Tide King (21 page)

“A midget.” Lane nudged Johnson and pointed his head over to the jukebox. “Can you believe it? Little Cindy, she calls herself.”

Johnson ceded she sounded familiar. He'd probably heard her on the radio on the miles from Ohio to Montana. He listened to the radio or he sang out loud, out of tune, to crowd out the other songs that cried like mythical sirens from just beyond his ears: the war, his parents, Stanley, and Kate. He did not know whether second chances existed, and if they did, whether he was deserving of one, but he was alive, by chance or by design, and he did not want to dwell on the choices he had made to this point. He was afraid that he would choose to relive the past, to rearrange facts that had no bearing on the present situation, a ghost walking across the foyer, its ancillary object long disintegrated.

“This here is Johnson,” Lane said to the leathered man to his right. “His truck rolled off MacDonald Pass this morning.”

“No shit.” The man laughed, moving empty shot glasses on the bar like a magician trying to hide a ball. “Your wife in it?”

Johnson took his own whiskey and set the rim of the glass to his lips. He drank before speaking. “You know Stanley Polensky at the Park service? I come to see him.”

“Never seen him here. Probably a boy scout. All the rangers are, mostly. The only boys who'd touch a drop are the smokejumpers, and hell, I'd be drinking too if you were going push me outta plane into a forest fire.” The man coughed, wet and phlegmy, wiping his bulbous nose and stubbled jowl with the back of his hand. “What, you looking into forestry work?”

“Maybe.”

“This here is collateral central for the fires, ain't that right, Lane?”

“They have been known to round up the drunks here, give them a Pulaski axe, and tell ‘em to cut fire lines.” When Johnson's face didn't register, Lane waved his hand. “You know, dig ditches in front of the fire—contain ‘em.”

“I ought to go find Stanley right away, see about a job.” Johnson stood up as Lane's hand pressed on his shoulder.

“I'll drive you over there, Johnson. It's only over in Nine Mile. Let's have a few drinks. Let's celebrate your good fortune. Who knows, maybe you'll want to take the summer off, like me, wait out the dam jobs. All right?”

“All right—just one more,” Johnson agreed as Lane signaled for the bartender.

The bar's occupants had multiplied steadily over the hours, and not because Johnson began to see two of everything. The sharp clack of billiard balls, laughter, smoke, bodies, and heat crowded into Johnson's back and in his brain, a sweet confecture, and he had not thought of Kate for a few hours, making him happy and disappointed at the same time.

He thought about his truck, a pulverized animal in a gulch of the Rocky Mountains. He tried to remember whether there was anything he needed in it—personal papers, a clean shirt, everything and nothing. He thought about his finger. If he could only find Stanley, straighten this out. Perhaps he'd find him today, tonight, and it would all be over. He stood up and went outside. The heat hit him like a train as it wafted up in waves from the road. The sky, so far away, seemed like blue glass, reflecting the heat back to the earth, cooking the drunken stew in his blood and his stomach. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He wanted to go home, back to where everything made sense. He was not sure where that was.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the smoke, a small plume from the mountains, like a giant smoking a pipe. He heard the heavy clank of suspensions, the churn of engines as the trucks came down the road, trucks that bore the green and white shield of the Forest Service. Equipment rattled around in their beds, and instead of passing by the bar they slowed and pulled into the crowded parking lot.

“Get in.” One of the rangers, a thin, wiry man who emerged from the first truck nodded at him. “We need all the warm bodies we can get.”

He found Lane cradling his head on the bar and hooked him under the armpits, dragging him out onto the dusty gravel before climbing in a truck full of men with bulging eyes, lopsided grins. He looked around for Stanley, even though he would not be among these men, the flotsam and jetsam of Helena. The smell of burning wood and brush had reached the road, and the smoky plume had become a monstrous cloud. He felt the shift of gears in the truck, its wheels begin to roll, and they were on their way, drunks to a forest fire.

From the truck, they climbed into a boat that took them down the Missouri river. There were no roads; pine-studded cliffs rose hundreds of feet on either side of the river, as if the hand of God himself parted them. In pockets of lower elevation bobbed little docks for boats that ferried picnickers and sportsmen and rangers into a territory that had seen little taming since the days of Lewis and Clark. From the boat the cliffs grew, straight, long molars that had erupted from the ground.

They could feel the heat before they even got to the base of the gulch, where the fire burned. They could hear it along the road that wound around the base of the gulch. It snapped branches, sending random pops through the air, along with the crackle of drying, burning leaves. Johnson could feel the heat and the smoke line the bottom of his lungs, a velvet aftertaste of soot and carbon. They disbanded the trucks in single file and a man, tall and pocked-faced with a prominent nose and high forehead, stood before them. Johnson studied the quick efficiency with which the man moved, as if every second on earth were calibrated with the same urgency. The man studied them quickly as he assigned them their tools: Pulaski, two-person saw, shovel, water can. He assigned Johnson the Pulaski, a wooden shaft with an axe on one end of the head and a pick on the other. Johnson felt he must have appreciated his broad shoulders and back, certain that he could chop down small trees standing in the fire's path and break open the earth, parting the dirt into a chasm, a fire line, that the fire could not jump across, thirsty for more fuel.

“All right,” the man, Mantee, spoke, and his voice was sharp, like metal, clipped. Johnson wondered whether he had been a corporal or a sergeant. “We've already dropped thirteen smokejumpers in to flank the fire and keep it on the south side of the gulch. You're to meet up and support them, building a fireline and clearing shrubbery. I'm your foreman; you listen to everything I say. At no time during a fire are you ever safe, so always keep yourself between the river and fire. You might need to escape to the river if the fire gets out of control.”

