by Linda Jacobs
All the way west, he kept expecting controller Jack Owen or Mark Liebman in the lead plane to ground everyone. For the first time in his life, he was ready.
Once on the West Yellowstone tarmac, Deering climbed out of the Huey and slammed the door.
“Hey,” Garrett called from beside the fence near the Smokejumpers’ Base.
Deering waved, but did not alter his course toward the charter trailer. Inside, Demetrios Karrabotsos sat at the Island Park desk with the phone against his salt-and-pepper head. Deering knew he’d be out flying later, for the cast had come off his foot the day before yesterday.
Down the narrow hall, Deering went into the office of Johnny Arvela of Eagle Air. He dialed, his hand trembling like it had on the collective when the C-130’s wake buffeted him.
On the third ring, Georgia said hello in a small voice that said she wasn’t smiling.
“Please,” Deering said, “don’t hang up.”
She didn’t, but neither did she speak.
“Babe, I’m sorry. Sorry for everything about this summer. That I … chased another woman. Jesus …” He gripped the edge of the metal desk. This was harder than he’d imagined. “I went after her … but nothing happened, not what you think, anyway.”
Still silence on her end.
“I’m begging you to forgive me.” He was sweating like a whore in church. “Let me come home. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”
“Did she throw you over?” Georgia dripped ice water.
“No! I’m the one who wants our life back together. Babe, I can’t do this anymore without knowing you’re there for me.”
The hum on the line underscored that she was far away. The trailer shook as someone came up the steps.
“When?” Her voice sounded small.
The pressure changed in his ears as the outer door opened, then slammed. “As soon as I can … “ From the front room, he heard Karrabotsos talking and Garrett’s deep baritone.
“What does ‘soon’ mean?” Georgia asked.
“Tonight,” Deering promised, “I’ll be there tonight.” He’d breathe the blessed smokeless air and listen to the Portneuf’s peaceful chatter.
Heavy footsteps came down the hall. “Deering?”
“A minute,” he called, and more softly, “I love you, hon. I’ll see you this evening.”
Garrett rapped on the door. “Where are you? I thought you were taking a leak.”
“Who’s there with you?” Georgia went suspicious.
Garrett opened the door and boomed, “We need to get in the air.”
“I see,” she said.
“See what?” Deering held up a hand at Garrett, who nodded and pulled the door closed.
“I have to go, Georgia. The North Fork is going to hit Old Faithful today and I have to fly Garrett Anderson … “
“It’s always the same, isn’t it? No matter what I need from you, there’s always a fire somewhere that’s more important.”
For a moment, Deering thought she’d hung up, but there was no dial tone. He heard muted strains of music from the little stereo he’d given her a few years ago to listen to while she quilted. There was a subtle change in the sound, as though she’d put the receiver down on the table and walked away. “Georgia!” Deering shouted.
She hadn’t hung up, but he did, slamming Johnny’s phone onto the cradle.
He sat for a long moment with his head in his hands. He had to fly. His livelihood depended on it, and whether Georgia liked it or not, hers did too. He’d make this one flight, he bargained, like he’d planned, and then go home to her. He’d made a promise.
When he came out, Garrett was polite enough not to ask questions. They walked in silence to the Huey, where Deering did his preflight and runup and hoped his hands weren’t trembling noticeably.
Devon thought that if Clare were still at the geyser basin, she would be out there with the firefighters. Through the glass rear door that led out of the Old Faithful Inn lobby, the sky looked even darker than it had when she’d come inside just after one p.m.
Her mother’s accusations still made her chest ache. For years, both her parents and Elyssa had believed the worst of her. According to Annalise McIntyre, whose folks had dumped her in the loonie bin for acting out inappropriately, group therapy was full of “dysfunctional families.”
Last night when it had gotten too cold and scary, Devon had sneaked, shivering, into the hotel. Near dawn, a patrolling security guard had rousted her from a couch on the lobby balcony. “Go on now, miss, we don’t have no sleeping in here.”
