Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “I’m here.” Tock called him Wild Thing because of a children’s book about a boy named Max, whose mother had called him Wild Thing.

  “You watching a clock?”

  “I am.” Max had spent most of the time in his shelter remembering times precisely. What had happened, and when, would matter to fire investigators.

  “Yes,” said Jen, finally answering Max’s question. Burned?

  This was why civilians, non-firefighters, were not welcome around blazes like the Silver Jack Ridge fire.

  “Not bad,” she added. But it hurt like hell.

  From his shelter, Max heard her talking to someone else, and then he realized that she must have a tape recorder with her.

  “How’s your cameraman?” he asked.

  They continued talking, all of them, by radio and by shouts. A smoke jumper from New Mexico was the one who’d been burned. Max felt a strange emotion, one he’d known before—that the fire had missed him again, that he’d been passed over, only to save him for another death that might be worse or might come in old age. When were these things evened out?

  Fire had caught Jen Delazzeri. Jen, who’d never fought another fire, he knew, after Makal Canyon.

  Something bad in store for me, he thought and then stopped imagining. He concentrated, instead, on his job. Raising the chopper, requesting medical evacuation for at least two.

  Then, he lifted the edge of his shelter.

  Good air.

  Wind lifted the aluminum lifesaver away from him.

  He saw Tock emerge from silver, across the haze of the blackened, incinerated helispot, and he rattled the shelter beside his. “Jen?”

  He let her lift up the shelter, and then the wind flipped it over.

  The back of her thigh and one buttock were burned, second-degree, he guessed from the blistering.

  She was not one for making noise. She asked, “How bad is it?”

  “Not bad. Drink water and stay put for now.” She would have to be treated for shock.

  But Jackson, the New Mexico jumper, was in worse shape and in far more danger.

  Failure. Max’s failure. Not to speak up when the helicopter landed; before it landed.

  But he’d seen nothing below them, then.

  Jackson was making muffled sounds that Max associated with bravely borne agony.

  There were six of them at the helispot and not much water to be spared, to pour over the third-degree burns on Jackson’s legs and back.

  His radio crackled: “Max, we can’t get a chopper to you until those winds calm down.”

  That wind pushing him, attempting to move him, Max stepped away from Jackson to tell the IC, whom he now knew by voice, if not by sight, that they had someone with third-degree burns over forty percent of his body and the newscaster had first-and second-degree burns over maybe six percent.

  The priority was to preserve life, and Jackson’s was in danger.

  He had not seen Salma after Makal Canyon blew up. She’d been airlifted to a hospital in Denver, and they were apart when she died the following day.

  But Jen’s sister, Teresa, had been with Salma the whole time.

  Max was the one who should have been there.

  He returned to Jackson, through the flapping sounds made by everything that was flying about in the wind.

  Tock was ready to walk to find water, and Max nodded at him to go. The creek was not far down the slope, and Jackson needed more water. Max emptied his own canteen over Jackson’s burns, ignoring what he was seeing—not the burns, but Jackson’s body position, curled over a large black object.

  Jackson, you chivalrous idiot, he thought.

  “It got under the shelter,” Jackson said when Max crouched beside him. He meant the flames, Max knew, and not the inanimate object beneath him. The jumper spoke through clenched teeth. “Choppers can’t fly in this.”

  “It’ll calm down soon.” But Max knew he was trying to convince himself. If they were lucky, the winds would calm sometime in the next two hours. That was a long time for Jackson.

  A Missoula smoke jumper, Mark Salazar, held a mixture of Gatorade and water to Jackson’s lips. Jackson sipped, regurgitated, sipped again.

  Max wasn’t sure when he’d ever seen anyone so brave.

  “WHERE’S THE CAMERA?”

  Max glanced up at the sound of the male voice, that of Jen’s cohort. She was standing, already rejecting his instruction to stay where she was, and was peering around her back, trying to see her burns. Her jaw was stiff with pain, but she’d obviously made up her mind to deal with the situation. Which was how Max had remembered her.

