Summer of Fire (32 page)

“This is Dr. Steve Haywood.” Clare did not meet his eyes. She wasn’t prepared for what she might find there. Truth to tell, she wasn’t ready for him to see how foolishly happy she was to see him.

“Hello,” Devon responded,
“Doctor
Steve Haywood.”

Clare could tell by the knowing look that her daughter thought they were an item. Not ready to admit how it made her feel, she stood on tiptoe to kiss Devon’s cheek. “Hi.”

“What kind of doctor?” Devon asked. “Are you sick?”

“Yeah.” Clare figured that about summed it up. “Sick of eating smoke and watching the fires outstrip anything man can throw at them.”

She was tired of everything about this wild country, except the man who smiled indulgently at Devon. “I’m a biologist. The past few years I’ve been counting elk.”

“Elk,” Devon echoed flatly.

Steve cradled the back of Clare’s arm with a persuasive touch. Gone was his mask of anger, replaced by the warmth she remembered in his eyes. That spark she’d felt in him just before he threw off their flimsy fire shelter.

From the corner of her eye Clare saw Devon notice.

“I happened to be in the neighborhood.” He grinned. “I wondered if I might buy you two ladies dinner.”

“Steak?” Devon qualified.

“The best in town,” Steve agreed.

Clare let their momentum carry her to baggage claim and out into the yellow afternoon light. After all, Devon already thought she and Steve were together.

He carried Devon’s duffel bag to Clare’s rental car and showed off the clunker of a truck from the park motor pool. “A hundred eighty thousand miles and she shudders when I brake. It’s a wonder I made it over Teton Pass.”

“I’m glad you did,” Clare told him.

Devon gave him a funny look.

As he held Clare’s car door for her, he murmured, “If I didn’t catch you at the airport, I was going to check the motels.”

A little stab went through her at the thought of what people could do in motels. This evening, though, she had a duty to her daughter.

At Jackson’s Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, the main room boasted a dance floor, pool tables, and long bars on either side. Glass cases displayed a stuffed grizzly, bighorn sheep, and game birds. When Devon mounted a vacant saddle that served as a barstool, Clare smiled at a wisp of memory; her tiny blond child bouncing a hobbyhorse until the springs squealed.

“I’ll have a Coors,” Devon directed the young man wiping the knotty pine bar.

Clare lost her smile. “You will not.” She ordered Cokes for them both.

“One more,” Steve said.

Devon looked softer in the golden glow that illuminated the Cowboy.

Steve slid some bills across the bar to pay for their drinks. Clare liked that he was taking care of them.

“Have you been to Jackson before?” he asked Devon.

She shook her head.

He looked at a faded sepia print of men dancing to a fiddler’s tune. “Jackson was a pretty wild place around the turn of the century. There weren’t enough women, so the men danced with each other.”

Devon flipped back her hair and looked bored.

“No kidding.” He kept on. “The guys with the longest hair pretended to be gals.”

“They were probably gay.”

“Maybe.” Steve looked at Clare. “I think most of them were just lonely.”

As lonely as she’d been last night when she knew another woman held him from beyond the grave.

“Haywood, party of three.”

They followed the hostess to the basement steakhouse. After recommending the ribeye, Steve turned to Devon. “I also have a research project that involves the Nez Perce War of 1877.”

Devon looked like she was in history class waiting for the bell.

Steve elaborated. “Your mother said your family has some Nez Perce in it.”

“I didn’t know that.” Devon turned blue eyes on Clare. “I don’t look like an Indian.”

“No, of course you don’t,” Clare soothed. “My great-grandfather was a quarter Nez Perce, making you one sixty-fourth.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Devon insisted.

Clare shrugged, but she felt uneasy. She’d been acting like the “folks” Garrett had talked about, not wanting to mention their Native American ancestors for fear of being ejected from the drawing room.

