Summer of Fire Part 18

September 3 "What's your crystal ball say now?" Clare asked Garrett through a mouthful of Fig Newton. On her first day off in two weeks, she'd stopped by Fire Command to look at the full-sized quadrangle maps used for daily press conferences. Since Black Sat.u.r.day, over two hundred thousand acres had burned inside Yellowstone.

Garrett set down his coffee and slid a hip onto a metal desk. "The moisture content measured in large logs continued to drop through the month of August, now hovering in the seven-percent range. Gra.s.ses and small twigs are at two percent. You just look at this fuel wrong and it blows up in your face."

The description made Clare think of Devon, whose eighteenth birthday was exactly one month away. It had been just that amount of time since the day she'd listened to the fire behavior experts' obsolete predictions. Although trying to second-guess her daughter by long distance was as futile an effort, she wondered aloud, "Seriously, Garrett. It's September now. When do you think this will break?"

He shrugged with the weariness of battle fatigue and looked out the south windows toward the nearest advance of the North Fork toward town. "Your nightmare is as good as mine."

She hadn't told him about Frank or her bad dreams. She didn't plan to.

As she turned to leave, thinking of visiting the Smokejumpers, Garrett detained her. Rummaging on his desk, he produced a pink slip. "While you were out s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g off . . ." He chuckled.

The message was from last night. Jay had called.

She stared at it like it came from another planet. What could her ex want, unless something had happened to Devon? With a fluttery feeling in her chest, Clare dove for the nearest phone.

Jay answered the home number and she heard a football game in the background. No doubt, he was sitting in his expensive leather recliner in the game room with the surround sound theater.

Clare bit her lip. She'd never been into ostentation, it just seemed that the pleasure coc.o.o.n he'd built for him and Elyssa was one more symbol of rejection.

In response to Jay's generic h.e.l.lo, she clipped, "What's happened?"

Jay chuckled. "You worried about me?"

Clare's nails curled into her palm. "I am worried about my daughter," she enunciated. "I know you'd only call about her."

"Our daughter." Jay wasn't laughing anymore. "I guess you're feeling guilty by now, knowing you shouldn't be out there."

"What do you mean I shouldn't be out here?" Her voice rose and she berated herself for not calling from someplace private. The woman dispatcher at the next desk had perked up and was staring through thick gla.s.ses.

"I can't do a thing with Devon," Jay whined, quite a trick for such a big guy. "She keeps saying she's nearly eighteen, but she needs supervision. Elyssa thinks she's seeing some guy on the sly, somebody too old for her."

Devon's talk of moving out without an education or a job rang a warning bell. That was how Clare had ended up married to Jay. "How does Elyssa know?"

"She saw them together."

Alarms went off, but Clare stuck to her guns. "You'll have to be a parent for a change."

"Sorry, but Tuesday afternoon Elyssa and I leave for Greece. Our tour doesn't end until September twentieth."

Clare had always asked Jay to take her places and he'd told her he was happy watching TV. "So change your plans."

The woman who'd been listening leaned across. When she grinned, it accentuated that her lipstick had bled into little lines around her mouth. "Give him h.e.l.l, honey."

"Have you a paper and pen?" Jay asked in the smooth voice reserved for clients and wheedling.

"What for?"

"For flight information. Monday morning I'm putting Devon on a plane to Wyoming."

Everything in Clare seized up. "You can't send her here. Postpone your trip."

"You know better than that."

Clare's mind raced for an alternative.

"It's Delta into Jackson Hole," Jay went on relentlessly. "Monday at two."

Today was Sat.u.r.day.

Before she could reply, he hung up.

She dialed back and got the answering machine. Elyssa's syrupy greeting went on while Clare gritted her teeth. At the beep, "d.a.m.n you, Jay, pick up."

Of course, he was sitting there watching football and laughing at her.

She banged out of Fire Command and told herself that she crossed Yellowstone Avenue quickly to avoid being run down by an Army Humvee. It was no use, as her boots struck the pavement with hard clacks. Her breath came fast and she wanted to break Jay Chance's neck. Not to mention Devon's.

Jesus, what if Devon was pregnant?

If there was somebody in her life, maybe it would be good to get her away from Houston, but West Yellowstone, Canyon Village, and Silver Gate were under siege and Clare was needed more than ever.

A young woman and her pig-tailed little girl sidestepped on the sidewalk to evade Clare's headlong rush. Kids were cute when they were small.

