High Desert Barbecue (4 page)

V
an Kamp rose again in his seat, leaning toward his cowering underling.

“
Now get that damned truck out of the front of my building.”

J
ason unfolded his legs, letting blood flow back into the extremities he’d clutched so tightly. Hobbling on tingling feet, he eagerly fled Van Kamp’s office, then set to figuring out how to extract an old, junked pickup truck from a cinderblock wall. Stranded as his team had been in the forest after their Blazer was stolen, they’d fled the fire with the only vehicle at hand—Rollo’s junker.

I
t wasn’t until Jason and his team arrived at the Forest Service office that they discovered the old truck’s handicap in the matter of brakes.

Chapter 7

T
hat evening, Rollo wandered back to Scott’s house by foot, following a weaving course through the streets leading to the small stone-and wood-sided cottage. He sipped slowly at a beer smuggled to the street from a downtown bar and enjoyed the pleasant glow of a day of vice in the city. In his left hand was a paper bag sporting a hardware store logo.

H
e gave a sharp rap to Scott’s front door with the base of the beer bottle, and then let himself in through the unlocked entryway. Within seconds he found himself warding off Champ, who launched an enthusiastic greeting directly at his crotch and could be dissuaded only with a vigorous scratch behind the ears.

A
flurry of motion caught Rollo’s eye as he entered the living room. He made out a brief glimpse of something slim and blonde in mid-leap from Scott’s lap.

“
Nice tits, Lani,” Rollo said. He chuckled as the woman promptly pulled and tugged at the top of her sports bra. He hadn’t actually caught a glimpse of anything, but he never passed up a chance to needle his friend’s girlfriend.

“
Did you find another refrigerator box to live in?” Lani shot back.

S
cott remained motionless, sprawled across the sofa, a broad grin spreading across his face. He wore running shorts and a t-shirt. He and Lani both looked like they’d been through a workout. For Scott’s sake Rollo hoped it was the same kind of workout he himself had enjoyed not long ago, especially since the younger man didn’t have to pay for his fun in hard cash.

“
Hey, Rollo,” Scott called out. “You’re looking shaved, showered and happy. I take it you found what you were looking for.”

“
Yep,” Rollo answered. “Flagstaff is still worth a damn after all.”

L
ani looked back and forth between the two.

“
I’m not sure what you guys are talking about, but I’ll bet it’s disgusting.”

“
What we’re talking about?” Rollo asked, raising his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, I should have been clearer. I went to a whorehouse and got my pipes cleaned. Then I went to a bar and got piss drunk. Which I am now. Well, I would be if I could still drink without feeling like crap. Actually, I barely have a buzz.”

S
cott doubled over in laughter.

“
You really
are
disgusting.” Lani folded her arms and leaned back on the sofa, distancing herself from both men.

M
ostly recovered from his bout of hilarity, Scott jumped in.

“
Is that my new back door latch?” He pointed to the bag in Rollo’s hand.

“
Yep. Get me a beer and put some music on the radio and I’ll go make your house safe and secure. Well, as safe and secure as it was before I broke in. Heh.”

S
cott rose from the sofa and headed for the kitchen, followed by Rollo and his paper bag. Champ trailed them both, grinning and wide-eyed with hope that whatever the two men had planned would involve food.

“
We’re out of beer. You can have water or … huh … water. That OK?”

R
ollo sniffed in disgust.

“
Yeah, water is OK.”

L
ani remained unmoving on the sofa, her arms still folded. After a long 30 seconds of snubbing an empty room, during which time Rollo and Scott chatted in the kitchen and Champ flopped on the tile floor in disappointment, she sighed, hopped off the sofa and turned on the stereo beneath the TV set in the knotty pine entertainment center.

I
n the kitchen, Rollo sat on the floor, staring in dismay at the doorframe. The frame was truly a mess, with the brass lock plate hanging free and a spray of splinters where he’d shoved the bolt through the wood. His head hurt too. He knew he shouldn’t have had that last beer.

“
Damn, I’m strong.” He raised his right arm and flexed his bicep. He accompanied the gesture with a weak grin.

S
cott, standing over him, grunted. Then he sipped at the glass in his hand.

“
Y’know, you’re making me nervous standing there. And isn’t that my water?”

S
cott handed the glass down, but didn’t budge an inch.

W
ith the edge of a putty knife, the seated mountain man pried open a can of wood putty and scooped out a generous blob.

“
No,” Scott said.

“
What?”

“
No. You’re not gluing that mess back together with wood putty.”

“
Well, what the Hell do you want me to do?”

S
cott stared around the kitchen, tapping his foot at the same time.

“
Hell. Tomorrow we’ll go get some lumber and reframe the door. You’ll earn your keep fixing this the right way.”

R
ollo sighed.

“
Fair enough.”

W
ith a patter of bare feet, Lani burst into the kitchen.

“
Guys, there’s something about a wildfire on the radio. It’s out near Williams.” She glanced at Rollo.

“
I told you!” Rollo yelled, jumping up. He was happy to be free of his locksmithing duties. “Those bastards burned me out. Now it’s out of control.”

“
They say they think it was started by a vagrant,” Lani added, still looking at Rollo.