With smooth ease, Steve saved her by regaling them with stories about the old days in Jackson’s Hole, when the fur trapping of the early eighteen hundreds gave way to turn-of-the-century homesteading and running cattle. Ranching “dudes”, guests from California or the east, had gradually taken over, evolving into the tourist industry that sustained the region in the late nineteen-eighties.

Clare relaxed and enjoyed the evening more than she had imagined possible. The steaks were fork tender. She ordered a glass of red wine and hoped it didn’t bother Steve as he drank his Coke.

When they stepped out of the Cowboy, Saturday night traffic was thick on Cache Street. A charred undercurrent came to Clare’s nostrils, borne on the wind from the Teton Wilderness. The fires had consumed nearly a million acres in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Some called it disaster, as Connie Chung, Dan Rather, and Jim Lehrer entertained the nation nightly with forests in flames. Others, like Steve, believed that fire was natural, old trees giving way to an astounding variety of new life.

“Are you driving up to the park tonight?” He leaned against a knotty pine support.

“We’ve got a room at the Antler Inn.” His obvious weariness reminded her that she was still exhausted from yesterday’s brush with death.

Devon knelt on the sidewalk to examine the Cowboy’s woodcarvings of stagecoaches. Clare frowned at the hint of swelling breast that showed at the side of her tank top.

Steve shifted his weight from one foot to another and she wished they might have a few minutes alone. “I’ll head back north.” He pushed off the post.

“Come by the room and call to check on the roads,” Clare suggested.

He agreed. She was glad he put his arm around her shoulders as they walked down the boardwalk. Even at Devon’s dark look, she did not pull away.

The motel room smelled faintly of prior guests’ cigarettes, but was clean and comfortable. Devon flung herself on the bed farthest from the door while Clare removed her boots.

Steve dialed Fire Command and asked for a status report. After hanging up, he said, “It could be tomorrow afternoon or the next day before the south entrance is open.”

Clare leaned against the partition that divided the bedroom from the bath. Bluish shadows beneath Steve’s eyes told her he hadn’t slept worth a damn last night, either.

He moved toward her and put out his un-bandaged right hand. “Come here.”

She let him draw her out onto the second floor balcony. The murmur of traffic and the talk and laughter of tourists walking around town had subsided. Even the air had changed, turning oppressive. Lightning flashed above the manicured ski slopes carved into Snow King Mountain.

With a glance at Devon, Clare pulled the door shut but did not latch it. “You can smell the rain,” she hoped.

Looking up, she realized that the water falling from the clouds was evaporating before it reached the mountaintop. In Yellowstone and the surrounding National Forests, flames swept on through the night. Fueled by the tinder-dry forest and nourished by wind, the lightning of each rainless front spawned more.

“It’s got to end soon.” Steve echoed her thoughts.

“All fires go out.”

Something in Clare’s throaty voice reminded him he was losing the best thing since Susan . . . before it got started. Clare would be going home to Houston and he didn’t know how soon.

With his wife, there had been a slow and gentle progression from friendship to intimacy. Nurtured by the cocooned environment of the university and the long slow semesters, they’d had the luxury of time. This summer he felt like he’d been chasing even an hour with Clare, mostly in vain. When she had flown away with Deering this morning, he’d watched her go with a sense of what could only be called desperation.

Maybe he’d been a fool, as he’d told her, to sit on Mount Washburn and imagine. Maybe he’d been doubly the fool when he’d tossed the cold remains of his coffee in the kitchen sink, packed his kit, and leaped to the wheel of the ancient Park Service truck.

He turned and found her closer than he’d thought, almost against him. With bare feet, she hardly cleared the top of his shoulder. He wished he were drunk, loose enough to slide his hands up her shoulders, then reversed that, fiercely glad he had all his senses to appreciate her.

Her eyes were a little red, but so were everyone’s who’d been on the line. Her lips’ slight chapping moved him more than Revlon red. Did her curve of smile invite, or had it been so long since he’d made the first move that he’d forgotten how?

