Summer of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  The soldiers were scheduled to drop her at her cabin, but Clare cut in and asked Javier, “How ‘bout a lift to Old Faithful?”

  Clare seethed in the passenger seat as Javier drove. Coming to Yellowstone had not been the escape she had imagined.

  Javier turned down the radio feature on the September match of Stars and Stripes vs. New Zealand’s entry for the America’s Cup. “Sorry about that back there.”

  “Not your fault.”

  They approached the turnoff for West Thumb. “Pit stop?”

  “Never pass up an opportunity,” Clare agreed.

  When Javier turned into the parking lot, afternoon light had turned the water midnight blue and the wind whipped whitecaps. Her throat constricted at the memory of the day they had rushed to the beach, looking for survivors.

  She hadn’t seen Steve since she’d turned down his dinner invitation. At the time, he’d been hung-over and she’d thought it the right decision. On the other hand, he’d been perfectly clear and very knowledgeable about the history of her Nez Perce ancestors.

  Clare opened the passenger door and started toward the restrooms.

  “What’s going on?” Javier pointed offshore where a sturdy vessel with a prominent pilothouse and broad deck rode at anchor. The workboat was the type Clare was used to seeing in the Gulf of Mexico, hauling equipment for the oil industry.

  Following Javier down the walk, she was nearly run down by Chris Deering. He brushed past her with a purposeful stride.

  “There you are.” Deering shook hands with an Asian woman wearing a red suit and matching pumps. Her wedge of sculpted black hair rippled in the breeze until she looped it gracefully behind her ear.

  A twinge shot through Clare, aware of her own dirty hair and filthy yellow shirt. Soot streaked her arms.

  “Call me Suzanne,” the woman offered in a flat Midwestern accent.

  Deering’s eyes lighted as he saw Clare. “You’re just in time to watch my helicopter rise from the deep. Turns out she’s only in eighty feet of water.”

  A surge of gladness at his smile put her off balance. She shaded her eyes and looked out over the water at the workboat.

  “They’ve got divers down now, placing flotation,” Deering explained, including both women by looking from one to the other. “Clare Chance, Suzanne Ho of First Assurance Aviation Underwriters.”

  “Let’s go and watch.” Deering put a guiding hand beneath Clare’s elbow. “Can you stay?”

  Javier joined them.

  They went down the curving boardwalk past mud pots. Most were stagnant matte circles of drying, cracked clay, but one spattered thick glots. Where bleached earth marked prior spring activity, a lone buffalo with a dusty coat posed next to a dead pine.

  Suzanne Ho tapped along on high heels, ignoring the springs and wildlife. “So, Mr. Deering, you say you lost control after you flew through a cloud of smoke.”

  “The air turbulence was murder.” Deering pointed to where the fire had burned down to the lake. Stark skeletons of trees and their ash created a colorless landscape.

  Clare stopped. She was struck again by the memory of blistering heat beside the chill lake, of kneeling beside Steve’s motionless form. Hot and cold … life and death, while she waited to learn which card he had drawn. “That’s where I found Dr. Haywood.”

  Suzanne frowned.

  “Look!” Deering said quickly.

  The surface of the lake boiled. Rotors emerged, followed by a dark blue fuselage. Last to surface was a pair of pontoon-like floatation devices that the divers had attached and inflated from an air compressor.

  “It’s not that far from shore,” Clare said.

  “It looked like forever.” The edge on Deering’s tone said he’d wondered if he were going to make it. “When I was out there swimming by myself.”

  She’d seen him rescued and wondered how Steve had made it to shore. “What about …? “ A sharp look from Deering stopped her.

  “What about Dr. Haywood?” Suzanne Ho finished.

  Small waves slapped below the boardwalk. Deering didn’t say anything for a long moment. Such a silent beat that Clare suspected he hadn’t mentioned Steve to the insurance company. “What about Haywood?” he finally asked.

  “You never spoke of a passenger. Yet, when I was getting your treatment records from Lake Hospital, the doctor told me. Apparently, Haywood checked himself out within a few hours of the accident.”

