Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  “Misty, please!” Judy tried again to dislodge her from the microphone.

  “NO, JUDY!” she boomed, wagging her finger, trying to look fierce. “NO! Stan’ back and no one will get hurt…except…except for Misty, course. I’M gonna hurt. I AM hurt.” She grimaced, the tears flowing steadily. “I’m frapping DESTROYED, an…all our friends here need to know…that…that fucking Jerry Stein killed my husband before he could be my husband, y’know? He’s…an AC…uh, a CA…no. Stein plays…with the frapping CIA…agency, thing. I’m not supposed to tell, y’see, ’cause Jerry said I couldn’t. No…Jeff said I couldn’t.” Her voice climbed an octave, becoming a squeak as her face screwed up into a mask of pain. “An’ now he’s dead…. Y’know?”

  Clark Maxwell appeared at Judy’s elbow and together they half carried, half guided Misty away from the microphone and out to the lobby, where they gently lowered her onto a couch. She didn’t resist. The dam had broken again, and her soft sobs precluded any protests.

  “Bill’s on his way over,” Judy whispered to Clark. “We’ll put her to bed in our motor home tonight.”

  “You need any more help, call me,” he said, satisfying himself that Judy had it under control. He hesitated, feeling momentarily guilty that he hadn’t offered the extra room in the log house he was renting. It was far larger than the Deasons’ motor home, but somehow the thought of being alone with a drunken, distraught Misty Ryan was frightening, and more than he could handle. Besides, she needed a woman with her.

  Clark stood for a minute, processing what she’d said. CIA? The mere mention was chilling, especially after several government executives had been tried and convicted several years before for misusing former Air Force aircraft obtained only to fight forest fires. The entire community was convinced the CIA had been involved but had weaseled out of any public responsibility, letting someone else take the blame and go to prison. The stories—and attendant suspicions—had taken on a life of their own.

  But there was Jeff’s demise to consider, and the question of precisely how an otherwise carefully inspected aircraft could suddenly come apart. If the aircraft had been used clandestinely and extensively by some CIA front over the years whenever they were supposed to have been in New Mexico just sitting, the extra flight hours and possible abuse without corresponding maintenance could explain the sudden breakup. Misty’s drunken reference to the CIA was worrisome, though it wasn’t difficult to imagine Jeff Maze telling Misty anything he thought would get him out of an otherwise hard-to-explain situation. Considering his tomcat reputation, a bogus explanation of “I had to disappear for three months because I’m with the CIA on assignment for Jerry” could easily have come from his bag of tricks to cover nothing more than a side affair.

  Clark moved back into the lounge where Karen was waiting at a table in the far corner.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No, no!” Karen replied, reaching out to touch his wrist in a reassuring gesture that sent a small jolt of adrenaline through his body. “I thought that was very good of you. Frankly, the rest of us were too embarrassed for her to intervene.”

  “Poor girl.”

  “She waited a long time for old Jeff.”

  “Makes you kind of reconsider your own time line, y’know?” he said, looking back in the direction of the lobby. “Makes you want to reassess what’s important, since it can all end so quickly.”

  She nodded, a faraway look in her eyes.

  “Been there, done that, Clark. Got the souvenir teaspoon.” She chuckled, her eyes reengaging his. “You never finished what you were telling me.”

  They’d been on their second beer when Misty had lurched in the door, and the interruption had been fortuitous. After they’d relaxed and both filled in the missing four years, he’d begun to get careless and had come close to telling her too much about his growing concerns, which inevitably centered on the maintenance department of Stein Aviation. Perhaps it was the instant level of trust he felt around her, or maybe the intense emotions of the day triggering an incautious need to talk. But drop-dead beautiful or not, Karen was still Trent Jones’s wife, and if there was anyone pressing the limits around Jerry’s operation, it had to be Jones.

  “Well,” Clark sighed, “what it comes down to is, no one alive knows how much our airplanes have taken in the way of overspeeds, and extra g-forces, and we don’t have reliable ways to check every critical piece for metal fatigue and cracking. I mean, I know maintenance does the best they can, but all we’re sure of is how many hours the airplanes have logged. We have no flight data recorders, no stress meters on the wings, nothing. And yet every low-level mission means the wing box is taking more severe flexing.”

  “No flight recorders? I thought they were required.”

  “On commercial jets, yes, but not on our ragtag fleet. We’ve tried. The Forest Service paid to install a few temporarily a couple of years back, and they worked too well. The readings we got scared everyone to death.”

  “You mean, some of you were putting too much stress on the planes and the recorders showed it?”

  Clark chuckled. “Karen, the hot dogs—the really outrageous guys who’d fly into hell and flip off the devil—they refused to allow the recorders aboard their birds.”

  “Like Jeff?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, like Jeff. But those of us who try to stay somewhat reasonably conservative in our flying thought we’d see reasonable readings when those recorders were installed. Instead, we were coming back from every drop with digital confirmation of constant over-g’s and massive overspeeds, and no way of knowing when the metal we were torturing so badly was going to break.”

  “Is that why you retired?”

