At twenty past twelve there's no wind in Tamarack Gulch at all, and Wes stands in the door of his father's shed and lets himself be glad of it.
The shed is the same as it's always been. Tarpaper roof, plank walls gone silver, a brick chimney at the creek end, a window on the creek side so filmed with dust it glows instead of letting light through. His father put it up the year Wes was born and moved the business into town twenty-some years later and never moved the shed, because Duane Garrity never threw anything away in his life. The workbench. The coffee can of fittings, sorted by nobody. The gray filing cabinet in the corner with four drawers of paper in it, gas jobs going back to when the tank trucks were green.
And the answering machine on the shelf above the bench, with its little red light.
The light is steady. There's a tape in it. Wes knows what's on the tape. His own voice is on it. And in the top drawer of the cabinet, in a folder with nothing written on the tab, there's a commissioning sheet he never signed. The part he skipped is printed on it in a box, with a line beside the box, and the line is empty.
The state man comes Monday.
He's thought it through. He's had all week to think. If the state man wants the sheet, he'll want the tape, and if he wants the tape he'll want the sheet, and either one on its own is something a man can explain over a table. Both together is something else. And a man can't walk in here and take one drawer out, or one cassette, not now, not with a date on the calendar and a name at the top of a letter. Pull one record out and it's tampering. An old shed going up on old wiring in August is just August.
On the shelf beside the machine there's Pilar's radio, the little silver one with the coat hanger for an aerial. Twelve years she cleaned in here for his dad and then for him, Tuesdays, with that radio going, rancheras turned up loud enough to hear down at the creek. It still has her station on it. He picks it up and puts it down again in the same ring it's left in the dust.
He leaves it.
He has done this carefully. That's the thing he keeps coming back to. He's been a fireman for twenty-six years. The hose is run out from the pump on the creek, and the pump is primed. The pump sprayer is full and standing by the pickup. He's raked a ring around the shed down to mineral soil, three yards wide, and wet it, and wet the grass beyond that. There's no wind. He checks the grass on the gully wall above the shed, the steep brown slope of it going up to the saddle, and it is standing still in the heat, every stalk.
He does it at the back corner, where his father's wiring comes through the wall in a cracked old sleeve. That's where it'll have started, if anybody asks. He holds his lighter to the rag until it takes, and then he steps back out of the door into the light.
It's twenty-five past twelve.
The shed goes the way he wanted. Slow at first, the smoke coming out under the eaves in a lazy gray roll, and then the window goes orange, and then the tarpaper on the roof starts to lift and bubble and the whole inside lights up at once with a sound like a breath drawn in. Through the door he can see the shelf. He watches the answering machine soften and lean. He watches the red light go out. In the corner the filing cabinet starts to tick like an engine cooling, and that's fine, that's what he came for. He stands in his raked ring with the hose in his hand and the heat on his face and he feels the thing in his chest come loose for the first time since July.
A strip of tarpaper lifts off the roof, alight, and floats.
He watches it. It rises in the heat over the shed, turning over and over like a leaf, burning at both ends, and it drifts sideways over the raked ring and over the wet grass and lands on the gully wall twenty yards up, in the dry.
Wes drops the hose and runs.
He has the shovel. The grass up there has caught in a patch no bigger than a tablecloth, and he puts the shovel blade to it and beats it and scrapes dirt over it, and it goes out. He stands up, breathing hard, and three yards above him there's another one. A second strip of tarpaper, or a cinder. He doesn't see it land. He just sees the smoke start out of the grass, white, and then the flame, small and yellow, eating sideways.
He beats that one out.
There's a third one by the time he's done, and he's going uphill to it on a slope so steep he's on his knees half the time, and the shovel handle is slick and hot in his right hand and something in his palm has torn open. He doesn't stop to look. He beats it, and scrapes, and beats it. His father used to say fire's just a dog that wants out. Sit on it early and it sits. He's sitting on it with everything he's got. He's fifty-four and his chest is going like a pump with air in the line and he's sitting on it.
He gets the third one.
He stands on the gully wall with the shovel and looks down, and the shed below him is a box of flame with its roof falling in, and the ring around it is holding, and the hose is lying on the wet ground where he dropped it, still running.
He says it out loud. "It's all right."
Then the wind comes over the saddle.
It comes like somebody opened a door at the top of the gully. Every stalk of grass on the slope lies down at once, uphill, and the smoke from the shed lies down with it, flat, and rolls up the slope past him and over him, and he can't see. He hears it before he sees it again. It's a sound like applause starting somewhere behind him. When the smoke tears open he's looking at fire on the gully wall above him, and to his left, and to his right, not patches now, a line, going uphill faster than a man can walk, and the grass ahead of it bending over to meet it.
He stands there with the shovel.
Then he does what twenty-six years taught him, which is to get off the slope.
At quarter to one he drives out of the gulch in his father's old pickup, the light-colored one that has lived at the shed since his dad died, with its cracked dash and its one wiper. He doesn't take the propane truck. The propane truck is in town, where it was all morning. He's got the window down and the smoke coming in and his right hand wrapped in a shop rag on the wheel, and in the mirror the gully is a chimney.
