Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and stared at Ira.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got carried away with the moment.”
Chandler was next to enter the harsh glare of the office’s fluorescent. He stood in the doorway squinting and rubbing his face with both hands.
Hunter laughed, “Rode hard?”
“Not even,” Chandler answered, “but I was sure-as-shit put away wet.”
Barnes said to Chandler, “Make certain the saws are purged and loaded. Let’s take one falling saw with us and extra bars and chains for the others.”
“Monterey’s right behind me,” Chandler said. “He’s the saw boss, he’ll take care of it. Right now I can’t do any heavy lifting.”
None of the people in the room said anything. They looked first at Barnes and then closely at Chandler still standing in the doorway, his legs spread wide.
“At this moment,” Chandler said with a disordered smile, “if it’s heavier than a cup of coffee or a can of beer, I can’t lift it.”
Dago held a full cup of coffee toward Chandler. “Here you go, big guy.”
Chandler took it and drank the cup down. “Jesus, that’s shitty coffee. Let me make some real-man’s coffee for you pups. You need something with attitude to jump-start these lazy-ass motors.”
“It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure,” Monterey said as he pushed past Chandler. “Fill me a cup of that attitude when it’s right,” he said to Sully, who stood with the others near the coffee pot watching Chandler dump handfuls of coffee into the maker’s top.
Monterey said to Barnes, “I’ll pull out the bars and chains and see they make it into the saw bag. Sully, you can purge the saws.”
Behind Monterey walked Budd and Lopez. Budd had a smile across his face, and he winked toward Horndyke as he entered the cache office. Lopez ignored Barnes.
The flight to Washington was straight and simple. The only sounds were snores and whispers. They landed in Wenatchee and boarded a Greyhound bus for the forty-five-minute drive along the Columbia River to base camp. While Barnes checked in at the plans tent, the crew filled their water bottles then ate breakfast. After a short briefing, they tooled out and waited at the heliport for their helicopter flights to a spike camp near the Oklahoma Gulch Fire.
With the ghosts of his crew fading before him into the morning’s new light, Barnes felt as though he danced through his mornings with these ghosts, always in step and never tripping, yet also never embracing in their slow sunlit waltz. He wanted to reach out for them and take them in. For a long while after the fire, he wanted to be one of them and sometimes he still thought he should be.
In the hours following the ghosts’ departure, he would catch his balance, sometimes quickly and sometimes gradually in broad degrees. Sometimes he felt as though he fell off balance. No issues had resolved and a morning would push on toward afternoon in a nervous jag. That Wednesday, though, the day moved in the slow waltz left from the dance with his spirits. His ghosts had left, but in their leaving a shaded presence remained that accompanied Barnes through the day. They were with him over the newspaper and yet another article on the tragedy fire of the previous season, and then at the long stoplights along College Avenue, in the stores and on the concrete sidewalks and brick walkways of downtown, at home as he wrote letters, and with him again while he sat on his porch with the afternoon sun still hours from falling behind the Front Range.
Earlier, soon after lunch, he got a phone call from the father of Max Downey. Downey’s voice rose like a violent sun, hard and inflexible as he confronted Barnes. He threw the same questions at Barnes—“Tell me what happened,” he would always ask, but the question was joined by an assaulting plea to not indict his son. “Will you testify in court?” he would ask. “But only tell the truth I want to hear,” he would leave unsaid. And again Barnes told Downey that he saw no reason to go to court.
Downey’s voice tightened, “You don’t give a shit, do you?”
“A lot of people made mistakes. Your son included,” Barnes sighed flatly.
He absently traced across the unfolded pile of washed clothes littering his bed. He looked up and searched his room for some definite illumination, something to hold with his mind.
He found the necklace Lopez wore, a rosary of wooden beads from which she had removed the cross. He could see her as the pyric fire burned over her, in the second between when she knew she would die and when she did die. He could see her hand reach instinctively for the loop of metal links joining the wood beads smaller even than piñon nuts. Her fingers searching in vain for the relic of her religion in that single lustrum second. And then only her, curled into herself on the empty and swept fane of the hillside.
