off his pants when the pager went off. They’ll be fresh when we land.”

  “They don’t have a choice.”

  Barnes leaned forward to look at the roster sheet. All of the names had checks next to them except Lopez. “Lo-girl not call in?”

  “No.”

  “You call her at home?”

  “Just now. Not there.”

  Barnes sighed. He took his coffee cup over to Chandler’s desk to wait with Stress and George for a moment.

  Within minutes the crew began straggling in, none of them anywhere near bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but none of them falling-down-drunk. Warner walked into the cache office, his eyes blinking awake. He stumbled toward the coffee maker like an old man looking for his spectacles.

  White tripped over his own bootlaces as he entered the room. “That bitch,” he slurred.

  “What now?” asked Hunter.

  “She took all my money and split to California.”

  “What the hell you talking about?”

  “While we was in Idaho, she emptied the bank account and split on me.”

  Barnes asked, “You had a joint account with your girlfriend of, how long, a month?”

  “Yeh.”

  Hunter said, “Does the word stupid mean anything to you?”

  “Oh, man, I need a lawyer.”

  “You need a good fire so you can pay for a lawyer.”

  Ira called from the coffee pot, “What you need now, son, is coffee. Come and partake in this delight. A robust yet mellow bean.”