Summer of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Clare glanced back at the battle beside the Laundromat. “We’ll go as soon as we can.”

  “Go now. The Shoshone has crowned.”

  When wildfire leaped into the treetops, Garrett had told her it released the energy of an atomic bomb. It sounded improbable, but when she cocked an ear, she heard a distant dull rumble like an approaching train. Her nostrils flared at a fresh and stronger mix of tart resin and char. Her heartbeat accelerated.

  With a tap on Javier Fuentes’s shoulder, she cupped her hands and shouted to the others from Houston, “We’ve gotta leave you. If it blows up, head to the lake and get in the water.”

  Javier leaped to the driver’s seat of the fire truck. As she climbed in the passenger side, she said a silent prayer for the safety of the men they left behind. She hadn’t gone an hour in the past weeks without asking what she could have done to prevent Frank’s death. “These things happen, Clare,” her friends at the station had drilled her.

  They were right. Before she’d joined the ranks, she’d seen on the news that every few months some firefighter paid the ultimate price.

  “You have to pick up and go on,” they’d said.

  She had, but in a different direction. Her flight to Yellowstone, and that’s what she now knew it to be, had been a headlong rush toward peaceful woodland and natural beauty. She’d believed she wouldn’t have to face another monstrous specter of dancing heat and light.

  Javier steered along the deserted inbound lane to Grant Village, past the stopped column of sedans, pickups with camper shells, and trailers. Despite the emergency, he drove slowly, bronzed hands light on the wheel.

  The approaching fire had been started by a lightning strike at Shoshone Lake, six miles southwest. After smouldering and creeping along for a month, high winds had fanned it into fury.

  They came to the head of the line, a stopped behemoth of an RV. Ahead, perhaps a hundred yards, tightly spaced pines burned on both sides of the road.

  Clare clicked the Motorola’s button. “Come in, Garrett.” She slid out of the truck to scan the sky. The sun was reduced to an intermittent copper disk. “Come in.”

  On the RV driver’s side, she hailed an elderly man with wild white hair and wire-framed glasses. “I’m Clare Chance with the firefighters,” she told him in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. She’d always had a raspy low voice that people mistook for a man’s on the telephone.

  “What shall we do?” The ginger-haired woman passenger leaned across.

  “A helicopter is going to dump water ahead,” Clare told them. “As soon as the fire dies down I want you to drive as fast as you can.”

  The runaway backfire wasn’t going to kill anyone, but the Shoshone’s rumbling underpinned all other sound. If it arrived before they could escape …

  She prayed the chopper came soon.

  Steve Haywood looked out the helicopter window into hell.

  Great tongues of orange flame leaped through the crowns of lodgepole pines, then reached another two hundred feet into the white-hot sky.

  “Swing over Grant Village,” he ordered pilot Chris Deering through their headphones, wishing he were anywhere but in the air. Although this recon flight over Yellowstone’s raging forest fires was important, Steve had already decided that for him it was a terrible idea. He wiped the sweat at his temples, right where the gray had started last year.

  Steve watched Deering peer out at the boiling smoke through his Ray Ban Aviators, noting the sunburst of lines around the pilot’s coffee-brown eyes. As he gauged the faint smile playing at the corners of the taut mouth, Steve realized that Deering was actually enjoying this.

  He knew the type. All over the mountain west, wherever choppers were flown, there were guys in military-style flight suits with winged patches on their shoulders that proclaimed Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association.

  He’d come to Yellowstone for the peace it afforded, not to wind up in a war zone.

  Deering fiddled with the radio and was unable to raise West Yellowstone Airport, as had been the case for about five minutes. He banked the Bell 206 into a steep turn and Steve looked straight down into leaping flames.

  It wasn’t the fire that had him on edge, but the flying. His decision to do recon had been one of those grand defiant gestures; he hadn’t wanted to tell his boss Shad Dugan that he was unwilling to get back on the horse that had thrown him.