Barnes trailed the short length of the rosary where it hung on a supporting post for his mirror, where Lopez had placed it the last night she had slept with him. He had thought of returning it to her in the days following that night as last year’s crew gathered for their two weeks of training. He had thought of returning it but he had not. It remained with him as some people keep a song’s melody in their ear. He kept it and she had burned without it and now he kept it with a sense of shadowy dependence.
“You son of a bitch.” Downey’s words damned him. “You’re still alive and you don’t care about them, do you? You son of a bitch.”
An expanding, frozen silence wedged between them. Barnes could feel his ghosts hovering, listening over his shoulder. Their presence cooled the room and Barnes closed his body. On the other end of the telephone, Downey waited with his own ghost. Barnes felt the other man attempting to reach inside him and draw from him some enclosed fiber. Barnes felt the man’s furious pull as he listened to the incentive breathing of Downey.
Finally Downey spoke again, his voice less commanding but more condemning, “You weren’t even there last weekend. We thought we’d see you then, at the commemoration of the trail, but you’re so damned gutless you wouldn’t even show for that. You haven’t been back, have you?”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere. I’ve told you I can’t help you.”
“My wife lost her youngest son. You are a bastard, you know that? My boy died up there and people think he caused all those deaths.” His voice broke and suddenly another voice replaced it, a more tired and defeated voice of the same man. “Is it that easy for you? Knowing that a dozen of your crew burned along with my boy. Have you found it that easy to let go?”
Barnes said nothing.
“You really haven’t been back, have you?” demanded Downey.
Barnes clenched his eyes tight to remove any trace of image or memory behind the violent orange-black of his closed eyelids. His free hand balled into a fist and if he had had someone to hit he would have, but instead he shook with the tension of his muscles. He said slowly and deliberately, “What the hell do you want me to say, Mr. Downey? Your son was the IC. He decided on the plan of attack and took half my crew into that canyon. They all died. They died because a lot of people made wrong decisions and because the fire and the weather and the land all conspired against us, but we did it wrong. Me and your son and others. We did it wrong.”
“You’re a bastard,” Downey said and hung up.
Barnes stood in a whirlwind, thoughts cascading around him with a spinning gyre. He thought of the lowest cross, Chandler’s cross, the cross farthest from the safety of the ridgetop. A white concrete cross maybe two feet into the air, just as high as the top of his knee. WALKER CHANDLER engraved in bold script across the horizon of the cross. RED FEATHER HOT SHOTS engraved below that. From Chandler’s cross, Barnes could see the other thirteen crosses, the eleven of his crew, and those for Max Downey and Russell Fleming, the smokejumpers. He could see the ragged trail of crosses like a horrible connect-the-dots pattern in the gray dirt of the hill. He could see where Dago and Sully died together, Dago possibly trying to crawl under the deployed fire shelter Sully had prayed would save his life but did not. Other groups of two or three crosse
s marking the bodies. And there alone, the cross for Lopez, a half-dozen feet from anyone else’s cross. The crosses stood as an unbreachable boundary between here and there, an impossible counterpoint.
Impaled by the ghosts of those cement crosses, Barnes spent the whole of that Wednesday afternoon watching a broken memory where they died in fetal curls, perished in their youth and hugging their earth for protection.
Lopsided slants of waning sunlight spread across the bedroom. Sometime during the afternoon, following the height of his mind storm, he realized that he had lain out across the length of one of those slants of light on the hardwood floor of his front room. He had been shaking but had warmed himself in the sun.
He wanted something simple. He boiled water and brewed a cup of tea, twisting and straining the tea bag around a spoon, then cupping the warm tea bag in his hands and holding it close to his mouth and nose to embrace the warmth of the scented steam rising from it. He drank that cup of tea, then mowed his lawn and changed the oil in his truck and turned his compost pile. He brewed another cup of tea to wait out the day in the sun of his porch.
