Send This Story To a Friend

"Shouldn't you be out reporting the news, Bradford?" Jake Schepper said, his eyes barely skimming my face as he scanned the room, the door closing too heavily under its own power behind him.

"Show me where to find some, and I'll report it," I said.

I sat facing the door, under the arch of letters which spelled out Stump's Diner backwards and inside-out, compared to the image on the street, on the wide front window. Jake took his cowboy hat off, exposing two white peaks above his red brow, and flanks of brittle-looking, graying hair overgrowing the ears crimped in an even line by the weight of the hat. A rancher removes his hat with the uncomfortable security of a man undressing in a doctor's office, mutual evasion of eye-contact providing a refutation of the act. It's a by-law of the range that you don't make fun of a man's hair as long as he covers it up again within a few seconds. He held the crown of the hat just before his chin and blew on it with care, as if handling an antique, evicting a small plume of dust.

"Get dusty from sittin' on a fence rail?" Clyde Parsons asked, seeing as the hat had been replaced.

"Could get dusty riding in a truck with the windows up in this wind," Schepper said.

"Which way's it blowin' now?" Bob Fletcher asked. Bob and Clyde were seated across from each other, staggered by one seat, at a long cafeteria style table.

"'Round," Schepper answered. He grabbed a chair like a dog by the scruff of the neck, yanked it a full yard from the table and reclined there as if he had intended to occupy the aisle until Janet took his order, then scooted forward as she turned toward the kitchen.

"Hey, Bradford, what's the weather forecast today?" Parsons said. It was just the four of us, and Janet and Helen in the kitchen, so there was no need to even raise his voice.

"Couldn't tell you," I said. "Didn't you listen to the radio?"

"Why listen to the radio when we have our own local newspaper editor right here every morning?"

"Now, have you ever seen a weather report in the Courier? We only publish twice a week, gentlemen. Would you really want me to guess at the weather that far out? Anyway, I come here to get the news from you, not give it out."

Bob went to the trouble of holding his hand beside his mouth like a privacy fence as he made an aside to Clyde, which meant it must have been an unusually rude comment for him to not want me to hear. Clyde laughed politely. His loyalties are first to fellow ranchers, after all.

"Tell you one thing," Helen called from through the horizontal opening to the kitchen where finished orders were placed. "We need rain."

Quote of the day material, that. Through the front window the tops of cottonwoods on the street behind the post office could be seen tussling with a swirling foe. People were just then waking up to find that persistent wind still on the rampage like a stray dog strewing garbage across their lawns for the umpteenth day in a row. But the wind was just the most concrete entity they could blame for the anxiety which pervaded more moments of each new day as the dry spell which was an absence, not a presence, and so could not be held accountable as the wind could be  trudged forward, defying all projections of when it might break.

"You see that?" Bob said. I turned to look, but they were all looking at the window. "We got ourselves a tourist. Red Chevy. Just went by."

"Hope they ain't come up for the campin'. That's what started that doozie up there in Flagstaff, some camper from the valley decided to start a fire."

"Heard they lost a thousand acres to that one."

"Yep. Wind got hold of it and took it right up the side of Mt. Elden."

"Thousand acres! That right, Bradford?"

"A thousand and forty is what we printed," I answered. I was proud to have called the Forest Service and gotten my own information instead of mining it out of stories on the CNN website like I often had to do for facts and figures.

I looked back out the window. Behind the post office, beyond those cottonwoods, you could point to where the smoke had hung, smeared and hazy in the distance, until just a few days ago. Then you might turn yourself around slowly, one inch at a time, scan the horizon close and far, peering to discern the wisp of a shadow above the next wildfire.

      Where is there to go in this town when you gotta be alone? When you get a
letter like this, not even handed to you, and you gotta be alone?

Kick me outta this forest? I don't think so! Hell, I've been rompin' around these hills all my life. Those locked gates are for the damned hippies outta Sedona, come up here and smoke their pot and dance around naked. Yeah, keep them out before they burn the whole place down around themselves. Ought to know better than to play with matches in someone else's house, anyways. But I know the fence only stretches wide enough to reach the first trees on either side of the road, and that ain't gonna stop me. So I just shift into four-high and hump it around the fence. I know the spare key's under the mat, if you know what I mean.

If you can't trust a Hot-Shot in the forest, who can you trust? And I'm gonna be a Hot-Shot, too. Just one more year a high school, and I'll be training to be the best a the best. Don't want no one from town to see me tonight, though, 'cause them lookout boys can be real serious times like this, so I turn my lights out while I drive over the rise, down into the ravine, around the mountain. Know these roads like my own backyard. Coulda done it with my eyes closed.