  Turbulence seized the chopper. Steve’s stomach clenched as they plunged earthward and then rebounded. Reaching for a handhold, he saw that his palm left a damp print on his green fire-retardant trousers. In the three years he’d been a park biologist he’d successfully stayed out of aircraft, preferring to visit the backcountry via the serenity of horseback. If only he were on a remote trail right now, breathing clean air instead of eating smoke from thousands of torching trees.

  Deering took them lower into even rougher air.

  Looking out through the bubble of glass, Steve tried to ignore vertigo and focus on the solid earth. Below, in Grant Village, at least twenty fire trucks lined the south shore of Yellowstone Lake. Near the boat ramp, pumpers equipped to fight wildfires suctioned water from the lake. With hoses connected to hydrants, firefighters sprayed the roofs of the visitor center and lodge.

  Deering dipped the chopper left and Steve looked where he pointed. The road out of the village was a narrow corridor between two walls of flame. Down this slender needle, a dozen cars and several fire trucks were threaded. The knot inside Steve twisted tighter as he realized that they were stopped.

  Black smoke billowed around the Bell’s windshield and the visibility went to zero.

  “Fuck shit!” Deering pushed right pedal.

  “Easy,” Steve blurted. The hard look Deering shot made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. The pilot obviously didn’t think a ranger should be telling him how to fly his chopper. His pride of ownership had been clear at the airport. Steve had stood on the ramp with reluctance while he showed off the custom paint, ultramarine edged in gold.

  Deering moved the collective between the seats and put the Bell into a climb. The veins on the back of his hand stood out where he gripped the cyclic stick in front of him.

  Steve tried to look through the window, but merely saw his reflection against the roiling blackness. Silver-gray eyes rimmed with red gave testimony to the irritating smoke. His thinning blond hair revealed a sunburned forehead between the insulated headphones.

  The sky lightened, and as the chopper broke back into clear air, Steve realized he’d been holding his breath.

  He exhaled and found it didn’t help him relax. He kept a wary eye on the way Deering’s feet feathered the pedals while adjusting the pitch of the rotors. They made another pass over the stalled line of cars and trucks. This time Deering avoided the smoke.

  “Okay, Doctor Haywood, look behind you.” The pilot’s patient tone said he regarded Steve as learning-impaired.

  On the rear deck, coarse canvas made a crumpled pile, a bucket attached to a cable hooked beneath the chopper.

  “I want you to climb in back,” Deering continued, “open the door, and shove that out.”

  Steve bristled. He’d fought the summer fires of the West for three seasons during college and several times since coming to the park. “Wouldn’t it be smarter if we landed to deploy the bucket?”

  “Just do it!” Deering snapped.

  Steve thought about the people trapped in their cars, choking on smoke. He’d felt that same heat on his own back as he bent to dig a fire line. Experience had taught him that each wildfire had its own personality, from how it devoured the forest to the play of colors in its flames. What they shared was that they could all turn deadly … as could the process of fighting them.

  Steve hurried to remove his shoulder harness and squeeze between the seats. The collapsed bucket made an unwieldy orange heap on the metal deck, with the cable snaking through a notch in the doorframe.

  “Be sure,” Deering’s distorted voice came to h
im through the headphones, “to pitch the bucket clear of the skids.”

  Steve slid open the door. After looking through tinted windows, brilliant light shocked him. The blast of wind and high-pitched whine of the helicopter was much louder. Turning to his task, he tugged at the bucket, but failed to budge it.

  Five years ago, he could have tossed it out. Now, at thirty-eight, multiple surgeries had left him with knees he could no longer rely on. Ignoring a stab of pain, he bent and put his shoulder behind the work.

  As the amorphous shape inched toward the bright day, he prepared to give the bucket an extra shove. Just then, the helicopter hit a pocket of rough air and dipped, nearly pitching him out. He clung to the doorframe, watching the bucket dangle perilously close to the left skid.

