Smoke Season

CHAPTER 28

The heat in the cab of Claude’s truck was now nothing less than an oppressive physical force, pinning Sam in place with the unrelenting strength of a gravitational centrifuge.

“Dad!” Astor screamed in an octave Sam had never heard from her, straining against her seat belt in fear, but he barely registered the sound over his own terror. They hadn’t even left the driveway, and yet directly in front of them, visibility had horribly, terrifyingly improved: the Flatiron Fire burned hot in a dramatic billow of red and pink and black, the wind sending a huge flume of smoke toward the east, illuminating the entire upper road.

“It looks like the ... poster from ... school,” Astor gasped, her words oddly muffled by her mask. They’d had a contest at the elementary; the winner of the best fire-safety poster had been a sixth grader with a penchant for dramatic watercolor strokes. He’d won a trip to the fire station, where he’d allegedly sprayed Dave Lewis with a fire hose. Sam let his eyes rest on Astor’s face for just a fraction of a moment, even her scared expression preferable to the sight of the blaze out the windshield.

He wrapped an arm around her, and she shrank into him, her face pressed close to his armpit.

“Claude!” he prompted, because the old man seemed to have frozen in place in the driver’s seat. “Go!”

Claude sort of jumped in his seat, like Sam’s cry had activated him, turning the key aggressively in the ignition. Nothing.

“Claude!” Sam shouted again, because why were they not moving ?

“I know, I know!” He cranked the key again; this time the truck gave a screech of protest, but the engine still refused to roll over. “It’s overheated!” Claude yelled, pointing one thick finger at the heat gauge on the dash. “Grab the hose! We gotta cool it!”

Sam wrenched open the door, only to emit a curse before flinging it shut again on base instinct. Because the second he’d exposed them to the outside air, a new, unprecedented heat had hit them all with full force against the wall of wind. It was as though they’d suddenly tumbled straight into an industrial clothes dryer.

“Dad!” Astor yelled again, and despite her morphined state, Annie began to cry again, a high-pitched, raspy wail. Even with the truck door closed again, the heat in the cab had risen. Surely, it had not been this hot in here three minutes ago. Even one minute ago.

“What-are-we-gonna-do?” Astor cried, eyes huge as she stared forward, watching the fire approach. She gasped a breath, her eyes streaming tears, strands of hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks. “What’s happening?”

Somehow, impossibly, this newly merged fire had beaten them, meeting them at Highline before they could flee. It had gobbled right through Sam’s precious timeline, his carefully laid-out evacuation plan, his and Claude’s cautious efforts. It had caught them flat-footed, sitting in a Ford that simply wouldn’t run.

“I don’t know,” he shouted. Outside, all he saw was black and red and sparks in the air. Inside this metal shell, he felt only increasing heat.

“Are we burning?” Annie mumbled. “Daddy, are we gonna burn up?”

“No!” he yelled, looking swiftly at Claude, which did nothing to reassure him. Claude’s eyes remained forward, his full focus on the fire, his hands now oddly braced on the steering wheel. Sam watched as the glass of the truck windshield steamed with this new, intense heat slowly, like a defroster working in reverse. “No, Annie, no,” he managed more calmly. They all needed to remain calm. “Claude?” he said. Then, “Claude! We need to move!”

In answer, he turned the key in the ignition again. Not even a sputter answered from the engine.

“Do we go back inside?” Astor yelled.

“Daddy,” Annie cried again.

“Let me think!” Sam shouted. They couldn’t just sit here in the truck.

Claude tried the ignition yet again, cursing at the truck, his stooped shoulders angled toward the steering wheel as if he’d decided that putting his full weight behind the task would urge the old beast into gear. Nothing this time, either. Not even a click. Sam’s stomach dropped out from under him in a sickening lurch.

He must have said something, though he didn’t fully comprehend what, because Claude looked at him directly for the first time in minutes, his face a mask of something Sam had never, in all his years living next door to him on Highline, seen in the old German man: stark fear. “It’ll only get hotter in here,” he said, his voice, always so stalwart and steady, unnervingly shaky. “It’ll catch us in the car.”

“Dad?” Astor cried again. She clutched at his sleeve. “Claude!”

Sam cast an automatic glance back in the direction the mass exodus of evacuees had taken, though the last of the cars had long ago been swallowed in the haze of black, brake lights no longer visible. Every cell in his body told him to follow them, to get out and run if they had to. But then he looked forward again, and he knew instinctively they could not outrun what was coming for them.

Astor followed Sam’s gaze. “The fire’s everywhere now!”

