Summer of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  “This is where Karrabotsos lives.” Deering motioned to a house she had passed the day she and Sergeant Travis had found the migrant camp. She recognized the snowmobile parked on the front porch.

  “Did you plan this, too?”

  “You’re the one who starting walking down this street.”

  She sighed, “So I did.”

  “Come inside.”

  She ought to go back to the Red Wolf and have a drink with Hudson and Sherry, but the reddish glow in the sky reminded her of the filtered light in the tent at the spike camp. She’d thought of it, ten times, a hundred, at odd hours of the day and night … most often when she lay in her narrow twin bed at Old Faithful and argued the pros and cons of finishing what they had started.

  “Please.” Deering circled his fingers on the sensitive flesh on the back of her arm.

  He wasn’t perfect and neither was she.

  With a key from beneath a flowerpot, Deering unlocked the front door. Inside, he disappeared into blackness until a faint glow shone at the end of hall. “Beer?”

  “Sure.”

  The refrigerator shut. Bootheels sounded on hardwood. Halfway up the hall, Deering snapped on a light in a side room, turning him into a tall silhouette.

  The can he pressed into her hand was cold and wet. She took a huge swallow.

  “Come down here.” Deering led her toward the light.

  They would talk now. Had he always wanted to fly? Was he a bad boy in third grade? Did he ever get a puppy for Christmas?

  Clare stopped in the doorway. Against the paneled wall was a single bed as narrow and lonely as hers at Old Faithful. Deering set his beer on a chest of drawers, took hers and placed it beside his. He stepped closer and tilted her chin up toward him.

  It was going too fast, like last time. All she really knew about Deering was that he loved to fly, a daredevil to some, or fool, if you listened to Steve Haywood.

  “Wait.” She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “We need to talk.”

  He covered her hand with his, pressing her fingers. “For Christ’s sake, you wanted it as much as I did.”

  It still grated that he’d lied.

  Deering dipped his head, a move to kiss her. His breath smelled of smoke and beer.

  Clare blocked him with her forearm. It was more than just the night at Mink Creek. This evening it rankled that instead of buying her a decent margarita, he’d snagged a beer from the fridge and tried to lay her down before she’d had two sips. Granted, she was out of practice, but she had an idea of how she wanted to feel.

  She tried to gather the shreds of her thoughts. “It’s just that … “

  Deering backed away and stared at her. “We’re working eighteen hour days. I’m based in West Yellowstone and you’re staying at Old Faithful.” He waved a frustrated hand. “We’ve gotta take advantage of the chances we get.”

  Clare went cold inside. “I get it. You’re saying ‘let’s hop in the sack’ and I’m supposed to say, ‘Great, I have an hour free on Tuesday’.”

  She went down the hall, past Karrabotsos’s snowmobile, and into the night.

  YELLOWSTONE FIRES

  August 22, 8:00 a.m.

  Here is a list of the fires and approximate perimeter acreages. To date, about 354,470 acres have been affected by fire. However, only about half of the vegetation has burned within many fire perimeters. Throughout the summer, 50 different fires have been started by lightning. Of those 50, seven are still burning inside the park. Fire fighters are working to control them. Any new fires will be suppressed as quickly as possible.

  Clover-Mist Fire: 156,502 acres. Mist Fire started July 9. Clover started July 11. They joined on July 22. Shallow Fire started July 31. Fern Fire started August 5. These two fires joined Clover-Mist August 13. Lovely Fire started July 11 and burned into Clover-Mist on August 21. Crews attacking hot spots on northeast flank. Fire trucks and crews in Silver Gate and Cooke City as a precaution. Pebble Creek Campground is currently closed and is being used as a firefighter camp. Regular U.S. Army troops arriving today to give civilian fire fighters a break. Fire contained at Thunderer, Amphitheater, and on Republic Pass.

  Falls Fire: 3,738 acres. Started July 12. Fire within ½ mile of South Entrance Road.

  Fan Fire: 22,020 acres. Started June 25. Islands of unburned vegetation continue burning within perimeter. 70% contained by a fire line.

