Torch

by Roxie Noir

  When I have to convince someone that they need to go or they might die? It doesn’t get much worse.

  “There’s only the one road into Eaglevale,” Randy says. “You’re not gonna miss the checkpoint, I promise.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Grab Lucy and get a move on,” he suggests, and then hangs up without saying goodbye.

  He’s also stressed and worried, I remind myself. Everyone is today. Be nice. Just be nice.

  We’ll see.

  It’s a long drive. A couple hours to Ashlake, where I grew up, then down a twisting, winding mountain road until we finally climb into Eaglevale. The fire’s gotten bigger and moved faster than anyone thought it might, and with the wind blowing east the sky is an unsettling yellow color, the sun an angry red ball in the middle.

  It creeps me out. I always feel like I’m in some horror movie when there are fires around. The light looks wrong, the air smells wrong, and everything just feels strange.

  I’ve got Lucy and another ranger in the car, but we don’t say much on the drive. I know none of us are looking forward to this, and talking about how much it’s going to suck isn’t going to make it better.

  “They sent the hotshots in this morning, right?” Lucy asks suddenly.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think they’re headed into the canyon. Last I heard, anyway.”

  “I hope they’re okay,” she says, looking straight ahead out the windshield. “This is a shitty thing to happen, especially right at the end of fire season. I bet they’d rather go home.”

  I swallow, then nod.

  “I bet so,” I say, and then we keep driving in silence, each thinking our own thoughts.

  At the checkpoint we pull over, and we’re herded to a card table manned by a no-nonsense woman wearing a traffic-cone-orange shirt. At least she’s visible.

  “All right. You all done this before?” she asks, like she’s the one in charge and we’re the volunteers. Already, it grates on my nerves a little, but I remind myself that every single person here is having a terrible day, and maybe I should get over it.

  Or, at the very least, not let on.

  “Yes,” the three of us chorus.

  “Good,” she says, and begins handing out clipboards and stacks of paper. “You’re doing the streets north of Main Street. This is a list of items they should bring with them, official records, birth certificates, things like that. If they’ve got someone out of town they can stay with, family or friends or whatever, they should go there. If not, Ashlake High is the current evacuation center, and this is the map to it.”

  I look at the documents she’s given us. They’re clearly photocopies of photocopies, the black lines a little unsteady, a little crooked on the page.

  When this is over I should make better evacuation handouts, I think. These look like the directions to a church barbecue, not official documents.

  “And remember, this is a mandatory evacuation,” says Mike’s voice from behind us, and we turn.

  He looks tired, deep circles under his eyes, his uniform rumpled.

  “We aren’t likely to drag anyone out of here in handcuffs, but don’t give people the choice to stay in their homes,” he goes on. “Knock on every door. If there’s no answer, go to the back door. Be a nuisance, but try to be compassionate. If anyone still refuses, alert us.”

  “What about pets?” Lucy asks.

  “The Ponderosa Ranch down Route Forty-Two is taking on stock animals for now,” Mike says, then looks questioningly at the volunteer woman in the orange shirt. “And household pets...?”

  “They should take all pets with them and ask when they get to Ashlake,” she says. “The Humane Society was working on something last I checked.”

  Sometimes, during evacuations, people just let their dogs and cats go free. As if a house cat or a Schnauzer can somehow escape a forest fire on its own.

  I look down at the materials, mentally steeling myself.

  “Anything else we should know?” I ask.

  Mike sighs.

  “This is the kind of area where a ranger knocking on a door will occasionally be greeted with a firearm,” he says reluctantly. “There’s never been a shooting incident, but if that happens, back away, don’t engage. If that asshole wants to burn to death, let ‘em.”

  I almost smile at the dark joke.

  “Got it,” I say.

  Mike nods at the three of us, his hands on his hips.

  “Thanks, guys,” he says.

  We quickly split up our side of the small town. The roads on the north side of Main Street wind further up the mountain, and they’re full of potholes and patches. The houses are spread out, and there’s no real rhyme or reason to them: some are pristine log cabins, probably some rich person’s vacation getaway. Some are little more than ramshackle plywood buildings with two busted cars out front and a porch sagging off the back.

  But most are just regular houses, a regular size, regular cars in the driveway, a swing set in the back yard.

  The first few houses are obviously empty, but I have to knock on all the doors, just to make sure, before I can stick the EVACUATED sign on the front door and check it off my list. We spend a lot of time worrying about the holdouts, the people who’ll refuse to leave for one reason or another, but they’re a tiny percentage of the population.

  Most people, when they learn that there’s a mandatory fire evacuation in place, leave right away, because most people are pretty reasonable.

  When I get to the fourth house, there’s a loaded sedan in the driveway and a little girl, maybe two years old, wearing a harness shaped like a monkey. The harness is attached to a leash that’s tied to the inside of the fence around the front yard.

  Some alarms start going off in my head, and I walk a little faster toward the kid on the leash, then crouch down on the other side of the fence.

  “Hey,” I say.

  The little girl frowns at me, then stands, grabs her stuffed dog, and backs a couple of feet away. She doesn’t say anything.