  Bob, the cameraman, was walking toward him and Jackson and Salazar.

  Bob’s face froze, suddenly gray, as he registered what had happened, why and how it had happened.

  “Have a seat,” Max told him because he looked faint. And he, himself, took a digital camera from inside his jumpsuit to photograph Jackson curled over the television camera, which he had chosen to protect with his own skin. “Want us to get that out from under you, John?”

  “Thanks.”

  Bob’s hands were there, ready to take the television camera. Max couldn’t read his expression. Relief that his equipment had been saved? That what he’d recorded had been saved? Perhaps. But also revulsion toward the thing that Jackson had protected from fire at such a high personal cost.

  The cameraman said, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Take care of yourself,” Max answered.

  Bob hoisted the camera to his shoulder, switched it on, began panning the blackened helispot.

  Max’s initial reaction—irritation—immediately gave way to pragmatism. The camera could provide fire information that would be useful to firefighters in the future—even to the extent of knowing what they risked.

  “Jackson, want to be a film star?” he asked the burned jumper. “For all of us?”

  Jackson knew what he meant. “Absolutely. That’s why I did this.”

  Max tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come out. Still, Jackson’s attitude was what would pull him through.

  Smoke jumpers, Max sometimes thought, were born performers. The four of them at the helispot were, in the off-season, a civil-engineering professor, a paramedic, a Buddhist priest and a forest-service ranger. Tock was the Buddhist priest; Max the ranger, a ranger with solid qualifications in the world of firefighting and on his way to becoming a specialist in wildfire behavior.

  Which made this burnover his own personal screw-up—one that might have repercussions in his career.

  Not to mention that Jackson was burned.

  Max had argued against this choice of helispot, but he was old enough and experienced enough with fire bureaucracies to know that the kind of argument that got heard was the kind he’d made the day before—refusal to cooperate. Today, he’d suggested to the hotshot superintendent who was second in command that the other side of the ridge could provide a safer helispot. The superintendent had argued—convincingly—that the alternative spot, Max’s choice, was too far from crews. And in the end, Max had…agreed.

  Those conversations, he knew, would be gone over again and again by fire investigators. Personal integrity would decide the outcome. When reputations were on the line, people often lied. Max had seen too much of it—and he was about to be in the middle of it again.

  What mattered was that he’d agreed, and now Jackson was paying.

  Max eyed the shelter that had been thrown aside, wishing for something that would remove the full weight of this disaster from his shoulders. But he’d already seen the cause of Jackson’s misfortune. It was in Bob’s hands, capturing Jackson’s burns and all their blackened faces, witnessing the ash in the air.

  Jackson should never have tried to protect the camera, should never have brought it into the shelter with him. If he hadn’t, he would, in all likelihood, be leaving the helispot unburned. Granted, there had been room in the shelter. If two people could survive in a shelter—and this
had happened many times—then one smoke jumper, with a camera could be fine. So Jackson must have paid more attention to protecting the camera than to holding down his shelter.

  Yet this didn’t make up for the bad choice of helispot, nor his—Max Rickman’s—complicity in that selection. He had agreed. The end responsibility might not rest on his shoulders, but he felt his part in it.

  He had been fighting wildfire for almost twenty years. Had lost a fiancée to fire, had known a total of six firefighters who’d died in the line of work.

  Yet after none of those other events had he felt what he felt now.

  That his life had been one way an hour and a half earlier and now was abruptly and completely changed.

  This time, the blame was his.

  JACKSON’S BURNS WOULD remain sterile for at least twenty-four hours, if they were not contaminated. The number one priority, as the fire had already burned their area and would not return, was to care for Jackson. Treat for shock and make sure that he drank. His airway seemed to be all right, not burned.

