On the first switchback down, the bus wanted to run.
It was full now, and it was a different animal full. Eleven people and four chairs and a man in turnout gear, all that weight sitting over the back wheels, pushing. Dawn felt it in the wheel and in the seat of her jeans. She went down a gear and the engine came up under her foot and held it, growling, and she took the bend slow and wide with the brakes barely on, the way her father had taught her on this exact road in a log truck, his big hand on the dash, saying let the engine carry it, girl, the brakes are for the end.
Embers ticked on the roof over her head. In the right mirror the home was going away behind them, dark timber under a yellow sky, the brigade pickup in the drive and the van in the carport, the porch empty. Then the bend took it and there was only the smoke.
The smoke was thicker than it had been on the way up. It hung in the trees on both sides like wet laundry. The headlights made two short tunnels in it and no more.
Wes came down the aisle and stood at her shoulder with his handset.
"Command, Garrity. We're rolling off Tolley Ridge, top of the Grade."
The handset hissed. Then a woman's voice, tired and clipped. "Garrity, Bakke. Copy, rolling. How's your passenger status?"
"Eleven residents, one aide, the driver and me. One on oxygen. Everybody's comfortable." He was looking down the bus while he said it, smiling at somebody. "This is precautionary, Captain. We've got time."
"Copy. The Narrows is open. I've got an engine and a water tender on the far side holding the cut." Bakke's voice dropped a notch, talking to somebody else, then came back. "What have you got on origin from up there? Anything?"
"Power line at the top of the Tamarack road," Wes said. "I saw it arcing coming up."
The water tender. Dawn had seen them at the fairground on the Fourth of July, a tanker truck of water with a pump on the back, the kids allowed to climb on it. One of those and an engine, at the Narrows, holding it open. She held on to that.
"Power line, my eye," Hal said.
He said it from the third row, loud, over the engine. He had his chin up and his tube under his nose and his big spotted hands on the head of his walker, which Rosa had folded and wedged between his knees.
"That started low," Hal said. "In a gully. I watched smoke for thirty years."
Wes keyed off. He looked back down the bus at Hal for a long moment, the handset against his chest.
"You might be right, Hal," he said. "You might be right."
"I am right," Hal said.
"Let me talk to her," Dawn said.
Wes looked down at her.
"The captain," she said. "Give me the handset. I want to hear the Narrows from her."
"You just heard it from her." He said it nicely. "She's got forty engines on that channel, Dawn. They don't want a school-bus driver on it. I'm not saying that's right, I'm saying that's how she'll hear it." He put his hand on the back of her seat. "You drive. I'll talk. That's the job."
He went back down the aisle before she could answer and sat by Hal and reached across and settled the old man's tube where it had slipped, behind one ear, then the other, with two fingers. Hal said something about the lookout on Tolley Peak, and Wes laughed, and said his dad used to take him up there for the view.
Dawn drove.
The district radio crackled on its hook. "Dawn. Marty. Talk to me."
She took it down one-handed. "Coming down the Grade."
"You told me clear." He wasn't shouting. Marty never shouted. "An hour ago you sat up there and told me it looked clear. I told the district clear. I told Doucette clear."
"I said it looked clear," she said.
"Dawn."
"It looked clear, Marty. Then it didn't." She held the wheel with her left hand and the handset in her right and the bus leaned and she leaned with it. "I've got them. I've got all of them. Is the Narrows open?"
"County says the Grade's open to the checkpoint. Doucette's holding it for you." A pause, and static in the pause. "Bring them down clean. Do you hear me? Clean, Dawn."
"I hear you."
She hung it up. Her ears were hot.
At the fifth switchback down there was fire on the road.
It came out of the trees below them on the right, a low line of it in the duff, knee-high, orange and crawling, and it was crossing the road from right to left in front of the bus about fifty yards down. It wasn't the big fire. The big fire was behind them, over the ridge. This was a small new fire, a spot fire, one the embers had started ahead of the main one, and it didn't care which one it was.
Somebody behind her said, "Oh God. Oh God."
There was a gap. Where the road bent there was a stretch where the line hadn't reached yet, maybe a bus length, maybe less, and the flames on either side of it were leaning toward each other like they meant to close it.
Dawn didn't brake. She went down a gear and put her foot in it.
The heat came through the glass on the right side so hard she flinched off it with her whole body. Flames went past the door, past the window, orange, so close the paint ticked. The bus bucked through the edge of the burning duff and something under the floor banged and then they were through, into smoke, into the gray, the line of fire sliding away in the right mirror.
There was a smell of hot rubber. She listened to the bus. The engine. The tires on the road. A new rattle somewhere at the back, metal on metal, steady, that hadn't been there before. The temperature needle had come up past the middle and sat there. Nothing was on fire that she could smell. Her hands were wet. She wiped one on her jeans.
"Straps," she said, loud. "Rosa. Check the chairs."
Rosa was already on her knees in the aisle. "Teeny's good. Len's good." She crawled to the man in the power chair. "His front one's come off. The hook jumped out of the track."
