Welcome to the Greenhouse (30 page)

She stood there silent for another moment. When he looked back next she was gone.

Two mornings later when he went downstairs, he found the vase glued back together, its cracks all but invisible. It sat on the kitchen table next to his now-empty, second-to-last bottle of Super-Glue, with the now-slightly-soiled tablecloth beneath it.

That week fire season started. The winds came up and lightning storms rolled across the sky. Smoke hung in the air. It clung to the low areas and snaked through the valley below his house. Charred wood smell stank up Bear’s clothes and hair and made his eyes burn. Bear spent the two days hiking through the back twenty, scanning the horizons from every angle, checking for fires. From the ridge that stretched along the southern edge of his property, he saw what he had been dreading. A line of smoke and flame snaked along the ridge next door.

He trudged back home. His house perched on a ridge that adjoined the one now aflame, the ridge about a mile or two to the west. Uncleared brush and dying trees filled the valley between the two. If the wind got much stronger, it would carry sparks into the valley and up toward his ridge. Time to chop down the last two trees in range of the house: the dead aspen next to his bedroom window and the big ponderosa by the front porch.

The aspen he didn’t care about. But the ponderosa… Orla had loved that damn pine, with its widespread branches and needles green and vibrant; its slats of rust-colored bark and the black vertical fissures that separated them.

“She’ll outlast both of us,” Orla had told Bear once. She called the tree Old Lady, or Old Woman Pine. When it dropped its cones on their roof, they would bounce down on the shingles with a frightful clatter, and drop around the eaves onto a cushion of pine needles so soft you never heard them land. Orla would look up from whatever it was she was doing and smile. “Old Lady’s heard from.”

He looked up through the branches that morning. “Nothing lasts,” he said.

First he brought down the aspen. He used a comealong and an axe. Once he had it down, he was dirty and sweating, and doused himself in the icy well water. Then he chopped the wood into sections, dragged it over near the workshop, and cut it down into firewood. Next day it was time to deal with the ponderosa. He got out his axe and his comealong. He went so far as to lift the axe and give the old lady a whack. The bark shattered where the blade struck, and the wet white living wood beneath splintered. He rested the bit of the blade against the tree’s root, rubbed his face, and looked up through the branches.

He couldn’t do it. Old Lady Pine had been too much a part of their lives, for too many years. He ran his hand over the gouge he’d made.
If this tree is to be the death of me, so be it.
He put his tools away.

That night Bear woke to find his bedroom on fire. Flames crawled in through the window and across the ceiling. Acrid smoke clawed his sinuses and lungs.

He rolled onto the floor, choking and gagging. Somehow he made it down the stairs. No conscious thought was involved. He returned to himself on the lawn in front of his home, watching flames devour his home. Painful welts bubbled up along his left forearm but he had no memory of how he had gotten them.

The winds were up. The ponderosa whipped to and fro in the grip of the flames devouring it. The roof had already started to cave in. Orange light shone from the upper-story windows. Even from here, the heat scorched his face and the light hurt his eyes. Through the open front door he saw that the staircase banister was alight. And now flames attacked the ceiling beams in the living room.

He looked at the blazing door frame and a powerful urge gripped him.
I’m going to perdition anyway, for loving Orla more than I ever loved God.
It was as good an end as any.

But in that instant before action followed thought, a yank on his arm threw him off balance. Something—someone—was dragging him away from the flames. The young woman who had broken in before pulled at him now.

“Come on!” she yelled above the noise.
“Venga
! We have to go!”

He looked down at her. She was covered in soot and her gaze was wild with fear.

He looked back at the house.
Orla. Orla.

Then he saw a troupe of children at the far edge of the lawn. They were skinny as this young woman was, dirty and stiff with terror. The fire hadn’t jumped to that copse where they stood, but soon it would. Old Woman Pine was cracking—splitting—about to go down. When it did, it would tip down the hill toward them. He couldn’t run into a fire and leave them with that memory. God knew what else they had already seen. With a grunt of anguish, he ran after the young woman, amid falling branches and billowing smoke. He snatched up a couple of the littlest ones. So did the young woman. The rest fell in around them. Down the hill they went.

