Hotshots (7 page)

We kept on trekking. The eastern slope was as precipitous as the western slope had been, and the going was slow. My toes slammed into the fronts of my running shoes and were turning numb. It felt like the beginning of frostbite. To the north of us I could see an area where the fire had leaped the ridge and burned about a third of the way down, about as far down as we'd come. I began making narrow traverses to cut the steepness, wishing I had a pair of custom-made hotshot boots, remembering a pair of favorite ski boots. It would have been a challenge to ski this slope if I were in shape and if I still skied. When I skied we used to joke about making birch christies, grabbing a tree and swinging yourself around it when you got into trouble. I grabbed a juniper to catch my breath and got a handful of pine tar.

The smell of smoke was stronger. The wind had returned with a vengeance. The afternoon updrafts were whipping the PJ into a jittery dance. The air seemed charged with nervous electricity. I came to a hump in the hill and there, as I'd always known someday it would be, was death staring me in the face. Hogue had seen it, and he turned toward me with the expression of stark terror you see on an unwrapped mummy. Death was behind him and it was the fire this time. Nothing false about the smoke we saw now. The smoke I'd been smelling hadn't been an illusion or the ghost of fire past. A monstrous orange glow filled the drainage. I looked into it and saw bursts of dazzling yellow as trees candled out, fire within the blaze. How had it gotten so big so fast? I wondered. High winds and fuel buildup had to be
the
answer. The trees that had hidden it before were fueling it now. There was a sudden roar like an F-16 taking off, the hiss of Gambel oaks giving up their lives. The heat became intense and seemed to zap the fluids from my body. Fingers of flame explored the side ridges to the north and the south. Directly in front of us the fire blew up to the size of downtown. It was still a couple of city blocks away, but moving fast, a lot faster than I could even with a major pucker factor. For a moment I couldn't move at all. I was an icicle in the face of the flames, frozen in place. My first thought was of the Kid. My second was of my house. My third was that I wanted to get the hell out of there.

“Run,” Hogue screamed.

“Where?”

“To the black.”

He turned and raced up the mountain, pursuing a course diagonal to the fire. I followed. If I'd had a pack I doubt I'd have had the time or wits to unload it. My instinct was to turn my back to the fire, go for distance, and run straight up, but fire, I knew, moves faster uphill than people can. I followed Hogue. The flames crackled and hissed below us. The fire was a hot, hungry dragon and we were its food. My shadow extended uphill and became a monster in the fire's glow.

The black had been visible from the side ridge, but here I couldn't see it because of the trees. Until the trees in front of us burned up we couldn't see how near we were to the black, and once that happened we'd be a part of the black ourselves. I had no way of pacing myself. I just ran as fast and hard as I could. I ran until I was gagging and coughing. I ran until whatever moisture I had left had sizzled out of me.

The fire's hot breath was scorching my back when I saw some black tree trunks ahead. Hogue dove into them and I followed, hoping this was real black, good black, black without the potential to reburn. The fire roared and made a run on our left, consuming the PJ with voracious appetite and speed. It nibbled at the edge of the black, but found nothing to feed on. It burned the PJ with an intense red heat, leaving behind a blinding cloud of smoke. I'd skied in a whiteout once where I couldn't see my hands or feet, didn't know if I was going up or down, didn't know where anybody else on the slope was, and kept calling out so I wouldn't bump into them. Hogue was in here somewhere, but I couldn't hear or see him. “Hogue,” I yelled, but he didn't answer. There were tree trunks in the black, but I couldn't see them either until I collided with one. My forehead smacked into a trunk. My ears were ringing, my eyes were stinging and tearing, my face was bleeding from the tree I'd hit. I was eating, drinking, sweating, and coughing up smoke. Death by smoke inhalation was making death by fire look downright appealing. At least fire was quick. I was desperate to escape from the heat and the smoke. I had an all-consuming thirst that only an IV could fill. I felt nauseous and dizzy, so I got down on my hands and knees and vomited smoke. “Help,” I called until my voice became a pathetic croak. There was some sort of answer, but my brain
wasn't
able to process it. “Here,” I gagged.