  Hellroaring Fire: 33,000 acres. Started August 15. Outside the park, burning to the northeast.

  Lava Fire: Started July 5. Contained but began smoking after high winds on August 21. A few fire fighters have gone in to cool it off.

  Mink Creek Fire: 21,036 acres in Yellowstone. Started July 11 outside the park in Teton Wilderness. Burning to the northeast into the Shoshone National Forest.

  North Fork Fire: 91,700 acres. Started July 22 by human. Now has two fronts: one north of Norris, the other along Canyon-Norris Road. Norris and Madison campgrounds closed and in use as fire camps.

  Red-Shoshone Fire: 58,744 acres. Red Fire started July 1. Shoshone Fire started June 23. Joined August 10. High winds caused flare-ups around Grant Village and West Thumb that led to evacuation of Grant Village on August 21.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  September 3

  What’s your crystal ball say now?” Clare asked Garrett through a mouthful of Fig Newton. On her first day off in two weeks, she’d stopped by Fire Command to look at the full-sized quadrangle maps used for daily press conferences. Since Black Saturday, over two hundred thousand acres had burned inside Yellowstone.

  Garrett set down his coffee and slid a hip onto a metal desk. “The moisture content measured in large logs continued to drop through the month of August, now hovering in the seven-percent range. Grasses and small twigs are at two percent. You just look at this fuel wrong and it blows up in your face.”

  The description made Clare think of Devon, whose eighteenth birthday was exactly one month away. It had been just that amount of time since the day she’d listened to the fire behavior experts’ obsolete predictions. Although trying to second-guess her daughter by long distance was as futile an effort, she wondered aloud, “Seriously, Garrett. It’s September now. When do you think this will break?”

  He shrugged with the weariness of battle fatigue and looked out the south windows toward the nearest advance of the North Fork toward town. “Your nightmare is as good as mine.”

  She hadn’t told him about Frank or her bad dreams. She didn’t plan to.

  As she turned to leave, thinking of visiting the Smokejumpers, Garrett detained her. Rummaging on his desk, he produced a pink slip. “While you were out screwing off …” He chuckled.

  The message was from last night. Jay had called.

  She stared at it like it came from another planet. What could her ex want, unless something had happened to Devon? With a fluttery feeling in her chest, Clare dove for the nearest phone.

  Jay answered the home number and she heard a football game in the background. No doubt, he was sitting in his expensive leather recliner in the game room with the surround sound theater.

  Clare bit her lip. She’d never been into ostentation, it just seemed that the pleasure cocoon he’d built for him and Elyssa was one more symbol of rejection.

  In response to Jay’s generic hello, she clipped, “What’s happened?”

  Jay chuckled. “You worried about me?”

  Clare’s nails curled into her palm. “I am worried about my daughter,” she enunciated. “I know you’d only call about her.”

  “Our daughter.” Jay wasn’t laughing anymore. “I guess you’re feeling guilty by now, knowing you shouldn’t be out there.”

  “What do you mean I shouldn’t be out here?” Her voice rose and she berated herself for not calling from someplace private. The woman dispatcher at the next desk had perked up and was staring through thick glasses.

  “I can’t do a thing with Devon,” Jay whined, quite a trick for such a big guy. “She keeps sayi
ng she’s nearly eighteen, but she needs supervision. Elyssa thinks she’s seeing some guy on the sly, somebody too old for her.”

  Devon’s talk of moving out without an education or a job rang a warning bell. That was how Clare had ended up married to Jay. “How does Elyssa know?”

  “She saw them together.”

  Alarms went off, but Clare stuck to her guns. “You’ll have to be a parent for a change.”

  “Sorry, but Tuesday afternoon Elyssa and I leave for Greece. Our tour doesn’t end until September twentieth.”

  Clare had always asked Jay to take her places and he’d told her he was happy watching TV. “So change your plans.”

