Wildfire at Larch Creek

by M. L. Buchman

“Half,” Tim riposted.

  “Whole. Interest. Besides,” she swallowed and managed to clear most of her mouth, “Frank’s cookies are far too good for me not to be greedy about them.”

  Tim’s smile indicated clearly what he was feeling greedy about, and that worked for her. Later though.

  She took the tray and headed up the stairs.

  Macy balanced the tray on the small marble shelf that had been put there for that purpose. She knocked once lightly and swung the door open. Eva was unlikely to answer. The trick was to deliver the tray close enough so that she could easily reach for it, then sneak back out without disturbing her writing.

  When she entered, Eva wasn’t writing. She was sitting in the chair but facing the door.

  “Even after all these years, I still recognize your light tread on the stairs. Tim and Frank could double for a cattle stampede, especially when they think they’re being subtle.”

  “Hi, Eva. Here’s your lunch.”

  “I’ll come down and join you in a minute, but I thought we girls should have a moment together.”

  Macy set the tray down and tried to find somewhere to look. Just like downstairs, Denali dominated the view up here. But rather than an open welcome, Eva’s office was a cozy nest lined with bookshelves that were crowded with reference books and a jumble of every genre imaginable. An eight-volume Oxford English Dictionary had a place of honor, its own shelf directly behind an oaken reading stand. There was a small desk against the back wall now covered with more books, but it had once been where Tim could do his homework.

  She felt awkward pulling out his chair even if it was the only other seat in the room. Sitting in it was even more troubling. Her awareness of Tim was becoming a real problem. She could practically feel him standing directly below them and staring at the ceiling in curiosity at Macy’s failure to return.

  “Let him wonder,” Eva said far too perceptively.

  # # #

  Tim waited another ten seconds but there were still no footsteps from either Eva or Macy returning. He looked down to see that his dad was watching him. They took their own plates and sat together at the kitchen table.

  With Macy in the house Tim felt both younger and older. A part of him kept waiting for Stephen to rush up, dump his bicycle on the porch with a loud clatter, and rush in without knocking—neither the door nor the snow from his boots. And a part of him felt as if his relationship with his parents was shifting minute by minute because he and Macy had become lovers.

  Tim rubbed at his forehead but couldn’t make any better sense of it.

  “Falling in love does that to you.”

  Falling in love?

  His dad didn’t look as if he was joking.

  “Confusing the hell out of you?”

  He nodded.

  “Women are good at that.”

  Tim stared at the ceiling again.

  “I—” he spoke to his dad while looking at the ceiling. Then he looked down at his dad and felt as if he was talking to the ceiling. “—don’t know what to do about it. My job. My life is—” he shrugged uncomfortably. Macy was as rooted in Larch Creek as Tim was with MHA. “And hers—”

  “Did I ever tell you that I was studying programming in college the year your mother came to Université Laval in Québec for a semester abroad?”

  Tim had somehow missed that part of the story.

  “I was damn good at it. Standing job offers on graduation, all of that.”

  “What happened?”

  “This pint-sized whirlwind with Asian features, an Oklahoma accent, and a passion for language came to Laval to study French. We didn’t meet until the last week before I graduated and she was due to go back to Oklahoma. I had never met anyone like her. To say we connected would be a complete understatement. We—”

  “Too much detail,” Tim raised a hand to stop him and his dad just grinned.

  “Your mother said we should take the summer and drive to Alaska together. We only slept together the night before for the first time…”

  Tim winced.

  “…but I could never deny your mother. We left two days after graduation. We were shooting for Nome—cross the Arctic Circle and all that. We still don’t know what made us turn onto this road. Wasn’t any more of a road sign at the highway then than there is now. We hit Larch Creek and neither of us wanted to leave. So we didn’t. It was years before we crossed the Arctic Circle even though it’s only a few hundred miles north of here. She did her senior year of college at Fairbanks. I did a lot of woodworking and other odd jobs until her writing took off. Now I’m mostly her assistant which makes a surprising amount of use of my computer skills. I do a nice side business doing the indie publishing work for most of the writers in town.”

  Tim had known the end of the story, but not the beginning.

  “What are you saying? Mace and I should run away to Oklahoma or something?”

  “Could do worse things.”

  Tim had been to Oklahoma to visit Grandpop. Flat. No dense forests. The only kind of wildfires were grassland burns, most quickly beaten. Certainly no smokejumpers. Definitely not.

  Again he looked at the ceiling.

  Options. They had been lovers a single night and already he was worried about what would happen when they talked options.

  He’d never tried to do that with a woman before.

  Even in his professional life there’d never been any real discussions. It had been Akbar who had led the way from Colorado to California to MHA in Oregon. Tim had just been glad to fight fires beside his friend.

  He had a sneaking suspicion that the answers weren’t going to be so obvious this time.

  # # #

  “It’s too soon, Eva,” Macy blurted it out and then wished she could take it back. “We only just—” she managed to stop that one before it came out. She wished she wasn’t sitting in Tim’s childhood chair in Eva’s office. It made her body far too aware of what they had “only just.”