She turned in at her destination. The ice cream store window sported a painting of a five-foot long boat bearing mammoth scoops of ice cream foundering beneath chocolate syrup, crushed strawberries and pineapple. Comfort food, just what she needed to help her forget about Jay and Devon.

She smiled at the young man behind the freezer case. "Banana split."

She'd gotten to know Alonso Mansales, who lived in the forest with the other migrants.

He dipped ice cream, dropped the stainless steel scoop into a container of water, and began to mound toppings. Watching him work, Clare was glad she'd urged Sergeant Travis against reporting the woodland camp to the Forest Service.

Alonso's dark eyes went to the plate gla.s.s window. Outside, the sky looked as though it portended rain, but only ashes fell.

Impossibly, the North Fork now threatened to burn through West Yellowstone. If Clare had imagined the Mink Creek as a sharp-toothed carnivore, then the North Fork had become an octopus of the Jules Verne variety.

"We had to move our camp west." Alonso handed over her banana split.

She took a bite from the chocolate end. It didn't taste as good as she'd hoped.

The parade of people outside grew larger, folks on their way to a Town Hall meeting, where they would be met with more plat.i.tudes and predictions. Clare was glad she didn't have to get up before the crowd like Garrett would.

Alonso's look was grave. "The fire?"

Words of rea.s.surance rose to her lips, but she stopped short of speaking them. All the predictions had been wrong. "I don't know," she told him. "I just don't know."

Throwing away the ruins of her confection, she stepped into the darkening day and joined the crowd. Nearly everyone walking toward the meeting seemed prepared to evacuate.

"I've got our clothes packed," an elderly man said, "but we can't afford homeowners insurance. If our place burns, we lose everything."

"They're hosing down roofs out our way," said a woman with a chiffon scarf across her face. She raised her eyes to the falling ash.

The atmosphere of uncertainty, with people talking about losing their homes opened a pit in Clare's stomach. After she sold her house this fall, where was she going to end up? She figured the two firefighters ahead of her to be swapping lies, but as she drew closer, a big red-bearded fellow declared, "d.a.m.ned feds, taking over everything in sight."

"Forest service is cut out, too," agreed a slender man whose smooth cheeks and downy hair made him look too young to be a firefighter. "The Type I teams and the military just marched in."

Clare took a closer look and noted from their T-shirts that the men were members of the local fire department, grousing about folks like her and Garrett Anderson.

Inside, the battle lines appeared drawn. The lectern was set up opposite the townspeople. Garrett stood flanked by men with rangers' shining badges and military officials in camouflage fatigues. It looked as though they hoped to rea.s.sure the population, but unfortunately, the rear windows faced south. Not three miles away, a crimson tentacle of the North Fork crested a ridge.

"We've got all kinds of resources, helicopters, and tankers," Garrett said into the microphone. "They're clearing a six-blade dozer line west of town and east by the park."

"All this 'let burn' is going to burn us out of town!" A woman with a hard-looking face called from near the stone fireplace.

"d.a.m.n right!" someone else shouted.

The tallest of the park officials stepped forward. "I'm Tom King, Yellowstone Superintendent." He looked over the sea of angry faces. A flush suffused his own face beneath a shock of unruly hair. After a pause to let the catcalls go unanswered, King cleared his throat. "On July 27th, the Secretary of the Interior upheld our suspension of the park's 'let burn' policy. Ever since, we've been throwing everything we have at these fires." He nodded toward the military. "Even brought in our boys in uniform, but . . . "

A big man who looked to be in his early sixties took off his orange ball cap and stepped forward. "I'm Pete Cullen, sir, own the Red Wolf across the way. Every time you say a fire won't burn past this place or that, you come back later and say the place is toast."

"We've never seen wildfire act this way," King said. "This season is defying all the models."

The people murmured like a rising wind.

Pete Cullen raised his arm and they quieted. "Me and some folks are doing something. Bringing in irrigation equipment and setting up a great big line of sprinklers on the edge of town."

"We're much obliged to you," Garrett told him, then announced to the room at large. "Mr. Cullen will be up front if any of you good people would care to help him out."

Clare didn't like the little frisson of hope that went through the room. A few sprinklers would have little use against the North Fork. Garrett must have realized. "I hate to say this, but if I lived in West Yellowstone, I'd be thinking about what to take with me in case of evacuation."

"No matter what bulls.h.i.t you shovel," someone shouted, "you've given up our town."

