Hotshots (3 page)

Kyle didn't give him a chance to gather his wits. “What is the cost to taxpayers?”

“Enormous.”

“Is the urban/wildland interface part of the problem?”

“Yes.”

“I understand four young women were killed at Thunder Mountain.”

“That's true.”

“Is it normal for so many members of a crew to be women?”

The official blinked and looked around like he was waking from a bad dream. “When we call for a firefighter we don't care whether we get a man or a woman. What matters is that the individual can do
the
job. The women firefighters are professionals. They've been challenged and they've proven they can do the work.”

The tape ended. I rewound it and went back to the kitchen, where I made myself a cup of Red Zinger with honey. The guy in the freezer was still dropping ice in his bucket and the boxes had not been unpacked. I took my tea to the living room (the room with the least mess), sat down on the sofa, opened the interagency report, and was still reading when the Kid showed up at three. The investigators listed the causes of the fire: a lightning strike, a high fuel buildup, a dry spring, severe winds. They listed the things that had gone wrong: fires were burning all over the West and resources were stretched thin, the change in weather conditions had not been communicated to the hotshots, the lookout had not seen the blowup in time to warn the firefighters, the hotshots had not dropped their packs or deployed their fire shelters when threatened. At the end of the report the investigators interviewed the firefighters, who came up with their own conclusions. The Duke City Hotshots had chosen to be interviewed as a team, so neither Ramona Franklin nor Mike Marshall were quoted directly. That account lost some immediacy in the group telling, but the individual accounts of the other firefighters were vivid and angry. Between the firefighters' statements and the investigators' conclusions lay a gulch wide enough for a lawsuit to fill.

I heard the Kid let himself in through the kitchen doorway.
“Puta madre,”
he swore as he collided with a box. It didn't take him long to track me down in the living room. “You're
reading,
Chiquita?” he asked.

“It's the Forest Service report on the Thunder Mountain Fire. The firefighters came to one conclusion, the investigators came to another.”

Without even asking he knew whose side I'd be on. “Are you going to do it?”

“I don't know. The parents are divided. She wants to sue, he doesn't. There are a couple of firefighters I need to talk to before I decide.” But he and I both knew that I wanted this case so bad I was already feeling the warmth of the flames and listening for the crackle of the truth. My house was a mess, but my mind was focused.

“That's good, Chiquita, but when are you going to move in?”

“I'll take you to dinner if you help me unload the boxes.”

“I don't know where to put things,” he protested.

“I'll tell you,” I said.

******

On Monday morning I called Joni's friend, Ramona Franklin, and told her I was Eric and Nancy Barker's lawyer.

“Why do the Barkers need a lawyer?” she asked me. Her voice was soft and she had a way of
putting
equal emphasis on all the syllables that made me wonder how she got an Anglo surname.

“They want to sue the Forest Service for negligence in Joni's death.”

“That won't do any good,” Ramona said, weighing carefully every word.

“Nancy Barker feels that if the government was negligent they should be held accountable.”

“Why did the Barkers ask you to call me? Why doesn't Mrs. Barker call me herself?”

“She thought you might have observed something at the fire that could help me in preparing a case.” As for why Nancy didn't call Ramona herself, I wasn't sure yet. “Would you be willing to meet me and talk about it?”

There was a pause. Long distance was in the line even though I'd dialed a local number. “All right,” Ramona said eventually.

“Are you married?” I asked her, wondering if that was where the Anglo name had come from.

“No.”

We made arrangements to meet in Java Joe's the following morning. It was a place I knew downtown where you could sit and drink coffee until the pot ran dry or the words ran out.

3

O
FFICIALLY
,
THE
L
AND OF
E
NCHANTMENT
runs on Rocky Mountain time. Unofficially, New Mexicans operate on their own time. It's the land of the mystic, the artist, the poet, the outlaw, and all of them dance to their own drum. The night I attended my first party in Santa Fe I arrived fashionably (I thought) an hour late. The hostess was still fixing the dip and arranging the flowers. That's Santa Fe time. In Albuquerque we run on orange-barrel time. We have orange-barrel slaloms all over town, and once you enter one you can throw your schedule out the window. One place you'd think would go by the clock is the courtroom, but there's a municipal court judge famous for keeping lawyers and defendants waiting for hours while he waters his roses and feeds the pigeons.

Since I don't wear a watch I've developed my own methods of telling time. I used to be able to lean over and peek at other people's watch faces in restaurants or bars until everybody went digital. Then I learned to go by instinct. I can wake to the minute if I have a plane to catch, but I can't do it on an ordinary day. In my office I had to have Anna tell me when it was ten o'clock, time for my appointment with Ramona at Java Joe's. I took the report along to have something to read in case she was late, but Ramona was already waiting-—the only woman alone at a table, the only Indian in the room.

“Ramona?” I asked.

She stood up and extended her hand. “Hello,” she said.

“I'm Neil Hamel. Thanks for coming.”

Ramona wore glasses with clear rims, a T-shirt without the green ribbon, jeans, and hiking boots. A backpack sat on the floor beside her. She had a strong and sturdy build. Her hair was shoulder length and parted in the middle. Her face was full and solemn. She was finishing up one black coffee; I got her another.

“What did you think of this?” I indicated the report I held.

“I didn't read it.”

“Why not?”

“Why?” She shrugged. “It won't change anything.”

“It puts a lot of blame on the firefighters.”

“That's what people are saying.”

“Are you going back on the line?”

“I have to. I'm in school. I have a daughter. I need the money.”

“
How did you get into fire fighting?” I asked.

“I lost my scholarship. Fires are like cows.” Her smile flickered and vanished.

“How's that?”

“You milk them for the money. I work in the summer, get all the overtime I can, and make enough money to go to school in the winter.”