  “But you’ve loved him since you were a teenager,” Eva didn’t make it a question.

  “Since I can remember,” she nodded miserably.

  “He has the same problem, sweetheart. You just need to give him a little time to figure it out.”

  “He what?” that got her attention back to Eva’s face.

  “Did he ever show you any of his writing?” Macy tried to make sense of Eva’s subject change, but couldn’t.

  “I didn’t know Tim could spell his way out of Winnie the Pooh.” Tim had always been a good student at school, but she’d never heard about any writing.

  Eva pointed a slim finger over Macy’s head.

  She turned to look at the shelf above the small desk. There were a half-dozen manuscripts stacked there.

  “Tim’s,” Eva confirmed before she could ask the question. “He’s good, some real potential there. Young work, naïve, but solid. Wrote those in high school. He loved writing, but ran out of time to focus.”

  “What’s your point?” How did she not know that about Tim? She thought she knew everything there was to…but she hadn’t known about the truth behind his relationship with Sally Kirkman either. Since when had the boy she knew better than anyone on the planet become an inscrutable man?

  Macy studied the shelf a moment longer. From watching Mom’s labors over her science fiction manuscripts, Macy knew enough to judge that there was an immense amount of work sitting there. That much work couldn’t be done without passion.

  Eva hopped to her feet and gathered up her lunch tray. Macy rose, opened the office door, and held it for her.

  “My point is,” Eva stopped close beside Macy and looked up at her, “he thought he was writing action adventure, but he really wrote romances. Good powerful love stories lie at the core of every one of those stories.”

  “And?” Mr. Macho Smokejumper w
riting romances was actually a pretty funny image that she rather liked about him. But Macy still wasn’t seeing it.

  Eva moved out into the hall, “As I said, he wrote them in high school. I’m positive that he wouldn’t realize it, but as an only somewhat biased reader, I did notice that his heroines always looked much alike.”

  “Sally Kirkman.”

  Eva shook her head, then her grin went wicked. “None of them looked like dear Sally.”

  Macy felt numb enough to stupidly ask the next question. “Then who?” There was little question that she didn’t actually want to know the answer.

  “It’s a common enough mistake for a young writer, to make all of their heroes or heroines look alike. Especially when they’re in love,” Eva then nodded along the upstairs hall before carrying her tray down the stairs.

  Macy tried to follow, honestly she did.

  But her feet were frozen to the floorboards. She couldn’t look away from where Eva had indicated at the end of the hall.

  Macy stared at the reflection in the big mirror that hung there.

  Her own reflection.

  Chapter 12

  “You never told me about your writing.”

  Tim grunted. It was all he could manage. How was it that women were able to talk the moment after amazing sex? All his body wanted to do was melt into Macy’s mattress and never move again.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged and enjoyed the way her head rode on his shoulder where she’d curled up against him, once he’d managed to roll his weight off her.

  “Give, Harada.”

  Please, just a moment to relax into the warm moment.

  She slipped a hand down his chest, past his waist, and clamped onto him.

  “Okay, Tyler! Okay.”

  Then Baxter decided that the fact they were talking was an excuse to jump on the bed and place a clawed foot in Tim’s gut before circling and flopping down to lie against his other side.

  “Geez, a guy just can’t get a break around here.”

  “Nope,” Macy sounded entirely too cheery.

  Tim thought back. He forgotten about the writing. Between wildfires and willing women, he’d found plenty of other things to keep him busy in more recent years.

  “I think I started because it gave me an excuse to be with Mom. I knew I couldn’t disturb her when she was writing. No matter how patient she thinks she is, I learned early to read the deep frustration each time one of my questions ripped her out of a story. Though she was always cool about it.”

  Macy snuggled in closer, still holding him, but thankfully gently now. Baxter sighed happily against his other side. Tim kept one arm around Macy’s shoulders, but scratched Baxter with his other hand. There was a surprising rightness to the moment, as if he somehow belonged right here.

  “So, I started writing. There was this one short story for English class that I’d been rather proud of. Mom read it and said it was a good idea for a novel. So I just started writing it. It became a thing we did on quiet summer mornings when the sun wakes you up way too early. Kind of became a thing we shared over the years. We just wrote together.”

  She paused and he could see a question skirting across the edges of her thoughts. Edges? More like a neon sign flashing above her head. Then he felt the tension slip out of her body as she set it aside for now and asked something else.

  “Writing became a thing?”

  “Uh-huh.” It was obvious that Macy was about to pith him with something, but he couldn’t imagine what.

  “You’re not very erudite after sex, are you?” she began nuzzling his neck and massaging him with the gentle hand still slipped down between his legs.

  “Sure. I can be. No problem.” He couldn’t even build a decent sentence at the moment. “At least I could after sex with any other woman. Where did you learn that last thing, anyway? No. I don’t want to know, but it was amazing.”

  “Uh,” Macy’s hand stilled and she rolled her face into his shoulder for a moment. “I’m a big fan of Dorothy’s urban fantasy,” she mumbled into his chest.