Drop the tailgate down, hop up and lay back in the bed, my lower legs dangling. Her note she couldn't say it to my face, or even over the phone held by both hands across my chest. The pines howl and swish, this damn wind. I sit up and reach for the quarter bottle of Jack I swiped from Dad's truck. He'll just think one a his buddies went home with it in their cab. Anyways, he's got three or four more opened bottles here and there all around the house.

Hope she calls. Hope she calls because she feels miserable about layin' it on me this way, and my folks'll say I'm out on a date, because that's what I told 'em, and she'll wonder who I found so fast, and they'll say they don't know, and she'll be the one sittin' at home knowin' there's questions to be asked and no one to answer 'em for her.

     First to arrive, last to leave, Fletcher and Parsons lingered in front of the diner before heading out, later than their hands, but still before most people had poured their first cup of coffee. I sipped the stain from the bottom of my mug, left two quarters for a tip and was just straightening out my back when I heard the siren. Parsons and Fletcher looked up the street as one, and I hurried around the table to meet them. News.

"Fire?" I asked, peering up the highway. News was my job, but don't think I was happy about the prospects of a fire. A house or business fire was always a pity, and a forest fire...that would have been a catastrophe in those conditions.

"Guess so. The trucks pulled out and headed over the rise."

"Whose place is out that way?" Parsons asked, though he knew as well as anyone.

"Wheeler. Wheeler and Jake," Fletcher said. "You gonna go watch the fire, Bradford?"

But I was already fishing my keys out of my pocket. Once I was past the hill where the old church had stood, then around the bend and over the rise, I could see across the peaks of pines, maybe two miles out, a low streak like a swipe from a charcoal pencil drifting out along a ravine from behind a small mountain. The dust kicked up by the fire trucks still formed a haze which indicated the turn-off before I could see the road. With one hand I reached under the seat, trying to keep my eyes above the dash, and withdrew my camera. Cresting a small summit, I slowed to a roll, then came to a dead stop in order to get out and take a picture of the canyon below.

Not fire, but a swarm of mystical termites, locusts, beavers, glowing in frenzy, devoured the wild grass, the fallen trees, the juniper not in one direction, but like a hole widening at the edges. No amount of training could have tipped the scales so much that the ten men breaking from the trucks would stand a chance.

     It's that stinkin' Josh Jenkins. She didn't say so, but I know. She's been watchin' him at the baseball games all season. Can hardly peel her eyes off a him. I bet she told Rachel first, too. Tells her everything about us before she tells me. I'm like to read it in the newspaper 'fore I hear it from her. Fine! She wants him, she can have him. And he can have her, too, for all I care.

I hop down and duck in the passenger door to get that jacket I left in here. Ah, that's right! She took it after the last game. I sit out there on those butt-numbin' bleachers for hours watching her watch him play around in his tight white pants and then she goes off with my jacket when it wasn't even cool out. Yeah, he'll find that out, too, how she's always cold when it ain't cold and she don't bring back your jackets, neither.

Reminds me I gotta get my ring back. Shoulda been the first thing she did, give my ring back. But she woulda had to face me to do that.

Gave her my ring. Hell, I only bought the damned thing so I could give it to her. What's a guy need a hunk a metal like that for 'cept to give it to a girl and let people know who gave it to her? And what all else? A necklace on Valentine's Day, but she can keep that. Throw it away for all I care. Fine by me. Stupid hearts. Chose it because a the gold hearts locked together like magician's rings. Guess she found a way to pull 'em apart, huh? Oh, they saw me comin'. Said, Here comes another high school boy thinks he found the girl he wants to marry, they said. Let's get out that stupid necklace with the stupid gold hearts, they said. Guess they got me.

Damn! What am I doin' shiverin' in July? Come on, Jack, get the furnace goin'! Ah! Like to knock you out, this stuff.

Know what? I got a better idea. Show her what she can do with her letter. I give her a necklace and my ring and she sticks a letter in my mailbox and doesn't even knock on the door to say it to my face? Show her what I think a that!

I rip up some a the brittle grass just off the dirt road, make a pile in one a the ruts. That's what this letter is good for: burnin'. Burn it up the way she done our love. Might as well grab a branch of two to throw on there since I'm gettin' it started, anyways. Warm up 'fore I head home. Don't wanna go back too soon and be home when she calls, though. Don't wanna talk to her. Guess there ain't no need for talk now that she told me what she thinks a me. Not worth the trouble no, consideration not worth the consideration to say it to my face, or just hand me the letter herself. That says a lot about a girl I gave a ring and necklace to and I want that ring back. Even if I don't never find no one else to wear it, I want it back. Yeah, says a lot about a girl I thought I was gonna marry soon as I saved up some money from my first season on a Hot-Shot team.