“UNM?”

She nodded, staring across the room. I know that some Indians believe it's rude to look people in the eye, but my eyes were drawn to hers anyway. It may well have been rude to ask so many questions, too, but that was my business and so far she'd been answering.

“You were the lookout on the hotshot crew?”

“I was stationed near the ridge top. I didn't see the fire blow up. It crossed the canyon and came out of there howling like a terrible red wolf. The trees were twisting and screaming. It was moving so fast the firefighters didn't even know it was behind them until it was too late. When it hit them, the sawyer was still shouldering his saw.” She stared into the dregs of her coffee.

I stood up and got her a refill but didn't get one for myself. I didn't want to get caffeined out. The caffeine didn't seem to have affected Ramona. She'd continued at her own measured pace. “Wasn't there aerial surveillance?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Should there have been?”

She chose her words carefully. “There usually is.”

“Do you think the Forest Service was negligent?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“The report said the hotshots would have escaped if they'd dropped their packs.”

“It wouldn't have mattered. You can't outrun a fire that's moving faster than a bird can fly.” She had her own way of speaking, slow, rhythmic, full of poetic images. “Your courts won't solve anything. The Navajo way is that if you hurt someone, you restore balance by making it up to that person or to the family. The Navajo way is to talk to the elders, but Mrs. Barker won't speak to me.”

“She is devastated by Joni's death,” I said. It was obvious that to some degree she blamed Ramona for it, but I didn't mention that.

Ramona shifted in her seat when Joni's name was mentioned.

“You're a Navajo?” I asked.

“Yes, but I can't speak Navajo. My parents never spoke it in front of us children. They wanted us to grow up speaking English. We lived in Albuquerque for a while and sold jewelry in Old Town, but after my father died we went back to the Rez near Farmington.”

“
How old were you then?”

“Ten.”

“Your father must have been young if you were only ten.”

“He was forty-two.”

“My father died when he was forty-eight.”

“What killed him?”

“He had a heart attack, but he also drank.”

“My father did, too,” she said very quietly. “There was a car accident, but there was drinking.”

She would have been young enough to experience her father's death only as loss. But I was twenty and my father's death had been more complicated than that. Why, I wondered, was I telling Ramona about my father? I hardly ever talked about him. The bad motive was to gain her confidence. The good was that I felt comfortable in her presence. She was calm and matter-of-fact in her manner and answers. There was none of the jockeying for position that can happen with some women.

“Why did you want to know if I was married?” she asked.

“You have an Indian voice. You have an Anglo name.”

“Franklin is my family name. We took it many years ago. My father was named Benjamin.”

“Any guy who experimented with lightning is all right with me,” I said.

“Sometimes when a crew sleeps on the mountain you will see lightning strike a tree and stand there and dance. She loved it when that happened. I have her boots in my backpack. The boots the hotshots get are custom-made to last, but she wore hers out. They rebuilt them, only the boots didn't fit after that and she gave them to me. I was wearing them that day. I can't wear them anymore. Would you give them to her mother and father for me?”

“Sure.”

She opened her backpack and handed me a rolled-up brown bag. “Thanks. After the fire the Forest Service brought in people to help us ‘deal with our grief,' they said. I said I wanted to deal with it my way, the Indian way. I went to the medicine man and told him I didn't know if I was a wigwam or a tepee. Do you know what he said? ‘Indian, your problem is that you are two tents.' ” She laughed.

I did, too. Some people get funnier when things get darker.

“That's a day fifteen joke,” she said. “Sometimes hotshots are on a fire for twenty-one days before you get a day off, and you tell jokes so you don't go crazy. A joke that isn't funny on day one can be funny by day fifteen. By day twenty-one a really bad joke is very funny. Are you going to talk to Mike Marshall?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“He knows some day twenty-one jokes.”

If
there was anything else to say, we weren't saying it. Ramona stared into space. Trying to avoid her eyes, I found myself staring into my empty cup. Silence fell like snowflakes across the table. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said.

“It's nothing. Tell them I am very sorry for what happened.”

“I will.”

******

The bag Ramona had given me wasn't sealed, so when I got back to the office I opened it. Inside I found a pair of lace-up boots stained black from soot and white from sweat plus a manila envelope that had gotten sooty from the boots. The envelope wasn't sealed either and it didn't have anybody's name on it, so I opened that, too. It contained several photographs of firefighters wearing yellow shirts. The most interesting one to me was a woman who had to be Joni Barker standing alone in a clearing. She wore skintight Lycra running pants as torn and tattered as a pair of favorite jeans, and she had an enviable body—firm and fit. Joni had her mother's blond hair, pulled back into a ponytail, but a few curls had escaped and framed her face. She had on her firefighter boots, which was fortunate because the clearing she stood in was a nest of snakes. She had picked up two of them and held her arms up with the snakes curling down to her elbows.

I took the photo out to the reception area to show Anna. My former partner, Brink, had left Hamel & Harrison and gone into probate practice with his girlfriend, although I hadn't gotten around to taking his name off the door yet. Every once in a while I missed him, but not now, because I knew that whatever his reaction to the photo would be, it would be the wrong one. “What do you make of this?” I asked Anna. I needed to run it by someone; when it comes to snakes my reactions are too primal to be trusted.

“Who is she?” Anna asked.

“Joni Barker.”

“Great bod!”

“She's the hotshot who died in the Thunder Mountain Fire.”

“Wow!”

“She was a friend of Ramona Franklin, the woman I just had coffee with. Ramona's a Navajo, a firefighter, and a student at UNM. She was the lookout on the Thunder Mountain Fire but she says she didn't see anything. When I asked her if she thought the government screwed up, she said she didn't know.”

“She probably needs the job.”