  When Tock returned with water, Max and Salazar took turns offering Jackson canteen after canteen of water. Max knew he must make sure Jen was managing, as well, but her burns were not severe enough to cause excessive worry. Shock was still a possibility, but she seemed to be taking care of herself by concentrating on the filming of the helispot and shelters, all of which would have to be left as they were. He had photographed Jackson on top of the camera for the fire investigation. To save yourself, Rickman?

  He would have done it any case. And there was no saving himself. It had always amazed him that at times like this supervisors were willing to lie to save their careers. This incident could negatively affect his future. Why hadn’t he seen Jackson taking that camera into his shelter and stopped him?

  Salazar, who worked as a paramedic when not fighting fires, had taken over the care of Jackson, using the extremely limited first-aid kit that he carried on him at all times as his personal talisman. Fortunately for Jackson, the kit included Percocet. Salazar had offered Jen some, as well. She’d accepted ibuprofen, instead, which Max had watched her down with water from her canteen.

  As the wind whipped over the helispot, Jen approached Max. “Any chance of seeing the incident commander?”

  Max considered pointing out that her first appointment when they got off Silver Jack would be for critical-incident stress debriefing. But until that time, her mental health was his responsibility. Her determination to continue being Jen Delazzeri of Channel 4 might just be the best way for her to deal with what had just happened.

  Bob, Max suspected, was going to have a lot more trouble in the long run. At some point, he’d given the camera to Jackson—or Jackson had taken it from him. Either way, Max knew that Bob might feel even more responsible for Jackson’s burns than Max himself felt.

  “Can he hike here, from where he is?” Jen asked, still on the trail of the IC.

  “He’s not going to. He’s where they’re fighting the fire.”

  Jen coughed, possibly from the smoke that was still in the air, and gazed at the slope above them. The wall of flame had torched everything in sight, and now the thick black smoke came from the horizon, beyond the rise.

  Max couldn’t blame Jen for what had happened to Jackson any more than he could have blamed her for Salma’s death thirteen years before. Salma and Teresa had been working a different area, cutting line. Jen’s presence in his shelter could not have been traded for Salma’s. Maybe what had happened afterward between the two of them had been his way of acknowledging the fact that Salma’s death hadn’t been his fault, either.

  “You shouldn’t have been up here. Either of you.” It came out anyhow. A mistake. Now was the time to support her, not to bring that trembling expression to her mouth. “But it’s not your fault,” he said. “It came from higher up.”

  Bob, who had been tending the camera, abruptly moved it aside and lurched toward a blackened stump at the edge of the area.

  Max said, “Excuse me,” to the brown eyes gazing out from that very exotic face, with its gorgeous bones—a face the camera must love. He went to check on the cameraman, who finished vomiting, straightened up and tentatively wiped his mouth.

  “Sorry,” Bob said, and his eyes were watery.

  Max knew Jackson couldn’t hear them. He put a hand on the cameraman’s Nomex fire suit. “He knew better, Bob. You’re not at fault.”

  “I would have taken it into my shelter, if he hadn’t taken it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have, because none of us would have let you. Because we knew it wasn’t safe. You have no blame in this.”

  Bob blinked through the haze. He was younger than Jen, maybe late twenties, with wire-rimmed glasses and a handsome, intelligent face. “Nobody’s looked at Jen’s burns.”

  “Actually, Salazar took a look at them. Drink some of that water in your canteen. And sit down. If you can’t, if you feel like doing some work with that camera, you and I can take a walk together and get some film for the fire investigation.”

  “I’ll come.”

  Max turned. He hadn’t heard Jen behind him—only the wind.

  “I’d like to hike down to where we first saw that smoke,” she said, “to see where it started.”

  “I’d like to carry water,” Bob said with a glance to where Jackson lay on his stomach, “for him.”

  “Tock’s taken care of that. He went to the creek. But you’ll help everybody by getting some of the information about this fire on film.”

  MAX RADIOED his division supervisor to let him know he’d be hiking with the two people from Channel 4 to film burned areas.

