That was four years earlier when Warner had joined the Red Feather Hot Shots as one of only two true rookies along with Dago. He nearly peed his pants the first time he saw a good hot flame front up Twenty-Five Mile Creek near Lake Chelan, Washington. He was scared that first time and, like most other firefighters, he remained a little afraid. But he was a fighter. His health was good, his body tall and strong. His will and his interest excellent. Warner had hoped that one day, one day before he left firefighting, he would be tested.
Barnes fingered the button on his radio. Voices moved from the receiver yet were silenced within the echo of soundless air swirling around him, displaced by him as he walked from body to body as though entering the dead-air depths of a tunnel, each step removing him farther from the light, his eyes adjusting and readjusting to the darkness and him praying he would not be able to see that which he saw.
He looked down the fireline for a long time. The sun warmed his back, and the remnants of that afternoon’s wind tossed errant eddies around his boots. The world paused and waited. He walked to the next body.
From Warner to Doobie and Stress next to each other seventy-five feet below Warner, to Horndyke close to them, to Lopez alone and curled into herself, to Freeze almost embracing a smokejumper named Fleming whom Barnes did not know, to Earl and Hassler together, to Budd still holding on to his chainsaw, to Sully to Dago to Max Downey to Chandler at the bottom of the line nearly three hundred feet from the ridgeline and within a hope of the diamond area that was not a safety zone after all.
More even than the sight of their bodies, he remembered the smells. The odor of burnt flesh still gagged him, and he remembered looking on and smelling them. At night, in his sleep, it was their sight that haunted him, but during the daylight he inhaled the hovering smell.
Call sat in a wicker chair facing Barnes, who leaned against the porch railing. Call had heard the story before, but he listened again, knowing from his own life that healing is often possible only in the telling of the tale. Call’s pipe perched easily and unlit from the corner of his mouth as he watched Barnes speak.
Barnes said, “I realized something then. I realized that nature is indiscriminate. I realized how easily the tragic happens. I don’t know that I learned anything other than that.” He paused. “Is that what I should have learned?”
“This wasn’t a lesson for you,” Call said. He filled his pipe with tobacco and tapped the tobacco tight inside the bowl of his pipe. “It wasn’t done for your understanding.”
Barnes nodded.
Call struck a match on the seam of his jeans. Barnes watched the slight tremor to the man’s hands, lined and scarred with road maps of life. Call had been born on his family’s ranch in North Park. He had lived a good life. He went to college and became an apprentice scholar and then a warrior in Vietnam and then a university teacher and historian and then a father and grandfather.
Call’s hands had met the springs which began the Poudre River, had known wheat stalks rising into the sun, had known dry earth and wet soil. They escorted him and reached out to share him with others. They caught the wind and tested the river and scraped the dirt. They knew the past and offered a faith in their embrace for the future. Years earlier in their first handshake, Barnes knew that in Call was a man he would like. His hand pulsed with life when they shook.
“After we have made our histories,” Call breathed, “we have to learn to live with them, to grow at ease with them. We need to become at ease with our lives and our dead.”
“But I still keep thinking something.”
“And you’ll keep thinking something until it drives you crazy. Believe me, I know. You didn’t send people up on that ridge to be killed, but I did. I know all those somethings you keep thinking.”
Barnes let out a breath. “Max Downey’s father wants me to testify that his son didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. As much, at least, as anyone else.”
“He wants you to lie?”
“No. He believes his son was a good man, and he was. But he wants something official that says so.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can’t testify for him. Not because I don’t want to lie for his son’s sake but because he needs to understand that a lot of people, myself included as well as Max, did some wrong things. If anything positive is to be taken from this, then we all, Max and I and others, have to shoulder our burdens.”
“No one to blame?”
“No one to blame and everyone to blame,” Barnes said. He looked from Call to the planter Ruth and Grace had weeded earlier in the week. There was no longer any freshness to the turned soil but all of the weeds had been gleaned from the flower bed. A six-inch strand of snow-on-the-mountain lay limp in the grass near the planter.
