Summer of Fire Part 31

She was losing it. Almost two months of inhaling enough to equal two packs a day, and she had had enough. If . . . when she found Devon, she was going to take her home.

The things she'd bought in Jackson were on her bed, with Devon's picture inside her checkbook. Peering though the drifting smoke, she saw the synthetic bag, a melted lump of plastic. Thankfully, she carried her wallet in her trouser pocket.

Her foot crunched on fallen s.h.i.+ngles as she advanced carefully into the cabin. The inn might have survived, but how old was this building that had seen many seasons of employees and their families come and go? With a thickening in her throat, the ruin reminded her of the falling down homestead of the Suttons.

There was more to lose here than a photograph of her daughter. Clare had only begun to know Laura Sutton through words penned long ago and she wanted more. To know the hards.h.i.+ps and triumphs of a life that had ultimately led to her creation.

The small table where she'd left the book still stood between the beds. There was nothing on it except the lamp, lying on its side with the shade burned away. She started to move toward the table, stepping over fallen boards.

Her foot slipped on the pile of rubble and she fell against the bathroom wall. Looking down, she saw that her boot had uncovered the diary. With a sigh of relief, she s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and headed back to where Steve and Garrett waited.

"There's Nez Perce," Deering told Devon.

Straight ahead of the Huey rose a high peak with a broad, jumbled slope of blocky rock facing them. Sharp ridges splayed out in three directions. The summit was above timberline, with scrubby gra.s.s growing in the fractures between dark rocks.

Jack Owen had said the hikers were being trapped on a ridge by a fire. Seeing a rising smoke column behind the mountain's shoulder, Deering zeroed in on a potential area.

He put the chopper into a dive. Then he leveled off and flew along the west spine. From a few hundred feet away he noted that the rocks were as big as houses. There was no sign that the hikers were sheltering on the barren slope.

"Help me look for these guys," he told Devon through their headphones.

She swiveled her blond head. From the corner of his eye, Deering noted long tanned legs in tight shorts and surmised that Devon's father must have been a big man. Her mother was certainly a lot smaller.

He climbed again, heading up to the ridge crest. The top flashed past and the forest on the east side dropped away beneath. There was the fire, eating its way up the slope.

Deering swung in a wide arc and came back. This time he flew only about a hundred feet off the promontory, fighting the wind that swept up from the valley and mixed dangerously above the spine.

Devon's hands were twisted together in her lap.

The narrow ridge dropped away on either side. The west was barren talus, the east studded with evergreens, the tops of their tall trunks below a rocky patch near the crest. Deering began to whistle tunelessly through his teeth.

He tapped the radio b.u.t.ton to call Jack Owen, but the wind surged up from the west slope. Even with both hands fighting the controls, the chopper swept over the east side of the ridge.

Deering couldn't f.u.c.king believe it. He struggled to stabilize, to achieve some lift. It wasn't happening.

Jesus, why had he brought Clare's daughter? In twenty-twenty hindsight, that was another of his brilliant hotshot moves.

The tail rotor caught the trees and the Huey whipped around. The main rotors sliced at the tops of the pines. The upper part of the slope was steep, dropping away so that there was at least a hundred feet to fall.

All he could do was watch it happen and wait for impact.

The chopper nosed over. It seemed to take a long time, yet he also had the impression of tree limbs flas.h.i.+ng past.

Clare's daughter screamed.

Rocks rushed up. The winds.h.i.+eld shattered.

For an instant after impact Deering kept falling, then his seatbelt and shoulder strap seemed to crush his chest. Metal screeched on rock as the rotors smashed to a stop. The Huey came to rest on its left side and he thought it was over.

Then the chopper seemed to feel the slope. Very slowly, it began an almost gentle roll.

Through a haze, Deering registered that he had to do something. Help, they needed help. He reached to the radio, "Mayday, Mayday."

Things speeded up fast. Once over, the chopper's ceiling became the floor. His seatbelt eased, then tightened.