There's a place where heat turns to cold, fire to ice, legal business to dreams, and that's where I was headed. In the lore of ice and snow there's always the story of an explorer or skier who becomes crazed by the cold, thinks she's burning up and throws her clothes off. That the opposite could occur in fire was my last thought before I entered the kingdom of snow and came out on a perfect winter day, crisp, clear, freezing. Cold bit my nose and I could see the shape of my breath. The air was clear, but so cold it hurt to breathe. The only way to get warm was to ski fast and hard. The sky was as blue as it ever gets in the East. The snow sparkled like Ivory flakes. There were six inches of new powder, and I was skiing the Rumble alone. It was a side trail where no one could see me, but that didn't matter; I wasn't performing for anybody on the lift. I was out here for Joe and myself, skiing the fall line in linked turns. The snow came over the top of my boots; all I could see of my skis in the fresh powder was the tips. The turns flowed into one another, smooth, quick, easy. I only had to flex my ankles and shift my weight. I was in the zone, queen of the hill, master of my sport. The pain that Joe wasn't alive to enjoy it was the long shadow I was trailing, but if I skied fast enough I could stay ahead of it. I looked down and saw him waiting for me at the bottom of the Rumble. He was wearing a plaid jacket and smoking a cigarette. The smoke expanded, slipping through the trees, billowing, smothering, making me gag and cough.

A voice brought me back to the harsher reality of heat and smoke. “You will be all right,” it said. “This is good black. It won't reburn. The fire cannot reach you here. I'll wrap you in this to keep the heat off and the smoke out. Stay inside. I will come back for you when the danger is over.”

It was a cocoon, a space blanket, a fire shelter. The arms that wrapped me in it were firm and strong. The voice I heard belonged to a woman.

8

W
HEN
I
WOKE
up I was still seeing white, not the blinding white of snowfall or the searing white of smoke but the antiseptic white of a hospital room. A nurse was adjusting the IV I'd been craving. A stern and fit doctor came in to tell me I was suffering from smoke inhalation and dehydration and that he wanted to keep me in the hospital for a few days for observation. I looked up at the dull white ceiling, heard the woman in the next bed gag and throw up, listened to the clatter of food trays in the hallway, and decided that if I was going to be sick I wanted to do it in my own bed, looking at my skylight, listening to the sounds my house made. When I told the doctor I didn't have any insurance, he said he'd consider releasing me the next day.

As soon as the doctor departed an investigator for the Forest Service entered and sat down in a chair beside my bed. His name, he said, was Henry Ortega. He had a long face and a mustache that nestled above his lip like a large, brown moth.

“We're very glad you are going to be all right.” He sighed.

I answered with a gut-wrenching cough that seemed as if it would last into the next millennium.

“I know how you feel,” he said. “I was on the line for ten years and every season I coughed up smoke until Thanksgiving. You were very lucky that Ramona Franklin was on the mountain and carrying her equipment. She found you, wrapped a wet bandanna around your face, and covered you with her fire shelter.”

“That was Ramona who spoke to me?”

“Must have been. Once the fire was extinguished and the smoke died down, a helicopter lifted you out. I thought you would like this.” He presented me with the fire shelter, a crinkly mess of Mylar that probably resembled the surface of my lungs. I knew where it would end up—in the closet of the empty room. Maybe I'd take it out someday if I needed reminding of how close I'd been to becoming a crispy critter. Maybe not.

“Thanks,” I said. My voice was the rasp of someone who'd smoked for two lifetimes or spent one day on the fireline. If I hadn't had any respect for the endurance of firefighters before, I did now. “What happened to Ramona? Did she get out all right?”

Henry nodded. “She had to leave you to save herself. She managed to escape over the ridge into the South Canyon. We found her there, shaking and crying.” Willingly or not Ramona had ended up near the place where Joni had died. “She's been through a lot.” Henry Ortega's eyes were deep and soulful.
Another
poet whose profession happened to be fire. “The hospital examined and released her. We offered her counseling with a trained professional, but she refused.”

“Ramona does things her own way. Is she here? Can I talk to her?”

“She's been released.”

“What happened to Tom Hogue?”

