Smoke Season

CHAPTER 3

In the wake of the sudden deluge that had split the sky, Sam Bishop stood at the window of the River Eddy Bar and Grill, watching his kids scurry around like chipmunks on the now soaked back deck, picking up windblown napkins-turned-pulp and throwing them at each other. However, what should have been a common enough show of childhood antics was anything but; little Annie lacked the stamina to play in earnest. Sam knew there was no need to go outside to referee the situation; soon enough, his eldest, Astor, would either lose interest or scoop Annie up in a bear hug to cart her around under her big-sister steam.

Even eight years into fatherhood, Sam heaved a quiet little sigh of wonder at this, such a startling contrast to his own growing-up years filled with sucker punches and spitting contests. His onetime best friend and pseudo brother Chris Fallows had shown no such mercy, but even so, while the sight of Astor coddling her sister should have filled Sam’s chest with pride, an odd sort of remorse lingered there instead. He wasn’t sure whether he mourned Astor’s childhood, on a fast track since her sibling’s birth, or Annie’s, destined to lag behind. Probably both.

He contemplated closing up early, but a handful of patrons had weathered the storm and still sat at the bar, mostly seasonal workers off shift from grow sites along the river valley. Though they could use a shower, these young crews always had cash burning in their pockets, cash Sam had no qualms about parting them from. Besides, his longtime server, Kim Murphy, needed the hours. He was about to duck into the kitchen to get a jump on the grease coating the fryer before Mel turned up to collect the girls when the Eddy door swung open again, cutting a swath of summer light across the polished wood-plank floor. One glance at the entrance had all thought of abandoning his post eradicated from Sam’s mind.

Speak of the devil, and his father will appear. “Out,” he said immediately. Every town had a resident lowlife, but John Fallows, the owner and operator of the biggest grow in the valley, took it to a new level. And he knew damned well he wasn’t welcome here. That went the same for Chris these days, much as it pained Sam to think it.

Kim blanched and beat a hasty retreat toward the deck, corralling the girls en route, as Fallows crossed the threshold of the Eddy. And who could blame her? If Sam was still fuming over the Fallowses’ mistreatment of her nephew Zack, Kim must be positively sick to her stomach.

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” she had begged Sam the night young Zack had been arrested on the Oregon-California border of I-5, baffled by the thick wad of Saran-wrapped cash and handful of pills found stashed in one of the boxes of grow lights he was transporting for Fallows. “He thought he was only making a supply run, trying to make enough money to enroll at Oregon State next semester. You know he’s a good kid.”

Sam did know, which was one of many reasons he wanted nothing to do with the man who’d just darkened his door. Sam raised his voice. “Get lost, Fallows.” He flung one arm in the direction of the door. “I’ve warned you enough times.”

John Fallows approached the bar anyway. “C’mon now, Bishop. Why you gotta pretend like we ain’t family?”

“Because we’re not.” Just because Sam’s old man had been plastered to Fallows’s side back in the day, not to mention just plastered, didn’t mean Sam had to put up with this shit now. And just because he and Chris had no one but each other then didn’t make it true now. Sam planted his feet firmly, shoulders square, channeling his years in the military as best he could. You didn’t forget boot-camp training in a hurry, and he was no longer the kid who’d grown up in Carbon with no choice but to cower under this family’s bullying. “I’m not kidding. Leave my bar.”

Fallows held up a lazy arm. “Keep your panties on, Bishop. We’re just here to talk to my guys. Those DEA pricks have been all over my shit.”

Not that the Feds would find anything, unfortunately, no matter how suspicious they got. Ever since marijuana had been legalized in the state, Fallows made sure to stay squeaky-clean, at least in the eyes of the law. Licenses all in order, storefront on Main Street, even a line of CBD lotion. An LLC and everything. That way, Fallows could carry on with the much more lucrative side of his operations unfettered and unchecked.

“I can’t believe I have to pay some overeducated, pansy-assed, fragile-as-a-snowflake chemistry PhD in Salem to tell me what I already know about my own goddamned weed,” Fallows griped now to his crew. “Goddamned worst idea ever, this fucking blue state voting to make my shit legal.” Some of the guys at the bar agreed with Fallows with a nod, but most kept their eyes on their beers.

