After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  Barnes moved slowly past Hunter and Chandler. He paused a few steps away to catch his breath and loosen some of the tension in his muscles. He turned and walked back to stand with them. For a moment they all remained silent. Finally Barnes spoke to Chandler, “You better take another digger with you.”

  Chandler and Hunter turned to look at the crew. Chandler ran a finger under his gum and tossed the spent Copenhagen onto the ground. He retrieved his can from the back pocket and scooped another pinch. Whenever he had the time to think, he took a moment to replace his Copenhagen. It was a habit he had assimilated from Barnes a few years earlier. And even though Barnes had since quit dipping, Chandler still used the exercise as a praxis.

  Chandler thought out loud, “I’d be inclined to take Aggie, but she’s the best pulaski you have and you may need her if the digging gets hard along the ridgeline. Monterey and Ira got saws and George is a good shovel man. If I take Kapell, that leaves you with Aggie and Lopez as your pulaskis, and I wouldn’t curse you with two women. So I’ll take Lopez with me. She’ll ride in the first load.” He spat again and turned to Hunter. “Sound good?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Good. Let’s get this road on the show.”

  Chandler hit Hunter in the middle of his chest with a heavy tap and walked off to tell Lopez and to join Max Downey at the front of the line. Barnes noted how a change had become apparent in Chandler over the morning, how in the few hours since they woke Chandler had grown more accustomed to giving orders. His voice had developed authority and he approached the crewmembers with less familiarity. Barnes thought that was good, that Chandler had adopted his new position and was taking it seriously.

  White had disappeared into the staging area and Barnes turned his attention back to his crew. He felt a constriction in his throat and an ache in his left ear, and he knew that a cold was working its way into his body.

  He sat with a groan on the running board of a truck. He looked down the line of firefighters readying to board the helicopter and noted that none looked as tired as he felt. They were all young, some over twenty years younger than Barnes, and most were in better shape. What they had as a result of their youth that Barnes could feel slipping from his body was a resilience, an ability to bounce back more easily from days and nights of humping across ridges or slumped over to dig a line or mop up a stump hole. And even though they averaged only five or six hours of sleep a night, they had usually fallen asleep well before Barnes slid into his sleeping bag and woke an hour following him. He envied them their youth and wished he could be twenty again and just beginning his fire career.

  “Mount up,” Chandler said.

  “Vaya con Dios, amigo,” Hunter said.

  Chandler waved.

  The first load followed Chandler to the helicopter, 39D in large red stencil along the boom. Its rotors spun with a lazy surety as they stepped in, one following another. A helitack person carried the racks of tools and placed them under the back seat and then put the two chainsaws and Dolmars of fuel and oil in the boom compartment. Barnes could see Lopez and Budd sitting in the hellhole on the helicopter’s near side.

  With that first load of Red Feather Hot Shots aboard, the helicopter’s rotors swung faster, and the helicopter slowly lifted, then hovered and dipped and swung and flew off for the ridge.

  A whirlwind of dust tossed by the helicopter’s rotor wash swirled around Barnes. He dropped his head to his chest, pulled tight the collar of his shirt, and clenched his eyes against the dust storm. When he looked up, the helicopter had already begun its long climb to the ridge.

  Barnes looked at those who waited for the second load. For a moment he studied Warner. The sleeves of Warner’s Nomex shirt were rolled down, collar up and top button fastened, as they were supposed to be. Barnes had fought long and hard with Warner about basic safety, that he would be more likely to survive the fire following a crash if he had his Nomex covering him as much as possible. At first, Warner just replied that he’d probably die in the crash anyway; eventually, though, Warner followed practice.

  As the helicopter disappeared behind the ridge, Warner pulled the strap for his hardhat down below his chin. His safety glasses were already on. A glove was on his right hand and in the fingers of his ungloved left hand he rolled an ear plug. His line gear lay in a heap at his feet.

  Barnes thought of how Warner liked to carry an extra water bottle instead of his fire shelter in the shelter’s case strapped on his belt. He called out to Warner, asking where his fire shelter was.

  Warner laughed and answered, “For Christ-sake, Barnes, I already got a mother—it’s where it’s supposed to be.”

  Barnes started to reply, to ask to see the shelter in its case on Warner’s belt and not in Warner’s backpack. He even raised his arm toward Warner, but felt deflated by the notion of another small conflict. He sat back and thought, “Go ahead and burn up, you stupid bastard.”

  The helicopter returned to pick up the second load and again disappeared over the ridge. On its return for the last load, however, the Bell 212 veered south before approaching the landing pads and flew off to the southwest toward Grand Junction.

  A helitack woman walked over to Hunter and Barnes. She was dwarfed by her flight suit and helmet. Both men leaned down to hear her over the whine of other helicopters approaching and leaving the pads.

  “Thirty-nine D flew to Junction for a while,” she said.

  “Why?” Hunter asked. Like Barnes, his hands were on his hips as he leaned in toward her. A quick gust of rotor wash swirled dust around them and they all closed or covered their eyes as the dust dissipated.

  The helitack woman said, “To pick up somebody important who wants a look at the fires.”