Henry Ortega looked at his hands, studying the fingernails and knuckles that had been outlined by ten years of soot. “He was found dead on the mountain.”

“Oh, God.” That explained why the Forest Service had been so quick to send an investigator. The death of a federal employee in the line of duty gets an immediate investigation. Better the gentle Ortega than some pit bull of an FBI agent anyway. “Where?”

“Just outside the black.”

“Why did he leave the black?”

“We don't know. We were wondering if you could tell us anything.”

“Not much. The smoke was very dense. I lost sight of him. I became confused. I thought I was skiing.”

“You were severely dehydrated. That can cause hallucinations.”

“I called to Hogue, but he never answered. You couldn't tell where you were, whether you were going up or down, the smoke was so thick.”

“That's how Ramona found you, you know. She said she heard you calling Hogue.”

“She wrapped me in her fire shelter and told me I would be all right. I knew it was a woman, but I didn't know who. I was pretty out of it at that point.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

“I thought I heard a voice before Ramona came, but that was all.”

“You will let us know if you remember more?”

“Sure. What caused the fire?” There hadn't been a cloud in the sky, and I hadn't seen any lightning strikes, wet or dry.

“Our arson unit is investigating,” Henry Ortega said. “The chief of the unit wants to talk to you.” He handed me a card with the name Sheila S. A. McGraw on it. The phone number, I noticed, was in the Duke City and it had the same first three digits as mine.

“The office is in Albuquerque?”

“Yes. The Southwest Interagency Coordinating Center is on Gold Street. Will you call Sheila as soon as you get back to town?”

“Okay.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“
Thanks,” I said. This was the man, I thought, who should have counseled Ramona. He had the manner of a gentle priest, and a priest might be more acceptable to her than a counselor in a business suit. Black robes had been around the reservation for a long time. Ortega had been so kind that I suspected a bad cop was lurking outside the door and would come in next to attempt to browbeat a confession out of me, but nobody did. I didn't feel any guilt myself, but that didn't mean I had nothing to confess. Mike Marshall's blowup on the mountain wasn't something I wanted to discuss with the Forest Service yet.

The doctor came back, examined me again, told me I could leave in the morning and to quit smoking. That seemed easy enough now, but who knew how long the feeling would last.

I called the Kid at the shop and could hear his parrot, Mimo, squawking in the background. “Where are you?” he asked.

“In the hospital in Oro.”

“
Híjole!
What happened?”

“I got caught in a forest fire on Thunder Mountain.”

“Are you all right, Chiquita?”

“I'm okay,” I said. “I'm going to be released tomorrow. Could you pick me up in the morning?”

“I can come now if you want.”

“Tomorrow's okay.”

“I'll leave after work tonight.”

“Thanks, Kid.”

“De nada,”
he replied.

Later Eric Barker called. “We are so glad you weren't injured,” he said.

“Me, too. Did you get out all right?” I asked him.

“Mike saw the flames on his way down the mountain. We drove out in his car and called the Forest Service.”

“Ramona Franklin rescued me, you know.”

“I heard,” said Eric. “You'll call us when you get back to town?”

“Yes,” I said.

******

There are several roads that will get you from Oro to Albuquerque. They're all scenic, they all take about the same amount of time. The northern route passes through the small towns of southern Colorado that rely on the resort trade for survival. It crosses the border into Chama and Tierra Amarilla, towns that rely on hunting and beauty for their survival. It's been said that the business of northern New Mexico is poverty, and the towns there are known to be suspicious of outsiders, even outsiders with
Spanish
surnames. But that could be changing. A latte bar, I'd heard, was opening in Chama. The Hispanic route passes through two national forests; much of it is high and green.

Another way passes through Indian country, which has its own allotment of poverty and beauty. The beauty here is in the big blue sky and the streaked red cliffs that reveal different levels of color and time, a white year, a red year, a year of rain, a year of fire. The Indian route goes through a number of the smaller reservations: Southern Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Jemez, Zia, Santa Ana. It misses the big one, the Navajo Nation, but it's still the road northern Navajos would take to get to Albuquerque. It's the road Ramona Franklin must have taken between her two lives. I owed her my life; I wanted to understand her better.