“You going to keep doing this?” Call asked. He puffed on his pipe and looked through the column of smoke at Barnes.
“Do what?”
“Keep fighting fires?”
“Can’t sing or dance,” Barnes said. “The funny thing about this job is that I’m fulfilling a prophecy in doing it.” He waited for Call to tilt his head in anticipation before explaining. “In high school one day I was working on my car, trying to work on my car, actually, because I wasn’t fixing anything. Didn’t even know exactly what was wrong. My father comes out of the house, pulling on his jacket and mumbling to himself. Within twenty minutes he had the problem fixed and the hood shut. Before he walked back inside, he turned to me and said, and I remember this distinctly. He said that I’d never amount to a thing if I couldn’t fix my own car, that the best I’d do in life is to be a ditch digger. And, by God, that’s just what I do on the fireline.”
“Goddamn,” Call said and raised himself from the wicker chair. “But aren’t we feeling sorry for ourselves tonight?”
Barnes fought the sudden heat of anger. He liked Call as much as any man he had ever met and did not want his words just then to form a gap between them, so he stood and breathed steadily but did not take his eyes from Call’s.
“You think I’m just feeling sorry for myself?” Barnes asked evenly.
“What I think you’re doing is what I did a long time ago after my war. You’re trying to impose a reason, a theoretical or metaphysical or theosophical reason for what happened. A chaos happened and you need an order to apply to it. But, son, there isn’t one. . . . Yes, I think you’re feeling sorry for yourself. What I really think, though, is that what happened on that fire, on that hill, on that day gone bad, is either going to make you a goddamn good man or it’s going to break you. Right now you’re teetering on the precipice, a hazardous place to stand, and you’ll go one way or the other. You’ll either fall or you’ll step away. It’s up to you, son.”
Barnes smiled in spite of himself. “Give it to me straight, Call. Don’t hold back now.”
“Barnes, you’re demanding a perfection in a world that is too imperfect. I know. I’ve been there. I have lived my adult life in the shadow of 1965. I have lived my life knowing how easy it would be to let my past rule my future. If I had let that happen, I would not have Ruth or Grace. I would not have had a life at all. That does not mean that I still don’t wake up in the middle of the night. It means that I have tried to be the best man that I can. That’s your choice, son. That’s your choice.”
Call tapped Barnes on the shoulder. “It’s a helluva cross you’re carrying and damn soon you’ll need to let it down.” He stretched his back and walked inside his house.
Barnes hesitated for a moment before following. He let the screen door swing shut, then opened it again and trailed Call into the front room where Ruth sat wiping a tear from her eye.
Before his eyes completely adjusted to the room’s light, he heard Call ask, “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Ruth answered, “Robert called. I just finished talking with him.”
Barnes saw Call’s hands ball into fists and work in those fists as though kneading
his palms. A coldness invaded the room.
Ruth wiped her eyes again and tossed her head back to throw her hair away from her face. She blinked hard a couple of times and sniffed and held her chin high and forward, and Barnes could just hear Call as a young man telling his baby daughter with the scraped knee to “buck up.”
But Call said nothing to his daughter.
Ruth continued, “He said that he wouldn’t be back home for a while. That he needed to figure some things out. That he still loves me, but he just needs to figure out some things.”
“I don’t know what to call it, but that sure as hell isn’t love,” Call said. He sat next to his daughter and took her in his arms.
Ruth laid her head in the hollow of Call’s shoulder.
“You okay, Mommy?” Grace asked. She stood next to Barnes in the room’s doorway. She was dressed for sleep in her ballerina pajamas, and she held a tattered blue blanket about the size of a large pillow, her “Gi-Gi” she called it. She stood pigeon-toed next to Barnes with an uncertainty. With one hand she held the Gi-Gi to her face, and with the other she reached out to hold on to the pocket of Barnes’s jeans, waiting for some sign from her mother.