"West Yellowstone, come in. Mayday." It was bad enough that he'd crashed twice in one season, but he'd promised Georgia he'd be home tonight. In a just few hours, he was supposed to be eating Greek meatb.a.l.l.s and opening a nice jug of red. Everything would be back in place, including his wife in his arms.

The chopper continued its roll. He'd once had a nightmare like this, about being in an elevator that escaped its shaft and swung in a dizzying arc.

He had to get the message out, so that at least Georgia would know what happened.

"Mayday, Mayday."

The familiar words reminded him of landing under fire. The tattered shreds of falling foliage marked where bullets ripped the lush green jungle. How many times in years since, had he dreamed the controls failed to respond to his handling? No matter how he pushed the pedals or moved the cyclic and collective, the Huey hovered, directly in the line of fire.

Another trip upside down and then upright. He tried to focus in the midst of tumbling chaos and saw the shattered state of the machinery in the dash.

"West Yellowstone, I am down on Nez Perce Peak," he tried. Dead air told him all he needed to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

September 7 Clare did not look back as they left the burned-out heart of Yellowstone. Garrett drove in deference to the pain in Steve's knees and she sat between them in the front seat of the tired Park Service truck. In her lap, she carried her great-grandmother's journal.

On both sides of the Grand Loop Road, flames glowed crimson in a ten-mile stretch between Old Faithful and Madison Junction. If these dry weather fronts didn't break soon, the entire two million acres of Yellowstone would end up like the trees that were torching tonight.

July 25th seemed a year ago instead of six short weeks. At Grant Village, she had never seen anything like the tunnel of flame on the narrow, deeply forested road. Tonight, she was deeply weary of watching fire's relentless advance.

Garrett had radioed Ranger Shad Dugan about Devon and received a more satisfactory response than Butler Myers had offered during the siege at Old Faithful. All over the park, radios were crackling to life with a description of a blue-eyed blonde.

Somehow, that didn't help. Even with a day's high in the eighties, nights grew cold. In just a few hours, the b.l.o.o.d.y sun would set for the second time since Devon had left in shorts and a tank top. A shrill admonition echoed from when Devon was two and Clare's mother found her clearly unable to mother her own child. "Don't you let that precious darling go out without a jacket!"

A jacket . . . when it might already be too late.

They rode in silence for miles. Clare felt sorry for Steve who grimaced each time the worn out suspension took on a pothole.

Garrett tuned the truck's radio to the press conference that North Fork Incident Commander Duncan Rowland was conducting at Old Faithful. With a deeply obvious sense of relief, Rowland revealed the inn's narrow escape. He reported the loss of fourteen cabins along with a gasoline tanker truck and storage shed, and gave thanks that no one had been seriously hurt.

When the press conference ended, Garrett shook his big head and snapped off the radio. They left the fire behind and drove through the false twilight of smoke.

Leaving the park's deep forest and broad meadows beside the Madison River was as startling as plunging into cold water. West Yellowstone shone with neon signs advertising Exxon, the Red Wolf Motel and the Saloon next door. When he pa.s.sed Fire Command, Garrett did not slow. "I thought we'd go on to the hotel. We've got a block of rooms."

From Yellowstone Avenue, he turned onto Dunraven Street, pa.s.sing two troop transports. Farther down, the Stagecoach Inn, with Swiss style dormer windows on the second floor, covered an entire block.

Inside the high-ceilinged lobby, a group of uniformed military had staked out the conversation pit before the fireplace. From the hotel bar came the raucous talk and laughter of enlisted men and firefighters. Business boomed even if the townsfolk were livid about lost revenue from the fires.

Garrett shouldered his way to the check-in and doled out keys. Clare noted that Steve's was 218 to her 220. Nodding toward the bar, Garrett said, "We can get something to eat in there after we freshen up."

Clare turned to speak to Steve, but he was limping toward the broad staircase without saying whether he would meet them. Garrett caught up and a.s.sisted him while Steve leaned with one hand on the polished wooden rail. She started to follow, but figured on seeing him later.

