The Searcher (13 page)

M
ORGAN STOOD AT THE EDGE OF TOWN INSPECTING THE RED LINE THE
tankers had painted. The ash was falling thickly around him now. He turned to the crowd and held up a megaphone so everyone could hear. “Okay, everyone, we have a line to hold here. The tankers will be back soon as they can, but we need to do our part and split you up into pairs.”

Solomon sat at the back of the pickup, studying the women in the crowd, wondering if one of them was James Coronado's widow.

“Once you're in a pair,” Morgan continued, “come see me and you will be assigned an area.” He held up a tourist map that had been roughly gridded with a Sharpie. “Soon as you have your area, go there and make it safe. Knock on doors to check that no one's inside, then commandeer as many containers as you can, fill them with water, and soak everything that's flammable, shift any woodpiles and anything else that looks like a bonfire waiting to happen, and keep your eyes open for the first sign of smoke in your area. If you see smoke, call out and put it out before it becomes anything worse. Shovel dirt, use a garden hose, roll on it if you have to, but do not let a fire take hold in your area, you understand?”

There were nods and murmurs. Everyone was subdued now that the tankers had gone and the fire was roaring closer, pushed by winds that seemed angered by the town's attempts to defend itself.

“The fire trucks are spraying down the area immediately behind the control line and will act as frontline defense. Most of the fires are going to start here anyhow, so we'll cover those. Your job is to watch our backs. We need you to stop any small fires from becoming big ones. If we can hold the fire here, it will have nowhere else to go and it will eventually burn itself out or the tankers will come back and put it out. We just gotta hold on here. Y'all think you can do that?”

A small chorus of “Yeah” rumbled up from the crowd.

“Come on,” Cassidy said, stepping forward with his campaign smile. “Don't let me be the mayor who let the whole dang town burn down. Can we beat this thing?”

“YEAH!” the crowd hollered back.

“All right.” Cassidy turned to Solomon. “You got anything you want to add, Mr. Creed?”

Solomon stood up, regarded the assembled faces, and leaned into the megaphone. “You're all going to die,” he said, and watched every expression shift from hope to fear. “But when and where you die is up to you. The tankers won't save you; this will all be over by the time they make it back. Only you can save you. So stay lively, stay alive—and pray for rain.”

He stepped back and smiled at Morgan, who raised the megaphone to his mouth, looking at Solomon like he couldn't make head nor tail of him. “Well, I guess prayer never hurt at that,” he said. “All right then, get yourself into pairs and get busy.”

The crowd quickly split and formed a line in their new pairs in front of the truck. Morgan pointed to sections of the map, marking each one off once it was assigned.

“I don't think that was a particularly smart trick to pull, Mr. Creed, frightening everybody like that.”

“Fear is powerful fuel,” Solomon replied, studying the faces of the women as they filed past.

“So is hope.”

“Yes, but they're already frightened, look at them. Might as well use what we have. James Coronado's widow, she wouldn't be here, would she?”

“No, she would not.”

“Pity.” The wind blew again, a deep roar carrying more ash that stung Solomon's face. He tilted his head back and sniffed the air. He had lost the scent of the rain, the smell of smoke far too strong now. “If we make it through the next hour, I would like to talk to her, if I may.”

“
If
we make it?
If
—don't be talking that way. Of course we'll make it.”

“I
hope
you're right.” He glanced over at the two fire trucks, their hoses sending arcs of water across the buildings closest to the control line. “I
fear
you may not be. How much water do they hold?”

Cassidy followed his gaze to the trucks. “About three thousand gallons apiece.”

Solomon nodded. “I don't see a hydrant system on the streets.”

“That's because we don't have one.”

“So what happens when the fire trucks run out of water?”

“What happ—” Cassidy leaned in, his face flushing red. “If we run out of water, then we'll run hose from the houses and do what we can with that. Hell, we'll start a bucket chain, if that's what it takes.”

Solomon shook his head. “You don't have the manpower. But at least you're getting angry now. That's good. Anger is almost as powerful as fear.”

Cassidy went to say something but never got the chance.

“FIRE! WE GOT A FIRE HERE!” someone hollered.

Smoke was pouring through a gap between two houses a block back from the control line and a little way off the main road. The crowd in front of the truck broke up and started running toward it. Solomon shook his head. The first whiff of smoke and everything fell apart. The town was doomed.