His phone is on the seat beside him. There's signal on this road in patches, one bar here and there where the trees open, and he knows every patch. He passes the first one. His eyes go to the phone and back to the road. A man who finds a grass fire calls it in. That's the first thing they teach you, before the hose, before anything. He passes the second patch, and the third, and his hand stays on the wheel.
The Tamarack road is four miles of dirt to the Saddle and he does it fast, too fast, the pickup slewing on the washboard. At the Saddle the dirt meets the Grade by the old cemetery, and he has to slow for the junction.
The home's white van is parked by the cemetery wall.
He knows it the way he knows every vehicle in this county, by its dent and its plates and the faded name on its side. Tolley Ridge Care Home. Its engine is running; the air over the tailpipe is shaking. He can't see in. The sun is on its windshield and the windshield is a sheet of white sky.
Rosa drives that van.
He doesn't stop. He turns down the Grade toward town and he doesn't look in the mirror until the second bend, and when he does the van is still there, small, and it isn't moving, and over the ridge behind it the smoke from the gulch is standing up in a column with a flat top, high enough now for the whole valley to see.
It's five to one.
His pager goes at twenty past, on the lower switchbacks. All brigade. Structure fire and wildland, Tamarack drainage, west side. He drives straight to the station and parks his father's pickup at the back of the lot between the brigade trucks and thirty cars of men who've been paged off their Saturdays, and he goes inside to the big steel sink and runs his hands under the tap. The water goes brown, then pink.
"You're bleeding, Wes." It's Danny Ruiz from the next sink, pulling his boots on with one foot up on the bench.
"Caught it on a valve."
"You were quick, anyhow."
"I was in town," Wes says, and turns the tap off. There's a blister on his palm the size of a coin, broken open, and he looks at it and wraps it and pulls a glove on over the top.
By three the fire's over Tolley Ridge and into the timber north of the home, and the brigade is in Pine Hollow trying to hold it off the houses.
He's good at this. There's a man on the roof of a split-level on Hollow Lane with a garden hose, and the man won't come down, and Wes goes up the ladder and doesn't tell him to come down. He stands on the roof next to him with the brigade's hose and they wet that roof together while the embers come over the trees, and when it's time to go Wes puts his hand on the man's back and says, "That's done, Jerry. That's all it can do now," and Jerry comes down the ladder in front of him like a boy.
At ten past four he's at the fairground filling the brigade pickup's tank from the slip-on, and the fire channel is going on the dash.
"Command, dispatch." It's Neely, flat and fast. "Be advised the school district's sending its lift bus up the Grade to Tolley Ridge Care Home to have a look. Facility's logged clear by Summit. Driver's Rasko."
Wes stands with the fuel nozzle in his hand.
Tolley Ridge. Pilar's up there, who cleaned his shed for twelve years. Hal's up there, and Ruth, and the rest of them. The van's up there, if it went home. Somebody at the depot doesn't believe the log.
He hangs up the nozzle and walks across the gravel to the command trailer, where Captain Bakke is at a folding table with a map weighted down by two coffee mugs and a radio in each hand.
"Lorna."
"Garrity." She doesn't look up. "I need you back on the houses."
"The district's sending a bus up Tolley Ridge on its own. Some driver who's been off the road since March." He keeps his voice easy, the voice he uses when a tank's leaking and the lady of the house is crying in her bathrobe. "The brigade'll send somebody up after it anyway, you know that. Better me. I know every one of them up there. I fill their tank."
Bakke looks up then. She's been up since five. Her eyes are red at the rims and she looks at him for a long second, at his face and his glove and the ash on his shoulders, and he lets her look.
"Go up," she says. "Ride with them. Bring them down."
At the foot of the Grade, Cal Doucette has the sawhorses across the uphill lane. He drags one back for the brigade pickup and leans in at the window, his face gray with ash.
"Bus went up half an hour ago," Doucette says. "Hasn't come back down. Neely's got the place logged clear."
"Then I'll bring the bus back down, Cal."
Doucette pats the door twice. The Grade is empty going up. Everybody else is coming down. He drives the brigade pickup through ash so thick on the road his tires leave tracks in it like snow, past the bright new rail on the fourth switchback, past the Saddle, where he doesn't look at the cemetery wall, up into a brown dusk with the fire roaring behind the ridge.
He pulls into the home's drive at ten to five.
The bus is at the front door with its side lift down. There's a wheelchair on the lift platform and a woman's voice shouting about straps, and a big orange glow over the roofline that turns the ash in the air to sparks.
He parks behind the bus. He gets out.
The van is in the carport.
It's parked nose in, neat, with its doors closed and a skin of ash on its roof. He walks to it without meaning to. He stands at the driver's window with his gloved hand on the warm metal, and looks in.
On the dashboard, against the windshield, there's a cellophane cone of supermarket carnations, pink and white, gone soft and brown at the edges in the heat.