Hotshots Page 3

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “He knows some day twenty-one jokes.”

  If there was anything else to say, we weren’t saying it. Ramona stared into space. Trying to avoid her eyes, I found myself staring into my empty cup. Silence fell like snowflakes across the table. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said.

  “It’s nothing. Tell them I am very sorry for what happened.”

  “I will.”

  ******

  The bag Ramona had given me wasn’t sealed, so when I got back to the office I opened it. Inside I found a pair of lace-up boots stained black from soot and white from sweat plus a manila envelope that had gotten sooty from the boots. The envelope wasn’t sealed either and it didn’t have anybody’s name on it, so I opened that, too. It contained several photographs of firefighters wearing yellow shirts. The most interesting one to me was a woman who had to be Joni Barker standing alone in a clearing. She wore skintight Lycra running pants as torn and tattered as a pair of favorite jeans, and she had an enviable body—firm and fit. Joni had her mother’s blond hair, pulled back into a ponytail, but a few curls had escaped and framed her face. She had on her firefighter boots, which was fortunate because the clearing she stood in was a nest of snakes. She had picked up two of them and held her arms up with the snakes curling down to her elbows.

  I took the photo out to the reception area to show Anna. My former partner, Brink, had left Hamel & Harrison and gone into probate practice with his girlfriend, although I hadn’t gotten around to taking his name off the door yet. Every once in a while I missed him, but not now, because I knew that whatever his reaction to the photo would be, it would be the wrong one. “What do you make of this?” I asked Anna. I needed to run it by someone; when it comes to snakes my reactions are too primal to be trusted.

  “Who is she?” Anna asked.

  “Joni Barker.”

  “Great bod!”

  “She’s the hotshot who died in the Thunder Mountain Fire.”

  “Wow!”

  “She was a friend of Ramona Franklin, the woman I just had coffee with. Ramona’s a Navajo, a firefighter, and a student at UNM. She was the lookout on the Thunder Mountain Fire but she says she didn’t see anything. When I asked her if she thought the government screwed up, she said she didn’t know.”

  “She probably needs the job.”

  “True.” My gut reaction was to like and trust Ramona, my lawyer instinct is not to trust anyone. I started thinking like a lawyer and reconsidered what Ramona had said. Maybe she couldn’t have seen the blowup from her station on the ridge. But “didn’t” was the word she’d chosen. Carefully or randomly, who knew? Maybe she didn’t look white people in the eye, maybe she didn’t look lawyers in the eye, maybe she didn’t look anybody in the eye. It could be the Indian way. It could be shyness. It could also be fear or guilt. These were calls I wasn’t ready to make. But if we ever went to trial and she testified, her every glance and gesture would be open to interpretation—or misinterpretation—by a jury. It was more than possible there would be no lawsuit and no trial, that the blame between the lines would fall on the firefighters and not the bureaucrats, that my investigation would lead me to a situation more troubled than a nest of snakes.

  “Why’d she give you the picture?” Anna asked.

  “I’m not sure she was giving it to me. I found it in a package with Joni’s boots.”

  Anna studied the picture. “You know, in sand paintings snakes represent lightning.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you think Joni’s doing with the snakes in her arms? Praying for rain?”

  “A firefighter is more likely to pray for lightning than for rain.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s where the jobs come from.”

  4

  THE NEXT DAY I talked to Mike Marshall. He’d been housesitting for a friend in Albuquerque and asked me to meet him there, which was all right with me. It’s easier to know the truth about people when they’re in their own environment surrounded by furniture that has their butt prints all over it. The house was near the university, on a street where the frame stucco houses had all been built at the same time. One ornery owner had turned his dwelling into a stainless-steel tower at the risk of pissing off the rest of the block. The other houses were all the same size and shape, set the same distance back from the curb. Streets where every building is evenly spaced make me feel like a crooked rat in a symmetrical maze. I prefer the randomness of my neighborhood.

  But it didn’t make much difference to Mike Marshall where he lived at this point. He was sheltered and that was about all he noticed. The shades of the house were drawn and the rooms were dark, but when he opened the door to let me in, the sunlight caught him. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Fuzzy blond hair covered his arms and legs and the sunshine turned it golden. His eyes were an intense blue and speckled like a robin’s egg. I guessed him to be twenty-six or -seven, a few years older than Joni.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  We went into the living room. I sat down on the sofa, a wooden frame with a futon thrown over the back. Mike sat down on a metal chair at a table. “I talked to Ramona Franklin yesterday,” I began.

  “What’d she say?”

  “Not much.”

  “Ramona’s quiet.”

  “She has a sense of humor. She told me a day fifteen joke.”

  “I could use a day forty-five joke myself,” he said.

  “That’s how long it’s been?” For him it was the beginning of a long sentence with his heart in solitary lockup. Someday he’d be released, but he’d never be the same.

  “Yeah. Ramona and Joni were good friends. Ramona’s the point woman on the Duke City Hotshots. Some people resented her for that.” A pad of paper and some colored pencils lay on the table. He picked up a green pencil, checked the tip, and began drawing on the paper.

  “The point woman?”