He’d thought she was a vagrant.
This afternoon the smell of smoke permeated even inside the Inn. Members of the press came out from filming the vacant dining room. With a small shock, Devon saw they wore white napkins tied around the lower half of their faces as filters.
“You think maybe we should get out of here?” she asked a red-haired woman reporter in a jeans jacket. Maybe she and her ponytailed companion with the video would give her a ride out. She’d looked for Mom until all the buses had gone.
The reporter shook her head and headed with the others toward the stairs. Devon checked out their conversation.
“Superlative vantage point … “
“Special exception … “
Devon ducked into the cavernous dining room with wagon wheel chandeliers and a huge fireplace. Like the others had, she grabbed a napkin off a table setting. Hurrying to keep up, she chased the press upstairs.
On the third floor, she followed the journalists as they stepped over a chain and went up rickety-looking stairs through the open atrium. Devon didn’t look down as she climbed. At the top was a tree house, complete with gingerbread scrollwork. Out through a door so small she had to duck, and onto the inn’s roof. Forceful gusts of wind struck. She stopped and stared at the column of smoke pouring up from the fire that seemed to be just beyond the horizon. One more set of wooden stairs took her to the widow’s walk astride the highest peak of the inn.
A mounting roar announced the approach of a plane from the west. Flying low, the tanker dumped a load of red liquid in a long sweeping pass. A rosy fog hung, streamers emerging from the bottom of the cloud as it fell to earth. The smoke lay down and Devon breathed relief.
In a moment, it swirled up black with the fire’s renewed fury.
The North Fork couldn’t be half a mile away.
With the rising wind and deepening darkness, it grew colder. On the opposite side of the roof, the ponytailed man videotaped the people wearing napkin masks. Even though the smoke stung her eyes and throat, Devon clutched her own napkin in a sweaty hand.
The woman reporter began taping. “This is Carol Leeds, Billings Live Eye,” she intoned importantly. “Only a handful of tourists remain to watch the geyser’s show at Old Faithful Inn this afternoon, where formerly there were hundreds of spectators.” A double ring of empty benches surrounded the geyser. “The evacuation was announced at dawn. All morning, busloads of visitors and employees have pulled away from the loading zone in front of this landmark hotel. This does not mean that all is quiet, though, for firefighters have ringed the inn.”
From below, they sent flaring arcs of water to break on the roof and sheet down. Farther away, another group covered small wooden cabins in foam that looked like shaving cream.
Devon looked for her mother, checking for a firefighter who was a lot smaller than the others. Last night she’d slipped up and admitted to being scared when Mom went to the fire station. Pretending it didn’t matter had been part of her defense. That had worked pretty well … until back in July when Mom came home and said she’d seen a man die. Thinking it could have been Mom who had burned to death had shocked Devon, so much she hadn’t known what to say.
She’d said nothing. Gone to her room and cried. Come out later with her eyes kohl-rimmed to hide the evidence.
If her parents hadn’t cared enough about her to stay together, she sure wasn’t going to let them know anything both
ered her. Her Dad had prissy, flat-assed Elyssa who sat on his knee and acted like Devon had bad breath when she went to hug her hello. Now, Mom had taken up with some Steve guy who lived thousands of miles away.
That scared her more than anything else. She’d seen Mom go on some dates since the divorce, but there was something very different about the way she looked at Steve.
And he at her.
The sky grew more garish by the minute. The sun appeared as an occasional bloody disc. Behind the southwest ridge, Devon caught a glimpse of orange, the barest tongue of color licking forth and then being swallowed by smoke.
The reporter continued. “The employee dormitory stands in the shadow of the larger inn.” The cameraman filmed the dark shingled barracks. “If it survives this day, the summer workers will not be back until spring, for the Park Service has determined that no matter what happens, they will close the Old Faithful complex for the season.”