  The woman who’d been listening leaned across. When she grinned, it accentuated that her lipstick had bled into little lines around her mouth. “Give him hell, honey.”

  “Have you a paper and pen?” Jay asked in the smooth voice reserved for clients and wheedling.

  “What for?”

  “For flight information. Monday morning I’m putting Devon on a plane to Wyoming.”

  Everything in Clare seized up. “You can’t send her here. Postpone your trip.”

  “You know better than that.”

  Clare’s mind raced for an alternative.

  “It’s Delta into Jackson Hole,” Jay went on relentlessly. “Monday at two.”

  Today was Saturday.

  Before she could reply, he hung up.

  She dialed back and got the answering machine. Elyssa’s syrupy greeting went on while Clare gritted her teeth. At the beep, “Damn you, Jay, pick up.”

  Of course, he was sitting there watching football and laughing at her.

  She banged out of Fire Command and told herself that she crossed Yellowstone Avenue quickly to avoid being run down by an Army Humvee. It was no use, as her boots struck the pavement with hard clacks. Her breath came fast and she wanted to break Jay Chance’s neck. Not to mention Devon’s.

  Jesus, what if Devon was pregnant?

  If there was somebody in her life, maybe it would be good to get her away from Houston, but West Yellowstone, Canyon Village, and Silver Gate were under siege and Clare was needed more than ever.

  A young woman and her pig-tailed little girl sidestepped on the sidewalk to evade Clare’s headlong rush. Kids were cute when they were small.

  She turned in at her destination. The ice cream store window sported a painting of a five-foot long boat bearing mammoth scoops of ice cream foundering beneath chocolate syrup, crushed strawberries and pineapple. Comfort food, just what she needed to help her forget about Jay and Devon.

  She smiled at the young man behind the freezer case. “Banana split.”

  She’d gotten to know Alonso Mansales, who lived in the forest with the other migrants.

  He dipped ice cream, dropped the stainless steel scoop into a container of water, and began to mound toppings. Watching him work, Clare was glad she’d urged Sergeant Travis against reporting the woodland camp to the Forest Service.

  Alonso’s dark eyes went to the plate glass window. Outside, the sky looked as though it portended rain, but only ashes fell.

  Impossibly, the North Fork now threatened to burn through West Yellowstone. If Clare had imagined the Mink Creek as a sharp-toothed carnivore, then the North Fork had become an octopus of the Jules Verne variety.

  “We had to move our camp west.” Alonso handed over her banana split.

  She took a bite from the chocolate end. It didn’t taste as good as she’d hoped.

  The parade of people outside grew larger, folks on their way to a Town Hall meeting, where they would be met with more platitudes and predictions. Clare was glad she didn’t have to get up before the crowd like Garrett would.

  Alonso’s look was grave. “The fire?”

  Words of reassurance rose to her lips, but she stopped short of speaking them. All the predictions had been wrong. “I don’t know,” she told him. “I just don’t know.”

  Throwing away the ruins of her confection, she stepped into the darkening day and joined the crowd. Nearly everyone walking toward the meeting seemed prepared to evacuate.

  “I’ve got our clothes packed,” an elderly man said, “but we can’t afford homeowners insurance. If our place burns, we lose everything.”

  “They’re hosing down roofs out our way,” said a woman with a chiffon scarf across her face. She raised her eyes to the falling ash.

  The atmosphere of uncertainty, with people talking about losing their homes opened a pit in Clare’s stomach. After she sold her house this fall, where was she going to end up? She figured the two firefighters ahead of her to be swapping lies, but as she drew closer, a big red-bearded fellow declared,

  “Damned feds, taking over everything in sight.”

  “Forest service is cut out, too,” agreed a slender man whose smooth cheeks and downy hair made him look too young to be a firefighter. “The Type I teams and the military just marched in.”

  Clare took a closer look and noted from their T-shirts that the men were members of the local fire department, grousing about folks like her and Garrett Anderson.