  “Couldn’t they finish our shuttle first?”

  She shrugged. “You guys are only fighting the fire. What makes you think that’s more important than some asshole from Washington, DC?”

  “What crap.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Can we finish our shuttle with another ship?”

  “We’ll do that as soon as we get the other crews to their fires.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. We’re running low on pilot and helicopter hours, so we’ll see how everything shakes out. Your fire is low-low on the priority list.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Yes, but you’re not in charge of this cluster-fuck.” She shrugged again and walked off to the helitack tent.

  “What’s the word?” Aggie asked when Barnes and Hunter joined her and the rest of the squad.

  “Hurry and wait,” Hunter said.

  “Same old song,” she said, as she sat and pulled a paperback from her daypack. She turned so that the morning sun came over her shoulder onto the book.

  Monterey and Ira pulled the bars of their chainsaws onto their crossed legs and began sharpening the chains. George walked to the helitack tent to see if he could scrounge or steal a Pepsi and recent newspaper. “Heli-slugs always got some good shit lying around. I’ll just find me some.” Kapell lay on the ground next to Aggie with his head on his pack, pulled his hardhat over his eyes, put ear plugs in, and slept in the dust of the field. Hunter walked to the Port-a-Johns. Barnes looked up at the ridge and shook his head. He felt a tightening in his throat and stomach. He drank from his water bottle to wet his lips. For the first time in years he wished that he still chewed.

  Aggie put down her book and said, “Don’t be such a mother hen, Barnes.”

  Barnes smiled and nodded.

  Soon after two in the afternoon, Barnes and Hunter and the others boarded 39D to fly to the ridge. The morning had been a six-thousand-foot August morning with a cloudless sky, high and clear as a diamond, with thin air and the promise of an afternoon of oppressive heat. The fire that had been burning slowly, just grazing at the brush and grass, began to stretch and toss fingers of flame restlessly into the sky as if to catch the air. As the helicopter passed the fire’s flank on its ap
proach to the helispot on the ridge, Barnes watched a long flowering of flame spiral to the left.

  When 39D landed, Barnes led his crewmembers from the helicopter. He did not turn to watch the helicopter lift off from the ridge to return to fire camp as the others did. He walked to the edge of the hastily constructed helispot and looked down on the fire beginning to churn below him.

  The sky was then high and violent, and the wind was already changing. Barnes could feel the wind against his face. He heard it rush across the leaves and dirt of the ridgeline like a felon memory, a strong and hungry, dry-toothed wind. He suddenly felt removed from himself, watching himself as in a photograph on that ridge looking down into that canyon. He had landed in a raw place in the heat of summer.

  Sunrise, his house had not yet filled with daylight heat but Barnes lay drenched in sweat. He turned on his radio to listen to the news, a continued savagery in Africa, a continued unrest in the Middle East, a continued famine in Asia. Images of men and women caught in a snarl of pain flashed through the opaque borders of his consciousness. The weatherman promised a change, a sunny day with little chance of rain followed by a quickly passing dry cold front and increasing winds. He blinked and clutched his fists, holding against a swirling wind. At Coors Field the night before, the Rockies had split a close doubleheader with the Giants, winning 16 to 9 and losing 21 to 18. Like debris in a current, harrowed faces rushed across his mind.

  His eyes closed. His ghosts came from down the hall. They walked past his doorway. Each took a moment to look in on him. He saw them without opening his eyes and imagined them walking down the slope, walking like blind men walking. A tightening in his throat gripped him and he shook himself alert, his breathing tentative, his fingers shaking.

  The room was calm, no breeze even through the open window. Everything was motionless and silent as fear in a wide wilderness. The only sound he thought he heard was that of dry twigs and senescent grasses crunching under heavy boots.

  He lay in bed until the telephone rang at almost seven-thirty, and then he stayed there until Ruth’s voice came over the answering machine, “Barnes? Answer, Barnes. We have a mission.”

  Barnes pulled himself from his bed to pick up the telephone. “Mission?” he asked. “What kind of mission?”

  “My dad said he has another date this morning. I’ve got to find out what the hell he’s up to.”

  “Don’t you think that if he wanted you to know, he’d tell you?” He rotated his neck to rid some of the kinks and saw himself in the mirror looking like Lazarus on the last day.

  Ruth said, “Don’t be so damn puritanical. Of course it’s snooping. I know that, but after all, I’m his daughter. I have a right.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. You sound like you were born in the Northeast.”

  “All right, let’s not get personal.”

  “So, you with me?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you do. But I’ll never cook any more cinnamon rolls if you don’t come with me.”

  “This may take more than cinnamon rolls.”

  “I don’t have time to barter. He’s downstairs getting Grace ready for school. As soon as he’s driven off, we’ll hop in your truck and follow him.”

  “My truck’s a little conspicuous for this sort of thing.”

  “Okay, my car. But you drive.”

  “Do I have time to shower?”

  “No. Just get dressed and keep watch out your window.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye.

  He dressed in Levi’s, Chuck Taylor’s, and a Fat Tire T-shirt, made himself a strong cup of coffee, and stood watching out the front room window for Call and Grace to walk to their car. When they did, Barnes hurriedly brushed his teeth and was out the door before they had rounded the street corner.