The big black chair had slewed a hand's width sideways, and when the bus leaned into the next bend it slewed again, the wheels sliding on the rubber floor. The man in it had both hands on his armrests and his head back against the headrest.
Wes was there. He went down on one knee by the chair with the loose hook in his gloved hand.
"Not that slot," the man in the chair said. His words came slow and even, one at a time. "The one behind it. Then pull it toward you. Then down. It only goes one way."
Wes did it as he said. The hook went in and the ratchet clicked.
"Again," the man said.
Wes ratcheted it again.
"That'll hold," the man said, and Wes patted the arm of the chair and said, "You'd know, Ambrose," and went back to Hal.
In the back the singing man was singing louder. It was "Rock of Ages," every word of it, straight out at the ceiling in a big low voice cracked at the bottom, and his wife held his hand against her chest.
"Can somebody please make him stop?" Vernon said, up at the front, not turning around.
The wife looked up the aisle at the back of Vernon's head.
"He can hear you," she said. "Say it to him."
Vernon didn't say anything else.
Rosa, going past with a water jug, said, "All right, Doris?" and Doris said, "We're all right, aren't we, Len," and after a verse she came in under him, high and thin.
Rosa bent over Len and tucked his blanket up over his knees, and tucked it again where it didn't need it.
Behind them the shaking man with the walker was praying, fast and out loud, the same few words over and over.
"You want to pray, pray quieter," Teeny said, from her tie-down. "Some of us are trying to hear the hymn."
He prayed quieter.
There was a viewpoint on the eighth switchback down, a gravel pull-off where the tourists stopped in summer to photograph the valley. As the bus swung around, the smoke tore open and the whole valley was there in the last brown light.
Larch Road, where the rental cabins stood along the east slope above Sumner, was a row of fires, each cabin its own column of smoke, like matches somebody had struck and stood up in the dirt. Below them, in Pine Hollow, a whole street of houses was going, small and orange and too far away to make a sound.
Dawn's foot came off the gas. The bus crawled along the lip of the pull-off, and her eyes went down to the water tower on the edge of Sumner. Carla's street was the other side of it. The fire wasn't there. She put her foot down.
"Every gas permit on the east slope crossed my desk," Vernon said. He had the folder on his lap with both hands flat on it, and the hands were shaking on the cover. He pressed them flatter. "I signed every one of those."
The woman with the letter board wasn't looking at the valley at all. She had her face turned to the west window, to where the smoke stood up over the Tamarack country, and she watched it.
The smoke closed over the viewpoint and the valley was gone.
"Shit," Dawn said, under her breath, to the windshield.
"I heard that, dear," said the woman at the very front.
Dawn looked up. The woman was watching her in the long mirror over the windshield, the one Dawn used to watch the kids in the back. She had her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on Dawn's mouth in the glass.
"Bea reads lips," Rosa said, behind her. "When she can see your face straight on. You have to watch yourself."
The man in the power chair laughed, a big slow sound, and Rosa said, "Ambrose, don't encourage her." Then the bus went into a bend with smoke so thick that Dawn lost the edge of the road, and she found it again with her front tire on the gravel.
On the long straight above the ninth bend she checked the mirror for Hal.
Ruth was writing. She was sitting upright in the third row with a notebook open on her knee and a pencil moving fast across the page, not words, marks. Hooks and loops and little slanted strokes, as fast as the pencil could go.
"What's that?" Dawn said into the mirror.
Ruth didn't look up. "Shorthand. Hooks and loops, faster than talking."
"What are you writing?" Dawn said.
"Everything," Ruth said. "It's what I do."
Across the aisle Rosa was kneeling by Hal's cart with a flashlight in her teeth, peering at the gauge on his cylinder. She took the flashlight out and rubbed the gauge glass with her sleeve and looked again.
"I can't read the flow in this," she said. "Hal, what are you on?"
"I'm on what I'm on."
"Two liters," Ruth said, still writing. "He's been on two since June."
Rosa looked at Ruth. Ruth turned a page.
"What's the tank say?" Dawn said.
Rosa shone the light on it. "Nearly full. The needle's right up."
Dawn did the sum as she did fuel, with her lips moving. She knew roughly what one of those little cylinders gave you at two. "Five hours," she said. "One, if the Narrows is open."
"The spare's still inside the door up at the home," Rosa said. She sat back on her heels in the aisle with the flashlight in her hand, and then she got up and went back to Len.
The walkie-talkie was in the cup holder by Dawn's knee. Mae would be at Carla's back window by now, in her socks, with her feet cold, watching the glow over the ridge get bigger. Dawn didn't touch the walkie. Bedtime was half past eight. They'd be down by then. They'd be down by seven.
Wes came back up the aisle. He leaned on the pole behind her seat with the handset against his ear, listening, and the smoke went past the windshield in long gray ropes.
"Command says the Narrows is open," Wes said.
Dawn pointed the bus down at it.