They ran far and hard, following the muddy creek. He noticed a youth—the next oldest after the young woman. He carried a younger boy on his back. Others carried toddlers. He glimpsed an infant. Babies saving babies. The young woman yelled at them, dragged them back to their feet when they stumbled, forced them on, away from the burning trees. At least three times she circled back and returned with someone who had stumbled or fallen behind.

They found a mine-tailing pile against a hillside. It was poisoned— lifeless. No brush to betray them by catching fire while they slept. They all huddled on the rocky ground in the predawn chill. Even the littlest ones were too spent to weep.

The fire moved on around them. Bear eventually dozed.

When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by a silent, ragged army of sleeping children. He sat up in the predawn gray, gazing around in wonder. They ranged in age from infants to preteens. Most of them looked to be maybe between five and eight years old. There must have been twenty or so: girls and boys, about evenly mixed, best he could tell. Some of the older ones had weapons: knives, clubs, sticks. All had sticklike arms and legs; several had distended bellies, including the one infant, who hung limp in the arms of one of the five-year-olds, clearly too weak to cry.

It was a boy—he had no diaper—and lay limp in a foul, brown-stained blanket in the lap of one of the younger girls. The corners of his eyes crawled with flies.

The young woman soon came into view dragging a heap wrapped in a filthy blanket. Bear recognized the blanket: it had come from the house. She was covered in soot and had swaddled her head in an old torn T-shirt. She had a military-issue rifle on her shoulder. She dumped the bundle at the feet of the youth, and gave him a good, hard shove with her foot.

“Tomás,” she said. Her tone was sharp. “Get them up.”

The boy groaned, gave her a sullen look, and sat up rubbing his arm. “All right.”

“Get them fed. Get Vanessa to help you. I need everyone to meet me at this man’s house
tan rápido que posible. Bueno?”
As quickly as possible. The boy blinked and nodded. He shook the girl next to her, who stirred. They two began waking the others.

“You.” The young woman gestured at Bear. “Come with me.”

He raised his eyebrows and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Try again,” he said.

She grimaced. He spotted impatience and regret. “I need your help,” she said. “We need supplies. Your—¿como
se dice?—su bodega.”
She wiped at her eyes and he could see her exhaustion. “I’m sorry. Usually my English is better. Under your house—the food.
La medicina.
It is still there. We need it. The children need it.” A pause. “Please.”

He stood. He couldn’t help it; he towered over her. She stepped back and half-raised her rifle. But Bear simply extended his hand. “Lewis Behrend Jessen. Pleased to meet you.”

She looked at his hand as if she had forgotten what the gesture meant. Then she blinked, lowered her weapon, and took his hand in a brief, strong grip. “Patricia de la Montaña Vargas,” she replied. “Call me Patty.”

“I’m Bear.”

While they hiked back along the stream bed, he asked, “Where are you from?”

“Mexico City. My parents were
profesores.
Professors. At the university.”

She said nothing else. He didn”t pry, but clearly there was a lot more to tell. How had she made it so far, across the thousands of war-torn miles between there and here? Where did the children come from? Where were they all headed? And why?

As they came up over the rise, he saw the smoking ruins of his home. The fires appeared to have burned themselves out. The air was still and cool.

Old Lady Pine rose above the rubble: a blackened, ruined post. Everything but the barn had burned to the ground. His hundred-acre wood was now nothing but ash and char. The sun rose, swollen and red as a warning, over the eastern ridge.

As Patty had said, the larder was mostly intact. In another stroke of luck, though the barn roof had caved in on one side thanks to a fallen tree, the walls still stood. So they had shelter.

It took them three full days to extract the supplies. Bear insisted on doing it right, pulling out the debris and shoring up the cellar infrastructure as they went. He had been a mine worker in his college days, before he got his engineering degree.

Patty paced across the ridge with the crook of her rifle in her arm, watching the horizons, while Bear organized his tools, built the supporting structures, and directed the children to carry the timber and debris out of the way.