Barnes sat holding the cup of tea on his leg. Again, the telephone rang inside his house but Barnes let the machine answer. He heard a voice talking but did not care to listen. The spring sunshine felt pleasant and the chatter of Tri-pod from the lower branches of an American elm held his attention. He grew sleepy in the sun. He placed the tea on the wood floor of the porch and extended his legs, folding his arms across his chest and resting his head against the wall behind him. He slipped leisurely to the edge of sleep until Call brought Grace home from kindergarten.
Call, dressed in denim shirt and Levi’s and wearing a worn Stetson, waved to Barnes as though waving away smoke.
Barnes’s hand paused before returning the wave. He watched across the connected yards, separated only by a waist-high fence with strands of ivy winding up and around the posts and boards. A silence held around Barnes for a minute as he watched Call walk deliberately around the car’s front to help Grace from her seat. Call stood tall and straight and broad-shouldered, but his movements were slowed with the wounds of war and age, and he used the car as a cane when he unbent.
The silence which hovered around Barnes like a sheltered pocket broke with Grace’s young voice. “Barnes,” she called and waved and ran.
Barnes sat up and stretched but he did not leave his seat. He watched Grace run from the car parked at the curb, along the sidewalk, jumping across the cracks, and then turning for the last dozen feet and up the stairs to where he sat. He felt a sudden rush of panic as he watched her run toward him, but that disappeared within her smile as she closed.
“Look what I have,” Grace said. She held a piece of paper in her hand and held it out for Barnes to take. Instead, he pulled her toward him and lifted her to sit on his lap. Then he looked at the paper.
Wisps and clusters of crayon reds, greens, and blues colored the heavy paper. “That’s wonderful,” Barnes said, turning the paper over to see what it looked like with the top side down. “That’s nice. Is it a house?”
“No, silly, it’s a tree. See.” She held the picture at arm’s length and studied it herself. “See. It’s our yard and trees and the sky and this,” she pointed her small finger at an arcing series of reds. “This is the sun.”
“A red sun?”
“Mandy had the yellow so I made it red. And you told me about how smoke turns the sun red.”
“Yes, sometimes it does. Can I have the picture or are you giving it to your mother?”
“No.” She leaned into Barnes and cupped a hand between her mouth and his ear, her breath warm and fluid as she added, “I’m putting it in my secret place.”
Barnes whispered back, turning his face to her ear, “Where is your secret place?” She smelled of soft youth and uncluttered innocence.
Grace huffed at Barnes’s ignorance and looked at him with a get-real slant to her mouth. She said, “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”
“No. I guess it wouldn’t.” Barnes looked up and nodded to Call, who walked slowly to join Grace and him on the porch. The old man held his unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth, which slanted his smile and creased the skin around one eye. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs to turn and watch what almost became an accident.
A car drove past on Loomis and would have run the stop sign had another car not beat him into the intersection on Mountain, the crossing street. A lean wind stirred the trees and the sun fell lightly on Grace’s golden hair.
“It’s in the basement,” Grace whispered.
“Your secret place?”
“Yes. It’s like a little room but it doesn’t have any lights so I take my flashlight down there with me. I don’t think anybody else knows about it because the door is so small, but I can get in. I think ghosts used to live there.”
“Ghosts? Do you believe in ghosts?”
Grace did not immediately answer Barnes’s question. She turned her picture over in her hands as she talked. She said softly, “Ghosts of other kids. I haven’t seen them but I know they’re there. I go down there with Harp and play sometimes.”
Call climbed the steps and stood facing Barnes. He sighed loudly. Grace slid from Barnes’s lap, her conspiracy broken, and hugged Call’s leg. He placed a hand on her shoulder to return her hug.
“Oh, darling,” Call said as he hugged Grace’s head against his jeans. “You had best never run away because these old legs will never catch you.”
Call sat in a wicker chair across from Barnes, and Grace sat on the porch’s top step. “How you doing this day?” Call asked Barnes.