She was right. After merging with the new lightning fire, the Flatiron Fire had split somewhere on Buck Peak, one side burning faster than the other through the dry undergrowth of Highline. It now consumed both sides of the road, down Highline and up, threatening to meet in the middle, like two forks of a river, Claude’s truck and the Bishops’ house forming a sort of sandbar between the blazes. No, they wouldn’t escape it on foot any better than in this coffin of a car.

Was this it, then? Were Sam’s mistakes going to cost his children their very lives? Were they all going to perish here, depriving the woman he loved of her family, if Mel was even ... hadn’t already ... Sam couldn’t go there. All he knew: he and his kids were paying far, far too high a price for his wanting to keep his family whole and happy on this hill.

Claude looked once more at the blaze, then seemed to snap back into action, thank God. “Get back in the house!” he decided, suddenly loosening his vise grip on the wheel to hastily unbuckle Annie next to him. The leather steering wheel cover remained indented when he released it, softened in the heat. “All of you! Now! Take a deep breath! Brace yourselves! But get back in the house!”

“Shouldn’t we—Claude, what about your pond?” It was a desperately flung suggestion, the words literally stolen from him in the oppressive heat now that Claude had reopened his door.

“What? No! Look!”

Sam did, only to see flames billowing on all sides of Claude’s property.

The heat smothered them like a blanket, and he heard Annie cry out again, only to have her voice nearly instantly stolen from her by a fit of coughing. Sam, too, suddenly couldn’t breathe—actually couldn’t breathe; for the first time, the density of smoke that wafted in now was enough to choke them all. Taking as shallow of breaths as he could, he thought of that airline regulation, the one where you put your air mask on first, before your kids’, and decided that was both the best and the most useless advice ever. As if he wouldn’t die trying to loosen Astor’s seat belt. As if he wouldn’t drown in this smoke trying to ensure Annie got back through the front door. It was the way he felt about tet spells times one thousand.

Still in the truck, Astor had gone uncharacteristically quiet, her eyes wide as she watched the angry flames out the window get closer and closer, the wind spurring them on. Sam yanked on her hand, his other arm loaded with only what he deemed most essential, with what he always wrote at the top of his priority list: Annie’s cooler and oxygen. Even the medical bag proved secondary right now. Claude had already scooped up Annie and was making an awkward, unsteady sprint toward the front door, her small body wrapped around his midsection like a baby monkey. When Sam put his hand back on the door handle to make a similar exit with Astor, the metal burned his palm; he yelped in surprise at the unexpected, searing pain.

In the driveway, the smoke instantly rendered him blind. Now he understood Claude’s weaving, stumbling gait. He kept his hand tight in Astor’s and made what he hoped was a beeline for the porch steps, pushing through the front door just after Claude.

It felt better in here, just slightly—he could breathe, he could see Annie and Astor breathing, though Annie coughed and sputtered again after being exposed to the air, to a point that had Sam digging blindly through his pockets for her emergency inhaler. He could see Claude struggling to make a sprint for the kitchen.

It was a hazy gray inside, the smoke thicker than in a casino lounge, but Sam could choke out, “Claude! I don’t know if we should stay!” He cast about through the chaos that reigned in his brain for hard facts he might have gleaned through the years: wildfires had an uncanny habit of sweeping right past or over some buildings, even while consuming others. Their mowed field might provide protection, but it just as easily might not. He was certain now that had they stayed in the truck, they’d be dead already. Did the same fate await them here in the house?

Mel’s words rushed in to haunt him. Is this really the hill you want to die on? No, no, no. Never.

But now it was too late. Leaving would be suicide.

But if this house was to be his last stand, Highline serving as the only sanctuary left to them, running the hoses and soaking the roof jumped in priority. Braving the elements one more time, he flung back open the door, running, near bent double, to the closest outside spigot and cranking it all the way open. Would it be enough to keep the lick of the flames from jumping from the field and neighboring rooftops? He just didn’t know, but he ran to the next one, and then the last, ensuring all hoses were flowing.

Claude yelled something just as Sam ran back inside, though he could hardly hear him over the sound of the wind and, now, more water running in the kitchen sink. Claude bent over the tap, stoppering the drain with the little rubber piece Astor usually dropped behind the counter when she was on dish duty. “Get me towels ... all the towels!”

Sam ran for the guest bathroom, on this floor just off the living room, pulling hand towels off the rack and thrusting them at Astor, who’d followed him, crying. “Give these to Claude,” he ordered, refusing to allow himself to stop and comfort his daughter, refusing himself even one stingy glance at the familiar determination in Astor’s young eyes, fearful that right now he wouldn’t find it.