“Go to your area,” Morgan hollered through the megaphone. “Go to your area. Let the trucks deal with this one.” His amplified words cut through the roar of the main fire and the hiss of the fire hoses. “We start running after every fire like this and we will lose this town.”

One of the fire trucks disengaged and sped down the street toward the smoking house, turning its hose to the fire. Everyone else hurried to their section, running now, frightened of the fire and the memory of Bobby Gallagher still fresh in their minds.

Fear.

Solomon could feel it crackling in the dry air. He could smell it, mingling with the sweat and the stench of smoke. Fear was good. Fear could make people do almost anything. Maybe the town wasn't doomed after all.

Another blast of wind brought heat and embers flying out of the desert. The billboard was starting to steam now, the water-soaked images of old-style cowboys looking like they were sweating for real. The fire was coming fast but the heat was coming faster, a solid pressure wave so dry it made the air uncomfortable to breathe. Solomon remembered the coach horses, restless and desperate to run but tethered by their reins. He felt like that too—wanting to run but bound here. He felt like the fire was a part of him, a part of his story.

Only those who face the fire . . . can hope to escape the inferno.

He took a step forward, his feet cracking the red-stained crust of the earth, and stared into the heart of the fire. He could feel the heat of it like a solid thing and he was breathing fast, drawing the hot air
inside himself, feeling like he was part of the fire already. The flames roiled and twisted like something about to strike and Solomon braced himself as the wind gusted and roared in his ears. He felt it buffet his body and rock him on his feet. But the fire did not surge forward. Instead it pulled back, rearing up and away like a horse from a snake.

The wind had changed. The gust of wind had come not from the desert but from behind him. It had come from the mountains.

“You smell that?” The shout came from behind him and he turned and saw one of the medics turn toward the town. “You smell it?”

Others stopped work and turned their noses to the air, breathing in the coal-tar smell of the creosote bush being carried to them on the wind, a smell desert folk learned to identify before they learned their ABCs.

“Look—,” someone else shouted and pointed up at the high mountains. A raft of gray cloud had appeared over the ridge and was sliding fast across the sky. “Rain. There's rain coming. Lord be praised, there's rain on its way.”

Solomon turned back to the fire and stared up at the arch of smoke above his head like the vaulted roof of a burning cathedral. A loop of fire lashed out like a tentacle, whipping across the air above Solomon's head.

“Go away,” he said.

And the first drops of rain began to fall.

The fire hissed and the rain hissed back, falling fast and washing the heat and ash from the air.

Cheers rang out behind him. Cheers, and prayers of thanks, and sobs of relief.

The flames began to shrink away and melt into steam, and rain ran down Solomon's face like tears, soaking his clothes, cooling his skin. A surge of people surrounded him, some still holding the tools they
no longer needed. Arms snaked around his shoulders, a woman kissed him. They were all talking and laughing and treating him as if he had personally summoned the rain in order to save their town. Someone offered him shoes, another asked if he needed a place to stay while he was in town. But there was only one thing he wanted. He turned to Cassidy.

“I'd like to visit Holly Coronado,” he said.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

                                                    —
S
OCRATES

Extract from
Riches and Redemption
—The Making of a Town

The published memoir of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy

The next thing I came across was a wooden box, its surface darkened by wax and wear and splintered open at one corner where it had struck the hard ground. It lay between the wheel ruts, just as the cage had done, with white cotton sheets and clothes spilling out from it and onto the dirt. There were petticoats and aprons, some boy's britches and a pair of men's trousers all scattered and dusty on the ground, the Sunday best of a small family. There was a twist of cloth too, knotted at the corners to make the arms and legs of a child's doll. I scooped this up, imagining the distress of the child who had lost it, but the box looked to be too heavy to carry so I left it in the track along with its spilled contents. As I passed it I saw sunlight glint off a rectangle of brass on the lid and read the name etched upon it—Eldridge.

It was evident the box must have fallen with some force for it to split open like this and yet the noise of the splintering wood had clearly not caused the wagon to stop. The wheels had continued rolling, meandering away along the wide riverbed, following their strange course without break or pause, and I found something deeply unsettling in the way this well-cared-for box with its precious contents had been so casually abandoned.

I picked up my pace, disregarding all previous resolve to take things slowly and preserve both energy and water. I had been anxious for human company but now I feared some misfortune or disease or delirium had befallen the party to cause such aimless transit and the steady abandonment of their belongings.

