Hotshots (2 page)

“What happened to him?”

“He died in the fire.”

“If you want to talk about errors. The lookout didn't see the fire blow up in the canyon and warn the hotshots, either.” Nancy turned toward Eric. The edge in her voice had gotten noticeably sharper. A cold front was blowing into this marriage.

Eric's eyes had come back into the room, but they'd brought long distance with them. “I don't want to argue about that, Nancy,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” she responded.

“Hotshots always have the option of saying no if they think an assignment is too dangerous,” Eric told me.

“And how often does that happen?” I asked. It seemed to me that a person who would become a hotshot firefighter wasn't a person who'd be likely to turn down an assignment because it was dangerous.

“Very rarely,” he admitted.

“You know, sometimes you sound like the government, like you're blaming the hotshots for what happened,” Nancy said. “The major mistakes were made a lot higher up than on the fireline. That's where the buck ought to stop.”

“I'm trying not to blame anybody, Nancy. Sometimes conditions are so severe there's nothing anybody can do. It was a major cold front with winds of forty miles an hour. Nobody could have predicted how fast that fire would blow up. Nobody can control how dry a winter is. Fire fighting is a dangerous and risky business. Every firefighter is aware of that when he or she goes on the line.” Believing Joni's death had been inevitable seemed to be making this easier for him. Fate was a tent that he was hiding under. “I've been on the line myself. I was a firefighter when I was in college,” he explained. “Nancy would like to have been, but they weren't hiring women then. Now they're hiring forty percent.”

“It's the law,” Nancy said. “They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“Joni wanted more than anything to be a Duke City Hotshot,” Eric said. “She was very good at it and she loved the work. Would she want us to sue the Forest Service?”

“
I think she would,” Nancy said. “That report blames the victims, and it criticizes the hotshots for their can-do attitude. What kind of attitude would you expect a twenty-two-year-old hotshot to have?”

The same kind of attitude I had when I was twenty-two and felt invincible: what mattered was keeping up with my peers, who felt equally invincible. “Why don't I read this report and see what I think?” I said.

“Okay,” they both agreed.

“But you should know that I can't take this case if you're divided. It's going to be a difficult and emotionally draining experience.” For them. Although it also had the potential to be very rewarding monetarily for them and me. “The government is going to fight us every step of the way and they've got the resources to do it. It will take a deep commitment from both of you to proceed.”

Eric's eyes turned back to the window. “We'll discuss it,” Nancy said.

“Is there anyone who was at the fire I could talk to? The hotshots who survived?” I asked.

“Joni's boyfriend, Mike Marshall, was there,” Nancy said. “He'll talk to you.”

“Anyone else?” I'd hate to base a case on the account of a man who'd seen his girlfriend die.

“Ramona Franklin was a good friend of Joni's,” Eric said.

“A great friend. Ramona's the lookout who never saw the fire.” Sparks flashed in Nancy's dark eyes.

“Talk to her,” Eric said, handing me a strip of paper with an Albuquerque phone number on it. Nancy gave me Mike Marshall's number and a video.

“Some of the people involved were interviewed on TV. I made a video of it,” she told me. “The Forest Service offered to fly the families to the site. Mike Marshall is coming, and we've been waiting for the right day. You're welcome to join us when we go.”

“Let me read the report first and talk to the other hotshots. If I think there's a case, I'll come.”

They both stood up, thanked me, and turned toward the door. Eric departed two steps ahead of his wife.

2

A
S SOON AS
they were gone I lit my Marlboro and asked my secretary, Anna, what time it was. I don't wear a watch or hang a clock on the wall, proving, if only to myself, that I'm not a bill-by-the-minute lawyer.

“You're gonna be late,” she said.

“How late?”

“Ten minutes if you leave right now.”

“That's not late in New Mexico,” I said. I had a real estate closing to get to at three-thirty—my own. This time the only half of a squabbling couple I represented was myself. I'd left no time to prepare for the closing, but it didn't matter because there's no way I could ever prepare myself for owning a house. So why was I doing it?