Caught without belongings for the second time in three days, Clare bought toiletries and a T-s.h.i.+rt with a grizzly logo in the small shop off the lobby. After a moment's deliberation and weighing her own negative reaction to Deering's coming prepared to Mink Creek, she picked up a discreet small box of condoms. She wasn't sure yet about sleeping with Steve but a powerful wave of temptation surged.

With the box in her bag, she wondered if Steve had been a Boy Scout.

Going upstairs, she appreciated the Stagecoach's rustic flavor with its western style artwork and bronzes, imagining a visit when the carpet was not stained by the tramp of sooty boots.

As she put her key to the lock, she noted that Steve's room was indeed the one next door. Once inside hers, she heard the rush of his shower through the connecting door.

Clare placed Laura Sutton's diary carefully on the chest of drawers. She pressed a hand flat to it as if communing and thought how nearly she'd come to losing her tenuous connection to her great-grandmother in this afternoon's fire. Her hand came away a little sooty so she got a tissue and wiped the leather.

Stripping off her dirty clothes, she went into the bathroom.

Back in July, her reflection had stared at her in the College Station Ramada Inn. At the time, she had believed her day running training sessions at Texas A&M had been a difficult one. Her cheeks had been pink and full from the day's heat, her muscles reasonably fit from lifting weights at the fire station. They had called it an emergency when Jerry Dunn of Toro Canyon had been burned, a minor second-degree blister.

Tonight the woman in the mirror was a stranger.

With skin as nut-brown as her Nez Perce ancestors, her face had gone gaunt and the cords in her neck stood out. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s looked smaller than she could remember since p.u.b.erty and her hipbones defined her flat stomach. More dark roots and a bit of silver showed in her hair.

Somehow, the blond highlights didn't belong to her anymore. In the lobby shop, she had purchased a manicure kit, hoping to clean up the ragged edges of her cuticles. Instead, she used the tiny scissors to attack her bangs.

A pile of clippings mounted on the porcelain sink. With each cut, Clare felt as though she left behind the woman she had been in Houston, emerging like a b.u.t.terfly from its chrysalis. She imagined that the natural dark shades in her hair were her great-grandfather's gift of heritage.

When she had finished, she stared at a ruffled little boy's cut.

What she saw in her eyes still scared her.

In the Stagecoach's Barrel Bar, the knotty pine walls bounced back the sounds of a country music duo playing guitar and keyboard. Clare had caught their act one night with Sherry and Hudson. Then she'd felt differently about the exuberant exhilaration of the fire crews, listening eagerly to each new story of beating back a fire front, getting run out, or rescuing someone in trouble.

Wearing clean fire clothes, Garrett waited for her at a table. He looked at her new T-s.h.i.+rt and the filthy pants she'd put back on. "Something for you from down the street." He nodded toward a fresh yellow s.h.i.+rt and olive trousers folded neatly on the chair next to him.

"You've saved my life." Clare thought of going to change right away, but she was starving. The c.o.ke and candy bar she'd had was a long time ago.

She sank into the wooden chair opposite Garrett.

His serious black eyes held hers. "You doing okay?"

"Better when I find Devon."

Steve came to them through the throng in jeans and the western s.h.i.+rt he'd worn in Jackson. He gave her a quick once-over that included her haircut, but didn't say anything.

She and Garrett ordered frosted mugs of beer and Steve a c.o.ke.

Garrett placed his big hands flat. "I found out where Deering flew off to this afternoon. He went to check out a report of some hikers trapped by fire on a ridge." His expression was graver than she might have expected.

"No one was hurt?" she hoped.

"We don't know. After Deering flew out toward Nez Perce Peak, he never radioed back. It got dark before they could send anybody to look for him."

Clare gripped the cigarette-burned edge of the table. "Oh, G.o.d. Do you think he's all right?"