  “Sure you want to do that?”

  Max blinked, uncertain he’d heard correctly. Supervisors rarely raised objections in the form of questions.

  “It will keep them busy until we can get them in critical-incident stress debriefing.”

  “Make sure they leave that television camera behind.”

  Did the supervisor know of the camera’s role in Jackson’s burns? No one had spoken of that over the airwaves, to Max’s knowledge.

  “Well, it’s theirs,” Max said. “I don’t think they’re going to leave it.”

  “Then, keep them on the helispot.”

  The supervisor, who did know of Jackson’s burns, was covering his butt. Max considered feigning deafness, feigning problems with the communication. “The reporter got some second-degree burns. I don’t think she’ll want to go very far. We’ll be concentrating on ecosystem changes. Their focus is world fire.”

  “Their focus is the news, Rickman.”

  Max couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I understand,” he said—which did not mean compliance, he decided. It meant only that he registered the truth of the situation, which was that the supervisor wasn’t keen to know what had gone wrong.

  Max, on the other hand, did want to know. And wanted to make sure other fire personnel knew.

  Signing off, he eyed Jen, who was noticing that some of her hair had been burned off.

  “I don’t remember it being on fire,” she said. “I must have put it out and sort of blacked out the recollection.”

  The fire investigators would want her fire suit, as well, to see where it had failed when exposed to open flame. The gap had melted away a streak along the back of her thigh and her rear end. She had hung a bandanna from a tab to cover the gap.

  Bob sank down on a burned stump. “Give me a minute.”

  Tock stalked over to them and offered Bob a canteen containing watered-down Gatorade.

  The cameraman drank willingly.

  “I’m going to go check out where I think this started,” Max said.

  “Going to take that?” Tock nodded at the television camera.

  Bob said, “You know, I think I’ll just stay here for a bit.”

  “Good plan,” Max said. The elevation was a good 3000 feet higher than Denver. Bob seemed strong and fit, but he looked shaky after the ordeal of
the fire.

  Critical-incident stress debriefing. All of them needed it.

  “I’d like to look at things,” Jen said. “I have a tape recorder.”

  Max didn’t object. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her following, but it was better for him to be accompanied by someone—for a few reasons, some of them legal and bureaucratic, protecting him by witnessing that he altered nothing of the scene—as if he could change anything meaningful. Someone experienced needed to remain at the helispot with Bob. Tock’s lumbering, reassuring presence was already having a calming effect on the cameraman.

  Bob said, “I thought I was dying. I’ve never been that scared in my life.”

  Yes, Tock was the person for this. The jumper took a seat on a burned log near Bob and sucked on his canteen. “It’s terrifying,” he agreed bluntly. “This is the worst burnover I’ve been in.”

  Max and Jen picked their way down from the helispot.

  The helispot was at the edge of a steep, rocky cliff face that fell fifty or sixty feet to a wide gully below. Max found a path between blackened rocks, glancing behind him to make sure Jen was following safely. They discovered scorched junipers amid the rocks, but Max could see that high flames had reached up to the helispot, and winds had blown burning shrubbery in a fire whirl from the gully. “This is similar to what happened yesterday,” he told her. “Yesterday, they were working on the edge of a ridge with a box canyon below, and the canyon acted as a chimney.”

  “Who picked the helispot?”

  Well, that was getting to the heart of things.

  “Division supervisor,” he said. “And I agreed. This gully was relatively free of fuels.”

  But Jen had her tape recorder in her hand, even as she picked her way down the steep burned-over slope. Sweat had beaded all over her face, as he was sure it had on his. The sun beat down on them, and the wind threw ash and dust.

  “It’s like a moonscape,” she said to the device in her hand. “But some vegetation actually escaped the blaze. I see incinerated piñons and junipers, yet here and there a low brush shows green beneath…” A pause. “A squirrel is burned here, frozen and blackened in a kneeling, praying posture.