One day when I stopped by to see the Kid at his car repair shop in its new North Valley location I took a different route home and passed a house with a “For Sale” sign on it. It was the right material—adobe. It was the right size—about twice as big as my apartment. And it was the right neighborhood—the part of the North Valley outside the city limits where there are still empty fields, minimal zoning, and a small-town feel.

Usually you have to be either rich or poor to own an adobe house; the materials are cheap, but the amount of labor involved is costly. It's not often one becomes available to the middle class. The house I was buying had been renovated, but not too much. It had Saltillo tile and brick floors, vigas and beams in the ceiling, corbels supporting the beams, and a fireplace shaped like half a beehive. There wasn't a right angle in the place. Even the courtyard had adobe's sinuous walls. In the tradition of adobe houses this one used skylights, walls, and the courtyard to create its own private world. Moving into my adobe reminded me of putting on a veil. It can be a good place to hide out.

The house was one lot away from an irrigation ditch, and the cottonwoods that grew there had branches large enough to support several tree houses. The tiny yard had been landscaped with rosebushes, piñon and juniper, and a drip irrigation system. All I had to do was turn the system on in the spring and off in the fall, my idea of gardening. A white horse grazed in the field behind the house. It could be seen through a place where a tree forked between two fences. There was a double-wide next door and a radio tower down the street. That's what made it affordable; some people prefer a tidier neighborhood, but a street where every house is identical makes me feel trapped.

The
house's renovations had been a case of real estate nearly precipitating divorce. The husband had done the work and when he finished his wife had refused to move to the North Valley. He saved his marriage by selling me the house. I smoked three cigarettes on the way to the title company. It was a good house, the price was right. The problem wasn't the property. The problem was ownership—of anything. When you rent an apartment, you can shut the door and walk away. When you own a house, it's always on your mind. Still, the papers got passed. Then I went to my house, sat down on the brick floor, and wondered how I was ever going to fill the space.

Over the weekend the Kid helped me move with his pickup. Nature has a couple of laws about moving, and all of them applied. One: You'll end up arguing with whoever it is that helps you. Two: You always own more than you thought you did. (I could remember when everything I had fit in the back of a hatchback.) Three: You either have far too little or far too much to fill the new space. Four: When it's over, you swear you'll never move again. I had four rooms but barely enough furniture to fill two. The Kid was heading for the second bedroom with an armload of empty boxes when I stopped him.

“They can go in the garage,” I said. “That's what garages are for.”

“What are you going to put in this room?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“I like it that way.” For some people an empty room is a canvas waiting to be filled up, but to me it resembled an open window or a rental car with unlimited mileage and a full tank of gas. I prefer things that remain unfinished.

“Okay.” He shrugged.

He took the boxes out to the garage, set up the TV in the other bedroom, poured me a Cuervo Gold, popped open a Tecate, and called it a day.

“To your new house, Chiquita,” he said, tipping his beer.

“Thanks,” I replied.

He lay down on the bed to watch “Walker, Texas Ranger,” his favorite bad TV show. Chuck Norris had killed four bad guys aboard an airplane and was about to take a dive when the Kid fell asleep.

“You awake?” I punched his shoulder, but he groaned and rolled over. The house would have to wait until morning to be broken in. Moving had tired the Kid out, but it left me too wired to sleep.

By now Chuck Norris was diving for the good guy who had been free-falling for several thousand feet. As he swam through the air, grabbed the guy, and popped his chute, I snapped the show off, found Nancy Barker's tape, and inserted it into the VCR.

It was a channel 12 special investigative report on the Thunder Mountain Fire. Kyle Johnson, wearing his trademark suspenders, conducted an in-depth interview with a homeowner who lived near the
South
Canyon, a middle-aged guy named Ken Roland who had a silver ponytail and a diamond earring in one ear. He was a Californian turned Coloradan, one of those who had fled the formerly golden state. Some Californians end up in New Mexico, more end up in Colorado. Wherever they spread out across the West they increase property values. Compared to California prices, most Western real estate is a Third World bargain.