Sam just continued to see red on behalf of young Zack, who now sported a record instead of a college ID. Along with all the other pawns who’d found their way into Fallows’s path.

Sam could have easily been one of them, a statistic instead of an entrepreneur. He still had plenty to lose, his reputation in this town first and foremost, just by association. Which was precisely why Fallows was in no hurry to vacate the bar.

He slid Sam a slow smile. “Want a sample? On the house. It might chill you the hell out, man.”

“Get. The fuck. Out of my bar,” Sam repeated, the crew members’ heads now on swivels, following the confrontation like spectators at a tennis match.

Fallows threw his hands up in the air. “Good thing your old man can’t see what a pussy you’ve become.”

“My old man in federal prison? The one you put there? That one?”

“Whatever, man. I’m out.” Fallows turned on his heel, like it was his goddamned idea in the first place, leaving Sam, per usual, fuming.

Heart pounding in his chest, he told Fallows’s crew to follow suit; he was closing up early after all.

A half hour later, he stood in the galley kitchen of his two-room apartment over the River Eddy, his hands still a bit shaky as he reached for his phone. Mel’s face graced the screen, a sight that still caused a little uptick of his heart. But they weren’t together anymore, no matter how much Sam wished it could be different, and their days of impromptu calls signaling good things were over.

“Don’t tell me bad news,” he entreated with a sigh. “I’ve had a day.”

“Look out your kitchen window, toward Flatiron.”

He clocked the thin plume of smoke in an instant. “Shit. All right, your day trumps mine.”

“Well, maybe,” Mel agreed, “given that mine appears to just be starting.”

She sounded tired. Sam knew she’d rather be with the girls than on the job, and he also knew she couldn’t turn down the hours. A familiar shame-resentment cocktail rose up like bile. Sam swallowed it back down. It wasn’t Mel’s problem that running the Eddy didn’t provide Sam’s full share of the money that was always in such desperately short supply with a medically fragile child, but it would be his problem to tell Astor and Annie that their mom wouldn’t be coming to get them tonight.

He changed the subject. “You think it’s going to turn into anything, this fire?” It wasn’t like they didn’t see them all the time at this time of year.

“Nah, just a little lightning strike.” Mel paused. “I’ll come get the kids first thing in the morning, all right?”

Sam agreed and disconnected the call with his customary “Stay safe,” because old habits died hard, already reaching for one of the boxes of Kraft mac and cheese he kept handy on the counter. Maneuvering in the tight space to retrieve a trio of bowls from the sole cabinet, he thought wistfully of the spacious farm kitchen sitting empty in his two-story home on Highline Road overlooking town before remembering that that space, too, was still in a state of upheaval. Just like it had been for the entirety of his childhood.

“You don’t have to renovate the whole house,” Mel had said—more like begged—for the duration of the half decade she’d lived there, when they’d still been a family of four. “This isn’t the hill you have to die on.”

Sam always brushed her off or made a joke. Because he just might die on that hill. He’d been born on it, after all, into a life of poverty, to Shelley and Mark Bishop, the former of whom hadn’t stuck around long. Ever since he’d taken over the place, remodeling it from the foundation up had felt more like an essential obligation than a choice.

“You’re nothing like your dad,” Mel promised time and again. She knew how hard it had been for Sam to reinvent himself in a small town with a long memory, but talking about home improvements had led to talking about money, and talking about money had been their downfall.

Or at least one of them.

After their marriage had imploded, he’d retreated to the Eddy apartment to lick his wounds. Sharing custody was easier if he was in town, he’d reasoned, though really, he’d just hoped to keep the constant reminders of their former life together at bay.

“We were happy,” he’d tell True, usually after one too many once the bar was closed. “Right?”

It always came out as a question, which was probably half the problem. He knew Mel had eventually grown weary of convincing him he was good enough, man enough, all the enoughs.

But the thing was, he hadn’t been. Not for Annie.

“That kind of thinking isn’t healthy,” True always told him with a firm shake of her head. And if he pushed back, wallowed even, she gave him shit, for which Sam was downright thankful. True could have chosen sides. More specifically, she could have chosen Mel. Sam wouldn’t have blamed her, even if True and Sam had been friends first.

