Ash

by Jon Billman

Continued ...

      Cappy said a forest fire was an educated devil who had made it to the top. Raphael said fire was a symbol of God's presence; trying to prevent forest fires was like trying to prevent earthquakes.
      Some of the townspeople said they suspected the Forest Service and the B.L.M. were professional arsonists who set "job fires" intentionally so they could collect hazard pay over long hours to put them out. I was invested enough in the firefighting game to know that this could be true. When I first started the job I would have been skeptical, but later I found myself thinking in ways that made arson justifiable.

      Ash said, "For a woman to dream about grasshoppers portends she will bestow her affections upon ungenerous people."

      Ash dreamed about grasshoppers. I awoke one night to hear her talking in her sleep.
      "They're everywhere," she said. Her blanket was on the floor, and I could see her pale nakedness in the thin security-light filtering through the uncurtained windows. "See them. Amazing! Do you see them?" She scratched at her face and then, with a shudder, jolted upright, breathing hard. "It's O.K., Ash," I whispered. "Only a dream."
      A couple of the other guys turned over, and Harley mumbled something about the Minnesota Twins. Out of nighttime weakness I whispered, "Do you want to come over here, bunk with me for a while?" The bunks were narrow, and I guessed Ash would take up more than half of mine. I wanted the temporal weight of her near me. We all did at that hour, though most would have denied it.
      "No," she said.
      The next morning over pancakes I told her I had had a dream about bears. "What does that mean?"
      She stared at the poster of Harry's trash fire, chewing. Still staring, she swallowed and said, "Bear is significant of overwhelming competition in pursuits of every kind. Killing a bear means extrication from entanglements." "Custer killed a bear in Wyoming," said Harley.

      One evening in July I drove out to the airport to see Raphael about Ash. Ash was on a solo hike in the desert, something she often did after work. I wanted to get this thing settled. Maybe he would win out, but I wasn't prepared to spend the rest of the fire season sharing her. But I also knew this: No one won Ash. She wasn't anyone's prize, like the office girls in Rock Springs or Logan could be. Her attentions were a good thing during a lonely summer, but they were unpredictable and carnal and not something you wanted to have to suffer through for a whole cycle of seasons. Her attentions were humbling when you found yourself counting on them.
      The sun was dropping quickly behind Utah and the crickets were chirping. I walked by the old phone booth that waiting passengers used more for a windbreak than communications-I'd tried to use it before and it never worked-and through the gate in the cyclone fence, across the dirt runway to the rusty green hangar. The shiny white Cessna glowed in the open bay door. My bootsteps echoed off the steel ceiling. Raphael looked up from his reading.
      I knew that he knew why I had come. "I don't think I'm here to break your nose," I said.
      He bit his lip and looked down at the toe of his tennis shoe. "Want a beer?" Turning to an old Norge, he pulled the chrome handle and a sheet of cool covered the little room. He took out two beers, and motioned for me to sit on the parts crate, the only furniture he had besides his own rotten-webbed lawn chair. "We do need to talk," I said, already feeling disarmed. There were little pieces of ice in the beer.
      "Would it help if I broke your nose?" he asked.
      "Might," I said. "It seems to be coming down to something like that."
      "Got any pistols?" he asked. "We could have a duel."
      "Nope."
      "Swords?"
      I looked at my hands and tried to make fists. "No swords. I guess it's looking like an old-fashioned fistfight." I took a hard swallow of beer, stood up, and walked back into the bay. Raphael followed, and we stood in the big doorway looking at the dull orange horizon of Utah on fire.
      "I get the feeling God's on your side and that bothers me," I told him.
      "Anyway, you can't hit me back-you're in minister school."
      "I think you'd feel better about coming all the way out here if I clocked you a few times. Be glad to, actually. I could clean your whole plow, if that would make you all the happier."
      "I thought so earlier, but I just don't have it in me anymore," I said. "I'll take that beating another day."
      On the short walk back to my pickup the payphone rang, once, twice, three times. I looked around, stepped inside, and picked up the receiver. "What would you do if you did have her all to yourself?" he asked.
      My manhood and what was left of my pride were riding on the next several words to come out of my mouth. What I'd say would secure my place in the natural order of things for the rest of that summer. What I said was guttural and instinctive. I said what I felt, what was true. I said, "I don't know." In that short arc between my ear and the receiver hook, it sounded as if Raphael said,
      "God bless you."