  “Yeah, to get stinking drunk,” Deering gritted. “I was trying to keep this simple, but you want to know about Steve Haywood, I’ll tell you. He lost his wife and baby in a plane crash and turned into a hopeless alcoholic who hates to fly.”

  Clare gasped. She knew Steve had a problem, she’d seen him drunk and with hands atremble after a bender, but Deering’s words pelted like ice chunks. Steve’s family dead? Deering hadn’t said whether Steve was also on the plane, but his fear of flying made it sound as though he had been.

  Suzanne listened with a serious look on her narrow face.

  “When Steve got aboard that day, he was scared as hell,” Deering went on. “We started to go down and he jumped without a life jacket.”

  Clare listened open-mouthed. Despite his problems, Steve must have had a strong will to live if he’d made it to shore without flotation.

  Javier stood at a discreet distance, his big hands shoved in his pockets.

  “I’ll need to interview him,” Suzanne said in a tone that Clare thought carefully neutral.

  “You’ll have to hike up Mount Washburn, then.” Deering looked pointedly at Suzanne’s dress suit and heels. Clare couldn’t see Ms. Ho undertaking the expedition.

  “Haywood’s on the mountain to dry out,” Deering finished.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August 11

  In the east central part of Yellowstone, Looking Glass Lake shone beneath a sliver of new moon. The wind sighed through the lodgepoles, a stand of old growth that had been kissed by the sunrise for four hundred years. Here and there among the trees, silver ghosts stood sentinel, dead on their feet from the ravages of the pine bark beetle. Long trunks of lodgepoles that had succumbed to winter’s winds and the weight of heavy snow littered the forest floor.

  A freshening breeze rippled the lake surface. On the beach, a pair of coyotes raised their muzzles.

  A flash of light augmented the starlight and a low rumble descended. Ahead of the front, a squall line swept down, churning a path into the waters.

  The sky went dark.

  The wind increased, first to thirty and then blew at a steady forty miles per hour. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Whitecaps whipped and splashed the beach. The coyotes trotted into the trees.

  Lightning split the night, a long finger that stabbed sideways and illuminated the towering cumulus. Thunder rolled in the mountains. Wind-driven waves began a steady pounding.

  With a sharp crack, the next bolt smashed into a live tree. Vestiges of moisture boiled and the trunk exploded, scattering shards of raw yellow wood. In the lee behind a log, a tentative smoke wisp coiled and was whisked away.

  A bull elk moved through the woods, swiveling his rack at the unsettled night. He paused to rub his flank against rough bark, scratching luxuriously.

  The next arc came down, a short, hot, blast that blinded the bull. He bolted, narrowly missing a dead tree. For a long moment, it seemed as though this strike would have no more impact than the last. The elk slowed his headlong rush, then gathered his dignity and walked more slowly toward the shore.

  His nostrils flared as dry pine burst into flame.

  No new smokes.

  Steve radioed in his six a.m. report. To the east, the Clover-Mist’s smoke brightened from gray to pearl, reminding him of dawn in the Great Smoky Mountains.

  At his grandfather’s cabin on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, he used to get up early and go onto the front porch. Holding the rough wooden rail, he had watched the seemingly endless ranges of mountains, blue swells like oc
ean waves. Sometimes on wintry days he couldn’t tell the difference between fog rising from the bottoms and wood smoke from backcountry chimneys.

  Steve loved the soft, deeply weathered eastern mountains. With their ripeness of rotting leaves and mossy boulders, they were steeped in an overwhelming aura of richness.

  When he went west for the first time, a college student on his way to fight fires, he’d discovered a raw new world of rock, sage, and towering heights. The thin atmosphere had seemed insufficient then, compared to the heavy humidity of the Carolinas.

  Now the Yellowstone air was a tonic.

  When he’d come to Mount Washburn, he had cursed Shad Dugan for sending him and himself for not smuggling in a bottle. The first night he had been unable to stay on his cot. The jerky thudding of his irregular heartbeat had coupled with a violent trembling that telegraphed to his befuddled brain that he was cold, even while he sweated.