  He nodded, his eyes on a faded picture of the Tetons on the far wall. “Yeah, well…that was one of the—”

  “Hey, Maxwell!”

  Clark turned to see Joel Butler and Ralph Battaglia, two of the other DC-6 pilots, standing by the table holding their drinks and nodding to Karen, serious expressions covering their faces.

  “What’s going on, Joel?” Clark asked.

  “Did you hear they’re considering night ops out of Jackson tonight with the choppers? The Chinooks and Skycranes?”

  “You’re kidding!” Night operations were prohibited, except in extraordinary cases with firefighters trapped or communities threatened.

  “I mean, they’re only talking about it, but things are getting really grim,” Joel was saying. “Some of the ground troops were being cut off on the other side of that ridge we were hitting this afternoon. And, by the way, Ops has given us all a seven A.M. show time tomorrow. Didja get the word?”

  Clark shook his head in mock pain. He reached for his cell phone to check for messages, but found none waiting. “Seven A.M.? Really? I’d understood eight.”

  “Crack of dawn, dude. And they’ve got you posted for Tanker Eighty-eight.”

  “Joel,” Clark said, looking askance. “Please don’t call me dude, okay? You know I hate that.”

  “Which is why I do it.” Joel smiled, leaning over the table toward Karen with his hand outstretched. “Since your ill-mannered boyfriend here won’t introduce me, ma’am, for fear, I guess, that I’ll try to hustle you away, I’d just like to make up for his manners. I’m Joel Butler, a genuine airtanker pilot who, unlike this rotorhead, doesn’t go slumming around in helicopters. And this is Ralph Battaglia, also a real man and an airtanker pilot, and with that last name, I strongly suspect a mafiosa as well.” He grinned back at his partner, who was rolling his eyes. Butler let her hand go and Battaglia leaned in to shake it while Clark sat back and watched in amusement.

  Joel stood tall and cleared his throat with exaggerated formality. “Now that we’re all introduced and know each other, and you have a choice in men, can we buy you a real drink and explain all about this business of fighting forest fires?” Butler asked.

  “I’m a Missoula smokejumper,” she said, watching the startled reaction.


  “No! For real?” Butler asked, shaking his head and glancing at Clark, who was nodding. “Wow. I mean, you’re the…ah…the best-looking smokejumper I guess I’ve ever met.”

  “Me, too,” Battaglia agreed, matching his friend’s somewhat evil leer.

  “See,” Joel continued, “most of your fellow smokejumpers aren’t terribly interesting because they’re kinda…seriously male, and—”

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for the compliment and for being so polite, and for the interesting invitations. I know my husband, Trent Jones, Jerry Stein’s director of maintenance, will be really flattered that you like his wife so much.” She sat smiling as they looked at each other in confusion and finally made the name association.

  “Oh, jeez! I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones. We just figured, you know, since you were sitting with Clark—”

  “I’m kidding,” she said.

  They both stood in confusion for a few moments, cocking eyebrows in suspicion. “Really? Then, you’re not Jones’s wife?”

  “No, I’m not kidding about being Trent’s wife. I am. Please, guys. Sit down,” Karen said, surprised when Clark popped to his feet to put a hand on Joel’s shoulder.

  “Ah…they’d love to stay, Karen, really they would, but they just can’t.” Clark began pushing the two backward in a modified bum’s rush. “In fact, they were both just leaving. Weren’t you, guys? Tell the lady how you were leaving, before her husband arrives with his shotgun.”

  The two pilots exchanged a look and started nodding as they backed up.

  “Yeah, you know, damn! Look at the time. We gotta go.”

  “Yeah,” Ralph echoed. “I forget we’re due in…where?” He glanced at Joel.

  “Tulsa.”

  “Oh, yeah. We’re due in Tulsa in…jeez, twenty minutes.”

  “We’ll have to hurry,” Joel added, aping concern.

  “Okay!” Ralph said. “Well, you two kids have a good evening.”

  “Absolutely,” Joel agreed.

  “We’ll just go over here and do some…leaving stuff. And we saw absolutely nothing,” Ralph continued. “We have no idea where you are tonight, or what you may or may not be doing to, or with, each other.”

  “No idea,” echoed Joel. “We know nothing.”

  Karen was trying to stifle a laugh as the two bumbled away toward the other end of the bar while Clark sat down, puzzled by her broad smile.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You.”

  “Me? Me what?”

  She was giggling audibly now. “You just gave those two characters every possible reason to think we were back here having a liaison.”

  “A liaison?”

  “Yep.”

  “Are we?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  He paused. “I don’t know, Karen. I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those before. How do they work?”

  “Well,” she stopped giggling and leaned toward him, her eyes sparkling.

  “First, you…” her voice trailed off and he could see her eyes narrowing as she looked over his shoulder, spotting someone she didn’t want to see.

  “So, exactly what’s going on here?” a somewhat familiar male voice asked. Clark turned to find Trent standing behind him. He stood in mild embarrassment and offered his hand, which Trent took reluctantly for a perfunctory shake.

  “Trent. Good to see you. I’m glad you were able to make it.”

  “No one told me I was invited,” Trent snapped, his eyes glaring at Karen.