  Inside, the battle lines appeared drawn. The lectern was set up opposite the townspeople. Garrett stood flanked by men with rangers’ shining badges and military officials in camouflage fatigues. It looked as though they hoped to reassure the population, but unfortunately, the rear windows faced south. Not three miles away, a crimson tentacle of the North Fork crested a ridge.

  “We’ve got all kinds of resources, helicopters, and tankers,” Garrett said into the microphone. “They’re clearing a six-blade dozer line west of town and east by the park.”

  “All this ‘let burn’ is going to burn us out of town!” A woman with a hard-looking face called from near the stone fireplace.

  “Damn right!” someone else shouted.

  The tallest of the park officials stepped forward. “I’m Tom King, Yellowstone Superintendent.” He looked over the sea of angry faces. A flush suffused his own face beneath a shock of unruly hair. After a pause to let the catcalls go unanswered, King cleared his throat. “On July 27th, the Secretary of the Interior upheld our suspension of the park’s ‘let burn’ policy. Ever since, we’ve been throwing everything we have at these fires.” He nodded toward the military. “Even brought in our boys in uniform, but … “

  A big man who looked to be in his early sixties took off his orange ball cap and stepped forward. “I’m Pete Cullen, sir, own the Red Wolf across the way. Every time you say a fire won’t burn past this place or that, you come back later and say the place is toast.”

  “We’ve never seen wildfire act this way,” King said. “This season is defying all the models.”

  The people murmured like a rising wind.

  Pete Cullen raised his arm and they quieted. “Me and some folks are doing something. Bringing in irrigation equipment and setting up a great big line of sprinklers on the edge of town.”

  “We’re much obliged to you,” Garrett told him, then announced to the room at large. “Mr. Cullen will be up front if any of you good people would care to help him out.”

  Clare didn’t like the little frisson of hope that went through the room. A few sprinklers would have little use against the North Fork. Garrett must have realized. “I hate to say this, but if I lived in West Yellowstone, I’d be thinking about what to take with me in case of evacuation.”

  “No matter what bullshit you shovel,” someone shouted, “you’ve given up our town.”

  Garrett’s jaw set, but Tom King was faster. “Putting firefighters in front of these fires is like putting your hand in front of blowtorch. You know you’re gonna get burned.” The Superintendent paused. “We believe that people’s lives are more important than property.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  September 4

  The next day was Sunday, but it saw Clare back on the line with a new batch of troop trainees.

  On Cutoff Mountain, inside the northeast corner of Yellow
stone, she shielded her face with her gloved hand and used a drip torch to splash flaming diesel onto the forest floor. The dry mixture of needles and bark flared.

  Stepping back, she joined Sergeant Travis, who stood in an attitude of command. She’d learned that his father was a career Army officer who had sent his son to military school, starting with seventh grade. In her mind, this helped to explain, but did not excuse his behavior.

  Ignoring Travis’s pose, Clare watched the burnout eat its greedy way across the slope. With luck, the small blaze would deprive the approaching Hellroaring Fire of fuel.

  Behind the backfire and the main body of flames, twenty infantry bent their heads to the task of scraping earth with Pulaskis.

  “They make good groundpounders,” Clare observed, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

  Travis surveyed the group that included two Native Americans, one Black, and three Hispanics. Two were women. Despite their differences, they all seemed equally wary. “Fresh off the plane in Bozeman,” he said. “We should be breaking them in at West Yellowstone, not on a live fire.”

  “The North Fork is probably torching our training ground there.” Clare thought of Alonso Mansales and his family moving out of the path of the monster. Garrett had suggested she take the soldiers to the Hellroaring, reported to be creeping along under light and shifting winds. Started August 15 at an outfitter’s camp north of the park, it had spread south and now covered over fifty thousand acres.

  She looked at the sun, half-hidden behind a pall of smoke, and checked her watch. Nearly six p.m., surprising, for the temperature was climbing.

  She took a long draught of lukewarm water from her belt canteen and continued to monitor the backfire. It attacked a downed log with sharp teeth of flame. This part of the woods was full of fallen trees that had died from an invasion of pine bark beetles.