Garrett's jaw set, but Tom King was faster. "Putting firefighters in front of these fires is like putting your hand in front of blowtorch. You know you're gonna get burned." The Superintendent paused. "We believe that people's lives are more important than property."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

September 4 The next day was Sunday, but it saw Clare back on the line with a new batch of troop trainees.

On Cutoff Mountain, inside the northeast corner of Yellowstone, she shielded her face with her gloved hand and used a drip torch to splash flaming diesel onto the forest floor. The dry mixture of needles and bark flared.

Stepping back, she joined Sergeant Travis, who stood in an att.i.tude of command. She'd learned that his father was a career Army officer who had sent his son to military school, starting with seventh grade. In her mind, this helped to explain, but did not excuse his behavior.

Ignoring Travis's pose, Clare watched the burnout eat its greedy way across the slope. With luck, the small blaze would deprive the approaching h.e.l.lroaring Fire of fuel.

Behind the backfire and the main body of flames, twenty infantry bent their heads to the task of sc.r.a.ping earth with Pulaskis.

"They make good groundpounders," Clare observed, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

Travis surveyed the group that included two Native Americans, one Black, and three Hispanics. Two were women. Despite their differences, they all seemed equally wary. "Fresh off the plane in Bozeman," he said. "We should be breaking them in at West Yellowstone, not on a live fire."

"The North Fork is probably torching our training ground there." Clare thought of Alonso Mansales and his family moving out of the path of the monster. Garrett had suggested she take the soldiers to the h.e.l.lroaring, reported to be creeping along under light and shifting winds. Started August 15 at an outfitter's camp north of the park, it had spread south and now covered over fifty thousand acres.

She looked at the sun, half-hidden behind a pall of smoke, and checked her watch. Nearly six p.m., surprising, for the temperature was climbing.

She took a long draught of lukewarm water from her belt canteen and continued to monitor the backfire. It attacked a downed log with sharp teeth of flame. This part of the woods was full of fallen trees that had died from an invasion of pine bark beetles.

Travis groused, "I don't like the looks of this."

In the same moment, the skin on the back of Clare's neck p.r.i.c.kled. Much as she hated to admit it, she agreed. It was the quiet, the dead zone where not even the air stirred. Fifty years ago the stories of calm before a blowup had been mythology, but science had corroborated that the dragon held its breath . . . just before it seared the land.

The wind began to pick up. First a puff and then a blow, it brought the acrid smell of singed duff. Atop the near ridge, the main body of the h.e.l.lroaring torched a dead tree into a hundred-foot tower of flame.

"This was supposed to be safe." Travis licked his lips.

Clare did not reply. This wasn't like Black Sat.u.r.day, with nearly hurricane force winds, but she didn't like it. The ground fire rose from a height of one to three feet. Over the ridge crest a steady roar mounted.

A sharp stab went through her at the memory of her dream. The one where Frank had led her to the ridge in time to join him in fiery death.

A falling cinder kindled a spot fire almost at their feet. Billy Jakes, a carrot-topped soldier with bright blue eyes, broke from the line and shoveled dirt. More embers swirled, landing on clothes and smouldering out on the fire r.e.t.a.r.dant Nomex.

"Let's get out of here," Clare decided.

Travis was in full retreat. "If anything happens to these guys, you got us into this."

A half-mile away, Steve was alone on the Pebble Creek Trail, two faint wheel tracks covered in dry golden gra.s.s. The deep valley between Cutoff Mountain and the long cliff of Baronette Peak was already in shadow. He was hungry; his lunch of cheese, peanut-b.u.t.ter crackers, and an apple had long since burned off.

It was good to be off Mount Washburn and on to other things.

Yesterday he had radioed Park Headquarters and asked for Shad Dugan. In a confident tone, he'd said, "I've been up here right at a month. It's time to come down." Outside the fire tower, the view that had once innervated had begun to close in.

"Think so?" Dugan asked dryly.

"Lots of rehabs run twenty-eight. I've done my time." He tried to sound matter-of-fact, but he knew the real reason he was in a hurry to get down. What were the odds that Clare was still in the park?

"Still want a drink?"

"h.e.l.l, yes. I probably always will. Walt Leighton gave up smoking ten years ago and says he wants a cigarette every day."

"Think you can turn it down?"

There was the tough question. Would staying longer on the mountain make it easier? He didn't know if Moru had told Dugan about him drinking the one night he'd been near a bar. Probably yes, since the two of them had put their heads together about getting him help.

"If I'm going to take a drink, I'm going to take it. I know the consequences." He also knew that he wanted to see Clare again enough to risk it.