“You’re stuck with me, and so is she,” True said instead. “Sorry not sorry.”

He made a mental note to try to touch base with True tonight—she, too, was out in the field tonight in her own right—then called out to the kids. The three of them might as well eat while the cheesy goo still bubbled. His stint as a firefighter’s husband had taught him not to wait on dinner, even back when Mel’s presence had graced their table, making it complete.

He pushed this memory back as Astor immediately ran into the kitchen from the couch, Annie attempting to keep up in a rare but gallant show of energy.

“Astor! Slow down!” Sam chided as Annie predictably gave up the race at the doorway, the short sprint leaving her gasping. “You know how important it is that your sister not overexert herself until she’s cleared at her pre-op.”

Mention of impending heart surgery tended to alter the tone of a room, and Sam was immediately sorry when Astor’s expression clouded. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt the gloom of this particular storm gathering, but Sam reminded himself that according to Annie’s surgeon, it could be the last. Annie only had one more pediatric surgery to go.

“What? I just came when you called,” Astor quipped, her expression guileless. But something flickered behind her eyes as she added, “And I don’t know why we’re in a rush. It’s not like Mom’s on her way.” She glanced up at Sam, testing his reaction. “Right?”

So the sudden attitude had less to do with her sister and more to do with her mother. It came and went with Astor, righteous anger at the fate of her family flashing one moment, gone the next, disappearing under the serene surface of her steady personality like the elusive rainbow trout in the shallows of the Outlaw outside the Eddy door.

“She got called out on a fire out by Flatiron,” he told her, and he was sorry as hell about it, but he couldn’t let Astor walk all over him as a result. He gave her a pointed look until she reached out and helped her sister up onto her seat at the counter.

Annie accepted the proffered hand eagerly, and, watching how instantly she forgave and forgot, Sam knew he should press the issue with Astor, but the truth was, it heartened him to see Astor treating Annie more like an equal than the invalid everyone else saw. It allowed her to experience having an annoying kid sister for a change, not the sick little girl with the congenital heart condition that ran as a headline in everyone else’s mind.

Annie took inventory of the kitchen. “Mac and cheese! Yay!” she exclaimed, just as Astor reached around her to snag a bite from the stirring spoon on the stove, then let out a squawk when the hot cheese hit her tongue.

“That’s karma, kid, for a few minutes ago.”

Sam dished them up, and Annie was three halfhearted bites into her bright-yellow noodles before noting with a disgruntled little sigh, “Mom promised we’d play Sorry!”

“You hate that game anyway,” Astor told her, though whether in solidarity or to cause more friction, Sam couldn’t say. “You never get to Safety.”

“Do too!”

His phone rang, and Sam fished it out of his back pocket, shushing the girls while wiping off his palms on the already dirty dish towel. “This might be her again,” he told them.

He was greeted instead by the voice of his longtime neighbor, Claude, who, after retiring from forty years of medical practice, still lived next door to Sam’s house on Highline. Though “next door” was a relative term. Claude’s place, where he and his late wife had raised their kids, lay almost a quarter mile across a shared field.

“Looks like the lightning storm lit up Flatiron,” Claude said.

Sam nodded. “Yep, Mel took the call.”

“Well, shoot. I know that’s tough,” Claude said.

Tough to be parenting solo again, or tough knowing the woman he loves—yes, present tense, unfortunately for Sam—and the mother of his children was out on the line? Both. Definitely both.

“Anyhow, I’ll have a front-row seat to Mother Nature’s fire show tonight, I’d wager,” Claude continued as Sam smiled to himself. Claude managed to see the beauty in everything. He pictured the old man craning his neck out his kitchen window toward his unobstructed view of Flatiron Peak. Even perched a full ridgeline away, their houses sat in its shadow.

“We can see it here, too,” Sam told him, reaching across the stovetop to push the pot to the back burner, out of the girls’ reach, before stepping out onto the narrow back deck, where the lingering humidity from the electrical storm greeted him in an unwelcome embrace. It prickled the scruff along his neck; as Kim was always quick to point out, he’d fallen a bit out of the habit of shaving in the months since he’d semi-returned to bachelorhood. “I’ll keep you posted if I get any news.”