  Well, at least she knows stranger danger.

  “Are your parents here?” I ask, glancing at the car. All four doors are open, so they’re probably around somewhere, but I still don’t like this, even though I know it’s probably the result of panicked parenting and not malicious.

  “Can I help you?” a woman’s voice says from the door, sharply.

  I stand up.

  “I’m doing evacuation rounds with the Forest Service,” I say, glancing from the kid to her.

  She’s young, probably not much older than me, and there’s an infant in a carrier on her back, her lips puffy, her eyes red, like she’s been crying.

  We look at each other for a moment, and she shifts the big tupperware box that she’s holding in front of herself.

  “Please don’t report me to CPS,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m sorry, my husband is out of town and I’ve been up all night and I just needed to keep her out of the way without running off for five minutes while I loaded the car.”

  The kid looks over at me, quizzically, the stuffed dog dangling by one leg.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say, because the kid seems perfectly fine and happy, playing in the front yard, and because I can’t imagine I’d do a whole lot better in the same circumstances. “Want me to keep her company?”

  She sags with relief.

  “That would be so nice of you,” she says. “I swear I’ll just be five more minutes, I need to grab a couple more things from inside and then we’re heading to my sister’s in Bozeman.”

  “No problem,” I say. The baby on her back starts fussing, and she walks toward the car, jiggling it a little until it quiets down. “You look like you’ve got your hands full.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “I swear, I’m never letting Chuck go on another business trip.”

  I come into the front yard and sit on the grass near the kid.

  “Hi, I’m Clementine,” I say. “What’s your name?�
��

  The kid looks over at her mom, loading the box into the trunk.

  “She’s okay, sweetheart,” the mom calls.

  The kid just looks at me, silent.

  I point to the stuffed dog.

  “What’s the dog’s name?” I ask.

  She looks from me, to the dog, back to me, and then grins.

  “Kee-tah,” she says.

  “Kita?”

  “Kee-TAHHH.”

  “Cheetah?”

  “Gee. TAWWW.”

  I blink at the kid for a minute, my mind racing, because I don’t really speak toddler.

  “Guitar?” I finally say.

  She nods and laughs.

  “That’s a really good name,” I say. “I have a dog named Trout.”

  I see the little family off a few minutes later and watch them drive away. Then I put the sticker on their door and check their house off my list, hoping that a perfectly fine toddler with a frazzled mom is the worst thing I see today.

  It’s not, but nothing awful happens. There’s a couple fighting in their front yard over whether they’re gonna go to her mom’s house or his buddy Wayne’s house, and when I calmly try to inform them of evacuation procedures, the woman just screams “We’re trying, you goddamn forest bitch!” at me.

  I don’t shout back, even though I want to, and make a mental note that goddamn forest bitch would be a pretty funny insult in a different context.

  There are more families, more kids with stuffed animals. I wake one guy up when I knock on his door, and he answers in his boxers, scratching his beer gut, and seems surprised that there’s a fire.

  I give him the rundown: where to go, what to take, be sure to shut off your AC to keep as much smoke as possible out of the house, all that. He just looks at me as I talk, like he’s hearing me but not necessarily listening.

  I leave his house, walk to the next one, and as I’m about to knock on that door, I see him driving away in a pickup truck, still not wearing a shirt. I’m guessing he didn’t grab his important documents, either.

  I tried, I think.

  I knock on doors all day. A volunteer gives me a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, and I scarf it down, then help Lucy with her section, since she managed to get the problem houses this time. Afternoon comes, then evening, and after darkness falls I’m still knocking on doors of empty houses, making sure everyone is out.

  My radio crackles every so often with updates: the hotshot crew is doing a controlled burn to the south and the west, though the heat and the winds are making even that dangerous. I try not to think about Hunter, out there in the middle of all that, but I can’t help it.

  I wish I’d give him something better than a dumb rock, but I don’t have anything, and I definitely don’t have anything that can do what I want, which is keep him safe.

  When we finish, it’s almost two o’clock in the morning, but every house in Eaglevale is empty, the stores closed, hardly any cars on the street. It’s eerie, a town with almost no one in it. A ghost town.

  “You’re staying in Ashlake?” Mike asks as we walk to the Forest Service vehicles.

  “Yeah, Lucy and I are staying with my sister,” I say. “I’ll be at the high school to help out first thing tomorrow.”

  He nods.

  “Thanks, Clementine,” he says.

  26

  Hunter

  It’s a long walk, and there isn’t all that much to talk about. Plus, we’re walking single file, so it’s hard to hear or be heard. It’s not long before we all just lapse into silence.

  Eaglevale is in the saddle of a hill. The Quartzite river runs to the south of the mountain, right below the steep, rocky slopes. Right now, the fire is burning hard to the west, on the north side of the river, and to the south, across the river from Eaglevale.

  If it weren’t for the river, Eaglevale would already be fucked, but all that water makes a perfect, natural firebreak. We find a wide, gravel beach on the north side and set up our base station. It’ll be uncomfortable for sleeping, but the gravel makes it a relatively safe zone. Rock doesn’t burn.