  Ruth had already backed her Volvo from the garage. She got out to let Barnes behind the wheel and then skipped around to sit in the passenger seat.

  “We know he’ll take her to school first, so we can wait down the street from that.”

  They drove down Mountain Avenue a couple of blocks behind Call and Grace.

  Ruth was dressed similar to Barnes in jeans and T-shirt. In her lap she held a pair of binoculars and a newspaper.

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “Damn right, I am.”

  “No guilt?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the burr that’s got you so worked up?”

  “He’s had dates with women before and never been as secretive as this. Something’s up.”

  “Like?”

  “Like I don’t know. That’s why we’re doing this.”

  They followed Call to the elementary school, waited for him to leave off Grace, then followed him again back downtown where he parked and walked to a coffee shop. They parked across the street from Call and watched him through the Volvo’s front windshield. He entered the coffee shop, sat at a window table, and opened his newspaper.

  “Convenient of him to sit there,” Ruth said, peering through her binoculars at the window.

  “Maybe too convenient,” Barnes said with a poor Russian accent.

  She put down the glasses and frowned, “Who are you—Boris Bad-accent?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Just pay attention.”

  After a few minutes, a man joined Call at his table. They shook hands, talked for a moment, then the man placed a small box on the table.

  “The Rover,” Ruth said.

  During their talks on the porch, Call had told Barnes about The Rover. His real name was Billy Rinaldi and he had been in the war with Call. In Vietnam he had been wounded when a mine had exploded near him, and since then he wore a metal plate in his skull. He was eighteen when Call sent him as point on a patrol to meet the end of his youth. Rinaldi had had a dog named Rover when he was young, and after returning from the war with a section of his brain replaced by metal, he answered only to the dog’s name. The Rover had his own house, but spent the length of each day walking through Fort Collins, beginning most days with a cup of coffee and a game of dominoes with Call.

  A young girl sat at another window table. Until her mother joined her, Barnes wondered if the girl had skipped school. The girl took off her hat, and Barnes could see the patchwork of her hair, as though she were molting. The girl ignored the stares of others, and Barnes wondered at her strength. Why a girl so young had to suffer that, and how a girl so young drew such courage.

  Nearly an hour later, The Rover left and Call sat with himself, his coffee, and his newspaper. He worked leisurely at the coffee and newspaper, alternating his attention between the two, enjoying each, it seemed to Barnes, as though they were intended as separate courses of a meal. Barnes drew his own comfort in watching Call with his morning ritual. Call’s ease warmed him. At the same time, however, the thought of intrusion pinched at him.

  “This isn’t right,” Barnes said abruptly as Ruth held the binoculars to her eyes. He interrupted a silence of more than fifteen minutes that had lasted since The Rover had exited the café.

  “Oh, Barnes,” Ruth said as though beginning a much longer sentence, but it ended there with her breath.

  “I’m going over to ask him,” Barnes said.

  “Ask him?”

  “Yes, ask him.” He reached for the door lever and Ruth put her hand on his shoulder.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Why are men the way they are?”

  “What?”

  “You’re repeating yourself.”

  “Just the word is all.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. What was it you wanted to know?”

  She scratched at a loose hair that had fallen across her brow, putting it back in place behind her ear. Barnes followed her fingers. He felt young and lonely, and he reached a finger over to help her fix her hair.

 
She smiled and asked again, “Why are men the way they are?”

  “Because of women, I suppose.”

  “No. Why can’t you guys just tell us about yourselves, tell us when something is happening inside of you. You make everything such a guessing game.”

  Barnes sat back in the seat, resting himself against the leather upholstery. He smiled, “I guess, I don’t know, because maybe we are more comfortable with ourselves, more comfortable trying to work things through before passing them on to others.”

  “Comfort?” Ruth asked and shook her head. Strands of hair again slid down along her cheek.

  “It’s like the therapist they wanted me to see after the fire last year. I went once but all she did was ask questions. I have plenty of my own, more important and more difficult than the ones she was asking. I mean, what I wanted were answers, not more questions. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “And so you think women are like, or want to be like, therapists and place men on a couch?”

  “Something like that. Or maybe put us underneath a microscope to see how we tick.”

  “What makes you think that’s what we want?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me, you’re the one asking all the questions.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Just trying to help.”

  “What do you know?”

  “We’re simple animals, baby, not that complex. Nuts and bolts, duct tape and baling wire.”

  “What do you know?”

  “What do I know? After all, I’m just a man.”

  “Shut up. Look.” She pointed through the car’s window at the coffee shop where Call had been joined by a woman. Ruth put the binoculars back to her eyes.

  A car pulled into the parking space next to theirs. The driver gave Ruth a double take as he left his car, and Barnes suddenly felt very small.

  Ruth spoke slowly through her concentration. “She’s tall and well-dressed. I’ve never seen her before but she obviously knows Daddy very well. They’re holding hands on top of the table. They’re talking serious. She’s let go of his hand and is getting something out of her bag. Who is she?”