      Sage gets elderly and brittle when the natural fire cycle is interrupted, and the silver and black sage hadn't burned in years, so it was especially thick that summer. It was reclaiming the narrow two-track we followed to the ghost town some Sundays, so that it brushed at us as we rode by on our mountain bikes and left cat scratches on our arms and legs. But it smelled good, and Ash said it reminded her of some poem I'd never heard of. I said it reminded me of good restaurant-chicken that you could get in Denver but nowhere near here. Ash could ride a bicycle like a big banshee. It was hard for me to keep up with her.
      Sublette, Wyoming consisted of 25 or so limestone foundations with the skeletons of cook stoves, bed springs, and flue pipes rusting away inside them. Tin cans, old leather shoes, and pieces of broken bottles stained blue and purple by a hundred years of sun. An old car chassis. Several steel mine vents. Tailings. A jail.
      "If a town in your dreams looks dilapidated," she said one Sunday as we pedaled through, "it means that trouble will soon come to you."
      "I'd say this town looks dilapidated," I said, "and you're about as much trouble as I want to take on this summer. You might have to slap me just so I can be sure I'm not dreaming." Ash turned. She looked taken aback, as if the summer were so simple and natural and I had just unloaded something complicated on her that she wasn't wired to handle.
      The jail was the only building relatively intact. Two cells not much bigger than closets. Ash and I sat in one, and I could tell she was wondering what it must have been like a century ago to have been trapped there. She let me kiss her on the mouth-garlic and marijuana taste. I awkwardly undressed her while licking the salt from her neck and little breasts, going lower to where the taste in the folds was animal.
      I carved our names on a pine windowsill with my Swiss Army knife, knowing the wind and rain would sand the names and heart away in a matter of seasons. In the brown willows along the little dry creekbed, she found a moose antler-paddle a bull had shed. I duct-taped it to my handlebars and we pedaled back to Hams Fork, coasting the gentle downhills.
      On Monday mornings, when I would fill my truck with fuel, coolant, and brake fluid in the gravel parking lot, the Cessna hauling Ash would dip its wings as a good-bye, bank to the northeast, and grow smaller until it disappeared behind Sheep Mountain. I told myself that what I felt for Ash was not love, but I had no other name for it. I realized one Monday, as the plane flew north, that things weren't settled and that they probably couldn't be until October and the end of fire season, when settling things meant packing up and leaving them.

      Ash hated fire duty. It wasn't her job unless she was available. She called ponderosa pine "weeds." But though she groused about it, Cappy made her keep her fire pack with her hard hat and fire-resistant Nomex shirt and pants in her truck. He made her keep her hand-held radio on her belt. If she was close enough to a smoke or if we were down on men, she would have to go. She was certified as a crew boss, certified to be in charge of 20 men, but putting out fire was below her. Or she was above it.
      She would hide. And she would lie. I know this, because I watched her once. We were building water bars on a logging road about a half mile from where Ash was taking silt samples. At break time I grabbed two Cokes from my cooler and set out to take her one. When I got close enough to see her, I stopped and sat down on a stump and just watched her. She knelt as if she was praying in the silt along the little spring creek she was sampling. I watched her for maybe ten minutes. Finally, she looked up to the pine crowns and rinsed her hands and washed her face. It was a moment, a time where I didn't belong. Without giving her the Coke-I drank hers, too-I returned to my crew. Half an hour later we got a call for an acre-large fire on Commissary Ridge. Cappy called Ash on the radio, asked for her location. She gave him an impossible legal: Township 28 north, Range 117 west. Alice Lake. "Taking tea samples above Alice Lake," she said. "I'm a good hour-hike away from my truck. Sorry, Cap, can't make this one," she said.
      "Roger that," said Cappy. "Sorry you'll miss it."
      From where she was praying, it would have taken her two, maybe three, hours to get into Alice Lake. You had to walk.
      We returned from that fire sometime well after midnight. Ash was sitting in an old naugahyde recliner in the crew quarters, wearing her cool-night T-shirt over nothing, drinking a beer, reading Insects of Western North America. "I suppose you guys want pancakes," she said.