Oh, come on now, Jack! Ah! That's the stuff.

Now where's them matches?

     Aside from the monsters in the Sierra Nevadas, Sangre de Cristos, Bighorns, Laramies, and most all of Idaho, there were hundreds of brush fires sneaking around the country, engaging every smoke-jumper and air tanker we had hoped could come to our assistance. If we were going to stop the fire, we were going to have to do it ourselves.

If someone had just seen the flames earlier, it may not have been so bad. But whoever it was who was dumb enough to sneak into the forest and start a campfire was at least smart enough to hide behind a mountain. That alone might have lost us the fight. The flames were low, as was the smoke, slithering through the canyon until the wind finally brought it out where Jake Schepper saw its tail before he turned off toward his ranch. If he hadn't seen it then, who knows how much worse it might have been. Even so, it was already a mutant terror, creeping up the sides of opposing hills and trickling through two valleys, urged on by the fickle wind.

Someone from the valley, we figured. Those know-it-alls think we're just a bunch of hicks, and don't mind our speed limits, much less a chain across the forest road to let them know not to get in there.

A long folding table set unevenly on the ground, with a cooler of water placed near one end, and some papers, weighted down by a rock from the ground, their corners sporadically rattled by the furtive assaults of the wind, served as base camp on the level pasture just before the last rise above the valley where I first saw the fire. In town, businesses were locked up as citizens mobilized. A backhoe and two bulldozers were brought in from companies in town, and dozens of men fetched their chain saws when the fire chief told them they could clear the lower branches of the pines to prevent the fire from climbing the mature trees.

"Right now, the one bit of luck we've had is the fire is contained to the ground," Chief Turner told the men who stood before him with their chain saws hanging at their sides. "It's eating up fuel like grass and fallen branches, and moving slow enough we can catch it. But if it starts creeping up into the tall pines, and becomes a crown fire, that means it can hop and skip right over our heads all across the Mogollon Rim, and there's not much we can do about that without air support. So what you need to focus on is cutting away the lowest branches of the pines."

Raising the skirt, that's called. When I hear jargon, I have to get it explained so I can write it out for my readers. The men were assigned to groups of a half-dozen each, and given a leader with a radio. A few of the men had experience from being on smoke-chasing crews when they were younger, so these were mainly assigned as field officers, to coordinate the chain saw crews, fire break crews, and generally monitor the status of the fire.

     You gotta believe me I didn't know I'd fall asleep. Just for a minute. I was just gonna get warm for a minute. I built the fire in one a the dirt ruts, deep as a pit, couple feet away from the grass, I swear. Oh, Jesus! When I woke and saw it sneakin' away into the forest, I tried to stop it, I swear! I didn't have no shovel so I just kicked dirt at it but there was more yellow grass than dirt and it was already seepin' out in every direction like a spilled drink. I had to give up and get outta there while I could, so I tore back over the hills into town. It was still dark, and I thought maybe I could just call the fire department and give them a tip, but I didn't want anyone to know it was me. Maybe they could trace the phone call, and even lift my fingerprints from the receiver, or match my voice, or who knows what. Oh, Lord, if they found out, how could I ever join the Hot-Shots?

I didn't sleep one minute last night, goin' back out to the front porch and lookin' to see if it had come over the ridge so I could see it. Even though there wasn't no glow and it was too dark to see smoke, I knew it was there and it was like the stars close to the horizon were a little dimmer, like the smoke was rising in front of 'em.

All morning I been waitin' for some news, for someone to come in with some news. I'm worried I'll say somethin' that I could only know if I was out there, and if they find out I was out there...

None a this woulda happened 'cept for that letter. I wouldn't a been out there, and I wouldn't a started no fire Oh, Holy Jesus! Did the whole thing burn up? The letter! I don't know. I held it over the flames for a few seconds, but then it was too hot so I just dropped it in, but what if it didn't burn up? If there's just one corner a paper left, them fire investigation boys can piece it together, and they'll know I was out there. They'll find a fingerprint, or my tire tracks, or my name on a scrap a paper and they'll be puttin' my face on the front page as the kid who burnt down the whole country.