  Oh Jesus, if only he believed there was somebody he could ask for help. No one had radioed for many hours and he wondered if Dugan had engineered giving him privacy for the worst of it. Gradually, control came back, until he was able to sleep a few hours. After three days, his hands had ceased their trembling. Yesterday, he had savored beans and bacon through a resurrected sense of taste.

  This small, square tower might have been set on top of the world, with a view that encompassed a hundred miles. As the sun struggled to break through, Steve sipped strong black coffee and imagined that the curling tendrils on the horizon rose from the campfires of the Nez Perce, ghost travelers from the past.

  It had been a long time since he’d considered breakfast, preferring to get through his hangover first. Today, he felt like having fried eggs. He turned toward the supply box but became aware of a change in the familiar landscape.

  All the monitored fires were posted on his map, updated daily through communication with Fire Command. If something new caught his eye, he had his Osborne Firefinder, a combination telescope and transit mounted on a column in the center of the room. He’d check the trajectory and compare it with the coordinates of the known devils. The final location would be determined though triangulation from more than one lookout.

  Binoculars in hand, Steve tried to decide. At about ten o’clock, between the definite smoke of the thousand-acre Shallow Fire and the smaller plume from the hundred-acre Fern, was what appeared to be a new signal. He’d seen last night’s dry lightning on the ridges, felt the cooler wind of the front and suspected conditions were right.

  Swiveling the Osborne on its post, he put his eye to the telescope and compared the bearing of the suspected newcomer with the known positions of the Shallow and Fern.

  He thumbed the radio mike. “West Yellowstone, this is Washburn. New smoke to southeast, vicinity of existing Fern Fire. I make it near … “ He consulted the topographic map. “Looking Glass Lake.”

  “Roger, copy, Washburn.”

  Recognizing the voice of Garrett Anderson, Steve asked, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Got a room at the Stagecoach Inn ah don’t see much.” Despite the radio’s thinning effect, Garrett’s deep baritone resonated. “When we get an exact fix, we’ll send the Smokejumpers. As her daddy, do you care to name our newest fire?”

  Steve looked out through the sparkling windows and studied the faintly rising wisps. Full day had dawned, the promise of morning richly recognized. From behind the eastern wall of smoke, a solid orange disc rose.

  “If I hadn’t been in the right place at the right time,” he proposed, “I’d never have seen it at all.” Carefully, he drained the last of his coffee. “Let’s call this one Chance.”

  Clare stepped out of Old Faithful Lodge and found herself alone with the geyser and the morning. Water gushed away from the flattened cone where an eruption had just ended. Sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, she followed the boardwalk. At just past six, the only people she’d seen were a few joggers and TW Services workers.

  She extended her free arm over her head to stretch out her side. She’d already run two miles in the gray dawn light, trying to erase the fact that she’d dreamed again of losing Frank. How many times had she been through it now, a hundred, a thousand, in sleep and awake? Each night came with the fear of a dragon, waiting in darkness.

  Clare deep-breathed and tried to focus on the contrast between the remembered holocaust and the placid solitude at Old Faithful. The inn rose in stately majesty, an impossibly overgrown Swiss chalet. Bare flagpoles studded its roof deck, but as she watched, a member of the bell captain’s staff raised the flags of the United States, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

  Forest ringed the geyser basin, in contrast to the two hundred thousand acres now blackened within the two million acre park. It was hard to believe that the experts’ prediction for the rest of the season had been blown to hell in one week. Garrett’s private forecast that the rules did not apply to crown fires had been right.

  Clare went down into the narrow valley of the Firehole, where low water slipped smoothly over rocks. Despite the coolness, she could already feel the promise of heat in the day. For a nickel, she’d play hooky and let Sergeant Ron Travis dig his own way around the front of the North Fork.

  She gripped the bridge rail. Javier hadn’t meant to slip up and talk about Frank’s death, but it was too late. Now Travis’s generic sexist behavior had turned to a specific lack of trust.

  She pushed aside thoughts of the little martinet and thought of her daughter back home. Lately, she’d had trouble in catching Devon at Jay’s house, but when she did, she got the expected listless boredom.