Steve s.h.i.+fted in his chair and made a face that could have expressed pain or a reaction to her concern for Deering.

Clare's mind flashed to the gilt-edged book on her dresser upstairs. "My great-grandparents were caught by a forest fire on Nez Perce." What if Deering was on that same peak, down for the second time in a summer? He'd told her of his wife's fears.

Pizza came; the frozen kind that got soggy when heated. Clare chewed without tasting. Garrett tried to keep up conversation, but while Steve obliged with talk of the ecosystem's burn recovery she fell silent. Every minute that pa.s.sed made it less likely that Devon was trying to get a message to her.

Before they parted for the evening, Garrett told Clare, "I promise I'll phone your room if I hear anything about Devon, no matter what time."

"Or if you hear from Deering." She couldn't help saying it.

Steve pushed up from the table. His chair squealed on the wooden floor that was littered with peanut sh.e.l.ls. "I'll catch you folks in the morning." His voice was neutral, but Clare detected coolness. He made eye contact with Garrett and pa.s.sed over her.

As Steve took his leave Garrett told Clare, "The park people and law enforcement in the border towns will keep looking for Devon." He put out his hand and hers disappeared into his firm grip. She drew strength from his calm certainty that things would work out.

By the time she reached the long upstairs hallway, she heard a door close near hers with a hard note that sounded final.

Biting her lip, Clare went into her own room and slammed her fist against the back of the closed door. What the h.e.l.l was the matter with Steve? She thought they'd straightened things out about Deering last night.

She killed the hotel room lights, but it wasn't dark. A red glow from the neon hotel sign filtered through the drapes like the eerie night beauty of the Mink Creek. Thankfully, the blowup had stopped her and Deering from having s.e.x. She couldn't call what they'd been about to do making love.

In the half-light, she stripped off her boots, socks, and pants. Wearing only her T-s.h.i.+rt, she climbed onto the king bed and stretched out.

Dammit, she and Steve could be good together. Her breath caught as she remembered the urgency with which he had pulled her to him last night. How his lips had felt smooth against her chapped ones. He'd made her feel connected, something foreign now that she was used to making her own way.

She sensed her heart beating, not faster, but she could feel her pulse as though she was more aware of life flowing through her. Her hands rubbed the quilted, paisley-print bedspread, heating with the friction. Steve's skin would be warm if she stroked her fingers over his back.

With a final adjustment, the tumblers fell into place inside her. The moment when she went from 'what if' to certainty that she wanted to make love with him. There would be time for second-guessing back in Houston if she was wrong about them, but what a lost opportunity if they never tried.

Clare spread her arms and legs and imagined that Steve's weight pressed her as it had in the fire shelter when his eyes had sparked a message. She looked at the connecting door that led to his room.

Steve shed his denim s.h.i.+rt and boots and sat on the bed he'd hoped to entice Clare into. That wasn't happening because it was always Deering, Deering, Deering. What a great pilot Deering was, she'd said. It was Steve's f.u.c.king problem that he was afraid to fly.

He'd had time to go over that one a dozen times on the drive from Old Faithful. If Garrett hadn't been there, he'd have told Clare how it p.i.s.sed him off.

He should say to h.e.l.l with her.

The urge for a real drink, not some sugary concoction, surged. What if he went down to the bar for a bottle?

He reached for one of his boots and started putting it back on. Clare would be gone soon, back to her real world while he continued his role of 'the widower who needs a good woman' in Mammoth.

Steve stopped, his hands at the laces. If he went downstairs, if he started drinking again, Shad Dugan would exile him.

Poised on the edge, he weighed the smoky glow of a good scotch against Mammoth beneath a clear winter sky. White drifts, piled as high as houses, casting blue shadows on the snow. Freezing air stung his nose and lungs while he made the short walk from the old stockade to the administration building. The bar on the door clanked as he pushed into warmth and found Moru Mzima pouring coffee and checking out the cherry pastries someone's wife had baked.