Hotshots Page 6

  “She wrapped me in her fire shelter and told me I would be all right. I knew it was a woman, but I didn’t know who. I was pretty out of it at that point.”

  “Did you hear anything else?”

  “I thought I heard a voice before Ramona came, but that was all.”

  “You will let us know if you remember more?”

  “Sure. What caused the fire?” There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, and I hadn’t seen any lightning strikes, wet or dry.

  “Our arson unit is investigating,” Henry Ortega said. “The chief of the unit wants to talk to you.” He handed me a card with the name Sheila S. A. McGraw on it. The phone number, I noticed, was in the Duke City and it had the same first three digits as mine.

  “The office is in Albuquerque?”

  “Yes. The Southwest Interagency Coordinating Center is on Gold Street. Will you call Sheila as soon as you get back to town?”

  “Okay.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I said. This was the man, I thought, who should have counseled Ramona. He had the manner of a gentle priest, and a priest might be more acceptable to her than a counselor in a business suit. Black robes had been around the reservation for a long time. Ortega had been so kind that I suspected a bad cop was lurking outside the door and would come in next to attempt to browbeat a confession out of me, but nobody did. I didn’t feel any guilt myself, but that didn’t mean I had nothing to confess. Mike Marshall’s blowup on the mountain wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with the Forest Service yet.

  The doctor came back, examined me again, told me I could leave in the morning and to quit smoking. That seemed easy enough now, but who knew how long the feeling would last.

  I called the Kid at the shop and could hear his parrot, Mimo, squawking in the background. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “In the hospital in Oro.”

  “Híjole! What happened?”

  “I got caught in a forest fire on Thunder Mountain.”

  “Are you all right, Chiquita?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m going to be released tomorrow. Could you pick me up in the morning?”

  “I can come now if you want.”

  “Tomorrow’s okay.”

  “I’ll leave after work tonight.”

  “Thanks, Kid.”

  “De nada,” he replied.

  Later Eric Barker called. “We are so glad you weren’t injured,” he said.

  “Me, too. Did you get out all right?” I asked him.

  “Mike saw the flames on his way down the mountain. We drove out in his car and called the Forest Service.”

  “Ramona Franklin rescued me, you know.”

  “I heard,” said Eric. “You’ll call us when you get back to town?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  ******

  There are several roads that will get you from Oro to Albuquerque. They’re all scenic, they all take about the same amount of time. The northern route passes through the small towns of southern Colorado that rely on the resort trade for survival. It crosses the border into Chama and Tierra Amarilla, towns that rely on hunting and beauty for their survival. It’s been said that the business of northern New Mexico is poverty, and the towns there are known to be suspicious of outsiders, even outsiders with Spanish surnames. But that could be changing. A latte bar, I’d heard, was opening in Chama. The Hispanic route passes through two national forests; much of it is high and green.

  Another way passes through Indian country, which has its own allotment of poverty and beauty. The beauty here is in the big blue sky and the streaked red cliffs that reveal different levels of color and time, a white year, a red year, a year of rain, a year of fire. The Indian route goes through a number of the smaller reservations: Southern Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Jemez, Zia, Santa Ana. It misses the big one, the Navajo Nation, but it’s still the road northern Navajos would take to get to Albuquerque. It’s the road Ramona Franklin must have taken between her two lives. I owed her my life; I wanted to understand her better.

  “Let’s go home through Aztec and Cuba,” I said to the Kid when he got to my hospital room.

  He made a face, his second. The first had been when he saw how wasted I looked. “Why you want to do that?”

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Any way you go is pretty.”

  “There’s a good restaurant in Cuba. I’ll take you to lunch.”

  “We can get there from Abiquiu.”

  “I want to go Route 44.”