The camera focused on his trophy home, which was the size of ten houses like mine or one medium-sized hotel. Not a spark had marred the expanse of his cedar-shake roof. The house bordered on a wilderness area and was reachable by a ten-mile dirt road in a Blazer or Mercedes-Benz jeep. It was a private and remote retreat that many people would covet. Kyle Johnson, channel 12's pit bull, was nipping at Roland's heels about the urban/wildland interface and the difficulty of protecting homes in remote areas.

“It's the government's responsibility to protect private landowners from public land fires,” Roland said while the diamond earring sparkled in the sunshine. “I'm very grateful to the firefighters for saving my home. It's a terrible tragedy that those young people lost their lives in the fire.”

The report continued as Kyle interviewed a hotshot who had escaped the fire. Until the hotshot spoke it was impossible to tell if the face beneath the hard hat belonged to a man or a woman. It was an old face on a young body, a face that had been to the mountain and back, way weary and black with soot. “Nine of my buddies died up there,” the hotshot said. “Nobody's house is worth risking a firefighter's life for. Nobody's.”

“Chiquita, please,” the Kid grumbled, pulling the pillow over his head. I zapped the TV off, lay back, watched the shadow of a branch skate across my skylight, and listened to the sounds a house makes when it thinks no one's listening. Someone tossed ice into a bucket in the freezer. Something scurried above the vigas in the ceiling. A valve in the toilet went whoosh, and I fell asleep.

I know a property manager in Santa Fe who sleeps with her lover in all her new listings. The properties she handles are luxury vacation homes with mind-bending views and absentee owners. They have bathrooms as big as bedrooms and bedrooms as big as a house. She doesn't do it for the movie-star-sized beds, for the skylights with a view of the moon, or even to warm up in the Jacuzzi. She does it for the adventure. She does it because it's forbidden.

I woke up in my own house in my own bed where nothing was forbidden to me, but everything was new. “You awake?” I whispered to the Kid. He wasn't, but I put my arm around his skinny body and woke him up. When we were finished the house had been christened.

I got up to make coffee. Once the bed had been set up last night and the TV plugged in, I'd thought I was moved, but in morning's light I saw how much farther there was to go. It would take a backhoe to clean out the dining area. There were boxes all over the kitchen. How could someone who
cooks
so little have accumulated so much? I wondered. I found the kettle, boiled some water, and poured it over the instant. I opened the refrigerator, a reflex action. What had I been expecting to find in there but white walls and metal shelves? Nothing that had been in my old refrigerator had been worth moving. Most of it had been unrecognizable. The brat who resided in the ice maker had a tantrum and heaved some ice. “Shut up.” I said.

There was a brown box from Pastiàn's bakery on the top shelf of the fridge. I opened it and found six pineapple empanadas. “Thanks, Kid,” I said.

“De nada,”
he replied. He was dressed in work clothes. As soon as he finished his coffee and empanadas, he headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“To work.”

“On Sunday?”

“Sí 'Ta luego.”

“Bye,” I said. Men don't mind helping you move the furniture, but when it comes to unpacking the boxes they're gone. I didn't blame him. I was the one who knew where the stuff ought to go, but I didn't want to put it away either.

I took my coffee, went back to the bedroom, dressed in the jeans and T-shirt I'd worn yesterday (my other clothes were still packed somewhere), and clicked on the VCR.

The next interviewee on the Thunder Mountain Fire report was a Forest Service official who looked bone weary. “It's been a gnarly season, the worst season we've ever had,” he said. “We lost nine firefighters here, two in Wyoming, three in California. Three million acres have burned.”

“Why has it been such a bad season?” Kyle Johnson asked.

“A number of reasons: a dry winter, a buildup of fuels, a fire-fighting force that's overworked and stretched thin.” He stopped himself; he'd been revealing too much, forgetting for a moment that he was on camera.