Devon heard the roar of a plane, but she couldn’t locate it. Another flame leaped the ridge, and she realized that the sound was coming from the fire, an unearthly shriek that sounded as though she were standing in front of a jet engine. There were plenty of firefighters here, but the fire didn’t look as though anybody could do anything about it.
Some still tried. Helicopters ferried back and forth, dipping their canvas buckets into the Firehole River, then flying to dump their loads and return. As the North Fork crested the ridge, the choppers looked like angry insects, impotent before the screaming monster.
Deering took off into the wind and was reminded of Black Saturday when he’d flown Garrett and been forced to turn back. As before, they flew into the park along the Madison River, with blackened forest beneath. To get to Old Faithful, he made a wide swing northwest around the fire front. He still felt shaky after his close call with the tanker.
Garrett sat stolidly in the left seat, swiveling his bald head. From the Hellroaring at the far northeast corner of the park to the Snake River Complex in the Teton National Forest, the entire horizon had exploded with mushroom clouds.
Deering tried to concentrate on flying. He came in toward Old Faithful from the northwest, crossing the Firehole and flying along the open meadows crisscrossed with boardwalks. Garrett pointed to the lower parking lot where several TV vans were parked, satellite antennae on their roofs. “Look at those bloodsuckers. Hoping this place burns so they can get their shot at the big time.”
A sudden downdraft gripped the Huey and the negative Gs increased. Deering rolled on throttle and steered to get out of the convection system before the fire front. He wished he could take his attention off flying and check Garrett’s face. They said these fire generals had nerves of steel.
The helicopter jittered and shook.
Of course, a lot of folks thought Deering had brass balls, as well, but he could feel …
The thing was, he didn’t want to feel. Not to think about how old this chopper was, and how flying it suddenly reminded him of the turbulence over the Chu Pong massif just before he’d sweep down into the Ia Drang Valley. “Fuck you, GI.” The sound of VC Charlie, latched onto their frequency, just as Deering was about to make a tight approach. Below, in the landing zone carved out of jungle canopy, he’d take on injured soldiers no older than he was. Looking back, they’d all been kids.
Flying over Old Faithful, the trembling started in the pit of Deering’s stomach. It spread up through his chest and down his arms until he had to grip the controls hard, trying not to let his sweating palms slip. It had been a long time since he’d felt the old battle fear and it didn’t make sense.
Or maybe it did. The prospect of life without Georgia scared the living shit out of him.
He forced himself to concentrate on the turbulent sky and realized that Garrett was speaking through the headset. “ … thing working?”
“Yeah, Garrett?”
“Guys down there. It looks like they’re getting cut off.”
Deering looked where Garrett was pointing and tried to focus on a group of four yellow-shirted people on the ground. They were inside a roped-off area that surrounded a small meadow. Two knelt in the weeds and the others were standing, writing on clipboards. “They don’t seem to realize,” Garrett said in a worried voice.
Deering couldn’t afford this, absolutely must not fall apart in front of Garrett Anderson. If he did, his fire charter days would be over. He inhaled through his mouth and let it out slowly, imagining that he was blowing out the knots inside. Some people had panic attacks, going mindless in the middle of their kitchen, but it had never happened to him. He’d thought it a sign of weakness.
The night he’d come home from Vietnam, Georgia had cooked his favorite Greek meatballs, poured stout red wine from a jug, and lighted candles on the porch that overlooked the Portneuf. Drawing her against him in the creaking metal glider, he’d made a mental note to put some WD-40 on it in the morning. The old place had gone to hell without a man to take care of such things.
“Aren’t you happy to be home?” She snuggled close and he felt the warm curve of her breast.
“Of course.”
“You seem … preoccupied.”
He’d left that damned jungle, a godforsaken place where men’s feet rotted in their boots and souls were etched, on the other side of the planet. Unfortunately, he already knew that distance had failed to silence the jerky cacophony of shot-out rotors, the rattle of incoming machine gun fire, and the screams of nineteen-year-old Johnny Washington who’d died in the seat beside Deering.
