Summer of Fire (27 page)

She pushed past Steve, searching. Her face was set in grim lines that told him she was ready for anything, from minor burns to full cardiac arrest.

Steve wasn’t.

Clare knelt and lifted a soot-blackened silver sheet with sure hands. Steve stepped closer and smelled something worse than a burned-out forest, a sweetish stench of scorched meat.

Bile rose in the back of his throat. That shiny, blackened crust belonged to no race on earth. White, Black, Hispanic, or Native American, there was no clue left. Fire retardant clothing stuck to skin as though it had melted on. One sleeve still smoked.

A look at Clare’s face confirmed the man was dead.

The first time she’d seen a dead person, she’d been shocked at how truly gone life was in the instant that light faded from their eyes. They hadn’t let her see Frank, but she’d imagined. His hearty energy turned to one more piece of fuel.

Clare felt the letdown start inside her chest and radiate down her arms. It happened whenever she’d been pumping adrenaline for a long time and there was nothing more to be done.

Sometimes it happened watching someone’s house collapse on irreplaceable photos, a child’s doll, and the memories that would never be the same. Once a family Golden Retriever had been trapped in a laundry room. When intense heat had beaten her back, she’d thought she’d need support to simply hold herself upright. She’d gone on.

After Javier had dragged her away from Frank and into the street, after she’d cried with Pham Nguyen’s mother, she’d gone down onto the curb. With her head between her knees, she’d felt lower than the gutter beneath her boots.

Beside the dead soldier, Clare was fiercely grateful she was already on her knees, for she would have fallen. Delayed reaction set in, a deep trembling that replaced the wall of detachment she’d thrown up on approaching the downed man. She was aware of the others standing at a distance, waiting to see what she might do. “There is nothing,” she said, then realized she’d merely thought it.

Steve offered the radio he’d worn on his belt. Hers was in her blackened pack.

She stared at the box as though she didn’t know what it was. Gradually, her training reasserted and with a shaking hand, she clicked the mike. “Firefighter down,” she told the man who answered.

Thank God it was someone she didn’t know, for if she had to talk to Garrett she’d break down in front of Sergeant Travis and the soldiers. “We need emergency medical care and transport for . . . twenty-two. We’ve got one . . . body.”

She realized that she didn’t know who had died. It could be any of the soldiers, whether they had called their names before the screaming or not. “We’ll have to get back with an ID.”

“Christ, who . . .?”

“We’ve got Joe, Sheila, Mako, Rodriguez . . . ”

“Sound off!” Sergeant Travis clipped.

It began as before, proceeding briskly all the way to J.

Private Billy Jakes, who had answered the previous roll call with a sob, did not reply.

“Jakes!” Travis shouted. “You there?”

A low murmur began.

“Jeez, not Billy . . . “

“Sound off, I said.”

The rest of the roll continued more slowly, from Lomatewa through Sanchez to Young.

“Ah, hell . . . ”

“Billy.”

Clare had handed Billy her own shelter after his blew out, but fate had evidently decreed it his day to die. Several of the male soldiers dashed at tears with the backs of their hands, while the two women let themselves cry without wiping their faces.

Dry-eyed, Clare pushed to her feet. She moved among the survivors, checking for burns and other injuries. She watched for signs of shock and instructed a shivering Rodriguez to wrap himself in a shelter.

She stepped toward Sergeant Travis last. His quick emergence from the shelter and attitude of command led her to believe he was not in serious trouble, but she needed to be sure.

As she approached, Travis stiff-armed her back. “Go away,” he said through set teeth.

It seemed to take a long time for help to arrive from the Storm Creek Camp, even though it was only about five miles as the crow flies. After their initial reactions to identifying Billy, most of the soldiers sat silently on the clean sides of shelters spread on the ground. Their shoulders slumped with exhaustion.

Steve sat beside Clare, looking lost in his own thoughts. Periodically, he cleared his throat and spat mucus into the ash. She did the same at intervals, aware of her raw throat.

The dead man lay at a little distance. No one looked in that direction.

Clare did not need her eyes to see a vivid picture of the face death wore today. Before entering the fire department, the only corpses she had seen were the pale products of an undertaker’s art. Masquerading as sleep, death wore pancake makeup.

In the field, it was different. A heart arrested and a woman toppled off the toilet. A middle-aged man died during sex and lay in an awkward sprawl, the sheets soiled with his bowel’s release. Billy Jakes’s humanity was lost along with his skin. The sour cooked smell and stink of singed hair clung cloying in Clare’s nostrils.

About thirty minutes after she’d radioed, headlights approached in the gathering dusk. How fortunate that the burned trees were mostly standing, or the vehicles would not have been able to drive in on the dirt track.

Without waiting for orders from Travis, the soldiers got to their feet and climbed wearily into the back of the Army transport. Travis waited with Clare and Steve while the ambulance attendants made a perfunctory check for a pulse. The senior man shook his head and his assistant brought out the body bag.

When they lifted Billy into it, Clare caught the malevolent flash of blame in Sergeant Travis’s eyes.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

September 4

"Good lord, what happened to you?” A powerful-looking woman in a Prescott Arizona Hotshots cap looked at Clare from the next sink. They were alone in the women’s shower trailer at the Storm Creek Camp.

“Setting backfire on the Hellroaring.” Clare’s boots sat side by side on a bench, along with a fresh set of Nomex. She stripped off her stained shirt and trousers and dumped them on the floor. The once-polished stainless mirror gave a blurred suggestion of her blackened face with bloodshot eyes.

Clare suspected that the woman had not asked about her merely because her clothes and skin were filthy, but because of her strained white look beneath the soot. The set of her mouth said she was at the limit of endurance.