  Across the river, the blackened spikes of former pine trees poke up into the smoky sky like they’re trying to point upward. Every time the wind runs through the valley, ash swirls up from the burned area across the river from us.

  We call that area the black, for obvious reasons. It’s ugly and unsettling, but it’s the safest place to be, since there’s no more fuel to burn. The lush, overgrown forest, full of trees and undergrowth is the most dangerous. That’s the sort of terrain that goes up in seconds.

  Once we’re set up, Porter gathers us along the riverbank.

  “Everyone good?” he asks.

  “Hell yeah!” we all shout, because we’re all crazy people who can’t wait to get to work.

  You have to be a little crazy to take this job in the first place.

  Porter allows himself one smile.

  “Good, because I’m gonna work the shit out of you guys,” he says.

  We cheer again.

  “Our primary goal here is to keep Eaglevale from burning to the ground,” he says, pointing vaguely in the direction of the town, somewhere up the hill. “Right now, the fire to the west of here on the north side of the Quartzite is our main objective while we keep an eye on the area across the river.”

  The Saturn Fire is big, hot, and incredibly dangerous. Most fires move along at the ground level, because that’s where most of the dry, dead material is: leaves, fallen trees and branches, undergrowth, et cetera. But this fire is large enough and hot enough that it’s spreading through the crowns of trees — the living top part.

  Crown fires are even more unpredictable and therefore even more dangerous than a normal fire. Every so often we can hear a faraway crack as a living tree gets so hot that its sap boils instantly and the whole tree explodes.

  Porter’s still got a big laminated map of the area, and he lays it out on the ground, holding it down with river rocks. Because this fire is off the ground, we need to fell a wide swath of trees before we can start the back burn.

  And because fire travels uphill almost unimaginably fast, the burn needs to be on flat land, before the Saturn fire gets there. That means we start now.

  “Any questions?” Porter shouts.

  No one has any.

  “Then it’s time to move out,” he says.

  We take turns at all the jobs. Taking down full-size trees, even though we’ve got chainsaws, is exhausting, backbreaking work, and it’s even more so because I started the day with a three-hour fully loaded hike.

  I chainsaw for a while, then Silas takes over, handing me a GPS and a can of orange paint. Then I mark trees for removal, making sure we’re keeping the break the right shape and width, and he cuts them down.

  Around lunch, we go on lookout for an hour and watch the fire from a high, rocky outcropping. We report in every fifteen minutes, but miraculously, the Saturn Fire seems like it may have stalled, or at least, like it might have slowed, both to the west and across the river.

  The dry, hot winds from the west have stopped blowing, so the fire doesn’t have that force driving it forward any more. It’s still destructive and dangerous, and we can still hear trees exploding every once in a while.

  But it seems like we might be getting the upper hand, like Eaglevale and Coldwater are being evacuated for nothing.

  At least, I hope so.

  “Casden, Dewar, take a break,” Porter says. We’re standing on either side of the fire break, carefully lighting fallen trees and tree stumps on fire, then watching the fire as it burns itself out, making sure there are no embers remaining.

  It’s hot, hard work, but everything here is hot, hard work.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and Silas agrees with me, nodding assent from across a blackened, charred log.

  “Guys, I said go take a dinner break,” Porter repeats, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  I look down and stomp out an ember, my heavy boot crus
hing it into the charred black earth.

  Fucking asshole, I think. Giving orders all day while I sweat my balls off.

  Silas shrugs.

  “Okay,” he says, and gives me a look.

  I glare at Porter, but he doesn’t take the bait.

  Fuck it. I’m hungry anyway. We eat more MREs, because that’s all the food that’s here, and talk a little about what we’re doing when fire season ends. I mention that I’m moving to Lodgepole, where my girlfriend lives, and he says again that Clementine is cool. That’s about it.

  We go back to the fire break, and we burn until it’s past dark, when Porter comes back and orders us to take the first four-hour sleep shift.

  I don’t bother setting up a tent, just lay out my foam pad on the gravel beach by the river and crawl into my sleeping bag with my clothes in a pile next to me. Even though there’s something poking into my back, I fall asleep almost instantly, thinking I wonder what Clementine is doing.

  27

  Clementine

  I wake up in the dark to a horrible, rattling, buzzing sound, and it takes me a second to realize that it’s my phone, on the floor, in vibrate mode. I dangle one hand off of Jane’s couch and grab it, answering without even looking at who it is.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “There’s a guy in a cabin,” Jennifer says.

  The gears in my head have to turn for a few moments as I look around the room, trying to figure out where I am and what I’m doing there.

  Then I remember what’s going on, and what there’s a guy in a cabin means.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Can you go?”

  I sit up on the couch and look at the inflatable mattress where Lucy was sleeping. It’s empty, so she must have left, or she’s in the shower, or something.

  “What kind of guy in a cabin?”

  “He’s a crotchety old goddamn lunatic who’s probably got three dogs, a shotgun, and some very strong ideas about private property rights as if a fire gives a flying fuck about the constitution,” Jennifer says, sounding more than a little irritated. “The usual kind of guy in a cabin, Clementine.”