by Linda Jacobs
There was nothing to stay for. She couldn’t stand that Steve thought she was on Deering’s side. And another midnight evacuation would put her God knows where when Devon’s plane landed.
She ran toward the truck, waving her arms.
The door opened and Steve pulled her into the cab. When they reached Mammoth, she could get a room at the hotel. In the morning, she would figure out how to get to the airport.
The miles unfolded hypnotically, as the truck made the ten-mile descent down Soda Butte Creek to the Lamar River valley. Traffic was light, for the hotel guests, campers, and soldiers of the fire war had settled for the night.
Clare straddled the seat between Steve and Miguel. She saw little of the country, just the stabbing beams of headlights on the two-lane asphalt and the colorless specters of trees rushing past. To the north, the crimson glow of the Storm Creek and Hellroaring fires lighted the sky.
Down and down, twenty miles until the truck launched onto a span over dark space. A sign identified the chasm as the Yellowstone River. After Tower Junction, they began the climb up the divide that led to Mammoth.
Deering had put his hands on Clare tonight, but the thrill that had first run through her at his touch had vanished. Hell, nothing was the same as it had been four hours ago when she and Steve had crawled into a dugout hole in the ground and listened to Billy Jakes’s fiery death.
On the rising slope, moonlight silvered the Blacktail Deer Plateau. A pair of reddish-gold orbs flashed in the headlights, animals abroad in the night.
Past the summit, the road to Mammoth joined Lava Creek Canyon, spiraling down. The center of the gorge was an ominous gash.
How dark was it where Billy Jakes was tonight? He had a wife, maybe even children, she didn’t know, but Sergeant Ron Travis had been clear. Clare had led Billy on his final march.
The truck rushed down a roller coaster that carried her stomach. Tomorrow Devon would arrive, coming into the midst of another death investigation involving her mother. She’d shrugged off Clare’s feelings of guilt over Frank, just like all the other firefighters. Get back on that horse and ride, they’d all said. Right into the maw of the Hellroaring.
She didn’t know if she could go back on the line. Garrett had given her a few days off to show Devon the sights and after that, maybe she’d go home.
As they drove, she felt Steve’s thigh and shoulder against her side. A few more miles and he looped an arm around her, drawing her head onto his chest. She rested against him, hearing his steady heartbeat. Deering had said he was a worthless alcoholic and she’d seen him drunk, but that couldn’t erase the way Steve had looked at her just before he’d thrown off the fire shelter.
Clare looked through the windshield and watched night rush at them.
CHAPTER TWENTY
September 4
By a freak of atmospheric currents, Mammoth Valley was clear tonight. Leafy cottonwoods underlined to Clare the contrast between this refuge and the stark skeletons of trees all over the park. A herd of perhaps thirty elk posed on the lawn in front of Park Headquarters.
They were more fortunate than the ones Steve had found on Black Saturday. For that matter, through mere luck, Clare and Steve had not been dealt the card Billy Jakes had received.
She climbed down from the truck after Steve. In the street, he said, “You can bunk at my place.” She saw how he looked at her rather than at the Mammoth Hotel across the way.
She considered. Still shaking inside at how close they’d come to the edge, she wasn’t ready to be alone.
He pointed along the street lined with stately old houses. “I’m down that way.”
She checked herself for reluctance. “Your place is fine.”
Steve played tour guide. “There used to be a much grander hotel. The National was an enormous wood-frame place, built in 1886.” A little nervousness edged in his voice.
“What happened to it?” she asked, still aware of how good it had felt to be snugged against him in the truck.
“It burned.”
They passed four two-story duplexes with tall brick chimneys. “Park service employees live here now instead of Fort Yellowstone’s officers,” Steve said. The next low frame building they passed was fronted by a porch holding an armada of bicycles. “This place used to be park headquarters at the turn of the century. Moru Mzima, a naturalist from Zimbabwe, and his wife, Nyeri, live there now.”
Clare looked across the lawn. “And kids.”
“Three.” Steve smiled. “I sit for them sometimes.” He pointed to a smaller building at the end of the row. “My place is next.”
“What did the Army do with it?”
“It was the first building in Fort Yellowstone. A guard house to hold ten prisoners.” The innocuous one-story building, its wide porch a dark perimeter, did not look like a jail.
Clare stared. “What were the prisoners in for? Picking flowers? Collecting minerals?”
“Poaching. Selling alcohol to the soldiers.”
Silence fell.
“So what’s it like, living in the stockade?” Clare tried.
Steve cleared his throat. After a little while he said, “Walt Leighton says I treat my home as a prison, especially when I have a bout of … bad times.”
Deering’s words about Steve’s wife and child hung between them. A pink tricycle lay abandoned on the lawn. “You have kids?” he asked.
Clare sighed. “Actually, I’m picking my daughter up at the Jackson airport tomorrow. At least I’m supposed to.”
“I can try and requisition another truck and drive you … but it may not be easy.”
“Or I can hitch a ride to Old Faithful for my rental car.” Despite the peaceful atmosphere, the night seemed to be at a distance. Because she’d felt safe in the curve of Steve’s arm, she went on, “Devon thinks she’s coming on vacation, while you and I are watching people die.”