  Deering flipped a switch and the cable paid out. The chopper banked and lost altitude until it hung so low over the lake that Steve had a clear view of white-capped waves. He wondered if he should return to his seat, but as long as he stayed back from the wind torrent, the fresh air cleared his head. Through the open door was West Thumb, a smaller arm of the cobalt expanse of Yellowstone Lake. Onshore, the hot springs of West Thumb Geyser Basin shone in a hundred colors.

  “Let me know when the bucket’s full,” Deering directed.

  Steve forced himself to approach the door. Downwash from the rotors beat the lake in a wide circle as the bucket touched the water. The canvas grew dark and slowly sank.

  It seemed to take a long time to gather a hundred forty-four-gallons, while Steve held onto the chicken bar above the door. Deering manipulated the controls with barely perceptible adjustments that kept the craft in a hover. When the bucket was finally full, Steve said, “Ready.”

  “We’re heavy on fuel,” Deering replied. It had been less than twenty minutes since they’d taken off from West Yellowstone Airport. “Fighting this wind with a full load is going to be a bitch.” He powered up to climb.

  Blown sideways, the craft turned up on its side and the bucket’s sunken weight skewed out from under it.

  Steve fell away from the open door to land hard on the small of his back. Cleats designed to hold a rear seat in place bruised him and his headphones slid across the metal deck. He retrieved them in time to hear Deering breathe, “Sum bitch.”

  The Bell’s engines whined in crescendo and, for a long moment, it seemed to hang motionless. Steve’s toes curled inside his boots. Although it had been years since he’d seen the inside of a church, he found himself sending up a prayer.

  When the bottom of the bucket pulled free, the chopper picked up speed and careened toward the burning shore. Flames leaped from the tops of the pines right down to the narrow rocky beach.

  Too fast, Steve thought, crouching on the deck. At the same time, he realized that they hadn’t gained enough elevation to clear the trees. They were unbalanced, skewing sideways.

  “Release the bucket,” Steve shouted into the roaring wind.

  “Can’t. Cable’s hung on the skid, thanks to you.” They headed fast for the inferno. Deering muttered a string of obscenities, the kind of language usually heard at the end of black box flight recordings.

  Steve clambered to his feet and clamped his teeth hard. With a wary look at the blur of rotors, he figured it was at least a hundred feet to the water since the bucket wasn’t quite dragging. He should have known better than to fly, to once more leave the solid earth and put his fate at the mercy of wind, machine, and human fallibility.

  All the fight seemed to have gone out of Deering while Steve watched his silent battle to keep the chopper aloft. His gaunt face was set in resignation, as if he were already contemplating the loss of the craft he’d shown off so proudly at the airport.

  By God, this time Steve would not go down with the ship.

  With as good a running start as three steps could give him, he leaped out of the helicopter.

  Spreading one hand to protect his crotch, he placed the other across his chest and assumed a cross-legged position. His stomach felt as though he left it ten feet above as he plummeted.

  Hurtling toward the water, Steve remembered his life vest beneath the front seat. He’d followed the pilot’s lead in not wearing the bulky, bright-orange device. Hot shot Deering must have thought a quick turn over the lake didn’t count as flying over water.

  Coming up fast was all the deep blue one needed to drown in on a perfectly beautiful day.

  Steve hit feet first with a mighty impact and drove deep. The cold shocked him, once, and then again, as he plunged into a more frigid layer. Spreading his arms, he pulled down until he felt his rate of sinking begin to slow.

  Finally, he poised motionless in the dark.

  It could have been peaceful, realizing that he’d safely separated himself from the flying machine, but it took him back, painfully, to that potent instant when the screaming metal of the Triworld Air 737 had fallen silent.

  Just before he turned toward his family.

  As if they remembered, too, Steve’s debilitated knees throbbed in the cold water.

  He began to swim up. His heavy boots and clothes acted as sea anchors, trying to take him back to the depths. It was a good thing he’d once been a strong swimmer, but how would he fare now?

  As he pulled toward the light, it began to brighten from cerulean to the shade of an October sky. He kicked the last few feet into slightly warmer water and his head and shoulders broke the surface. Chest heaving to suck in air, he found that panic’s icy fingers gripped his lungs.

