Summer of Fire Part 5

"Not good." She shook her head and saw his eyes go to the gold hoops at her ears. "We're in for a long haul."

She traced a wet spot on the table and checked his sinewy left hand. A flesh-toned bandage there, but no sign of a wedding ring, or even the telltale band of shrunken flesh that said it was in his pocket.

A sip of champagne refreshed her throat that was dry from the high thin air. "Rumor has it we're about to throw everything we've got at the fires."

A deeper line etched between Deering's brows. "You don't sound like that's a good thing. Most of the firefighters I know like saving the burning forests."

Clare looked out the window, but rather than the dark s.h.i.+ngled side of the inn's opposite wing, she saw a wall of flame. "Yesterday, I got a close-up of the Shoshone at Grant Village." She turned her gaze on Deering's gaunt face, marked by the purpling bruise. "And you lost your helicopter. Before this is over, somebody is going to get killed."

"d.a.m.ned right. Haywood and I lucked out when we ditched, but somebody dies every season." His prominent Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed beer.

Clare paid attention to her stemmed gla.s.s to avoid the intensity in Deering that she wasn't ready for. "I'm going out on the lines west of here in the morning to try to keep the North Fork from burning this place down."

"That would be a shame. One thing for sure, if it burned, they'd never be able to replace it." Deering studied his own gla.s.s for a moment and then tapped it with a long finger. "If I were going up in the morning, this would be c.o.ke."

That was good, for she'd caught a glimpse of Steve Haywood looking soused-he'd even tripped going through the door. He was out there now, leaning against the wall of the breezeway between the old and newer wing of the inn. When she looked directly at him, he turned his head away as though she'd caught him staring.

She checked out Deering, comparing the st.u.r.dy blond scientist and the tall rugged pilot.

Deering met her eyes in a questioning, no, maybe a questing, way. "I need to get back in the air," he said with an air of confiding.

Why did it not surprise her that this man was ready to fly again? "I can imagine you'd get antsy being grounded," she sympathized. "Were you in Vietnam?"

"How'd you know?"

"Lucky guess. The right age . . . You have family?"

He cleared his throat. After a little pause, he said, "Wildfire's tough on commitment."

In her peripheral vision, Clare saw Steve reenter the Bear Pit, a man on a mission. "Annabel, I need a Jack," he barked. "Make it a double." When he leaned on the bar, his elbow slipped in a puddle.

"Excuse me," Clare murmured to Deering.

She approached Steve from behind. Maybe because she'd rescued him, it disappointed her to see him like this. Before she knew what she was going to say, the words came out. "Don't you think you've had enough?"

Steve turned with the slow care of a man who'd had too much to drink. Her head barely clearing his shoulder, she looked up at him steadily.

"You again." It sounded as though he was accusing her of something.

A flush rose from her chest and spread across her cheeks. "Why are you doing this to yourself?"

His silver-gray eyes went wide. "Whaddaya mean? I'm just having a few to celebrate . . ." He steadied himself on the bar. " . . . tomorra's visit of the honorable Secretary of the Interior and his muckey-mucks." He made a bowing gesture that indicated obeisance, then met her eyes. She recognized the look of sadness and defeat she'd seen lately in her mirror.

Maybe she conveyed something, for the bl.u.s.ter went out of him. "I'm sorry. I shoulda thanked you . . . saving my life."

She started to soften, but he caught his boot toe in the bar's bra.s.s foot rail and lost his balance. Blind anger that she knew was irrational turned her back toward Deering with a tart, "Someday when you're sober you can thank me properly."

CHAPTER FIVE.

July 27 The next morning Clare found it hard to believe there could be any threat to this pristine forest. She rode in a troop carrier with ten other firefighters on their way to divert the North Fork from Old Faithful. Almost everyone had his or her head down trying to catch a last few minutes of sleep despite the hard bench.

Although the rising sun angled through the trees on the small forest track, its warmth did not reach beneath the truck's canvas tarp. In Houston, the July temperature and humidity had both hovered near one hundred.