  Tim tried not to picture that, but it was difficult once the image was planted in his brain. Dorothy Quinn might be a recluse and old enough to be his grandmother, but her books were undeniably hot. Copies hidden deep in knapsacks had been all the rage in high school, probably still were.

  “I,” Tim had to clear his throat. He could feel himself start to laugh.

  Macy’s giggle into his shoulder was both charming and contagious.

  He did his best to resist joining in. “I must have missed that one,” he managed to say with a suitably dry tone.

  Rather than collapsing into a fit of merry giggles, she lifted her head off his shoulder and studied his face for a moment.

  “What?”

  “Well then there’s something else you don’t know about.” Macy shooed Baxter back off the bed and proceeded to show him.

  Neither of them felt inclined to giggle for long.

  Macy didn’t kill him with kindness, but she came darn close.

  Chapter 13

  Tim had Natalie on the run, at least he hoped he did.

  They sat at the bar in French Pete’s and who paid for the plate of onion rings they were both eating was on the line; Tim or Carl. Carl wasn’t looking very worried about it, with good reason Tim had to admit. Losing a game of chess to a ten-year old, well, he wished Akbar was here so that she could be trouncing his behind instead.

  Funny, he hadn’t thought about Akbar much since early in the Arctic Village Fire. He’d initially kept asking himself, “How would Akbar approach this? What line of attack would he use? How to balance the resources against time to best—” Finally, he’d run out of time for even that simple a luxury. He’d reacted as his training had told him to.

  Oregon felt a million miles away at the moment. French Pete’s, on the other hand, was humming this morning. The quilters were at the big corner table today. Ma King, a big, round Native woman with astonishingly delicate needlework, had the seat of honor close to the front window where the light was best.

  Dorothy Quinn came in and set her quilting bag beside Ma. He knew there was some overlap between the writers and the quilters, but why today of all days?

  She spotted him and crossed to the bar to greet him.

  “Timmy! How are you, boy?” She made boy sound like he was a street punk about the get his behind whipped and she’d be the woman to do it. She was a tough old bird.

  He attempted to speak, but he’d have better luck speaking to Macy while they were having sex, which was completely the wrong thought at the moment.

  So, he blushed and Dorothy cackled with that evil-witch laugh of hers that had always creeped him out as a kid. She didn’t even have the decency to need a moment before she understood that there was no way he could speak to the author of what Macy had just done to him.

  She was humming merrily to herself as she strutted back to sit beside Ma King.

  When Natalie asked what that was all about, he refused to answer, even if it took his cheeks a long time to return to normal color.

  Oregon was definitely a million miles away. A million miles and just three more days.

  But he couldn’t think about that. He attacked Natalie’s bishop and immediately lost a pawn and his own bishop on the next turn in exchange for his troubles.

  He would allow himself two more days to focus on only the here and now. It was something Tim was usually pretty good at, just living in the moment.

  Wildland firefighting was like that. On the fire, other than brief planning sessions, there was only the moment. The pain, exhaustion, and heat combined into an endless blur of events mostly indistinguishable; except at one end was a raging inferno and at the other a brutal terrain covered by wide smoldering stretches of the Black.

  Off the fire was oddly simila
r, without the pain, heat, and exhaustion. You prepped, you trained, and you played. But it mostly blurred together until the moment the fire call came and interrupted all other pursuits.

  The problem with this moment was how much he was enjoying it.

  “Checkmate,” Natalie announced.

  Okay, most of it.

  “At least you played a little better than Macy. She was really off her game.”

  Which made Tim feel a little better, but not much. The problem was that this was about as well as he ever played. Chess wasn’t one of his strengths.

  “This kid wipe you out?” Macy’s dad came up to look over the final layout of the chessboard.

  “She did me out of a half plate of onion rings,” Tim dropped a couple of dollars on the bar beside the empty plate.

  “Way to go, champ,” Josh Tyler congratulated Natalie. “Are you planning to grow up to be a chess hustler?”

  “I’ve considered it. Thank you for the game and the onion rings, Mr. Harada,” then she picked up her book—with a cover that didn’t look as hot as one of Dorothy’s but otherwise not much less gruesome—and Tim felt suddenly invisible.

  Macy’s dad pointed to one of the tables, “Keep me company for lunch. Lisa is over with the gang.”

  Macy’s mom waved when he looked over. She was an older, less chaotic version of her daughter. Macy’s brash turned to elegance.

  “Glad to, Mr. Tyler.” Though now that he was sleeping with Macy, maybe not so much.

  Eight or nine women were now gathered around the table with Ma King. He’d been a couple years behind Ma King’s daughter who was now one of the group. There was one other girl of the same age, who he didn’t recognize, but most of them were at least empty-nester age or older. Dorothy said something. The whole group turned to look at him, including Lisa Tyler, then there was a huge burst of laughter.

  Tim chose the seat with his back to them. Maybe being defeated by Natalie was going to be the least painful part of this day.

  “At some point I have to cease being ‘Mr. Tyler.’ That worked when I was your teacher twenty years ago, but I’m retired now, so you may cease and desist.”