  A loud whining surrounded him. He swiveled his head and found the chopper still in the air. For a paralyzing moment, he watched it skate straight for him. Through the windshield, a flash of light caught Deering’s sunglasses.

  With a desperate gasp, Steve dove back into the lake’s cold embrace. The frigid water compressed his chest as he kicked and pulled through the first thermocline. The Bell’s impact pushed him deeper. Water churned as the tail and main rotors of the helicopter thrashed up a wake. He kept stroking, expecting any second to be chopped to pieces.

  Whispering tendrils of black began at the edge of Steve’s consciousness.

  “Mayday, Mayday.” Deering spoke tersely into his headset. “I have ditched off West Thumb.” Water rose over the windshield.

  He’d done a helluva job leveling out and pulling off power, if he did say so himself. Despite the rough setdown, he’d hit the water without the transmission coming through the cabin and taking out the pilot’s seat. Back in Vietnam, Deering had lost his friends Joe Silva and Skip Harlan to just that accident. One night they drank tequila shots together, knowing they would still be lit when it came time for the predawn climb into the cockpit.

  The next evening Deering drank alone.

  Despite the shaking up, he’d climbed into the next available Huey and taken the controls. Flying was his life, all he’d wanted to do from the time he was six and his father had taken him to the Pocatello airport to gaze wide-eyed at the planes.

  “Will have to abandon.” He stripped off his headphones and reached into the cold calf-deep water for the personal flotation device he cursed himself for not wearing.

  The omens had all been bad this summer.

  It had been years since Deering had seen a firestorm like the one sweeping toward the campground at Grant Village with those poor S.O.B.s trapped and waiting for it. He should be helping instead of sitting on his ass in a brace position while his helicopter filled with water.

  Where in hell was Haywood?

  Dr. Steve Haywood had rubbed Deering the wrong way from the moment they met on the tarmac at West Yellowstone. Blond and balding, a few inches shorter than Deering, Haywood had greeted him amiably enough, but Deering had divined with a pilot’s sixth sense that his passenger hid a fear of flying. With a roiling animosity Deering had figured for a cover, Steve had hefted his sturdy body stiffly into the Bell, slammed the passenger door, and planted his booted feet on the deck.

  The chopper capsized, rolling over onto the open
rear door. The numbing rush climbed past Deering’s waist.

  During his offshore safety training, the clear warmth of a swimming pool had made it easy to do the drill. As the training cage submerged, you reached your right hand for an orientation point on the door handle and placed your left on the seat belt beside the buckle. Not easy to do while they flipped you upside down, so they made you do it until you got it right, or the instructor gave you a break.

  Today he couldn’t buy one.

  Deering looked down at his left hand in the rising water, at the bandage where he’d had a skin cancer removed three weeks ago. He’d spent a little time thinking about mortality, and had somehow omitted telling his wife, Georgia, about the diagnosis.

  Better he should have waited for today if he wanted to think about dying.

  His aircraft rolled upside down and he tried to keep track of his life jacket.

  Wait … wait …

  All those years, Georgia had waited and worried, first during Nam when a shitload of guys got Dear Johns, then later when he’d flown timber charters and forest fires all over the West. Petite Georgia’s coppery hair shone like the sun, even at night. Today she was probably at their home in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho tending her summer garden beside the Portneuf River.

  Cold water covered Deering’s mouth and nose.

  Count it out. One cucumber, two cucumber.

  At least to eight while the craft’s inverted.

  Deering pushed on the door handle. The force of water pressed back.

  Hell, he hadn’t done anything by the book today. Why not swim out through the rear door?

  Halfway through the space between the front seats, he found out why not as his flight suit snagged on the collective. He told himself he had plenty of air, that it had only been around twenty seconds since the water had flooded his face. The lake was clear, but he couldn’t see anything through the rush of bubbles.

  Pressure and darkness came down and desperation swelled. The chopper dropped steadily while he tried to ease the pain in his ears by clearing them. As the water grew colder, he kicked harder, smacking his head smartly on his way out through the rear door.