  “A crew boss gets points for hiring women and minorities. A woman who also happens to be Native American is worth a lot of points. It’s not hard to find women firefighters, but it can be hard to find Native Americans because so many of the reservations have their own crews. It’s good seasonal work. Some of the guys were bitter about Ramona getting hired, but she proved she can hang.”

  “She was the lookout at Thunder Mountain?”

  “Right.”

  “She told me she didn’t see the blaze.”

  “She’s getting flack for that, but I was near the top of the north ridge and I didn’t see it until it blew up either. The fire jumped the canyon and roared up the western slope. It sounded like a jet taking off.” He stopped sketching for a minute and stared at his hands, which had the scabby look of burns healing.

  “How did you escape?”

  “I got into some good black and waited it out. Then I went over the ridge and walked out through the drainage on the other side. The black is the area on a fire that has already burned. It’s the safest place to be, but a lot of the black at Thunder Mountain wasn’t good because of the reburn potential of Gambel oak. Gambel oak has the ability to retain moisture. It may look like it has burned, but there can still be a lot of fuel left in a Gambel oak.”

  “You’ve read the report?”

  “Yeah. It’s a bunch of crap.”

  “It says that if the crew had dropped their packs they could have outrun the flames.”

  “That’s a fucking lie. First of all, nobody drops their pack. Everything you need is inside. Your instinct is to hold on to it. The wind was forty miles an hour, the fire’s rate of spread was eighteen miles an hour, the slope was sixty degrees, the flames were one hundred feet tall.” Mike looked up at me as he rattled off his figures. He was very precise and sure of himself, and I was convinced. A narrow beam of sunlight had made its way through the closed curtains and across the room. It tapped Mike on the shoulder and he moved his chair to get away from it. “Fire moves faster uphill than down, people don’t,” he said
. “The firefighters are also getting criticized for not deploying their shelters. You read that, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nobody is going to take the time to drop their pack or get into their shake-and-bake when a fire is breathing down their neck. The pucker factor is too high. Your instinct is to run, but there’s no way anybody could have outrun that blaze. It blew up too fast and hot. The heat killed the hotshots before the fire did. It seared their lungs. Now the Forest Service and the BLM are trying to cover their asses. It’s easy to blame the hotshots; they’re dead.

  “But the really bad decisions were made higher up. They’re criticizing Ramona because she didn’t see the blowup, but where the hell was the aerial surveillance? The Forest Service’s own meteorologist knew the cold front was moving in, but they never told us. We were getting our weather reports from the weather channel. Many of the hotshots had never fought a Gambel oak fire before. We were helicoptered to Thunder Mountain in the morning with no briefing. A couple of years ago there was a Gambel oak fire in Lone Ridge, Colorado. The crew boss, who’d lost three of his crew on that fire, prepared a report on the special properties of Gambel oak, but the Forest Service stuck it on a shelf and never showed it to a single firefighter. These were situations that shout watch out, but the Forest Service ignored them.” He picked up his pencil again and began moving it across the page with a quick, sharp motion.

  “Why did the Forest Service ignore the dangers of the situation?”

  “Because too many fires were burning then and resources were stretched thin. Because people are moving near wilderness areas and they expect the government to protect their houses. Because a homeowner will bitch to a congressman, but a tree won’t. Nobody’s house is worth risking a firefighter’s life for. Nobody’s. If this goes to court and you need somebody to testify for you, I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Mike also had poetry in his speech. I guess that’s what you’d expect from a job that deals with life and death. He was articulate and angry, a mixture of precision and passion. The ability to reel off facts and numbers would make him a good witness for me, maybe even an expert witness, but the government’s lawyer would be likely to poke at the cinders of his anger until they exploded.

  “This case may never go to court; Eric doesn’t want to sue. He feels that conditions were so bad that day that what happened was unavoidable.”

  “Yeah, well, it makes it easier for him to accept Joni’s death if he thinks it was an act of God. But he was a firefighter and he knows better. He’ll change his mind when he gets to the site. A lot of firefighters don’t want to get involved because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Me, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m not going back on the line anyway. I’d be too cautious now to be any good.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go back to school.” I could see the appeal of academia to someone who’d been through what he had.

  “Computers?” He had the mind for it.

  “Engineering.”

  “Ramona gave me Joni’s boots and some pictures of the hotshots. She asked me to pass them on to the Barkers,” I said.

  “Is the picture with the snakes in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d give them the other stuff but not that picture. It makes people uneasy. We were on a trail crew that day. Joni saw the snakes and waded in. A lot of guys on the crew wouldn’t have done that. She was a strong woman. I would have trusted my life with her. I did trust my life to her, and to Ramona, too.” His hand was sliding across the page, filling in the blanks, maybe, of what he’d already done.

  “Nancy Barker seems to want to avoid Ramona. Do you know why?”

  He shrugged. “It could be because Ramona survived the fire and Joni didn’t. Maybe she’s blaming Ramona, but she shouldn’t.”

  “Do you want the picture of Joni?” I asked. “If you don’t, I might like to keep it until this case is settled.”

  “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of pictures of Joni.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Joni? She was full of life, full of fun. She loved fire fighting.”