He slowed his steps. “What will you do with a little girl here?”
She stopped. “Devon is seventeen.”
“No way.” Steve whistled softly. “You got pregnant when you were twelve?”
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. My ex thinks she’s seeing an older man and won’t deal with it. He and wife number two have plane tickets to Greece.”
“That’s tough.” Steve stepped onto the porch. “I often wonder what would have happened to us if Susan and Christa had lived.”
As Steve reached for his keys, Clare watched the patterned silver light that shined through the porch lattice from the streetlamps and a quarter moon. The stench of death was still in her head. Based on experience, it would be there for days, but she sniffed and tried to replace it with the scent of fresh-cut grass and summer flowerbeds.
She needed this sense of normality tonight.
Steve opened his door and flicked a switch that spilled a pool of brighter light.
Moving past him to the focus of the crowded room, she slid a hand onto the black-lacquered finish of a grand piano. Beneath a layer of dust, it felt smooth as silk. She raised the cover and picked out a chord with her right thumb on middle C.
Her fingers protested when she flexed them and she became more aware of her burns. “Do you have any aloe?”
“I could use some myself.” He went down the side hall.
Clare played random chords until Steve came back barefoot in khaki shorts and a tourist T-shirt with a moose on it. He offered bottles of green gel and hydrogen peroxide.
She urged him toward the worn, brown leather couch that clashed with the ornate piano. “Let me look at your burn first.” When she unwrapped the layers of gauze, blistered skin made her wince.
That wasn’t like her. As a teacher and mom, she knew how to minimize life’s little hurts. When she worked wrecks, fires, or medical emergencies, she called on a calm façade that sometimes kept victims from going into shock. This evening she was so fragile that this reminder of Steve’s vulnerability made her eyes sting.
It was his turn to wince.
She bent to explore first one knee and then the other. Her fingers traced the length of the three-inch scars, matched pairs along the inside and outside of each kneecap. “Sports?” This explained why she had occasionally noticed Steve limping.
“An accident.”
She suspected the air tragedy that had taken his family, but he did not volunteer. He made a move to go and she backed away.
In his kitchen, copper pots hung from a wrought-iron rack. Repeated scrubbing had worn the linoleum until the red and gray squares were blurred into a muddy continuum. The dining area, with a pine table between corner windows, overlooked another row of staff housing.
Steve opened the icebox to reveal a rotting cucumber, three cans of Olympia beer and some Calistoga mineral water. “This is the first I’ve been home in a while. Stick around until I get to a store and I’ll make you coq au vin.”
Clare’s opinion of him continued to change. First the piano and now he professed to be a chef. Of course, the tuna salad he’d whipped up on Mount Washburn had been tasty.
She took the beer he offered and drank, the carbonation stinging her raw throat. Uncapping the Calistoga, Steve drank off half of the quart in three gulps.
Clare lifted her Oly and raised an inquiring brow.
“I’m off the sauce.” He toasted with his water.
Something inside her lifted at his commitment to stay sober. Being on a mountain was one thing, handing your guest a beer and not having one yourself must be tougher.
She bent to take off her heavy-soled boots. In sock feet, she carried her can into the living room. “Do you know Moonlight Sonata?” She sank onto the sofa.
“I know the piece. I don’t play.”
That was odd. Everything else here fit her expectation. A set of packed bookshelves held technical books on biology and geology, along with a well-worn collection of popular paperbacks. Bleached animal skulls sat alongside specimens of turquoise, amethyst, and other rocks she couldn’t identify.
She set her drink on the pine coffee table and lifted an irregular black stone. It was heavy and smooth, but the concoidal shape tapered to sharp edges.
“Obsidian,” Steve said. “The Nez Perce believed it had healing powers.”
Holding the rock, she asked, “Do you think it could help me forget today?”
“Only you can answer that.”
She stared into the stone’s glassy depths. Inside was a vortex, somehow dizzying. Glancing toward the darkness outside the door, she noted the bars on its small window.
Steve took the obsidian from her. “You’ve been through a lot.” He set the rock down. “But there were a few things about today I wouldn’t change.” His steady eyes suggested he was as aware of her as she was of him.
Clare looked for a distraction. “Your work?” She nodded toward a black-and-white photo of a snowshoe hare huddled at the base of an aspen. On the same wall hung a view of the Grand Teton emerging from morning fog, alongside a baby elk with spindly legs threatening collapse.
“I put in a darkroom beside my study,” Steve said.
Something about the process of capturing a wilderness image and putting it into a frame underlined Clare’s ephemeral association with the Yellowstone country. Her family had once lived on this land, while she merely visited, welcome to take snapshots, leave footprints, and go home.
Although she ran out of small talk, she felt more was required. “Long day,” she began and then realized that she was taking them back to the Hellroaring.
“Very long.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The caring in his eyes, overlain by something deeper, decided her.
Curling her feet beneath her on the couch, she confessed, “Today isn’t the first time I’ve had somebody die in a fire with me.”
Steve came to sit beside her.