  “I don’t like that road.” I knew why—nobody drove NM 44 unless he didn’t know any better or had no choice—but the Kid told me anyway. “Es el camino de la muerte,” he said. The highway of death, one of New Mexico’s infamous slaughter alleys. You couldn’t blame it on the weather or on the curves. It rarely snowed or rained on Route 44. In many places the road was straight as an arrow. You could blame it on the bars at either end, the two lanes in between and the lack of a concrete wall median. Someone coming from one of the bars with a blood-alcohol level high enough to make a buffalo comatose fell asleep or passed out and plowed across the highway into the oncoming lane. And it was never just one person in the target vehicle. It was always a family, three or even four generations turned into roadkill by drink.

  I looked at the clock on the wall: eight-thirty. “Nobody will be out yet.”

  “They’ll be coming home after drinking all night,” the Kid said.

  “I’ll drive if you want.”

  “It’s my truck, Chiquita. You’re sick.”

  “I’m not that sick.”

  “I drive. Just tell me why you want to do this.” Maybe he thought I was under the irrational influence of sniffing smoke, but I had my reasons.

  “Ramona Franklin grew up on the reservation near Farmington. She must drive 44 on her way back and forth to Albuquerque. I thought driving the road might help me understand her.” It’s my belief that you should never judge a woman until you’ve driven a mile in her vehicle on her roads. This wouldn’t be Ramona’s vehicle, but hers was also likely to be a truck. This was pickup country. “Do you remember what Gordon House said after the accident that killed the Cravens family?” The House case was one of New Mexico’s most notorious traffic fatalities. On Christmas Eve three little girls and their mother were wiped out.

  “What?” the Kid asked.

  “That a trial wouldn’t accomplish anything. That it should be settled the Navajo way. That he ought to get together with the family and talk it out.”

  “So?”

  “That’s what Ramona said to me. She wants to talk to the Barker family, but Nancy Barker won’t talk to her. She saved my life; I’m wondering if rescuing me makes up in her mind for the loss of Joni Barker’s life.” That was the tip of the mountain, but there were layers upon layers underneath.

  “Was Ramona to blame for Joni Barker’s death?”

  “Some people think she could have prevented it, some people think she couldn’t. The question for me is what Ramona thinks.”

  It was getting too complex for the Kid. Easier to put the pedal to the metal and drive the road. “All right,” he said. “Vamos.”

  South of the Bloomfield oil fields I began coughing and didn’t stop until we reached a trading post where I bought myself some cough drops. Route 44 is a great road for old trucks, and the Kid is a connoisseur. He pointed them out to me as he drove. “That’s a ’49 Chevy,” he said. “That one’s a ’62 Ford.”

  “Sixty-two isn’t that old,” I said.

  Trucks last forever in the dry New Mexico air and there’s no inspection to ground you for a broken tailpipe or lack of turn signals. The older trucks have a rounded shape that’s a pleasure to look at—adobe on wheels. It would be a pleasure to own one, too, if you didn’t have to rely on it to take you one hundred miles to work or the store.

  We went through a lot more empty space and passed a lot more old trucks before we reached Cuba. I hadn�
�t been getting any adrenaline buzz from Route 44 or from wondering if any of those great old trucks had my name on them. Maybe I’d been adrenalined out. The Kid listened to Los Lobos and the Gipsy Kings, kept his mind on the road, and didn’t talk much, leaving my mind free to think about Ramona Franklin. It must have been a big step for her to leave the reservation and move to Albuquerque, worrying, maybe, about whether the car would make it or not. It had to be a giant step to become the only Indian woman on a hotshot crew. The money was good. It would buy a reliable car, a comfortable place to live, toys and clothes for her daughter. How much did that mean to Ramona? Speculation was useless, but easy in the big empty. She had saved my life. But why mine? I had to ask. Why not Hogue’s? If I was yelling for help, hadn’t he been yelling, too? The even bigger question was what had caused the East Canyon fire that had endangered me and killed Hogue?

  We stopped at Bruno’s Restaurant in Cuba and sat in the courtyard under the ceiling of latillas so freshly cut that the leaves were still on. I had a sopapilla stuffed with meat and green chile. Nothing like a hit of green chile to clear your head.