R
ollo turned to face Lani, then wagged a finger and spoke softly. “Lani, I am a lot of things. But I’m not so dumb that I’m going to set fire to my own back yard.”

T
he room was silent for a long moment, then Scott took Lani by the arm.

“
I believe him,” Scott said. “Vagrants may start fires, but Rollo isn’t a vagrant; he’s a feral weirdo. He knows what he’s doing. Let’s see what else we can find out.”

Chapter 8

L
eaping from treetop to treetop, the flames roared across the land. Sucked dry by years of drought, weakened from infestation by bark beetles, and crowded by well-intentioned but ill-considered fire-suppression tactics that prevented small fires from burning brush and thinning the press of trees, the ponderosa forest of northern Arizona had become, potentially, the world’s largest barbecue pit.

T
he fire was reported only after it had burned for several days—unusually late, considering the close watch kept for smoke and flames that could herald a catastrophic wildfire. When firefighters finally arrived, they quickly established lines intended to keep the fire away from populated areas and set back-burns meant to consume fuel that would otherwise become part of the wildfire.

L
ine after line was breached, with fire inexorably jumping ahead and establishing new beachheads. In an area of thin habitation, the flames moved, almost as if with a purpose, through open forest, then outlying settlements, toward the town of Williams and its roughly 3,000 residents.

F
ar from the office of the red-faced, excitable chief ranger, Jason felt at-home. There was nobody here to screech and point fingers. He was in his beloved forest, which he expected would heal from the flames that were already driving out the human invaders.

S
mudged from head-to-toe, Jason surveyed his half-dozen equally sooty colleagues. There were Ray and Tim, in matching crewcuts and aviator sunglasses. Both men nursed aspirations to work for the FBI, but had somehow ended up in the Park Service instead. They might not actually be G-Men, but they could act the role, which was sometimes a little disconcerting—especially when they were leading children’s tours at the Grand Canyon. Even so, they were really good at taking orders and viewed any civilian off pavement as a potential security threat.

T
erry was a fellow Forest Service ranger who shared Jason’s proprietary view of wide-open spaces.

A
nd then came Bob, Rena and Samantha, volunteers from the Center for Floral Supremacy who’d bicycled all the way up from Tucson under orders from Rupert Greenfield, their group’s bearded, cult-like leader. The trio had recovered from severe dehydration, suffered during their ride through the desert, on the floor of Jason’s conscripted living room while Greenfield, Van Kamp and other people Jason didn’t know cooked up the plan that Jason insisted on calling the Carthage Option. Bob, Rena and Samantha were so pure in their dedication to the shared vision of a human-free wilderness, and so neglectful of mere civilized concerns, such as hygiene, that Jason found them a little intimidating.

A
ll of them wore Forest Service uniforms like his, to discourage questions about their presence near a wildfire.

W
ould there be room for them all in the new wilderness? Jason suddenly wondered. They were good, earnest people, but he hoped they wouldn’t crowd him in the world they were making. Maybe he’d have to do something about that; he’d pick and choose among his allies.

L
ike Samantha. He could imagine sharing the forest with Samantha. She was almost doe-eyed … He lost himself in thought, gazing once again down at the hypnotizing flames.

T
he members of the small group all stared, slightly wild-eyed, from the temporary safety of a ridge to their ravenous handiwork below.

I
t’s not easy being radical green, Jason thought to himself.

Chapter 9

T
wo days after Jason looked out over his handiwork, Martin Van Kamp sat sweating and uncomfortable in a stuffy motel room. The diminutive Forest Service administrator sipped at a paper cup of tepid tapwater while trying to find a non-lumpy spot on the bed. His feet barely touched the floor, giving him little leverage to shift his position. So, in his search for a soft perch, he had to hop on his buttocks from position to position, probing for a few square inches that didn’t feel like a sack of old laundry. The room in the low-rent motel jammed in along Flagstaff’s Route 66 strip of cut-rate conveniences for travelers on a budget certainly
smelled
like a sack of old laundry, or at least like a high school locker room.

L
ooking equally uncomfortable, Van Kamp’s counterparts from the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service leaned back in the small room’s two rickety chairs. In rumpled uniforms pasted to their bodies by the ongoing heat wave, and unrefreshed by even the slightest breeze—the room’s one window was sealed tight, with the blinds closed—they glanced occasionally at the TV whispering softly on its veneer tabletop, but clearly preferred keeping an eye on Van Kamp’s acrobatic antics.

S
urrendering to the inevitable, Van Kamp ended his search for a soft spot on the mattress, preferring a measure of dignity to a quixotic quest for comfort in a room that seemed to stand as a shrine to the motel management’s relaxed attitude toward housekeeping.

H
is colleagues were clearly disappointed, and the three turned their gazes to the television.

T
he screen was occupied by a lined, bearded face haloed by a spray of graying hair and partially obscured by the word “LIVE” in excessively large, fire-engine red letters. He looked like a biblical prophet who’d been tracked, sedated, and stuffed into an off-the-rack Sears sport coat.

T
he screen briefly flashed to a pretty, redheaded interviewer who appeared to be crowding the upper end of her teen years, then switched back to the bearded face.