Oh, Lord, I gotta get back out there. Yeah! Yeah, that's it. If I get my truck out there today, they won't know last night's tracks from the new ones. And I'll work one a the crews makin' breaks so even if they do find out, I can say it was an accident and here at least I come down to take care of it.

"Mom!" I call from the patio, chain saw ready to go. She's just inside the kitchen 'cause I can hear the water running.

"What?" she says through the screens before opening the back door. When she sees me with the saw, I see her face twist like a scoldin's comin'.

"Mom, I'm gonna head on out there and help dad and the guys on the crews," I say.

"No, you are not going down there. One man from this family is enough. Now put that chain saw back in the shed."

But I say, "Mom, I gotta go help out."

"I don't want you getting hurt," she says.

"Mom, I'm gonna join the Hot-Shots next year, so this'll be good practice," I say, pleased with my lie.

"Over my dead body you're going to be a forest fire-fighter! Now do what I say. You can go out to base camp later with me and help serve up dinner, if you want to help."

I wonder if my mom would be so protective if she hadn't gone to nursing school. Anyways, she won't hear of it, so what can I do? Serve out dinner? No, that ain't gonna wipe the slate clean.

     "We're keeping it out of the taller trees," Chief Turner told me. "But this wind is scattering the fire so much that it's more like three fires moving in different directions."

"Like fighting Cerberus," I said, imagining the typeset.

"What's that?"

"Title for the article I'm writing. One of them. I think I've got a whole edition of stories here."

"Just don't be getting in the way while you're writing your stories," Chief Turner said. His scorn was not even as substantial as the scent of the distant burn from atop that meadow. After sending the story out on the wire that night, I figured we'd have a whole litter of cub reporters from the big papers scurrying to get a piece of the action, and the media attention will bring the air support and man power we needed.

"Chief!" Someone too far off for me to recognize called through cupped hands, instead of using a radio, from the edge of the meadow which overlooked the fire. "Come look. I think we got trouble."

I accompanied Chief Turner as he jogged in his heavy boots over the deceptively bumpy ground. Though I'm not in great shape, I could have overtaken him, but I was careful to let him retain the lead. The lookout, Nelson Hunt, was using a pair of field glasses to track the progress of the flames, but a momentary survey with his own eyes confirmed the chief's fears.

"Damn wind's changed again," he said. "Who's down in that gully right now?"

"Uhm, Crew Three."

"All right. Radio them and tell them to get out."

But, as they would tell me in their exclusive interview, Crew Three did not get out so easily.

     But she stands there in the doorway to watch me put the chain saw back. Why not just tell her? Ah, no. She'd tell someone. Dad for sure. This is too big for that. But I gotta get out there before they figure out who started that fire. And I need to take the chain saw with me, or else how am I gonna explain bein' out there? Think! Need to get Mom out a the house so I can get the saw and go without her stoppin' me.

I have a plan! I dial up my buddy Parker. "Parker, it's me. Hey, do me a favor, all right? Call me back in a second."

"Why? What's up?"

"Don't bother 'bout that. Just call me back."

When the phone rings, I call out, "I got it!" so my mom won't pick up the phone. After brushin' Parker off, I go into the kitchen to tell my mom, "That was Mrs. Ketchum from down the block. She wanted to know if you could go over to take a look at a mole she's got. Says she thinks it's skin cancer."

"Oh, that silly old woman. She's practically a hypochondriac. What am I? A doctor?"

"Well, anyways, I said sure, you'll be right over."

"Well, thank you very much, but don't speak for me in the future."

She washes her hands and I have a hard time waiting even that long until she finally leaves and I have to stand inside the front window to make sure she's past the neighbor's spruce and she can't see our yard anymore. Now I'd better hurry. She'll be there in a minute, and I do not want to get caught in a lie and a sneak. So I dash back to the shed, fumble that darned latch open, and snatch the saw, which I throw into the bed a my truck while the other hand is yankin' on the door handle. Don't even look down the street as I rip away 'cause if I see her comin' back toward me, wavin' her arm for me to stop and scowlin' at me and I have to ignore it, I'll be in even more trouble when this is all over.

Can't really see how much smoke there is until you come 'round the bend and over that rise and can see over the trees, down into the valleys. Just lying around like spilled ink. Up ahead I can see a state truck parked at the turnoff. Fella's got a radio in one hand, and waves me not to enter, but I pull in, anyways.

"Sorry, but you can't go in here. There's a fire down this road," he says. Figure he musta been called up from a Parks office somewhere, 'cause I never seen him before.

"I know. I'm bringin' this chain saw to my dad. One he took from home is the old one," I say, thumbin' to indicate the saw in the bed. "That old one has a bad motor. Like to seize up anytime."