  “You don’t check your messages, do you?” she shot back.

  “I got back to the room expecting to see your things there,” he said, ignoring Clark. “So where’s your stuff?”

  “Trent,” she began evenly, her voice steady but taut. “Would you please wait over by the bar and let me finish my conversation here, and then we’ll—”

  “Screw that! Answer the damned question, Karen. I’m your husband. You’re staying somewhere tonight, and it doesn’t seem to be in my hotel room. So where’s your stuff?”

  “I have my own room here, Trent. I’m staying here by myself.”

  Once more he glanced at Clark, his eyes narrowing. “And where are you staying? Here, or…” he looked over at Karen.

  “I’m not staying here, Trent,” Clark replied carefully. “I rent a house on the south end of town, which is where I will be headed when I leave this bar.”

  Trent was glaring at him, and Clark paused, then continued. “Look, Trent, this has been a tough day for all of us, and I haven’t seen Karen for the four years I’ve been away from airtankering. So there’s nothing going on here but two professional friends getting reacquainted and talking shop and commiserating about losing Jeff today. Okay? So cool down. What you see in here is more or less a wake.”

  For the space of a few heartbeats Trent looked at Karen in silence, then turned back to Clark and without warning shoved him backward violently with both hands. Clark stumbled, almost losing his balance, and steadied himself with his hand on the wall as Trent’s voice boomed through the bar.

  “I know what you’re up to. You get away from my damn wife, flyboy! Got that?”

  Clark straightened himself to his full six-foot-one height and put an index finger in the air, his head cocked, his jaw set.

  “Touch me again, Trent, and I’ll deck you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Trent!” Karen snapped, sailing around the table and getting between them. “Cut it out. Now!” She slapped her left hand firmly on Trent’s chest, her right balled into a fist, staring him down. “You’re acting like an ass!” she added.

  “Get out of my way,” he said, weakening, but trying to keep up the show.

  “Trent! Sit down and shut up,” she said, her eyes flaring. “I mean it!”

  At least a half dozen of the men around the bar had slid off their barstools and quietly converged on the standoff as Mr. and Mrs. Jones stared each other down. Well aware he was awash in witnesses and potential defenders of his wife, Trent gave a sudden snort of defeat and grabbed a chair, flinging it back behind him against the wall where it clattered harmlessly on its side.

  “Screw you, bitch!” he snarled.

  “Not anymore, Trent,” she shot back, turning away as he pushed past and stormed toward the front of the tavern.

  Clark watched over his shoulder until Trent was gone. He turned, then moved carefully to where Karen was still standing and facing the wall, and placed a hand gently on her shoulder.

  She turned sharply, her features softening when she saw it was Clark.

  “I am so terribly sorry, Karen, to have put you in a…a…”

  “Compromising position?” she laughed, as tears appeared. “You didn’t. I did that to myself when I married Trent Jones.”

  She took a shaky step toward the table they’d occupied, searching for her purse.

  “I’d better go now.”

  “Of course. May I walk you out?”

  She nodded. “To the stairway.”

  With the other pilots and patrons returning to their drinks, Clark followed Karen to the hotel lobby, carefully avoiding the temptation to put his arm around her. She turned at the foot of the grand central staircase, a discreet distance between them.

  “I sincerely apologize for my husband’s stupid, boorish display, Clark. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Neither did you.”

  She looked at the ceiling and laughed sharply before looking back at him.

  “There’s a lot I haven’t deserved. He’s…he’s not a bad guy. And he wasn’t always like this, mad and surly and combative, I mean. Something’s changed in a place he won’t let me near, and it’s destroyed us.”

  She looked outside again for a while and sighed heavily, returning her eyes to his. “The job with Stein is killing him, and I’m really suspicious why. It can’t just be the normal pressures. There’s something more going on.”

  “Maybe it’s the chance that Congress will end it al
l.”

  “Could be. But that guy in there who shoved you? I don’t know him. I didn’t marry him.”

  “I’m sorry, Karen. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course not. I guess, earlier, I felt it…improper to suggest to you that my marriage was over, since I didn’t want you to think I was issuing some sort of invitation, you know?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why hide it? We’re history.”

  “Are you going to be safe tonight? I mean, he obviously doesn’t know which room you’re in, but—”

  “Oh, I’m okay. He’s not dangerous, just obnoxious. I’ll be fine. I jump out of airplanes and attack forest fires, remember?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I meant to ask you about that. Why do you smokejumpers do that? Is it kind of a lemming thing?”

  She ignored the question, her eyes on his for an uncomfortable interval.

  “We never really got to talk tonight, you know?”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time…four years ago when we met in Oregon, Clark, that night…that was so incredible.”

  “For me, too,” he said.

  “It was important to me. And I want us to try this again, okay?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Talking. Sitting down together and just talking.”

  “I’d love that.” Clark pushed his hands in his pants pockets and examined the floor at their feet for a few seconds before looking at her. “Karen, I’ve got to fly a full eight hours tomorrow, but when I get back…”

  “Call me, would you?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, I may be in the woods for a few days with my squad.”

  “I’ll find you. Just…try to convince Trent that—”