“Frank inspired me every day. He kept the station meals on par with a chichi restaurant. He shorted-sheeted our bunks.” She gave a giggle that surprised her.
Steve smiled.
Once more, she felt solemn. “We were together on the hose. When the roof came down, and I lived, I was afraid to show my face at the memorial service.”
Steve took her hand. “What happened to Frank and Billy wasn’t your fault, no matter how hard you try to take responsibility.”
“Get back on that horse?”
“Right.”
Sick and tired of hearing that, she withdrew her hand and lashed out. “That’s great advice, but do you practice what you preach? Did you book an airline flight after your crash? Have you given any thought to remarrying?”
Steve levered off the couch and stood with his back to the piano, his gray eyes bleak.
Her ears got hot. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business … especially the part about marriage.”
For a long moment, they faced off. Then Steve nodded with a gentleness that said he accepted her apology.
Clare wished he were still sitting next to her, but the distance of the room separated them.
Steve glanced over his shoulder toward the rest of the house. “There’s only the one bedroom.” A catch in his voice suggested he might be thinking of those brief moments when their bodies had pressed together in the fire shelter.
A pulse began to pound in her. “I don’t want to put you out.”
Extending his un-bandaged right hand, he reached to help her up. “You won’t.”
His palm was dry, reassuring, and strong against hers. She remembered him holding her in the truck, his heart beating beneath her ear. Someone else’s strength was what she craved tonight, to set aside the burden of training young men and women too briefly, before sending them to what today had been death.
She stood. Steve released her hand, but warmth lingered. They went into the hall, leaving the light from the living room behind. His touch on the small of her back almost made her turn, thinking of going into his arms.
She waited. At the archway that led into a darkened room, he left her, padding across the hardwood floor.
When he turned on the bedside lamp, it shone full force onto a picture of a blonde in a black formal dress, smiling lovingly at her photographer. She sat at the keyboard of a grand piano, her hands poised to play.
“Your wife?” Clare asked quietly. The wild pulse in her still pounded, incongruous against the feeling of being dashed with cold water.
“That’s Susan,” Steve agreed. He sank onto the bed with a dejected look.
Clare folded down beside him. “Why don’t you tell me about her?”
“Fasten your seat belt.” The pert Triworld Air attendant couldn’t hold a candle to the incandescent beauty of Steve’s wife, made ripe by her recent pregnancy. Susan held three-month-old Christa against her breast while he secured her seatbelt.
He’d wondered at the wisdom of traveling with Christa so young and fragile, but Susan had been off the circuit for six months. She’d badly wanted to make the concert engagement in Anchorage.
At last night’s performance, she’d been at the top of her form, gracefully introducing three compositions she’d written while on sabbatical. “I call this the Suite of Life. The first movement speaks of the passionate glory of conception, the second of the still fullness of waiting. The last celebrates birth, both as completion and a promise that is just beginning.”
Steve had heard Susan play it a hundred times in the studio overlooking the Potomac, first a halting, intermittent progression of notes. Gradually, a theme emerged that was day-by-day embellished. Never had it flowed as it did in answer to the questing hush of the Anchorage audience. During the standing ovation, he’d blinked back tears.
In the morning, Susan’s agent had telephoned their room at the Captain Cook Hotel. Steve took Christa and walked to the window overlooking Cook Inlet. The t
ide was out, exposing a half-mile of chocolate mud flat that would be covered again within hours. Ever since Susan had told him she was expecting he’d felt differently, as though he were not just a scientist observing the cycles, but finally part of life’s ebb and flow.
Christa’s rosebud mouth nudged his shirt. Her tiny face began to screw up as she gathered energy for a squall that would keep Susan from hearing the news from New York. Steve chuckled and offered his finger as a pacifier.
“Guess what?” Susan crowed, putting the phone into the cradle.
“They hated you in Peoria.” He kept his face straight.
“The Times had a man here last night, happened to be on vacation.” Steve heard in her voice there was only one Times and that it was in New York. “He phoned in a review of my new work that Charlie says will net me a recording contract.”
As the 737 taxied for takeoff in Anchorage, he looked at the barren earth beside the runway and thought how impossibly rich his life was.
Steve realized that although Clare studied him with steady eyes, tears ran down her cheeks.
They sat opposite each other on his bed, crossed-legged like children in a reading circle, but he couldn’t read her.
He’d told her about screaming metal and fire. How he did not remember Susan and Christa’s funeral because he had attended in a wheelchair, doped to the gills. He’d been lucky, they told him, that he’d taken the impact there and not broken his neck.
How many times in those early days had he wished he had?
“After it happened, I was stationed at Park Service Headquarters,” he said. “I’d drive to work on the George Washington Parkway. Planes were always taking off and landing at National, flying low over the Potomac.”
“How did you come to Yellowstone?”
“Everyone knew I was having a rough time.” He swallowed. “My boss thought that if I had a fresh start someplace I could get back into research …” He looked at her squarely. “It was a kindness. And a move to get a problem drinker off their hands.”
She nodded. “Do you miss the booze? Crave it?”
“Some days are better than others.”