—
From a distance it’s difficult to see smoke in the nighttime. It can appear no different from a storm moving in. It’s the air that is different, and the soot that falls on a person’s windshield and clothing. And sometimes it’s the great, loud popping sounds and the whoosh of heat wind.
I smelled the fire before I heard Colm call it in to dispatch. I had turned off 139 and was about ten minutes south of BLM 23, driving at high speed with my lights flashing on top of my vehicle.
“Dispatch, Command, ten-seventy-two, wildfire. Ignition spot estimated at 20-Charlie and 36-Quebec. Subjects are in the area, exact location unknown. Request full assignment, Code Three.”
I picked up my radio speaker. “Alpha One, Command and Dispatch, can you give me a ten-twenty on Deputy Scholtz and the boys? Over.”
“Dispatch, Alpha One and Seventeen, evacuate the area, do you copy?”
“Alpha One, Seventeen, do you have the boys with you?”
But Dean didn’t answer. I continued en route. Engines and medics were responding to the scene, working channel F3. Because Dean and the boys were on foot in the area, and because Trip Mortenson’s ranch abutted the canyon to the southeast, the area had become a mandatory fire exclusion zone. Alarms went out to BLM fire dispatch offices in Rio Mesa and Rangely. Within hours the fire could be suppressed, but the winds were unpredictable. And there were the oil pits to contend with. I could only wonder if Joseph and Corey had inadvertently started the fire, but there was no way I was going to evacuate the area without those boys.
The BLM road I was driving would be the same exit route of Joseph and Corey and Dean. The smoke swept back toward the fire, as if a vault had been opened, sucking in the air. The winds were now blowing from the northwest and would be pushing the flames into the draws south of Bowman Canyon. I watched the smoke, tried to gauge the wind. Heat sources created their own currents, and an explosion in the area from one of the oil pits could change the course of the fire’s path.
“Come on, Dean,” I said out loud. And all the while I peeled my eyes for some sight of Joseph and Corey.
—
She heard the breeze. She smelled fresh burning wood, like the Douglas fir she and Farrell used to heat their home, like campfire, but her head felt dizzy, and she did not know where she was, and the ground was rocky beneath her. And then she remembered the cave. She must have awoken in the night, because above her she saw the faint etching of white birds, and she was thankful that she was warm and the fire was still burning and she could sleep longer, because all she wanted to do was rest. But she was dizzy and her head ached. Perhaps she should eat something, or drink water, but her pack was not there. She rolled onto her back, and above her was sky and stars, and a beautiful moon; had the moon ever looked so beautiful before, like a sickle of God, separating the chaff, and the night was unimagining all those things that she had become. She was the young girl counting raindrops on the window, and loving her mother who used to laugh and wanted nothing more than to bring life into the world. She was the daughter of the doting father, broken by the pain of a woman whose grief he could not comfort, whose body he could no longer hold, a wife he could not bring back, and the daughter who had betrayed him and reminded him every day of a larger betrayal of himself. She had become the mirror of each of them. And then she saw Van Gogh and Hemlock; and Saddle, who’d found her on a dark street on that windblown, snowy night in January. A stray dog, fur matted, and leg permanently crippled, who led the woman whom he had followed to the man whom she would never have found, to the only man who could love her most.
And then it came back to her, the canyon that stretched out before her, the oil pit, the flames and smoke that somehow she had outrun, or was it the wind that had kept the fire away? But she was so tired, and her body limp. Her left foot was numb. She licked her parched lips, her throat and tongue dry.
—
Colm and I had continued to talk to each other over the radio. Then Colm called my cell phone. We had not yet lost signal. “Pru.” That was all he said.
“My son is out there,” I told him.