“Oh, baby,” Ruth said. She turned to hold her arms wide for Grace to walk into. “I’m okay, just a little sad is all.”
Grace walked into Ruth’s arms, and they hugged each other.
“Everything’s okay, sweetie, everything’s okay,” Ruth said. She rocked from side to side with Grace, swaying to a silent melody only the two of them could hear. “Everything’s okay. You’re all ready for bed?”
Grace stood a step back from Ruth and said, “Yes, except I can’t reach the medicine jest.”
“The medicine chest?”
“Yes, that. I need to brush my teeth, and I’m too short to reach my toothbrush. God made me that way.”
“And He did a damn good job at that,” Call said.
“Daddy,” Ruth said.
Call pushed himself from the couch. “I’ll help you out, little lady.” He took Grace’s small hand in his own and walked with her. The white of her tiny hand, soft and white as a cloud, shown in bright relief against the red clay color of Call’s hand, like thin air above adobe.
Barnes let them pass and begin to climb the stairs before he moved to take Call’s place next to Ruth. Her eyes were rimmed and shaded in darkness, and Barnes understood that she had wrestled often with this problem. Her hands stayed in motion, moving from her knees to her face in search of some comfort.
Barnes reached over and placed his hand on Ruth’s shoulder and she leaned into him. He breathed in the smell of her, a scent rich in poignancy and subtlety. He liked the smell so much that he smiled as he breathed.
After a few seconds, she pushed herself away from Barnes and reached to turn off the floor lamp beside the couch. Then she returned to his embrace, and they remained that way well into the night. Barnes felt his arms begin to ache and want for stretching, and the muscles of his legs knotted. Still, he held her as he watched the shadows cast by the lights of passing cars stretch along the walls behind her. He liked watching shadows that were only shadows.
Chapter Six
SATURDAY
Midnight was bathed in moonlight. Barnes rolled from his bed and stood to peek through the blinds of his bedroom window. At first, he felt a slight chill standing so close to the glass. He lifted the window and smelled the breeze, the air so clear it tasted fresh as a stream. The world shimmered in the remnants of the light May rain that had wet the grass and street. The rain, however, had left and the sky had cleared. The moon shone high and clean and the midnight sky was jeweled with stars.
Somewhere from down the road, Barnes could hear someone singing. A tenor sang the scales, running up and down in succession for five minutes. The singer stopped. The night became loud in the absence of his music.
A bat flew in the tenuous ring of light cast from the lamppost across the street. The bat swooped and dove for insects attracted to the light, the light becoming both their quest and their death.
He searched the world, and in the sudden absence of sound and of cars driving along the street and of people walking from campus and in the world washed momentarily clean, he found a vacancy—silent and clear as an iced lake.
Barnes sat back on his bed. He lay again with his head on his pillow, no covers on him, his feet barely apart and his arms crossed on his chest. He let tracings of the night’s wind bathe him in cool waves.
He remembered Maria Lopez, could still remember the feel of her lips on his. He still carried the touch of her fingers cool and light on his skin. He wished he could touch her face one more time.
He stared at her eyes. In their innocent gaze, her eyes teased under the brown-black bangs which covered her forehead. As deep as the night, he always thought when he looked at her, the flashes of light bouncing from her eyes like wafers of moonlight on a midnight lake.
He closed his eyes and dreamed that she lay next to him, her black hair soft as a whisper on his arm. That she rolled into him to wrap her leg over his. That he nestled his face in the warmth of her neck, smelling the hint of lavender in her perfume. He did not love her, although he had felt it was something very close to that and might have eventually become that, and he wondered whether she had felt anything similar.