Before leaving, she'd visited her mother. They had sat in Constance's back yard in suburban Bellaire, ignoring the gla.s.s-walled office building that towered over the squat, one-story bungalow. The roar of traffic on Loop 610 formed a constant stream of white noise.

Pouring lemonade from a sweating pitcher, Constance said, "Are you sure about this Wyoming, dear? You're still suffering over your . . . friend." Her arch pause suggested Frank might have been more than a co-worker.

That was ridiculous. Frank had treated Clare like the big brother she'd never had, being an only child. Without bothering to correct her mother, she said, "That's precisely the point. I need a change and my job will be waiting when I come back."

She didn't say that one more night in Houston, where nightmares wakened her with almost hourly regularity, was more than she could stand.

"But, dear, Devon is at a delicate age." A stranger might believe that Constance, with her wide dark eyes and innocent delivery, was being sweet. Clare knew better. "Mother," she warned, "one of the A & M trainers called a friend in fire command at Yellowstone. Garrett Anderson is expecting me."

"Of course, dear, but Devon . . ." Constance pushed back her silver hair where it had fallen over her forehead.

Clare sipped her mother's perfect lemonade deliberately. "Taking care of Devon is just an excuse. She could stay with you, but you haven't been willing to have her overnight since she set her mattress on fire."

"Can't you teach her safety? And you a firefighter." Constance's tone said she regarded her daughter's profession as no better than ditch digger.

Clare busied herself selecting a fat oatmeal cookie from the symmetrical arrangement on a platter.

"She still smokes, you know." Constance lowered her voice as though Devon could overhear. "I smell it on her."

"A lot of the other kids smoke. She gets it on her clothes from being around them." Clare defended Devon even though she knew her daughter probably did smoke, and lied about it.

"I hope you're right about her being okay at Jay's while you're gone. Her visits there are usually shorter, and you know that fish and family . . ."

"Stink after three days." She didn't need to check her watch to know that she and Constance had exceeded the three hours they usually required. "Devon needs a relations.h.i.+p with her father," she parroted, from years of repeating the mantra.

Her mother's mouth made a line. "You ask me, you should have sole custody, after he . . ."

Clare had emphatically not asked, but every time Devon left for visitation, she stifled the same thought. "You know that in family law court, you get all the justice you can afford."

Beaten back on the new front, Constance returned to the West. "This Wyoming . . ." She gave another of her signature pauses and smoothed the skirt of her yellow-flowered house-dress. "You know they have bears up there."

"Yes, Mother."

"I'm serious." Constance's hands fluttered, a sure sign that she had found something to worry about. Her vigilance was steadfast, such that she fretted over everything from refusing to get onto an airplane to shredding magazine covers marked with her name before putting them in the garbage.

Clare had learned to live with it, but the familiar charade rankled. It had gotten worse in the seven years since her parents divorced. Her father kept busy with his new wife and twin baby sons, reminding her too painfully of losing Jay to ten-years-younger Elyssa Hendron.

Looking at a ma.s.s of greenery topped by spiky red flowers, Clare tried, "Your cannas are doing well this year."

"Don't change the subject," Constance persisted. "You were too young to know your Grandfather Cordon before he died, but he told me they broke ice in the water buckets in June. The homestead was in Jackson Hole, just by the Snake River."

"With the drought and the fires, I hardly think I'll get cold."

In the back of the truck, Clare had time to regret her smug a.s.surance, pulling on rough gloves and flexing stiff fingers to soften the leather. The cotton bandanna issued with the fire uniform did not keep her ears or neck warm beneath her hard hat.

The truck jerked and swayed on the rutted track. It was strange to be on the way to a fire at such a slow speed, without the strident sirens and the klaxon of the air horn parting traffic.

Clare clamped her teeth against the opening of the instant replay of Frank's death. Reliving the experience did no earthly good. Both the psychologist and the guys at the station had made that clear. She focused instead on what she'd seen the day before yesterday at Grant Village. For sheer force and power, no fire she'd ever seen compared to the Shoshone.