  The Kid bit into his burrito and the chicharrones crunched. “You learn anything about Ramona?” he asked.

  “Lots of people can’t wait to get away from the place they grow up. You did it, I did it. Right?” I hit the ground running when I departed Ithaca, New York. The Kid and his family had been forced out of Buenos Aires and into Mexico.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Could you or would you want to go back?”

  “In the beginning I did, but not anymore.”

  “Me neither.” But we didn’t come from the Navajo Nation with traditions that went back forever. “Ramona’s job must mean a lot to her.”

  “It’s a good job, no?”

  “In some ways. It’s also very dangerous.”

  “That’s why the pay is good.”

  “Right.”

  “Some people like the danger. I’m hiring a new guy next week.” Legal or illegal, I didn’t ask. The Kid’s business was expanding. He was making it in his new world.

  “Good,” I said.

  ******

  We saw a lot more beauty before encountering the fast-food strip at Bernalillo and I enjoyed every bit of it. I could have turned into a white light or a black hole on Thunder Mountain, but I wouldn’t have been seeing any red cliffs, tasting any green chile, listening to the Gipsy Kings, or resting my head on the Kid’s shoulder if it hadn’t been for Ramona. I called her the minute we got back to Albuquerque, but there was no answer.

  9

  THE NEXT DAY I slept until noon, snuggled up in my adobe home. Nothing like a mud hut to make you feel cool, calm, and sheltered. As I couldn’t cough and sleep at the same time, sleeping gave my throat a chance to heal. The Kid had spent the night but gone off to work without waking me. Usually when he stays over, he just kind of shows up. But last night he’d planned far enough ahead to bring a change of clothes, and yesterday’s blue jeans dangled from the bedpost.

  He’d already called Anna to tell her what had happened on Thunder Mountain. I called her to find out what had happened in my office.

  “Not much,” Anna said. “How you doin’? You okay?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “That Indian woman saved your life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You owe her.”

  I already knew that. I called Ramona again and got no answer. Then I called Sheila McGraw’s office and made an appointment for the following day. After that I went back to sleep. Sometimes sleep is an elusive lover, but sometimes it’s there when you need it. This was good sleep, deep sleep, sleep with the potential to heal. I didn’t wake up again until the Kid arrived with Lotta Burgers and curly fries at six, and even then he had to shake me to rouse me.

  “Who is Joe, Chiquita?” he asked. “You were talking about Joe in your sleep last night.”

  “I was?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was doing that in the hospital, too, the nurses said. Joe’s my father.”

  “I never hear you call him Joe.”

  “Usually I called him Dad, but he liked to be called Joe. That’s how I remember him. When we were little he taught my brother and me to skate on the Irish Pond. Every winter he measured the ice to see if it was thick enough, and when it snowed he shoveled the snow off for us. When I wanted to play basketball he put up a net. He bought me my first pair of skis. He never skied himself, but he always encouraged me.” My father, who worked for the phone company for thirty years, encouraged me to do all the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t do himself: to take risks, to finish college, to ski, to become a lawyer, and to never work for anyone else. After he died I completed his life. I graduated from college, became a skier, went to law school, and eventually started my own practice. I lived in Mexico for a while, which he would have loved to have done. I ended up in New Mexico, where he would also have enjoyed living. Joe and I were both sun seekers. After my brother joined the army, my father and I were left alone. The major relationships build their own kind of house. The one that Joe and I built was a snug and isolated cabin with a wood stove and no room for anyone else. The Kid and I shared twelve hundred square feet (when he stayed here, which had become more and more often), but the house our relationship inhabited had lots of rooms, lots of doors; some of them (the kitchen) were opened rarely, some of them (the empty room) were kept closed. “I was a good skier, Kid. I could ski better than most of the men on the hill. Do you believe that?”