“Just enjoying it.”
“There’s plenty about the day to enjoy.” Call pulled from a coat pocket his roll of pipe tobacco. With a dexterity that belied his age, he scooped the tobacco into the pipe’s bowl and tamped it down with the closed end of his pocket knife. He lit the tobacco with a wooden match ignited on the seam of his jeans, and pulled softly at the pipe to blow a subtle plume of smoke into his lap.
“You look like you’re enjoying the day’s end yourself,” Barnes said, inhaling the slight drift of pipe tobacco. It reminded him of whiskey and leather and weathered wood.
“I am. I had me a fine day. Ruth is moping about the house, but me and Gracey-girl are doing fine.”
Grace raised her head from the picture she had laid on the wooden floor. Her smile passed from Call to Barnes and both men smiled back, captured for a moment as the sun landed softly along the little girl’s head and shoulders.
“I’m going to get Harp,” she said and stood.
“Don’t go inside the house,” Call said to her as she skipped down the steps.
“Why?” she stopped and asked.
“Because I asked you not to,” Call said.
“Why?” she asked again.
“Because . . . Gracey-girl,” Call leaned to sit closer to Grace, who stood on the stair’s bottom step, “just think about it.”
Grace did. She blinked and looked at her feet and turned and walked slowly. “Okay,” she said, then skipped into a run.
“And bring Harp right back here. Don’t go off on another of your walks.” She was nearly out of earshot as Call finished his instructions.
They both watched her dash off, the wind dancing her hair in the soft afternoon light. She was something to smile at, a girl so innocent that her motions and movements were tender and principal. Barnes did not think that, but he felt it as he smiled at Grace’s skipping shadow.
“I finally found an answer to the ‘Why’ question,” Call said to Barnes.
“I’ll try and remember that.”
The two men sat in the sun and the company of each other without speaking. They stared at cobwebs on the ceiling and watched another car pass on the road. Barnes let himself drift in the warmth. In the tender sun of that afternoon, their neighborhood seemed like a calm and controlled place, and Barnes bathed in that comfort.
Barnes aske
d, “Why is it your day was so good?”
“I beat The Rover three straight games.”
“Don’t you usually beat him?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“And that’s it?”
“I’ve had some mighty fine company this day. . . . And if you don’t quit your fishing, that’s going to end right quick.”
Barnes laughed and leaned back in his chair.
“If she’s not back in a couple of minutes, one of us is going to have to hunt her down,” Call said, turning to Barnes with the age lines around the corners of his eyes and mouth doing a light dance with his smile.
Barnes nodded without opening his eyes, “I’ll go.”
“Good man,” Call said.
Barnes rubbed his eyes open. After all the rain that had drenched Fort Collins that spring, the sunshine seemed unusually bright.
“I thought you might,” Call added and smiled, settling into his chair. The smile eventually faded from his face. He turned his head and spoke toward the street, not looking at Barnes and not really speaking to Barnes, “That son of a bitch Robert wouldn’t walk across the street to find her, his own daughter. I should have kicked his lousy butt the first night I met him. I felt like it then and I should have.”
Barnes let the dust settle around Call’s anger. He said, “Without him, you wouldn’t have Grace.” Barnes did not understand why he felt compelled to support Robert even so halfheartedly. He did not like the man any more than Call did and, like Call, thought Robert was Ruth’s one big mistake.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Call said with satiric scorn. He puffed feverishly on his pipe to bring it back alive and then brushed a honeybee from his sleeve. He took a moment to look through the smoke from his pipe, then said, “The thing about it is that his daughter is only five and she’s already twice the person he’ll ever be. He’s worth piss. I swear . . . either Ruth cheated on the bastard or he passed on some mutated gene to get a girl as good as her. Grace ain’t his, I swear.”
Barnes felt for the moment like he was standing on the rim of a volcano. He took a moment to step away from the fire. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He asked, “How is Ruth?”
After the Fire Page 8