“Rose Chee,” her companion offered.

“Clare Chance.” Because Rose had a kind face, she confessed, “Around six it blew up and we went into shelters.”

“Everybody make it?”

Clare swallowed around a hard lump.

Rose waited. From the pocket of her fire trousers, she produced a gold tube, twisted it with an adept hand and applied a coat of crimson lipstick. She pressed her wide lips to even the color.

Clare met her serious dark eyes. “We lost a young infantryman out of Fort Lewis. They were just in and I was training them.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

Pulling a stack of the paper towels offered for drying, Clare headed to a shower stall and pulled the white plastic curtain behind her. She dropped her charcoal-mottled turquoise brassiere and underpants into the trashcan on the rubber mat. As she reached for the taps, the tears came.

With them surged the memory of harsh questioning after Frank’s death. Hadn’t she known they should retreat from beneath the burning overhead? Had she given Frank any signal to back off? Had he, in turn, tried to go back and found her blocking his way? How was it possible that the roof had come down without warning, as she suggested?

She imagined the combined firepower of the National Park Service and the Army descending on her. Did not Sergeant Travis express concern at the safety in the area, long before the actual emergency? Hadn’t she taken it upon herself to delay a judgment call until it was too late?

For God’s sake, the Hellroaring had been tame earlier. She’d given her own shelter to Billy Jakes.

Somehow, she did not believe that would be enough.

They hadn’t let her see Frank’s body. He’d been brought out of the apartment house in the same type bag they’d closed Billy in; the one that served as equalizer for kings and paupers. Frank’s casket had been closed.

Seeing Billy’s disfigurement made it real. Clare slid down the fiberglass shower wall and hugged herself beneath the spray. Great gulping sobs wracked her and she hoped Rose Chee didn’t hear. Without success, she called on her resource of coolness, the one that permitted her to package the dead.

This happened to the best of them. Some firefighters called it processing, an impartial cover-up for the tears, the rage, the obsessive washing that failed to remove the taint of smoke and burnt flesh. Everybody handled it her or his own way and Clare had congratulated herself at partitioning it when the victims were unknown.

Even after Frank, she’d been in denial. Despite her few bouts of crying, she’d set her backbone in a straight line and run to Wyoming. Now, she let the cleansing water mingle with her tears. Frank was not waiting back at the station the way she sometimes imagined. The good knife he’d brought to chop onions and spices had gone home with his widow. Someone else’s clothes hung in his locker.

When she finally emerged from the shower stall, two women were talking excitedly about the prospect of the thousand people in the Storm Creek Camp being evacuated before morning. The fire that had threatened Silver Gate and Cooke City at the east entrance had backed around and was heading for them.

At this latest proof that there was no haven, Clare wondered if what she, and everyone on the lines had gone through today wasn’t enough.

Now she faced the prospect of phoning Garrett. Sergeant Travis had probably bent his ear an hour ago, before the transport carrying the troops back to their base had left. Billy Jakes’s comrades had been excused from the fire line.

Clare had decided to stay overnight at the camp, rather than ride to West Yellowstone under Travis’s baleful eye. His farewell had been to succinctly turn his back and walk away. Not a word to suggest she might give a shit about what happened to Billy.

With a shock, she remembered that Devon’s plane arrived tomorrow afternoon. For the past few hours, it had been wiped from her mind. Now that she knew the fire was coming, she wished she’d hitched a ride to pick up her rental parked at Old Faithful. If the camp was evacuated to Mammoth on the north end of the park, she might have trouble getting to the airport on time.

Near the dining tent, she queued for a pay phone. It would be more private than talking to Garrett over one of the radios.

His deep voice was unchanged and reassuring. “Anderson.”

She bit her lip against the horror of Billy’s screams.

“Yo, talk to me.”

“It’s Clare.”

“Gal.” His voice said he knew. “You okay?”

She sucked in her breath. Did trembling inside qualify as okay? Even though she’d bathed, the scorched stench had permeated her head and she could not shake it.

Garrett spoke into her silence. “These things happen,” he said in an uncanny echo of what the folks at the station had told her about Frank.

“Yeah,” she managed.

“With your daughter coming, you take some time. Show her the sights,” he offered.

“Yeah.” She discovered how hard she’d been gripping the receiver only when her fingers relaxed.

“I’ve been briefed on what happened, but I’ll need your story. Are you up to it now while the memory is fresh?” His voice was steady.

“Okay,” she agreed. Around her was a throng of yellow-shirts. From eager students to men and women with graying hair, they all risked themselves, as she did.

She just didn’t know if she wanted the job anymore.

The Storm Creek Camp’s dining tent bustled at ten p.m. Hundreds of firefighters, pilots, and support personnel grabbed a meal before too little sleep and a too-early call.

Despite her aversion to the thought of food, Clare joined the line. A loudspeaker garbled a country tune while servers heaped her plate with greasy pork chops, lumpy mashed potatoes, and canned green beans.

Since the troops had left, the only person she knew at the tables was Steve.

When she paused beside him, he looked up from his Styrofoam plate. His blond hair was clean and, like her, he had turned in his soiled Nomex for fresh. Some medic had bandaged his more seriously burned left hand, and his right was pink in places. Her own hands stung, but she didn’t think she needed a bandage.

Clare climbed onto the bench beside Steve. As she settled in, her arm brushed his. “Excuse me,” she murmured.

She reached for a plastic saltshaker. Steve passed it, their hands touching briefly. His face, still pink from a day of sun and the heat of the fire, seemed to turn a bit redder.

Looking at her plate, Clare salted, lifted a mouthful of the tasteless green beans, and salted again. Her raw throat protested.