  “Why not? You have mucho determinación when you want to do something. Why don’t you ski now?” You only had to look out the window to see that we had mountains year-round and in a few months they’d be covered with snow. “The cigarettes?”

  “No. I smoked then. I don’t know why I quit exactly. I was at my peak. After my father died I had a perfect day and I didn’t want to ski anymore. That’s when I decided to go to back to school. When I passed out in the fire I was reliving that day, and I saw my father at the base of the mountain calling to me.”

  “My father does that sometimes in my dreams,” the Kid said. “He calls to me from the end of the soccer field.”

  “Are they asking us to join them or telling us not to?”

  “Not to or we would be dead, no?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When you learn a sport you never forget it. It stays with you your whole life.”

  “I don’t know, Kid. Skiing isn’t like riding a bicycle. I don’t know if I could do it again. The equipment is different now. I’m not in great shape.”

  “I mean it stays in your attitude.”

  “You mean I have a skier’s attitude?” These days that meant expensive skis and boots. I wasn’t a person who’d chosen to earn or spend a lot of money, and I’d already been a ski bum.

  “You have no fear, Chiquita,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”

  No fear or no sense. I had a feeling of twenty-year-old invincibility that lingered no matter what the pushing-forty evidence indicated. One thing I could say about my life was that I’d lived it. There’d be no one left to do that on my behalf. Was there anything wrong with still feeling like an invincible twenty-year-old? It had taken me into some dark places, some light places, some very interesting places. If you went into the past looking for hurt and abuse, you’d find them. If you went looking for accomplishment, you’d find a platform to spring from. You can master more than the mountain when you learn how to ski. That was what Joe had taught me.

  ******

  Because my appointment with Sheila McGraw was for nine in the morning I approached the Forest Service’s office on Gold from my home on Mirador instead of from my office on Lead. I drove down Edith past the new warehouses, the old pawnshops, and the bars with topless dancers. Albuquerque is a one-story town, a place where development doesn’t climb, it crawls—although we do have a couple of skyscrapers downtown that can be seen from all over the city. They’re the tallest bu
ildings for miles, lightning rods in a storm. From the foothills in winter the downtown buildings are tombstones floating on a cloud of smog. From the West Mesa in any season they’ll glow like rosy pink candles in the setting sun. There’s an ongoing debate here about whether the sunset’s afterglow is the color of watermelon or the color of blood. I call it watermelon-blood. The buildings of downtown are ugly in some lights, rose colored in others, but compared to most cities they’re not imposing.

  On the other hand, a fire the size of downtown is very imposing. I’d seen it and I’d seen it in motion. I’d heard it roar and hiss. It left me looking at downtown from a different perspective. I cut over to Third, stopped at the traffic light on Tijeras, and, while I waited for it to change, counted the stories in the Hyatt Regency. I’d reached twelve before the guy behind me leaned on his horn. “All right, all right,” I said, and stepped on the gas.

  I’d found a way to measure the fire. If anybody asked I could always say I’d been in a twelve-story blaze. That’s something guys do, compare distance to a football field and height to the number of stories in a building. But when you get down to it, what other landmarks do we have? I do know that the more precise your figures and the more emphatically you present them, the less likely you are to be challenged.

  I parked the Nissan and walked to 517 Gold, a government-issue gray building. Sheila S. A. McGraw wasn’t a middle-aged guy looking around at the changes taking place in the Forest Service with regret and looking forward to retirement with longing. She was a woman who had to be older than she looked—around twenty-five. She was small with quick and nervous gestures, shiny black hair, and a complexion like the finish on an expensive tea cup. Her hair was cut short and straight. She wore glasses with dark rims that were too big for her face. They slid down her nose; she pushed them back up. She never lifted the glasses either to read or to look across the room. Maybe the prescription was weak or the glasses were an attempt to make her appear older and duller.

  “That was quite an experience you had,” she began.

  “It was.”

  She looked down at a report on her desk. “Have you thought of anything you might have missed or forgotten to tell Henry Ortega?”