  Last night had been different.

  “Have you met any nice boys?”

  “Boys!”

  “Okay, young men, then.”

  Devon was silent for a second too long. “I spend all my time at the pool. Where would I meet anybody?”

  Clare’s intuition pricked. “How about at the pool?”

  “Ma!” Devon had cried tightly, sounding near tears. “Get off my back!”

  Clare could almost hear her own mother admonishing her to get to Houston on the next plane. Quickly, before Devon got in some kind of trouble.

  Usually Clare brushed aside Constance’s anxieties, but today she wondered. Should she pack it in? Give up the most exhilarating experience of her life?

  If Devon were younger, Clare would go home, might never have come at all. But one thing in her daughter’s constant and irritating refrain rang true. Devon was nearly eighteen, and many girls were wives and mothers by the time they reached that age. God knows Clare had not been much older when she’d married Jay and had Devon. She sighed at the thought of the minefields that lay ahead of her daughter.

  Just across the Firehole, Clare spied a cow elk cropping grass. As she considered moving closer for a better look, her Motorola radio seemed to awaken with the day. “Good mornin’,” a deep male voice resounded. The elk swiveled its head.

  “What’s this, a wake up call?” Clare came back at Garrett Anderson. “I’m not only up, I’m meeting Travis and his troops at Madison in half an hour.”

  “Nope. The North Fork’s too edgy,” Garrett said. “I’ve called Travis and given the troops a day off. You too.”

  Clare knew the vagaries of fire in confined structures or the training field, but Garrett had an uncanny talent for predicting how it would proceed in the open. Reading the flames like tea leaves, he told when and where the next advance would be with far greater accuracy than those entering vegetation, moisture, and terrain data into handheld computers.

  From the beginning, Garrett had nailed the progress of the North Fork. Now over thirty thousand acres, it was a sneaky bastard that had a finger pointed at scenic Firehole Canyon Drive, not far from the Madison Campground. If Garrett thought the troops didn’t belong on the fire front today, she thought it just as well.

  “Say.” He was jovial. “You may have a secret admirer.”

  “What?” She wondered if Garrett might have run into Dee
ring last night in West Yellowstone.

  “I think Steve Haywood up on Washburn just named a fire after you.”

  Clare laughed and signed off. Within seconds, her face settled into more somber lines.

  She recalled that little hesitation in Steve before he’d asked her, ever so casually, to have dinner with him. She didn’t know what his love life was like, but at times, he acted as awkward as a teenager. Lord, if she’d known about his family, she’d have been more kind.

  On the other hand, pity was the worst reason to take up with somebody.

  Morning sun touched the highest peak of the inn. The day stretched before her, full of the promise that she would not have to wield a shovel or wind up blackened and coughing from smoke. The thought of clear air reminded her of Jackson Hole when she’d first arrived. She could drive to Grand Teton Park and ask for information about the early settlers. If they knew the Sutton homestead, she might find her grandfather’s birthplace before nightfall. There was also the historical society that Walt Leighton had told her about. What if her great-grandmother’s journal had been on file there all these years?

  On the other hand, that was an all-day trip even without fire apparatus causing traffic jams. Deering had invited her to West Yellowstone this evening for dinner and she wanted to be back in time.

  Her attraction to Deering had not diminished, but she couldn’t forget the venom in his voice when he’d spoken of Steve.

  When she came within sight of the Mount Washburn Lookout, Clare saw that Steve had visitors. He stood at the base of the tower in his ranger’s uniform and summer straw hat, pointing off toward the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. A man and woman with well-worn backpacks studied the half-mile deep chasm, stark ochre against the green mat of forest.

  As Clare drew closer, the hikers headed off across a rocky field. Not twenty yards from where they walked, three bighorn sheep stood as though carved in stone.

  Even after the tourists were out of sight, Clare watched Steve from a distance. He removed his uniform hat and ran his hand through blond hair that shot silver in the sun. Squinting, for he wore no sunglasses, he turned to climb back to the lookout.