The twelve men seemed to slouch collectively as he set them at rest, the saws and axes suddenly more burden than they could care to handle. The memory of ice-cold beer in frosted glasses back at the bar grabbed at their hearts like a first girlfriend. The heat swooned heavy over them, buckling their knees and soaking their brows, and they had not even broken camp yet.

“Okay, let's move.” Mantee picked up an oversized water can with one hand, clutched a compass in the other. “Last report from the radio tower had the front of the fire about two miles from the river.”

Johnson found himself next to last in line. Lane had made sure to get behind Johnson, giving him a wink and grin.

“What the hell happened to your hand, Johnson?” Lane pointed to his left hand, his smile wiped into a frown. Johnson expected to find it suddenly missing, mushroomed to the size of a sausage or covered in blood, oozing gangrene. The way it should have been. Relief washed through him, warm like piss. But he held his finger up to the sky and found that nothing was wrong—the peach pit from earlier that morning had shrunk to its more regular shape of oversized marble, the color and texture of skin uniform with the rest of his hand. He squeezed and wriggled, felt no pain.

But Gustafson had seen it too, the malformed member before its renaissance of health. And Johnson knew, for the first time, that he was not crazy.

He could not think about it now. They walked through a thick growth of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, a tinderbox of needles that lashed at their faces. Above them, a blue china sky became milky with grey plumes. Ahead, a clearing beckoned; beyond, one could see the slurry orange lollipop of fire that tumbled slowly down the south side of the gulch like a slinky. As they got closer, Johnson could see that it moved in waves, dancing a little bit forward, backward, before making short sprints across fuel-heavy areas. Still, it kept under the tree crowns, away from the branches and leaves. They would start the fire line in the clearing, he heard Mantee say from the front of the line, men separated ten or twelve feet apart, digging trenches that would meet up at both ends. It was not much different than the war, he reckoned, except the enemy could grow exponentially and unexpectedly. And these men were not soldiers; they were drunks, slurry-smile good ol' boys and liars.

“Johnson,” Lane said behind him, and Johnson glanced over his shoulder as Lane doubled over against a tree, the remains of his last three or four whiskeys watering the base. “Christ, the smoke's so thick.”

“Come on.” Johnson felt little earthquakes in his stomach as he straightened up Lane by the armpits. “Don't think about it.”

Before them, the faint smoky shadow of the tree line seemed to go on forever, thicker and with a glimpse of an upward slope—perhaps the northern side of the gulch. They were on the far arc of the fire trench, working toward its middle. But already they could not see the men twelve feet in front of them; the smoke and the heat crackled as intimately as if they were in a closet. Johnson bent his knees low, trying to find the heavier, cooler air near the forest floor. Each time he swung the Pulaski behind his back and speared it into the ground, it was as if he was spearing himself and not the earth. Pain and nausea zig-zagged through him, and he could no longer see the trench he had begun. He thought he heard the voice of Mantee calling to the men.

“What is he saying?” He shouted to Lane, who rested on his knees behind him. He did not know whether it was fire or voices, the screaming white noise, but he knew his hands burned with such intensity he could see the flesh begin to redden. He nudged Lane, who fell to his side. A roar swept around them, like an eighteen-wheeler or a train bearing down on them, and Johnson turned to see if such a calamity was possible.

But it was the fire, the giant swell of burn that consumed the oxygen in ragged, hungry breaths through its insatiable mouth. The fire had moved upward into the crowns of trees maybe seventy-five yards away.

“Run!” He shouted to Lane, but he couldn't even hear himself, only knew that his mouth had formed the words, and to back them up, he grabbed Lane's arm and began to pull him through the growth and up the slope. They were a quiet breath machine, tongues leaving the caves of their mouths as they opened them wide to breathe the thin air, hot and filled with smoke. It burned at their lungs and stung their eyes; bright red and blue stars filled their vision and their legs seemed filled with cement.

The fire was twenty yards away, maybe less, and Johnson could feel the heat in waves at his back, his lungs gasping for the thinning air. He saw Lane drop beside him, his boots kicking stones and roots down the hill as he scrambled for footing on the ridge. They were thirty yards, maybe more, from the top of a ridge and would not make it. Johnson thought of his finger and had an idea. He pinned Lane to the slope with his body and tucked in his flailing limbs as the fire burned over them, a howl of flames and crackling wheat grass and smoke and wave upon wave of searing air until it was quiet and they lay on the black slope, the ashes falling over them like snow.

“Jesus, are you okay?” Lane wriggled underneath Johnson, but Johnson could not answer. He rolled slightly to the side, feeling cold on his back and legs. He reached around and touched where his shirt, his belt, would be and felt oily, separated flesh, hard blades of rib. He looked down at his feet and saw the heels of his boots melted against ankles, his pants burned away or grafted into what remained of his skin. He opened his mouth to dislodge the sand-papery sack of his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and when he worked up enough precious saliva, he spoke.

“Are you all right?” he asked as Lane scooted away from him.

“Oh dammit, Johnson. Oh jeez. I'm okay.” He patted an earlobe, singed, and brushed at some minor burns on his hands and legs. “Oh Christ, look at you.”

“Give me some of your water.” Johnson looked, reached for Lane's canteen, which had been buried under his stomach.

“Sure, buddy, sure.” Lane made a face as he unscrewed the cap. His hands shook as he held out the canteen to him. “Where do you hurt?”

“I don't hurt anywhere,” Johnson answered. He was euphoric, actually. “Just thirsty.”

“Yeah, I imagine you wouldn't,” Lane answered, and Johnson knew vaguely what he meant. He remembered when he was in the army and received treatment for a shrapnel burn, how one of the nurses had explained that sometimes burns can be so deep that the nerves are burned as well. Those patients, she added, usually died. “We need to get you out of here.”