Astor followed him, asking, “Is that Uncle Claude?”

“Hi, Uncle Claude!” Annie chimed in, trailing after.

Astor squinted into the distance, eyeing the small plume of smoke as Claude returned the girls’ greeting with a chuckle. Sam switched the phone to speaker in time to hear “You kids gonna be good for your papa now?”

“Never!” they both chorused, just as Claude had taught them, Astor adding, “You see the fire up there, too, Claude?”

“No bigger than a Bic flame, kiddo,” Claude answered, and Sam told him, “She doesn’t know what a Bic lighter is, Claude.”

But Astor cooed, “Coool.”

“Sam?” Claude added, “you still got that John Deere in your side yard? Got it juiced up?”

“Think so.” They’d saved it from repossession the last time Annie’s hospital bills had ballooned out of control, Sam able to claim it in some roundabout way for work.

“I thought I’d go ahead and mow the back acre,” Claude said, “between the houses, just in case.”

Sam felt a lurch of regret. He’d been meaning to get back up there to mow—standard fire-deterrent practice for any homeowner out here on the wildland-urban line—but had kept putting it off. Seeing the house that had once embodied so much hope always pressed on the still-tender parts of his heart. “I can’t ask you to do that, Claude.”

Why hadn’t he just mowed it last month, instead of spending his free evenings trying to find elusive profits in the columns of numbers in the Eddy business ledgers, or worse, on halfhearted nights out with True, who was ill-equipped to cheer him up, seeing as she was nearly as gutted about his family situation as he was? “I’ve been meaning to get that done,” he said lamely.

Claude pshaw-ed. “You gotta give an old guy something to do in his retirement years, or else he starts feeling less useful. Anyway, you’ve got your hands full.”

Claude was being kind. What he didn’t say: You have enough on your mind, working your own business, raising two kids, and trying not to drown under medical bills in sums bigger than any of us will ever see in a lifetime, let alone pay off in a year.

“Relief is in sight,” Mel kept saying, though Sam couldn’t see how. Sure, her making chief had taken the edge off, enabling them to pay a few of the bigger bills to their Portland pediatric clinic and the cardiological-specialist group, but still left Sam playing his least-favorite guessing game: pay the electric bill or home oxygen delivery? Car payment or echocardiogram? And there was still a pile of unpaid invoices as long as his arm, all with overdue notices stamped in red ink.

He sighed into the phone, imagining seventy-five-year-old Claude making the turns up and down the field in this heat, struggling with his old mower. “I’ll come up and do it myself first thing in the morning, Claude,” he promised. “I just don’t want to leave the girls here alone.” Even if he asked Kim to come by and babysit, he didn’t trust the likes of Fallows to keep to his own lane, not after turning up today. The very thought of him interacting with his kids made Sam’s blood boil all over again.

“I got it, Bishop,” Claude insisted. “You just take care of that little one of yours. Unless her big sis has already worked you out of a job.” He chuckled.

“You sure?”

“Absolutely. Where I come from, neighbors take care of one another.”

Sam smiled, knowing that, while Claude might have grown up outside of Munich, Germany, he considered himself an Oregonian through and through. “We sure do,” he agreed, ending the call as gratitude replaced the stress his earlier confrontation had placed on his heart.

An hour later, he’d settled the girls into bed on the pull-out sofa and retreated to the River Eddy deck one story below, Pbr in hand. He liked to come out here on summer evenings to watch the sun set over the river, but tonight he faced the opposite direction, staring up at Flatiron. Claude was right: they certainly had a nature show to watch. Even here in town, he could glimpse the flames undulating like a well-choreographed dance just one ridge over.

Carbon’s seen fires before, he told himself firmly. The Bear Creek Fire of ’92, the Pine Flat Fire of ’05 ... both worse than this. And Mel had handled those just fine, hadn’t she? By late summer, it wasn’t uncommon for over a dozen fires to burn across the state. But early July? Smoke season had come early. Sam figured he’d better make peace with losing his view, as well as his out-of-town customers.