Claude soaked a towel and wrapped it around Annie, who in her drug-induced disorientation tried to yank it back off, sputtering on the cold, wet terry cloth. He ignored her, which was saying something. Annie had had Claude wrapped around her little finger from the day she’d come home from the hospital, already battle-worn from multiple surgeries.

The next time she flung off the towel, Sam urged the inhaler on her, demanding her to breathe on cue, yelling at her really, as she sobbed, eyes bleary and body limp, depressing the plastic button and blindly hoping the medication made its way into her lungs.

He ran up the stairs to the girls’ bathroom next, yanking Astor’s octopus-print terry robe off its hanger and dousing it in water from the tub. His eyes streamed tears: fear, smoke, adrenaline—somehow it had all become the same thing, one chemically driven, emotional ball of synergy that kept Sam moving forward, kept him soaking towels, gave him the strength to stagger back down the stairs under the dripping weight of them.

All the while, his brain played on a loop: How is this happening? They should have had time. He had his go bags. He had his list. He had his timeline. He’d waited for the evac order. Where had he gone astray? He’d never seen a fire do this. In all his years living in wildfire country, he’d never seen anything move this fast.

The wind rattled the windows now, smoke pouring in from even the best-sealed panes, the ones Sam had actually outsourced to a construction crew. He had no idea what was happening outside, only that it was angry and loud. He hadn’t realized fire could carry such noise, but thundering cracks cut the air amid bursts of hissing steam over a never-ending roar like the sound of hydraulic power coursing over a dam. The emergency broadcast still blared its warning, background noise to intermittent BOOM s of his neighbors’ propane tanks blowing up, the fire consuming houses one by one. If he counted booms, would Sam know when they were next? The morbidity of this thought would have shocked him, had any shock value remained possible. But Sam had gone numb inside. Fighting for his life, fighting for his children’s lives, while knowing they were all at the absolute mercy of the elements, shut something down inside him. It was like Sam was back in Afghanistan, where he’d somehow removed his heart from his body, his soul from his actions, to get through a day of combat. And this was worse. So much worse.

Claude, however, seemed to thrive in battle. He worked with singular purpose, stuffing towels everywhere he could at the cracks, along window ledges and under doorways, while Sam continued wrapping the girls like sopping mummies, ignoring their cries and screams and coughs.

“Take them into the primary bathroom. The one on this floor, that has the bigger soaker tub,” Claude ordered, and Sam obeyed blindly—literally, for the most part—even as his mind spun, and he tried to determine whether they should still make a run for it instead or whether hunkering down was truly the smartest choice now. It always seemed so clear when he watched stories like this on the news. It always seemed so obvious, what people should do. He rubbed at his eyes blindly, attempting to see. Nothing is obvious. Nothing is clear.

In the primary bathroom, he spun in an aimless circle. Wait ... did Claude mean put the girls in the tub in the water? Or in the dry tub? What would Mel do? Again, he wondered wildly: Were he and Claude destined to be lambasted in the news media, those people everyone talked about who’d done the wrong thing, walked through the wrong door, put these children at risk for nothing? If so, it was Sam’s fault. All Sam’s fault.

He ushered the girls unceremoniously into the dry tub, layering wet towels and blankets over them. A compromise. Faintly, over the sound of the fire, he still heard the warning siren blaring, but it no longer came from the kitchen, through the radio. What he heard, Sam realized, came from outside, down Highline, and after a moment of letting it register, he identified it as the siren from one of the smaller fire rigs used by ground crews. Like Mel drives. He’d know it anywhere. How many times had he heard its surprisingly loud wail as he visited the station with the girls? How many times had Dave Lewis, or the new kid, Deklan, let Astor and Annie climb into the cab and push the button, running the lights simultaneously? Annie had delighted in it, clapping her hands at the bleep-bleep-bleep reeeeeer coming from the tinny speakers, and all those burly firefighters had gamely clapped hands over their ears and gone about their chores, happy to let the little Bishop girl with the heart condition have her fun.

He ran to the window, remembering belatedly that, just like before, it would be too smoky to see a thing. Wind rattling everything. Rushing smoke into the bathroom like some valve somewhere had been released, opening up the floodgates of a hell Sam had thought existed only in the movies. He squinted: lights filtered weakly through the haze on the road. The sirens grew louder and louder. The girls sobbed, curled up in the tub with towels over their heads, no longer yanking them off, no longer needing to be told to cooperate. Surely they could barely breathe through the towels, but they didn’t squirm under the sopping pile, their little sides rising and falling in a sad, weak sort of obedience. Astor’s arms wrapped around Annie’s stomach, Annie’s face smushed into Astor’s armpit. The heat bore down, worsening by the second now, not by the minute.