My heart beats fifty times in the three seconds he takes to peer into the bed.

"All right. I'm gonna let you through, but stay on this road only, and stop when you get to the base camp up on the meadow. You can leave the saw with them, and they'll get it to your dad."

"Yessir," I say, trying not to dust him as I take off.

     When Crew Three didn't emerge from the river of smoke after several minutes, Chief Turner had Nelson radio them again.

"We're on our way," the voice said, coughing before the speaker released the button.

But they still did not appear a few minutes later when a new voice came over the radio. "Bill's passed out. We're lost. We can't see two feet in front of us."

Even if we had had air support, no plane would have been able to locate them through that cloud as thick as oil. I could see Chief Turner trying to wring some solution out of the situation like water from a stone, but what could be done? "What's your position?" he said into the radio, perhaps not that it was important, but wanting the crew to know he was applying himself to the emergency.

"I told you, we can't see. Can't see up, can't see anything. It's dark as a cave in here. We been trying to follow the ravine out, but we shoulda been there by now."

"You boys keep down toward the ground. You'll be able to breathe better. Just keep moving," Turner said, then handed the radio back up to Nelson. "Keep talking to them. We gotta get them out of there before they all pass out from the smoke. Holy Jesus."

Turner was talking to the air by then, but his eyes were intent on something over my shoulder. Before I turned to look the Chief was by-stepping me, waving his arms over his head as he waltzed into the middle of the dirt road where a cloud like a snake was barreling toward us, a Chevy pick-up at its head. Turner put one hand out in front of him, signaling the truck to stop, and kept waving the other arm over his head. An avalanche of gravel accompanied the sudden stop as the tail of dust drifted forward past the truck before dissipating in the wind. Turner stepped around to the driver's window.

"What are you doing out here, son? You know you can't be around here now."

The boy inside seemed panicked. "I gotta get this saw to my dad," he said, as if it were an organ for a transplant.

"No, you can't be going any further. You just drop that saw off here, and I'll see he gets it."

"No, I gotta give it to him myself."

"Son, I am neck-deep in a crisis here, and I do not have time to argue with"

But the boy had heard enough. He sprayed gravel so hard the chief had to turn his back and cover his face not to be bloodied.

"Dammit! Where the hell's he going?"

Unbelievable as it seemed, there was no other place to go but right into the smoke, into the fire. We watched helplessly as he careened down the slope, leveled out with no sign of letting up on the gas and plunged into the smoke, which swallowed him from our site. We could still hear the distant rev of the engine, though. He shifted, he fish-tailed, he skidded, then accelerated again. He bounded over rocks and logs as we peered toward the direction where the sounds buzzed out from the cloud like some insect we could not see. For several silent moments we waited to hear him crash headlong into a tree, and to this day I don't know how it is he avoided such a doom. There was a point when all fell quiet, but as we listened more carefully, we found that though the engine had lulled there was noise, indeed. Voices. Hollering and yelling, suddenly cut off as the engine once again revved, with a less reckless growl. We could clearly distinguish when it would emerge from the smoke, right back along the same trail it had followed in.

"We're out!" the radio in Nelson's hand blurted, but we could already see the men loaded in the back of the Chevy.

"Thank the Lord!" Turner said, suddenly sweating more than a moment before. "Looks like you got yourself a new headline."

I pulled the camera around on its strap and shot off half a roll as the truck climbed the slope, the men in the back whooping and swinging their hats over their heads, paramedics rushing up alongside, and through the ash on the windshield the beaming but stunned face of one teenage hero.

     "I just knew I had to get down there and help," I say to that newspaper guy. Yeah, you take a good look at Josh Jenkins now, Sweetie. He ain't no hero gonna have his face sent "over the wire" to every newspaper in the country.

I knew the boy was hiding something, but what did it matter? He rushed in there yapping about taking a chain saw to his dad and ended up pulling out Crew Three, who were way off course and would have been dead, for sure. Which story did people want to read?

     "Anyways, I just followed the road from memory. I know this forest like my own backyard. Fire didn't scare me. I'm gonna be a Hot-Shot next year, you know."

He could just as easily have run them down, with visibility as low as it was. Or crashed into a tree, giving his gas tank to the fire like a bon-bon. But that isn't what I wrote.

In the morning there'll be a new celebrity in America. In a few days the fire will be contained. The circumstances behind either won't much matter in the long run, as both will burn out and fade into memory.

*~*~*~*~*

Copyright © 2003 Eric Prochaska. All rights reserved.