Smoke Season

CHAPTER 11

True heard the roar of Quartz Canyon well before she could make out its entrance through the haze. Even so, the sound came later than usual along the half-mile-long flat stretch that preceded it. Its low rumble usually began to make itself known to her slowly, joining the closer-at-hand cacophony of birdcalls and insects buzzing and oars slapping the water in a subtle snatch of sound here, a more insistent hum there, growing in intensity as she approached. Today, however, the birds had fallen silent or else had already fled the thick smoke on an exodus of feather and wing. She couldn’t hear the mayflies or crickets, either, so the drum of the canyon’s whitewater hit her in a sudden boom through the smoke that tightened her gut and had her sitting up straighter at the oars.

What if she couldn’t see properly in the smoke? She swallowed down this worry even as it arose. Because what could she do about it? “There. You hear it?” she asked the Wus, who both nodded silently. “We’ll eddy out at that next bend, where the reeds are growing along the shore. See?” Another set of nods.

“Do we scout this one?” Emmett’s voice sounded small.

“Yep.” True tried to counter his uncertainty with eager excitement, even as her stomach sank again. “We’ll take a little hike up over that rock outcropping so we can get a good view of the entrance. We won’t be able to see the whole thing, though, remember. This set of rapids is long.”

At the bend, True dug in deep with the oars, turning the nose of the raft to shore. They had their pick of tie-off spots, which, while not unusual, made True wonder whether Mel had been right, and other stranglers had aborted their trips early.

Vivian and Emmett clambered out awkwardly to stand on the bank in their dripping water shoes, thumbs hooked into the straps of their life jackets as they waited on True. “Go ahead and start up the bank to those rocks,” she called to them from the boat. “That’ll be a good vantage point. I’ll be right behind you.” When Vivian looked hesitant, True added, “Nature calls.”

She watched the Wus depart, trudging up the bank single file, then unearthed her small ammo box from its dedicated spot behind the Yeti. It looked just like the TP box, which wasn’t a coincidence, but she sure as hell didn’t want to mix them up. The last thing True needed was for one of the Wus to be on the groover, reach into the can for TP, and end up with Ben Franklins instead. Best to double-check, just for peace of mind. Subterfuge held even less appeal than ever after opening up to Vivian.

She strode off in long strides in the opposite direction from the Wus, making her way through the reeds along the riverbank to emerge onto a small, open lava bed, hidden from view from the river. She climbed up it easily—the bank was steep here, but the lava flow, so common here in southern Oregon, was only a few yards long. Once concealed from view, she popped the ammo box open at the edges—it was a simple two-sided clasp—breathing a sigh of relief that its contents still sat there as expected, waiting for her. She eyed the thick roll of bills wrapped in Saran wrap, bagged in a ziplock, before snapping the box shut again, her heart pounding even harder than it usually did when it came to this shit.

“You sure you gals got the cojones for this?” John Fallows had asked, a mean smile playing about his mouth, the day she and Mel met with him to seal the deal. “I hear little Zacky Murphy shit his Captain Marvel Underoos when the Feds had him spread ’em across the back of their patrol car.”

Mel had gone crimson and so True had risen to her feet in anger, and Fallows had reminded her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t even family, not like the Bishops, to whom he might consider throwing a bone, so she could go fuck off. “Unless Melissa here is batting for both teams,” he’d added with a wink. “In which case, good on you, TrueBlue. Just watch out she isn’t just using you for your connections.” He’d laughed heartily, and Mel had been forced to yank True out of arm’s reach. She’d already been winding up a swing.

True tried to shake the memory now, running her hands roughly through her hair, nails raking across her sunburned scalp. The sting of it helped, somehow, to take the pain out of it all.

She glanced back at the Wus, who stood at awkward attention in their PFDs, waiting for her as they eyed the whitewater churning downriver. True felt a deep pang of regret. They should be excited right now. True should be building them up, rallying them for the challenge of Quartz Canyon, not pushing all three of them far too hard.

She could still change plans. It was smoky, yes, but the fire remained a safe enough distance away. They could slow down, enjoy the journey. To get her head back in the game, she had to remind herself of the horrible weight of debt Mel and Sam always lived under. Of the way Annie’s breathing became labored whenever she so much as played a game of hide-and-seek or tried to keep up with her big sister. She straightened her shoulders in resolution. What was a little bit of risk, a dash of danger, compared to that? She’d hated the sound of her favorite nickname on Fallows’s tongue, but was she TrueBlue or wasn’t she?

Besides, this would be the last time True climbed the riverbank and scrambled over lava and shale to check the contents of the ammo box, sweating through every minute of it. Stomach in knots.

Only for Annie. Only until this final surgery.

It was a mantra she repeated to herself over and over again, ignoring the question that persisted behind it. You really think the Fallowses are just going to let you quit? They had a good thing going with True, after all. What did they need the Bishops for?

True squared her shoulders, looking out over the Outlaw before navigating back over the shale and lava rock toward the Wus. In sickness and in health, right? An apt-enough comparison, she decided.

Throughout midmorning, Mel had swung her Pulaski with one part of her brain still perpetually back in Carbon, worrying over Annie’s condition in this smoke. Please, she thought, don’t be too stubborn to take her to Highline. Because she knew how Sam’s emotional baggage could get in his own way.

