Firestorm-pigeon 4

Nevada Barr 1996 - Firestorm
Chapter One
IF SHE'D HAD a foot fetish Anna would have been an extremely happy woman. Cradled in her lap was a prime example of pedis giganticus belonging to one Howard Black Elk. More mole foam than flesh was visible.
"Fighting on slopes keeps tearing 'em off," Mr. Black Elk told her between gulps of Mountain Dew. "Anybody but you does 'em they're gone by lunch. You got the touch."
Absurd as it was, Anna took great pride in the durability of her blister dressings. Caesar's army may have moved on its stomach, but firefighters moved on their feet. After ten days of skirmishes, the army battling California's Jackknife Fire was proceeding a bit gingerly. The line queued up outside the medical unit tent was Anna's barometer, and the pressure was rising. Sho-Rap, the Shoshone and Arapaho firefighting crew out of Montana, seemed to suffer more than most. Maybe because they were big men. Even with the protective fire boots they were required to wear, gravity hit them harder.
Anna eased the ruined dressings off Mr. Black Elk's foot and examined the carnage. Black Elk was an Arapaho Indian but he wasn't with the Sho-Raps. He was a member of the San Juan crew from the southwest. "You busted open the blisters," she accused.
"Got to let 'em drain."
"No you don't. They'll get infected." She looked into the man's face to see if she was getting through to him. "Are you going to quit that?"
"You betcha."
Anna didn't believe him. She cleaned the ball of his foot and his heel with hydrogen peroxide. When he winced at the sting she said, "Serves you right."
A heady sense of Normandy, Tripoli, John Wayne and Twelve O'clock High reverberated through fire camps. Like everyone else, Anna reveled in it. A soldier's life—particularly in a war where death was highly unlikely and the battle soon over—was a life enhanced with an illusion of importance untrammeled by responsibility. Orders were simple: climb, stop and dig. Hard physical labor and the ability to sleep on rough ground were all that was asked. Anna found peace in the freedom from choices.
With great care, she began reconstructing the protective barriers of foam, Second-Skin and bandages on Mr. Black Elk's foot. The rest of the San Juan Plateau crew began drifting over from the chow line to swell the ranks waiting for medical attention.
The San Juans were an interagency crew with firefighters from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. Three of the firefighters were from Mesa Verde National Park, Anna's duty station. Anna had arrived independently when the call went out for more emergency medical technicians to man the medical units. These units provided care to the firefighters in the spike camps. As the Jackknife cut a black swath through the Caribou Wilderness and Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California, Incident Base—the main camp housing supplies and command headquarters—needed units closer to the fireline. Small camps, called "spikes" by firefighters though officialdom no longer used the term, were springing up like fire moss.
"You guys with blisters go ahead and take the dressings off and clean your feet with peroxide," Anna said to those waiting. "I think Stephen's got a spare bottle."
"Go easy with the stuff," Stephen Lindstrom, the other EMT, said. "We won't have any more till tomorrow afternoon."
Lindstrom was with the Forest Service out of Reno, Nevada. When Anna and three crews had been spiked out nineteen miles from base camp, she'd begged for and gotten him. Efficient and gentle, he was one of the better EMTs she'd worked with.
"How 'bout I get you some dinner before them hogs swill it all down?"
Anna looked in the direction of the familiar Memphis drawl. Jennifer Short, a seasonal law enforcement ranger from Mesa Verde, leaned against a sugar pine near the outdoor examination room Anna and Stephen had pieced together from a ground cloth and twelve folding chairs.
Jennifer had been on the Jackknife fire for seven days, one day less than Anna, and she was still wearing makeup. Anna couldn't help but admire her. Anybody who stuck to their beliefs under duress deserved respect. The sooty fingerprints around her nose and the trails of sweat running through her dust-coated rouge only added to the effect: bloody but unbowed.
"Thanks," Anna said. "Stephen, want some supper?" Belatedly she asked Jennifer, "Would you mind?"
"Why I'd just lie down and die if he said no," Jennifer said, and winked.
Dividing her time between bites and blisters, Anna managed to finish her supper and thirteen feet in the next hour. Kneeling at the fourteenth and last, she began unlacing a well-worn, custom-made White's fire boot. "Helps if you remove your boots for me," she said mildly.
"My feet's not what hurt."