As her chest stayed tight, Clare reminded herself that despite Garrett Anderson's pessimism, this unusual fire behavior and weather weren't likely to last. According to historic data, it usually rained more in late July and August.

The truck rounded a bend and braked.

"Deer," someone said. A dozen soft-eyed does stared at the intruders from the dappled shade. One leapt high, and like the quick communal reaction of a school of fish, the others exploded and shot across the track in pursuit. Clare thought of Bambi, how at five she'd cried in the theatre when the forest fire sent the animals fleeing.

The truck moved on, rocking, as the track grew fainter.

A young man who appeared no older than Devon studied Clare. Probably a college linebacker, his broad shoulders pressed against the boards. Like many of the fire crew who eschewed shaving during the season, he sported a s.h.a.ggy brown beard. A faint smile played at Clare's lips. Back in Houston, her routine was set in a way that did not include meeting new men. Here the faces were as fresh and different as the land.

Last night she had enjoyed talking with Deering. He seemed friendly and open, although she'd detected complexity below the surface. He had promised to leave a message for her at Fire Command, so they could have dinner when she had the chance to be in West Yellowstone.

As the truck negotiated the broad expanse of Little Fire-hole Meadow, Clare started to feel warmer. Dry golden gra.s.ses stirred in the vehicle's wake. Ahead, a gray shroud hugged the ground, and in another minute, she had a view of the fire front, six-inch flames licking their way through the undergrowth.

The sight of their adversary reminded her of the night she'd made her decision to fight the summer battles of the West.

It was at Frank's wake in a popular Irish bar, and she'd been pretty well into the Guinness Stout. Raucous male laughter surrounded her as the acne-scarred young man tending bar turned on the television. Male swimmers backstroked, competing with honed bodies for spots in the October Seoul Olympics. Clare paid attention, for she had swum compet.i.tively in college and kept up with the new generation of men and women in the sport.

The bartender changed channels, flipping past local news and the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. Behind Lehrer's shoulder, a forest fire raged.

"Hold it there," Clare ordered.

Lehrer read his copy. "Wildfires have burned over fifty thousand acres in five western states. In this driest summer in park history, several fires are burning out of control in Yellowstone under the Park Service's let burn policy. This allows fires started by lightning to run unless they threaten life or private property."

"I heard they're gonna be bringing in help from all over the country." Javier Fuentes set his brew on the table littered with dead soldiers.

The TV showed a line of firefighters walking up a forest road. Dressed in olive trousers and yellow s.h.i.+rts, they wore hard hats with bandannas tied around their foreheads as sweatbands. Clare recognized their heavy tools as Pulaskis, a combination axe and hoe, heavier than her crash axe at the station. Smoke swirled around them.

She drew a deep breath. Fire was sweeping across the land of her ancestors. She felt as though she could smell the smoky tang of pine forest and feel the comfortable heft of the fire tool. The decision that her job with HFD could go on hold hit her with the swiftness of a blow. Devon could stay with her father for a while.

"I'm going out there," she told Javier.

"Count me in," he had agreed. The miraculous thing was that after they had slept on it, neither they nor the other guys who'd sworn aboard had changed their minds. After her mandatory consultation with the department psychologist, the station chief had agreed to let her go. She and the Houston crew had worked the line together only a few days before she was called to be a trainer.

Clare snapped out of her reverie when the truck driver cut the engine. The only sounds were that of a crow's caw and the brisk crackling of the North Fork. Then the firefighters moved, piling off the tailgate, their boots making hollow sounds on the metal. Voices rose and they pa.s.sed tools.

Clare felt the odd person out, having come to observe so she could direct others later.

The hotshots' a.s.signment for the day was to cut a three-mile line along the southeast flank of the North Fork, while aerial bombardment with r.e.t.a.r.dant liquid was used on the most active front. Before they got to the place where they were to work, Clare felt the first trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades.