“You’re nothing like your father,” she’d told him back when he’d been in the throes of his remodeling stage, trying to convince him that therefore, this house he’d moved his little family into was good enough as it was, just like Sam. “We are comfortable and happy, and you never have to deal with Mark ever again,” she’d promised. “Him or Fallows.”

To say the memory stung now would be an understatement, but she couldn’t have known, back then, that it would be she who would cross back over the enemy line, doing business with the man he despised.

The welcome sound of the dozers coming in to cut a deeper, wider containment line in the wake of the ground pounders rumbled in Mel’s ears by 1:00 p.m., shaking the ground under her boots and seeming to rattle even her brain matter in her skull. She looked up from her place on the line, glad for the welcome distraction from the mind-numbing task of manually clearing the brush. It wasn’t every day—it wasn’t every fire—that such measures were deemed necessary. Hernandez must have alerted the USFS that Carbon Rural had its hands full here on the wildland-urban interface, because they’d clearly decided to respect the hell out of this blaze.

She sent up a silent thanks for the support, because that dozer line was all that stood between this fire and potential civilian targets. If they couldn’t contain the blaze here on Flatiron, the river canyon would be next. Her thoughts swung to True, floating through smoke that would only get thicker if they couldn’t contain this thing. Her clients’ health truly could become compromised. Or worse.

Mel tried to shake off the guilt this worry induced, if only to get her focus back on her job. True was her own woman. She’d made her own choices. But she had to call bullshit. The responsibility of this whole damn thing lay squarely on Mel. She’d known True would agree to running the money. She’d known why.

“Bishop,” Lewis called from somewhere above her. “We taking five?”

Shit. “Negative, Captain. Sorry.” She picked back up her Pulaski, her worry and the dozers’ presence renewing her vigor. She swung the axe in faster and faster arcs, the blade sending little tufts of soil flying up around her with every bite into the dirt.

“Hey, Chief!” Janet complained, behind her. “Take it easy, will you? I’m breathing in enough shit as it is.”

“Sorry,” Mel muttered for the second time in as many minutes. She forced herself to settle back in, mimicking the steady rhythm of the Pulaskis ahead of her, her forearms burning satisfactorily with the effort. It wasn’t more than a minute later, however, that she heard “Bishop!” again.

“All right, all right,” she griped, but this time, no one was chastising her. Janet stood frozen, Pulaski limp at her side, staring west. Mel followed her gaze, and that was when she felt it: wind blowing from the east, cooling the sweat on the back of her neck.

What had been a light breeze had just kicked into high gear.

“Janet? Did you notice that? I think—”

But before she could finish her sentence, that gust of wind caught the fire at just the right angle, changing everything in a second. Mel watched in awestruck, almost inescapable resignation as the blaze, stable enough one minute, suddenly raged in an updraft, its flirtation with instability and power suddenly fully formed. This was the very scenario she’d been most afraid of. As the fire doubled in size before her eyes like a beast from hell, she shook herself loose from her shock with a yell.

“It’s making its run!” she shouted in the direction of the Eagle Valley supervisor, her closest superior, who looked back at her with shock. Never had she been so sorry to have predicted a blaze correctly. In a flood of communal alarm, Pulaskis dropped to the dusty ground as the firefighters all around Mel abandoned them at a full sprint, heels digging into the dirt, knees bent in effort, screams drowned by the sudden roar of the Flatiron Fire.

Mel fell into pace amid the mass of dirty yellow shirts before pivoting to snag the back of Deklan’s. The kid had veered off course in a blind panic, as if to outrun the fire on foot. She tugged him back.

“Here! C’mon!” Mel pushed him toward the road, nearly tripping him up when Deklan cast a frenzied glance behind them toward where the wall of fire literally loomed. “The trucks!” Mel ordered, waving one arm forward, her other palm pressed hard against Deklan’s sweaty back.

They flung themselves into the back of one of the waiting water-tank trucks, a crew of Eagle Valley volunteers clamoring in after them, with a mere minute, maybe two, to spare. “Go, go, go!” Mel shouted to the driver, a fist on the glass between the tank and the cab. The man sat frozen in the cab, his fingers white-knuckling it on the wheel, watching the blaze approach as if in a trance. “Go, goddammit!”

The man snapped out of it and went , the heavy truck’s massive tires grinding deep into the dirt as he slammed the gear into second, Mel still trying to count her men and women as the vehicle peeled out. What if Hernandez didn’t have eyes on the ground?

“What’s it gonna do?” Deklan sputtered, body craned backward toward the fire, arms taut as he gripped the roll bar of the back of the truck. He swung a look at Mel, eyes wild above his Buff, face marred by soot and ash. “Chief! What’s it gonna do?”

His panic was visceral. The kind that broke out in a cold sweat across one’s brow. The kind that made you shit your pants. “It won’t jump our containment line between us and the river,” Mel shouted back, a hand still braced on Deklan’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. It can’t jump the bulldozed containment line.”

And then, as if just to spite her, with a roar they could hear from the base of FS 7312 even over the clamor of the fire engine and the cries of the ground crews and the rush of this goddamned wind from hell, the Flatiron Fire jumped the dozer line.