Anna rocked back on her heels and took in the face attached to the expensive boots. "San Juan crew, crew boss, right?"
"John LeFleur." The firefighter stuck out a hand with spatulate fingers reminiscent of the toes of Amazon rain forest frogs Anna'd seen hopping through various PBS specials. She forced herself up from her knees. Cold, fatigue and hard beds were taking their toll. Getting old, she chided herself. Once hard work had made her tougher; now it only made her tired. She stuck out her hand and, trying for a pressure that was manly without being macho, took LeFleur's.
His bottom lip was swollen and bruised. Dried blood caked where the skin had split. "Does your face hurt?" she asked. The third-grade insult, "Because it's sure killing me," flickered nonsensically through her mind, but John LeFleur certainly wasn't hard to look at. Anna had him pegged for forty-five or so—his hair was still there and still brown. The nasolabial folds chopped like hatchet marks in his weathered face; heavy brows protected blue eyes.
"Walked into a door," he said, fingering the injury. "All I need's a cold pack."
When Anna returned from the tent with the desired item, the man was lighting an unfiltered Pall Mall.
"Can't get enough smoke on the fireline?" Anna crushed the cold pack to mix the chemicals that provided the cooling effect.
"I'm an old fire horse," LeFleur admitted. "One sniff of smoke and I start to snort and stamp. This is my thirty-seventh project fire. My eighth in California."
Anna was impressed. What she said was: "My, but you must be old."
"I can still work most into the ground." The crew boss took the cold pack and pressed it against his lip.
"You'd have to look a long ways to find a door up here," Anna commented.
Sudden anger flared in his voice and his eyes. "If I run into it again, I'm going to bust the son of a bitch up for kindling."
Anna let the remark pass without comment. Spike camp was too small a world to make enemies. As far as she was concerned sleeping dogs could lie or take the first ride down the mountain.
Since no new pilgrims had arrived at her canvas Lourdes, Anna sat down next to LeFleur while he enjoyed his cigarette. From inside the shadowed tent she could hear Stephen busy with the inevitable litter left at day's end. In a minute she'd go help him. At the moment it felt too good just to sit.
Light was draining from the sky, taking the day's heat with it. Anna rolled down her sleeves and hugged herself. The camp was situated on the back of a mountain ridge amidst a landscape of mountains cresting like waves in every direction. To the west and southwest the trees breathed up black smoke. As the day faded, pinpricks of orange blossomed.
A garish blood-red sunset fired the sky, the last rays bending through smoke so thick the neck bones of Lassen Peak were obscured. Near the horizon the smoky pall blotted out the sun. Higher up, smoke sucked fire from the sun and burned in the heavens as the Jackknife burned on earth.
Anna shoved her hands in her pockets to retain their warmth. "The end of the world looks pretty doggone festive, if you ask me," she said.
LeFleur stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his boot then shredded the paper and scattered the tobacco. "That's where we were today." He pointed across a narrow valley to a burning hillside. "We cut line to that outcrop of boulders and tied into the dozer line."
The area he pointed to was on a steep forty-percent slope and choked with dog-hair thickets.
"Bitch of a climb," Anna said.
"Try it with a chainsaw on your shoulder." LeFleur lit a second Pall Mall and contemplated his day's work. "I'm going to be out of the game soon if I can't move into management. Time to leave the backbreakers to the kids."
Since he didn't seem to be talking to her as much as to himself, Anna felt justified in changing the subject. "Speaking of kids, how did Jennifer do?" The Jackknife was Jennifer's first fire. Her red card and fire boots were both so new they squeaked. After working with Short in Mesa Verde, Anna had developed a reluctant fondness for the southern belle.
"Fireline's no place for a woman."
"Did she screw up?"
"No."
"What then?"
The crew boss laughed. "You're not going to drag me into that. You know what I mean."
Anna did and quelled an urge to bite the man. Anna had served her time on firelines and knew quarter was given to no one. On her last three project fires she'd gone out as a medic or security or, as in the case of the Jackknife, both. The work was less backbreaking and more challenging, if not physically, then cerebrally.
"Jennifer kept up," LeFleur said finally.
"Don't dress it up on my account," Anna said dryly.
LeFleur laughed. "She's okay. Works right along. She's got blisters on both her hands but never complains about anything but how big her butt looks in NoMex," he said, referring to the baggy, fire retardant wool pants all firefighters were required to wear.