If the air quality got bad enough, he’d have to keep Annie indoors tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, where medical-grade air purifiers hummed day and night in both the Eddy apartment and in Mel’s place across town. Painfully unfair for a kid on summer break, and especially for Annie, who’d already been robbed of too much of her childhood.

The doctor and midwife had known something was wrong the moment she’d been born by C-section at Carbon General. Though their faces had remained professionally neutral, it had been the heavy silence throughout the sterile room that gave them away, punctuated by Annie’s weak cry after far too long a delay. Later, Mel would liken that moment to the silence right before the pop signifying a combustion fire ... when all the air seemed to go still before being sucked right out of the room.

Sam scrubbed his hands across his face, trying, unsuccessfully, to rub out the memory. No dice. It rushed right back in like a back draft in the gas line on the Eddy grill, same as always.

Annie’s diagnosis after a barrage of tests: tetralogy of Fallot. Tet, for short. Sam had never even heard of the condition, and no wonder. Only four hundred out of every million babies were born with the complex congenital heart condition that left baby Annie weak, winded, and hypoxemic.

The first thing you think, after being informed you have a child with intense medical needs: Just tell me how to meet them. Let’s go , what’s it gonna take , time’s a-wasting , all that. He and Mel, they’d been a dream team, getting second opinions, meeting with experts, finding time, even in the thick of it, for a hand squeeze here, a bracing hug there, even a lingering kiss or two in the sanctuary of the half-remodeled Highline house, Mel’s arms around him enough to keep him together. Back then, the pillars of the life they’d constructed had seemed load-bearing. The foundation solid. Sam had thought they’d weather it, he really had. But he hadn’t seen the wolf at the door.

First the insurance advocates had called—their tones always clipped but friendly—then the doctors—still helpful—and clinics and registered pediatric RNs—more businesslike. Then the collectors. Who had proved to be worse bloodsucking bastards than the drug runners and car thieves Sam had grown up around.

Sam and Mel had burned through their savings first, though that hadn’t taken long. Then the credit-card debt began to pile up. Mel had reluctantly turned to her parents and True, but lord knew Sam’s dad, his only family, had nothing to give.

“Contact John if you need some cash flow,” Mark Bishop had said, on one of Sam’s last visits to see his old man in the state penitentiary at Pendleton. “He owes this family big time.”

Wasn’t that rich. Sam had pushed back from the table between them like it was on fire, the legs of his folding chair screeching across the linoleum of the visitation room.

“That would require us to be a family in the first place,” he’d shot at his father. Sam and Mark Bishop were anything but, in no small part due to Fallows’s intrusion in their lives.

“Just let me know when you’re ready to swallow your pride,” Mark had called after him, the clatter of metal echoing in Sam’s ears.

He’d tried to rent out the rooms over the garage at Highline instead, had even tried to convert the garage itself, but couldn’t get past the red tape of the Airbnb contract. Too many code violations while he finished the wiring and the drywall in the kitchen. Too hard to ensure the space met ADA requirements. Things had been tense before, but to hear that Sam couldn’t even manage to wire his own house well enough to run a small business tipped the scales. He was a failure. He had let down his family.

“No one said anything of the sort,” Mel had argued, exasperation lacing the exhaustion and fear in her voice. “Certainly not me.” And of course she hadn’t, not in so many words, but Sam was more than capable of filling in the blanks.

The arguments turned into days of silence, then outright absence as Mel poured herself into work and childcare, her embrace reserved only for her children now. To be fair, that might have been all she had to give after the hours she put in at the station. At the hospital. At the heart center. In a last-ditch effort to salvage what he could of his marriage and their finances, Sam had put the Eddy on the market, with no luck on either count. No one else in economically depressed Carbon wanted to take it on. And Mel, even knowing what it had cost Sam emotionally to list it, had not been moved.

So here he was, still at the rail of the deck, a.k.a. the helm of his sinking ship. At least he had gotten Fallows the hell out of his bar. He exhaled long and hard, the way he’d been taught by the meditation app he’d downloaded to help calm his nerves. It had come in handy just tonight, as he played one of the sleep stories for the girls. Astor had had a hard time settling down; she was prone to nightmares when Mel was out in the field. Hell, so was Sam. He stared back at the fire, trying to read it, wondering what Mel saw in it from where she stood right now.