I had seen things like this before on my travels, items that had seemed so essential at the beginning of a trek steadily losing value as the days and weeks wore on until they became nothing more than a worthless burden. I had once seen an upright piano, standing alone in the middle of a prairie with the stool in front of it slightly askew, as if the pianist had stopped playing then vanished into the air. I wondered now whether the birdcage I had retrieved had not been lost at all but jettisoned, along with the wooden box, to lighten the load on the heavy-laden wagon. Nevertheless I kept hold of the cage and uttered a silent prayer that the wagon party's arrival at the well might revive them and the subsequent appearance of a stranger returning something lost might cheer them still further. I clung to these hopes and pressed on. Then I saw the third thing, and knew that no amount of water or rest or the retrieval of lost valuables was ever going to restore that poor family to whatever former joy they may have known.

She must have been about three years old. Her tiny body curled up the way babies do when sleeping. She wore clothes that would have been too big for her even before starvation had withered her away to almost nothing. She was lying on her side, her auburn hair spilling from beneath a salt-stained cotton bonnet and spreading out in a puddle of dark copper. Her eyes were shut, as if she were merely sleeping, but the dark line of flies clustered around her lashes as they scavenged the salt of her dried tears showed it was a slumber from which she would never wake.

She had been dead awhile, I could smell the rot coming off her as my mule drew closer, and she lay so rigid and flat upon the uneven ground that I could see she had the death stiffness already, that peculiar hardening of the flesh that takes place in a body a few hours dead. I imagined the girl curled up on the floor of the covered wagon, perhaps the smallest of a family all lying in the wagon alongside her in exhaustion. This would explain the unusually deep wheel marks in the dirt. Folks generally walk alongside their wagons during the heat of the day to spare the horse—but not if they are dying.

Maybe the poor girl had been shaken loose by the jostling of the cart as her body started to stiffen. Or someone had pushed her out to rid the wagon of her growing smell and lighten the burden some, though the poor starved thing could not have weighed much more than a sack of coffee. I like to think it was the former, though I know what survival and being close to death will make a person do. God knows I have been to the edge of that dread abyss myself.

I kicked my mule onward, whispering a promise to the dead child that I would return as soon as I might and properly commend her soul to God and bury her deep enough in the ground so that scavengers would not nose her and dig her up for a meal. And though it pained me to abandon her that way, I knew my Christian duty lay with the living, if any of the wagon party lived still, and I doubted but they were too far ahead of me.

My mule was laboring now, sweat foaming around the saddle straps, but I had no water to spare and precious little for myself so I pushed on, knowing that somewhere ahead of me, where the ground began to rise up to the twin mountain peaks, I would find fresh water and here my mule could rest and drink, and so could I.

I saw the trees first, a small thicket of mesquite, the crowns
rising darkly beyond the bleached banks of the dead river, then, as I spurred the mule on in prospect of shade, I saw the wagon. It had come to rest in the first fringe of shadow, the dusty canvas of its cover standing out against the dark background of the trees. I took the wagon's rest as a good sign, imagining the party's horse must have halted the moment it came upon water.

I entered the shadows and felt the instant relief of it. The temperature beneath the trees was many degrees cooler than out in the crucible of the riverbed and it took my sun-scorched eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloom. I blinked away my sun blindness as my mule trudged closer and saw the horse, not halted at a water hole but lying on its side, its foam-flecked hide stretched tight across ribs that were sharp-edged and still. It looked like it had been dead for days, but I knew this could not be so. I smelled death and saw the flies in thick clouds, seething about the horse and wagon. I reached the wagon and peered through the rear flap.

Flies were everywhere, thickening the air and crawling over every surface, so many that I wondered how they had hatched so quickly. There were three people inside, a mother and two children stretched out one next t'other between sacks of dry goods. They were folded into each other as if in some deep slumber, the woman on the left, one arm raised as a pillow for her head, the other draped over a boy of around twelve. He in turn had his arm around a girl of five or six and it was the sight of her that nearly undid me. Her arm too was extended, the arc of it preserved by the death stiffness over a small empty space on the bare boards of the wagon floor. This was where the tiny child I had found on the track must have lain until death and the movement of the wagon had edged her away from her family. There was something unutterably beautiful and unspeakably sad about this and I offered a prayer for them all, which I did
silently, not daring to open my mouth on account of the flies and a fear that if I tasted that foul air I would never again rid myself of its flavor.

I said an amen then maneuvered past the wagon where I expected to find the last of the party, the man of the family, fallen by the horse he had led here. But I did not find him lying on the ground.

I found blood.