To build a fire line, the sawyers started, revving up their chainsaws and felling trees over a fifteen-foot wide corridor. Afterward, the hotshots with Pulaskis cleared a two-foot wide swath, careful to hack out every vestige of roots that could keep a fire smouldering.

Clare had thought she was in shape, but the crew had been digging line since mid-June. As the morning wore on, she found that she was only able do about fifty feet an hour, while the others managed to clear at least a full chain, or sixty-six feet.

Toward noon, she fell farther behind. Her back and arms ached from bending and wielding the heavy Pulaski. She stopped frequently for water breaks, figuring that if she got dehydrated, she would be worse than useless. When lunch was finally called, she was torn between whether to sit and risk stiffening or to stand and eat. The sight of the crew lolling on the ground decided her.

With a care for her aching back, she sat and took off her hard hat. Dampening her sweat soaked bandanna in fresh water from her canteen, she attempted to wipe some of the salty grime from her face and hands before eating.

The day wasn't half over.

After choking back a pair of dry bologna sandwiches, she leaned against a tree trunk and closed her eyes. Against the s.h.i.+fting sparks that decorated the backs of her eyelids, she saw Deering again, smiling at her with teeth that shone white against his skin.

But thinking of last night opened a darker dimension. When she had first seen Steve Haywood, she'd had a distinctly different impression of the park biologist. Going back into the lake after he'd fetched up on sh.o.r.e, he'd seemed a real trouper, not at all like the sodden wretch who had nearly fallen on the floor at the Bear Pit. Shortly after she'd been rude to him, she'd turned from her conversation with Deering to find him gone. Too late, she wished she'd done something to keep him from driving drunk.

Sitting against the tree, she found that even thinking used too much energy. It was just on the borderline between warm and hot, and rest felt so bonelessly wonderful. The sharpness of fresh-cut pine overpowered the undercurrent of smoke while insects droned around her head. Gradually, the voices of the crew muted, then fell silent . . .

She was inside an apartment complex that was burning faster than the Houston Fire Department could put it out. The wood s.h.i.+ngle roofs were igniting from flying sparks so that the flames leaped from building to building. Sirens shrilled as more and more alarms were called.

Inside the smoky apartment hallway, Clare and Frank approached a closed door that poured smoke from around the edges. No other firefighters came from the opposite end of the building, leaving them alone to a.s.sault this cell of the larger conflagration.

"All for us," Frank said through the mask on his air pack. She imagined the usual twinkle in his deep brown eyes.

Facing away from the door, Clare raised her leg and brought it back into a mule kick. The panel swung wide, back against the interior wall with a bang.

Light suffused the hall. Heat struck out and pounded. She crouched and turned to face the inferno. She'd been in worse situations, but couldn't shake a bad feeling. Her rapid breathing hissed in her mask and she told herself she could stay the course.

Frank cracked the valve and sent up a power cone. Steam rose and hot water began to fall like rain, running down her helmet and into the neck of her coat. Over the fire's roar was an overprint of snaps and pops that didn't sound right.

She took a hand off the hose. Immediately, over a hundred pounds of pressure threatened to tear it from her remaining hand and Frank's. Nevertheless, she clutched his arm, with the strength born of premonition. "Don't go any farther!"

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h! Will you look at that?"

Clare jerked and her heart took off like a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit. She stared through open eyes at the afterimage of the flaming apartment. Gradually, she realized that she sat beneath a tree with the midday sun slanting through the branches, hoping she'd not called attention to herself.

"No s.h.i.+t, man," someone replied to the request to 'look at that.'

Clare swiveled toward the unmistakable crackling and saw what had happened. Not a hundred yards back, the North Fork had jumped the line, rendering the morning's work useless.

CHAPTER SIX.

July 27 "Randolph Mason." The Secretary of the Interior greeted Steve Haywood. Mason's entourage had stopped this afternoon on the road from Norris Geyser Basin to Mammoth Hot Springs.

The Secretary's handshake was firm, his presence more commanding in person than through the filter of television. He carried his tall frame elegantly, his coal black hair lending a distinguished air to his jeans and chambray s.h.i.+rt.