They shared the winter between two fire seasons and as that second season approached, the summer that would be her last, she told Barnes that they would have to break up for the season. She did not want anyone to think that she was on the crew because she had slept with the crew boss. When the season ended, she said as they stood together in the tempered light of dusk, they would talk. That May afternoon on his porch, she told him that she would give up a lot for him, but she would not give up herself. Then she said to him, “Mi corazon,” and kissed him softly on the lips.
He woke at two o’clock. The side of the bed where she would have been was empty.
Barnes turned on the radio to a repeat broadcast of a talk show aired the previous afternoon. He listened for a minute to a fat man who made over twenty million dollars a year tell some woman from North Dakota how he understands the needs of the people of this country so much better than her, or anyone. “No,” he began. “Just listen to me. Let me tell you.” Barnes wondered when the last time was, if ever, that the man with a voice like a soft doughboy had busted a blister. Stroking Willie in the bathroom would have been about it, he decided. He shut off the fat man.
At six-thirty in the morning he did what he used to do at six-thirty in the morning, what had once formed his morning ritual. He boiled water for a press of coffee, poured a glass full of orange juice, warmed two breakfast rolls in the microwave, and let his mind and body and eyes prepare for the day.
Through his dining room window, he could see Tri-pod perched on his single back leg on the fence that separated his yard from Ruth’s. The three-legged squirrel nibbled on a peanut, held tight in his grasp, that Barnes had dotted the fence with earlier in the week.
Barnes gave the squirrel a thumbs-up. “Good man,” he said.
He looked at his refrigerator door where he kept photographs and notes and newspaper clippings magneted like pieces of a puzzle. He found in the cluster of things on the door a snapshot of Chandler and Aggie and Warner and half a dozen other crewmembers at last year’s end-of-training party, food filling his dining room table, bottles of beer and empty shot glasses littering the table and window sills behind. Lopez and Budd sat leaning into each other on the bench against the room’s far wall, their eyes, like those of everyone’s in the photograph, at half mast. Kapell held his bottle of Fat Tire beer out toward the camera as in a toast. Horndyke laughed at something Doobie said.
Barnes shut his eyes tight as though he could strangle his thoughts in that way, but they, like the photograph, hung with him.
When Barnes opened his eyes, he saw them again.
Chandler led the way. Behind Chandler as he walked into the dining room to si
t silently on the radiator, came the line of ghosts who greeted Barnes each morning. At the end of that line of ghosts, Barnes saw Warner who had died closest to the safety of the ridge, who had died with his head and arms and knees touching the ground as though he were praying.
They sat with steady patience, monuments staring at grief. Their shoulders and arms touched and their hands hung loose between them, their heavily booted feet flat and slightly apart, their clothing the yellow shirts and green pants of their firefighting clothes. The unfolding light of morning backlit them against the room’s windows. Their eyes were ice. As he searched each for the scars they wore, Barnes thought that he should be one of them, maybe that he already was.
“After something like that you have two choices—you can live your life either naked or dead.”
“Sounds something like a catch-22. And you’re damned regardless. If you get yourself back together, somebody’ll think you didn’t care enough. If you don’t get it together, then you cared too much and it kills you.”
“Another burden added to all of those things you already carry.”
“And a thin line to walk.”
“Thin and red as a fireline, but it may be the only way to get any peace in your time.”
The Forest Service had hired a psychiatrist to assist Barnes and the remainder of his crew through their grief. An hour before the sun set and while the bodies still lay on the hill to be photographed and charted and measured and examined, the psychiatrist stood looking at Barnes and the survivors from the front of the hotel meeting room. The psychiatrist stood with one hand on the hip of his Dockers. His other hand loosely held a pair of eyeglasses dangling from his long, thin fingers.
Barnes watched those fingers move when the man talked. How they took flight when the man stressed a point. How they fluttered like doves. How he sometimes seemed to notice how Barnes watched them and then would trap them inside the pockets of his pants. Eventually, though, they would take flight again and the long, thin fingers like the wings of a soft bird would flutter about in front of the man’s face.
After the Fire Page 17