“Don’t you feel better now that nobody’s going to shoot at you?” Georgia looked at him with soft green eyes, her hair a red-gold cloud around her luminous face.
He opened his mouth to tell her how wonderful it did feel to be safe, but he stopped. It was then, at that peaceful moment with the river running by and a sliver of moon peeking through the top of a cottonwood that Deering realized.
Waking up in the morning without the prospect of combat was dead boring.
It did not make sense, therefore, that on this afternoon over Old Faithful, he should be hyperventilating and sweating like a grunt under fire.
“Are you all right?” Garrett asked.
“Must have gotten hold of some bad chow,” he managed. Turning to the man in the left seat, he lifted a hand to wipe his brow. “I’m gonna have to set her down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
September 7
Clare watched the Huey’s rotors wind down on the Old Faithful Inn parking lot.
“They’re bailing out of the sky,” Javier Fuentes said. He kept the hose from the foam tank trained onto the employee cabin near the one where Clare was staying.
With a worried glance skyward, she realized that no other planes or helicopters were in sight. Without air support, the battle could be lost.
The chopper door opened and she saw Garrett Anderson climb out. He headed across the parking lot to a man she recognized as Duncan Rowland, Incident Commander of the North Fork. Clare said to Javier, “I’m going to find out what’s happening.”
She ran to Garrett.
“Hey, gal. This is one bad mutha, “ he shouted with a baleful glare at the North Fork.
Fire swept over the southwest ridge while cinders the size of a man’s hand pelted the parking lot. Rowland, a slender man with narrow features, listened to his Motorola. “This is it,” he told Clare and Garrett, yanking off his ball cap and throwing it down. It tumbled away like a soccer ball.
Press vans were retreating from the perimeter, filming as they drew back to the open space beside the inn. Everyone in sight wore a bandanna or some kind of cloth tied over his or her face.
With a start, Clare realized that there were eight or ten people on the widow’s walk atop the inn, small stick figures at this distance. More press, no doubt, daring danger the way her daughter liked to do. She wished she could warn them off, for if the eighty-five year old wooden building billed as the largest log cabin in the world went up, they were
going to be shit out of luck.
The eerie orange light deepened to the reddish-brown of dried blood. Clare had to remind herself that the air itself could not burst into flame. As more burning brands sailed sideways, it was apparent that even the relative haven of the parking lot was not a safe place.
Behind the Hamilton Store and the Snow Lodge, the top of a two hundred foot wall of flame hove into view. Clare stared at the monstrous apparition.
East and west, the North Fork burned there as well, its long tentacles encircling the inn. Where was Steve? He’d gone into the forest and there didn’t seem to be any part of it that wasn’t burning.
And where, oh God, was Devon?
The wind that had been blowing toward the blaze shifted and bore down more directly on the Inn. Clare felt as though she stood in front of an oven, reminding her of the day she and Javier had driven through the tunnel of flame at Grant Village.
Duncan Rowland turned to his car, opened the trunk and drew out a fire shelter.
Clare fingered the pouch on her belt. Surely, that wouldn’t be needed here on the parking lot, but the flame front was throwing up huge fireballs that raged for seconds before they disappeared. If one of them spotted forward … She shut her eyes, but she could still see the Hellroaring … no, it was the North Fork.
Eyes open, she pulled on her goggles from around her neck and fended off the flying bits of forest. Javier ran up to her and they both realized in the same instant that the crew protecting the Snow Lodge, Hamilton Store, and some storage buildings was woefully inadequate to the task. It was all she could do not to run away, but she hurried across the parking lot with Javier, toward the North Fork.
A cinder driven sideways by the wind caught her in the chest. As she brushed it off, she realized that if she had not been wearing Nomex, her clothing would have caught fire. She ran on toward what looked like the gaping mouth of Hades.
At the edge of the lot, she and Javier joined a pumper crew that was hooking up to a hydrant. “What can we do?” she shouted into the wind.