Thinking of her in the field, his mind hopped from Mel to True with a guilty pang. It was probably too late to try her on her sat phone by now. Did she have a view of this fire tonight, too? She sure wouldn’t welcome it, this early in the summer. The rafting season got shorter and shorter in Oregon every year, it seemed, as the watershed got drier and the rivers got lower.

It was a hell of a way to make a living.

For all of them. Without the rafters and anglers, Sam’s bar would be empty all August, Carbon a ghost town. Even his Highline house, sitting as close as it did to the urban-wildland line, had depreciated in value in today’s ecological climate.

And then what he feared the most in his darkest moments would come true, if it wasn’t already: he’d turn out to be no better a provider than his father. According to the Army psychologist he’d been required to see before each deployment, a childhood of neglect with regular, healthy servings of verbal abuse would do that to a person.

He knew better than to let his past dictate his future, but it was easier said than done. The ending of his marriage still felt more abstract than real. Mel had initiated it but hadn’t yet followed through on the formalities of a legal divorce. On good days, this gave Sam hope. It had to mean something, didn’t it, that Mel hadn’t signed on the dotted line? But then on bad days:

“It’s not like we need the extra paperwork,” Mel would quip as they sifted through medical forms. Their finances were complicated enough as it was, she said.

Should Sam have taken Fallows’s money, had it been offered those years ago? It was probably a moot point: Fallows, like Mark, never owned up to responsibility, at least not without the threat of a bat to his knees.

He envisioned his half-finished house perched on the ridge, still fighting the tight feeling in his throat that always arose with this kind of self-talk. Memory of his father’s mockery echoing through the tinny payphone at Pendleton seeped through the cracks. What? You think if you build it, they will come ... back ? His laugh had crackled from the connection, splintering as it hit Sam’s ears.

It hurt because it held a ring of truth. Wasn’t that what they said? No, that wasn’t it. It was funny because it was true. Sam bit back his own bitter laugh. Somewhere in the back of his mind, did he really hold out hope that if he finally made the house on Highline into the sanctuary he envisioned, he and his young family could break generations of toxic patterns?

Sure. And a fairy godmother would wave a wand and Annie’s heart would magically heal, too.

How pathetic.

Thank goodness for True, who’d practically adopted the Bishop girls from birth.

At least there’s one man of the house around for your kids.

Another of Mark Bishop’s observations. He’d told his father to shut the fuck up, though he might as well have saved his breath; offensive statements were one of Mark’s favorite ways to get under Sam’s skin. He pushed the memory aside now, determined not to let his old man hijack his brain for one more second.

True was the girls’ godmother. Astor looked up to her and Annie adored her, always pressing in close to True when she came over for their weekly dinners together, perching herself on True’s knee like she was some sort of river-goddess Santa Claus. Which she was, Sam conceded, in her faded board shorts and worn sandals, always bearing gifts ... beaded things she’d made the girls at camp in the evenings, whitewashed river rocks shaped like hearts and stars, welded sculptures of wolves and river otters made from scrap metal in her shop on that acreage she had by the river.

Up on Flatiron, the fire gave a little spurt of a flare-up as it consumed one of the tallest ponderosa pines near the ridgeline, and Sam sat up straighter, swallowing his beer in a quick gulp. Shit. That edginess was back. Should he worry, like, seriously worry, about Mel? And what about Annie? Nothing, not even smoke, could be allowed to compromise her health right now. He went inside the Eddy to retrieve the portable radio he kept on the bar, turning the dial to 93.2, the station that alerted him to every snow day, every delayed start at Carbon Elementary, and every traffic incident. If he needed to know anything about this fire that Mel couldn’t tell him, this local channel would deliver the news.

Every summer brings forest fires, he reminded himself again as he returned to the deck rail to study the pulsing line of heat in the distance. This one was close, sure, but it was tiny, and Mel’s whole team was out there somewhere, on the job. He finished off his Pbr in one last, long swallow and turned to go inside, leaving the orange glow of the spot fire at his back.