He decided on the old “nothing ventured, nothing gained” gamble, and bent toward her. She looked up at him and he believed she was receptive.

“Mom,” said Devon, three feet away in the doorway.

Steve stepped back. His face went hot while a flush stained Clare’s cheekbones.

Although physically a woman, Devon studied them with a child’s suspicion. “Have you got the keys? I left my bags in the car.”

Clare fumbled in the pocket of her jeans. The key secured, Devon headed for the staircase.

Steve wanted more time with Clare, but he decided it was not to be. “I’d better look for a room, then.” His married friends had told him how god-awful kids were on your sex life.

Below, Devon dragged out her duffel and backpack and slammed doors. He saw Clare scan the street where a couple of “No Vacancy” signs were visible. “You’ll never get a place at this hour.”

“Yeah,” Devon agreed, as though eavesdropping was perfectly fine. “This town is packed.”

So he’d drive up to one of the Teton overlooks and sleep in his damned truck. If one of the rangers rousted him, he’d flash his badge and convince them that Steve Haywood was not drunk for a change, just too dog-tired to drive. He’d try not to think that last night Clare had slept in his bed while he’d repeatedly retrieved his pillow from slipping through the sofa’s armrest.

He could hardly believe his ears when Clare’s husky voice stopped him. “We have two beds. Why not stay with us?”

Ten minutes later, Clare climbed in beside Devon, who appeared to be already asleep in the spot against the wall. She’d thought of asking Steve to go for a walk, but they were both exhausted.

At least now, they had tomorrow.

Keys and change jingled when Steve placed them on the round table near the window. That sound came from another life, when Jay used to stow his stuff on the glass-topped dresser in their bedroom.

Steve faced the window and she heard the snaps of his western shirt. He loosened the cuffs and shrugged out of one sleeve, stopping to scratch his back. Off with the other and he turned out the hanging light over the table.

With wonder, she realized that she had spent the entire evening without thinking of Billy Jakes, her upcoming interrogation, or the question of whether to quit fighting fires. From across the three feet that separated the beds, her eyes met Steve’s. One arm was pillowed beneath his head and the other beneath the covers, but for a moment, she felt as though he reached out to her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

September 6

The river terrace dropped away, revealing an inner valley where the Snake River flowed in three winding, braided channels. On the bank, Clare saw at least a dozen leaning cabins with red metal roofs bleached by the sun.

“There’s the Bar BC,” Steve offered. “Dude ranch for armchair cowboys of the teens and twenties.”

When Clare had told Steve over breakfast omelets that she wanted to try and find her family ranch, he had immediately started making plans. Even Devon had surprised her by saying she’d like to go.

They’d convoyed to the airport and dropped off Clare’s rental, then driven through sage meadows and crossed a bridge over the rushing Snake. At the Grand Teton Visitor Center, a silver-haired ranger offered directions to the landmark Bar BC and the nearby Sutton homestead. “They’re just ruins,” he warned. “We don’t have funding and the goal is to let the land return to its natural state.”

The Bar BC was better preserved than Clare had thought from the way he’d spoken. Despite their derelict appearance, most of the buildings stood intact behind rail fences. The exception was a bare foundation with a river-rock fireplace where she imagined ghosts danced on moonlit nights.

Steve turned the noisy truck onto a faint track at the base of a bluff. Willows and aspen grew thick in the bottomland. As the trail grew fainter, they backtracked several times. Finally, Steve brought the truck to a halt beside a small ravine lined with granite boulders. “Can’t give up now.”

He struck out on foot down the bank and into rushing water. Clare splashed behind him, wetting her boots and jeans. Past the ravine, she had to watch for burrows, twisted roots, and the rounded pellets of elk droppings. The bottomland smelled of evergreen, the woodsy tang of sage, and something cinnamon-like. “What smells like Christmas?”