  “What did she love about it?”

  “The excitement, the danger, the adrenaline rush. Firefighters are basically adrenaline junkies. Joni was very strong and athletic. We were mogul skiers in the winter. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got a video here of us skiing last winter at Breckenridge. Would you like to see it? It’ll give you a feeling for the kind of person Joni was.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He got up and pulled the curtains tighter, blocking out the rogue ray of sunshine that had annoyed him. He inserted the video and the TV turned the brilliant blue of a western sky until the screen filled with the whiteness of snow. After I stared at it for a minute, bumps took shape and I could see that it was a field of moguls. Mike would probably know the exact pitch of the slope; all I knew was that it was elevator-shaft steep. The video was being shot from the chairlift. Two specks showed up at the top of the screen and began maneuvering their way down the mountain while the camera moved toward them. Mike plowed through the moguls with his head down and his shoulders hunched, strong, steady, determined as a buffalo. Joni was an antelope: light, graceful, joy in motion. She careened off the moguls and got to the bottom a few seconds ahead of Mike.

  A camera at the bottom of the hill closed in on them. Mike had bent over and was adjusting something on his boot. Joni took off her helmet, shook her blond hair loose, and smiled triumphantly for the world and the camera. They were far from the grubbiness of fire, but not that far from the spirit of fire fighting. Adrenaline is adrenaline. Power is power. The younger and more promising the person, the sadder the death, but some deaths go beyond sadness into the tragedy realm. Joni must have had faults. She might have been mean, irritable, or arrogant, but she’d had the kind of radiance that could turn her life into legend and her death into myth. People would be remembering Joni Barker and the Duke City Hotshots for a long, long time.

  Mike was staring at his pad and tears were watering his scorched hands. I got up, took the remote from the table, and snapped the video off. When I reached over his shoulder to grab the remote, I saw that the pad he’d been drawing on contained graph paper. On a page divided into tiny squares, he’d been drawing trees: deciduous trees, evergreen trees, standing trees, fallen trees. His voice became husky. “Get the assholes who were responsible for this,” he said.

  “I’ll try.” I went back to my seat on the sofa with the remote still in my hand. I wanted a cigarette, but I was in a no-smoking household. I’d known that the minute I stepped in the door. “I used to be a skier,” I told Mike.

  “You skied?” he asked.

  “Yup,” I said.

  He blew his nose. “That’s a surprise. I mean, well, you don’t look like an athlete.”

  What did I look like? A smoker and a drinker? A lawyer who was pushing forty? I had been an athlete. I’d been a die-hard skier, in fact, but even then I smoked and drank, stayed up all night and smoked joints in the chairlift, getting by on adrenaline rather than healthy habits. You can do that when you’re twenty. “I grew up in the East. I ski-bummed in New England.” I skied on rocks and mud. I skied on glare ice and black ice, mashed potatoes, corn snow, and slush. I skied in rain and sleet and occasionally even snow and sun. I skied when it was fifteen degrees below zero and my skin was turning to frost.

  “I’m a Western skier,” Mike said. But he’d skied like an Easterner, tight and controlled, relying on technique, where Joni had relied on reflexes and grace.

  I’d perfected my own technique until I forgot I had one, until my turns had a quick and easy flow. One day I had a perfect run under a deep blue sky in six inches of new powder, and I never skied again. Would Mike quit skiing now? I wondered. “You know the rush you get when you’re skiing the fall line at the edge of your ability?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.”<
br />
  “Fire fighting must be like that.”

  “It is. You get in the zone. All the training kicks in and you go on automatic. You look up and the day is over.”

  “You’re pursuing a risky activity with people you care about. The feeling of camaraderie must be similar.”

  “It’s very strong. When the wind is right I’m going back to Thunder Mountain. The Forest Service agreed to helicopter the families in. I can prove there’s no way Joni could have escaped that fire even if she had dropped her pack or deployed her shelter, and I’m going to do it. They’re not going to get away with blaming her for this. Do you want to come?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  5

  WE COULDN’T GO on any ordinary day. It had to be a day that approximated the conditions of the fatal fire when the winds howled out of the South Canyon like a terrible red wolf and moved faster than a bird could fly. But the winds, which didn’t want to stop in June, wouldn’t return in August. At first I watched the weather forecast every night, waiting for the winds to pick up and for the Barkers to call, but then I stopped thinking about the Thunder Mountain Fire. Real estate and divorce were how I made my living. The Thunder Mountain suit had a lot of potential but it also had some major strikes against it. Feuding clients wasn’t the only one. Negligence and personal responsibility are complex issues. I wasn’t an ambulance chaser and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a liability lawyer either. Three weeks later when the winds finally rose I didn’t notice; Mike’s phone call came as a surprise.

  “High winds tomorrow,” he said. “And we’re going to Thunder Mountain. Wanna come?”

  Yes, but could I rearrange my schedule to fit it in? I looked at my calendar. Nothing there that couldn’t wait. “Okay,” I said.

  “The Forest Service helicopter will pick you and the Barkers up at Kirtland at oh-nine hundred.”