By the first evening they had extracted enough rations for a decent meal. They camped out in the shell of the barn, exhausted. A soft rain started and the temperature dropped sharply. They huddled, shivering, under the portions that had a roof. Still, Bear was grateful for the rain. He persuaded Patty that it would be safe to have a fire in a barrel for cooking, light, and warmth.

“No one will see the flames behind these walls,” he said. “And with all the fires right now, the smoke means nothing.”

“A fire would be nice,” she replied, and sent the children to the unburned areas below to gather firewood.

By the end of the second day they had most of the supplies out of the cellar. He found the gun safe. The children cheered when he brought out his Colt and shotgun, and all the boxes of ammo. He felt better for having his Colt—not least because of what the children had told him the night before.

There were twenty-three, including Patty. Bear set about trying to learn all their names. He kept asking over dinner that first night, and they kept telling him, but their names rolled off his old brain. They were all so dirty and bony and so quicksilver fast he couldn’t tell them apart. For now, he settled for remembering Tommy (Patty called him Tomás, but he was of Asian ancestry and told Bear his name was Tommy Chang) and Vanessa (a freckled girl of Northern European ancestry, with curly red hair and a lisp, who didn’t know her last name). They were the next oldest after Patty. Tommy didn’t know how old he was but thought he might be thirteen. Vanessa said she was twelve. They told her that Patty had rescued them from a work camp down in Denver, two months before.

“There’s a man chasing us,” Tommy said. “The man who ran the camp in Denver. The colonel, they called him.”

“That’s why she’s so worried,” Vanessa added in a whisper, glancing over her shoulder at Patty, who was pacing at the edge of the camp. “She’s scared he’s going to catch us.”

Bear laid a hand on the butt of his shotgun and wondered how real the danger was.

The first and second days they worked till there was no more light. But when the sun was low in the sky on the third day, Patty called a halt to the preparations and clapped her hands. “Time for school!”

School?

Patty chose a slope facing the sun. The children jostled each other as they sat down in a rough semicircle on the hillside. She used a stick to draw letters, pronounce them, and had the children repeat the work with a stick at their own feet. Then she spelled some simple words. After this she drew numbers and tried to teach the older ones how to add.

She walked around checking their work: encouraging, cajoling, and scolding. She had a hard time keeping their attention, though. The older kids spent most of their time taking turns with the infant, who whimpered incessantly, or chasing toddlers and keeping them from putting things in their mouths that they shouldn’t. The toddlers ran around, naked from the waist down, giggling, scuffing up the students’ work.

Tom and Vanessa paced behind the students while Patty talked, and occasionally gave the rowdier students a whack across the shoulders to make them be quiet. It was Keystone Elementary. Bear rubbed his face, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
Well
, he thought,
points for trying.

He sat a short ways up the hillside at the class’s back; now he stood up and walked over to Tom, who had raised his stick to strike seven-year-old Jonas. The younger boy had not seen Tom coming. He was giggling after kicking dirt over little Hannah’s work and she cried and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. Bear caught the stick and gave Tom a warning head shake. He pressed a finger to his lips, then caught hold of Jonas and lifted him back over to his own spot, as easily as someone else might lift a doll.

“That’ll be quite enough of that,” he told Jonas. “Do your numbers like your teacher says.”

He said it rather mildly, he thought, but with a look that brooked no back talk. The little boy’s reaction shocked him: he stared at Bear in sheer terror, sat right down, and started sketching in the dirt with a shaking hand. His sketch came out looking more like a tree than the numeral 9. Urine spread on the ground behind the boy’s seat.

Bear understood, and felt sick.

He sat next to Jonas. “It’s all right, son,” Bear said. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

The boy leaned away from Bear, trembling like an aspen leaf.

Nothing I say or do will make this better.
Bear stood up, brushed the dirt off, and went over to Patty to put in a quiet word about what had happened. She gazed at him and gave a nod.

“Class is over,” Patty announced. “Now Bear is going to tell a story.”

While Bear distracted the other kids with “The Three Little Pigs,” Patty led Jonas over to get washed up and changed, before the other children noticed and teased him.