"A wolf in femme fatale's clothing," Anna said with satisfaction. Abruptly, she asked: "Are you married?"
"Are you offering?"
Anna squirmed figuratively, if not literally. She was tempted to tell him the information wasn't for her but knew whatever she said at this point was bound to sound lame. "Just making conversation." Letting it go at that, she watched the reds deepening into night. Darkness was brought on early by smoke. Sparks of orange, just hinting at the vastness of the burn before sundown, pricked the sides of mountains in three directions.
The coming of night had hushed the constant growl of retardant aircraft and the helicopters that chopped into the heli-spot below camp. The small sounds of raccoon, deer, owl, coyote and cougar had been silenced for eight days. In its infancy, the Jackknife had made a name for itself by taking two newsworthy sacrifices: a young man camped out near Pinson Lake and his dog. Tabloids had made hay with photos of the charred remains of the pooch while thousands of wild things lost went unmourned.
Anna didn't mourn them now. Tiny corpses left behind by fires—squirrel, fawn, bunny—didn't sadden her as they once might have. Wildland fire returned many needed things to the earth.
An icy breeze was sucked down through the trees. Fire raged over thirty thousand acres of prime timberland. Creeks boiled dry, birds fled, fledglings died in the nest, smoke hung in the valleys for a hundred miles, and still Anna could not get warm. She buttoned the top button of her shirt and turned the collar up. Soon she would have to go in and get her coat but she was not yet ready to move. The folding chair and ground cloth felt like home. Marooned as it was, an island of life in a sea of black and flame, the tent village seemed cozy.
Three twenty-by-fifteen-foot tents, their white canvas reflecting the evening light, were clustered around a central clearing. Time Keeping operations were housed in one of the big tents. It was there hazard pay, overtime and wages were recorded. The LeFleurs of the world might fight fire for the love of it, but for most it was a living, a way of making ends meet.
The San Juans were housed in the second tent and Anna and Stephen shared the last with medical supplies and emergency gear. East of the main tents—and hopefully downwind—was a slum of blue Porta-Johns. The honey-pot industry was one place Anna was against unisex application. Privately she believed the Shoshone lost to invading armies because they had such lousy aim.
Between the tents and the toilets was the mess area; twice a day meals were trucked in from base camp. A long table lined with basins and soap for washing was just beyond. Cubies— square, plastic five-gallon containers for water—were stacked in a translucent wall on the far side of the table. Basins and table alike were smudged with the ubiquitous soot that tinged hair, nails, skin and clothes of everyone in spike camp.
Down at Incident Base, showers housed in semi-truck trailers with their own generators for hot water provided the crews with some relief from the endless grime. In spike camp dirt not removable with basin and towel remained for the duration. Long-haired firefighters—and at this camp they were in the majority, with twenty men from Sho-Rap and four women including Anna—kept it braided back. After an hour on the fireline, hair took on the consistency of cotton candy.
LeFleur finished his second Pall Mall. Night was upon them. He handed Anna back the spent cold pack. "Bedtime for this boy."
"Watch out for doors," Anna said as he left.
Laughter from the medical tent lured her from the night.
Jennifer and Stephen were wrestling with an uncooperative Coleman lantern. Providing more laughs than light, they argued about the perfect number of pumps required to create the ideal pressure in the lamp's fuel chamber.
As Anna came in the Coleman roared to life and the peace of the evening was pushed aside. Obnoxious though it was, the harsh light was necessary. For the next couple of hours Anna and Stephen bandaged cuts, handed out analgesics, mole foam, nasal spray, hand lotion and, when called for, sympathy.
Near midnight they crawled into their sleeping bags, laid out on the unheard-of luxury of army cots. In less than five hours they'd be back at it, packaging feet for another day on the line.
In soft beds and climate-controlled bedrooms Anna had trouble sleeping. At fire camps the nightmares left her alone. Exhaustion claimed mind and body during the brief respites allowed.
From the modest confines of her yellow fire-issue sleeping bag, she squirmed out of her underwear: plain, white cotton; underpants that wouldn't melt at high temperatures and adhere to the flesh. The western forests might burn but Anna's underwear shouldn't ignite.
"Got the scoop on John LeFleur's lip," Stephen said as Anna dropped the maidenly garment to the floor. Lindstrom loved to gossip. One of his endearing qualities, as far as Anna was concerned.