      The Thursday after Raphael and I finally locked horns, Cappy left the Gazette on the kitchen table. He had circled the article in the Police Blotter with with a red pen: FS MAN IN DRUNKEN RUCKUS. The reporter used my full name, which seemed foreign to me, the neon details of the fight belonging to someone else. I had already settled with the bar owner, and neither Raphael nor I were about to press charges.

      I began watching her wake up again-my left eye half-closed with swelling. And I soaked her pancakes with syrup to soften them up, make them easier to chew. I worked. I slept. I drank. At night, heat lightning ringed the sky around Hams Fork. Several mornings it rained. No fires.
      I wrote a couple of long letters telling Jennifer I missed her and dreamed of seeing her in October. I carved a six-foot-tall pine-log grizzly bear with a chainsaw one Saturday afternoon and had Harley help me drag it into the crew quarters. I set it up between my bunk and his. I was glad when Ash said it gave her the willies, like it was staring at her all night.
      The better part of August came and went. We had no fires to extinguish so they put us to work stacking slash piles and painting trees for timber sales. We prayed for fire.

      One afternoon I ran over Cinder while backing my engine into the shop. I don't know why he didn't get out of the way, but he didn't. The dual tires rolled over him, squashing him flat. We had to use a snow shovel like a spatula to scrape him off the concrete. Cappy said we didn't need a goddamn cat around anyway. Ash didn't say anything.

      In late August, Raphael abandoned her; he had to get back to Bible school in Nebraska. The way she limped around when he left-in his ambulance, like a portent, kicking up gravel dust in the crew-quarters parking lot-we knew it was over for good. He'd strung her along like any of us would have done, or did.

      Ash stopped making pancakes. "Eat some oatmeal for chrissakes," she told us the morning after he drove away. She stopped going for long walks in the desert alone. She stopped going to church-Hams Fork New Psalmody Free-on Sunday mornings.
      I took to walking in the desert northeast of town by myself. I carried a rucksack and spent a good deal of time thinking thoughts I was later ashamed of.
      After work the day before Labor Day, I mixed brake fluid and antifreeze in a styrofoam cup and set it in the desert near the dump, so we could blame the fire on garbage.

      We were hunched around the kitchen table trying to coffee away our hangovers, when Cappy walked in and told us we didn't look like firefighters, we looked pitiful. "Goddamnit," he said, "every Mormon kid in the county is gonna be downtown and our public-relations point-man smells like a distillery." He meant, in particular, that I looked and smelled pitiful, especially considering I was slated to be Smokey again, for the second time that summer, my third straight Labor Day Parade.
      But we'd gotten a call half an hour before-the Eternal Flame-and Harley and Chuck had gone out to see about it.
      I was experiencing acute deja vu: after coffee, Ash would be off to her grasshopper study in the north, sharing her tent with a new pilot. Harley sounded concerned on the high-band.
      "Bit of a problem here, Cappy. Better give the boys at the B.M. a ring. Their desert is burning and ours is catching. Over."
      "You wanna give me a size-up? Over."
      "Roger that. Break."
      We waited, staring at the radio.
      "Yeah, Cappy, looks like 25 or so acres are lit up, and there's a stiff wind out of the west, northwest. I'm a little concerned-this pitchy sagebrush is some serious fuel. You might consider sending every gandy dancer we got. And a B.M. dozer."
      Ash's face fell and she got up to grab her rucksack and head for the airport. Cappy looked up from the radio and glanced at the wall map. "Get your Nomex, Ash, you're swatting flames today. There's nothing between that fire and town but five-thousand acres of dry sage."
      "No bear-duty," I said. "There is a God."
      Ash threw her fire pack on my engine and jumped in the cab. We passed a B.L.M. lowboy shuttling a D-9 dozer up the dump road. The fire was sending up a thick column of smoke the color of young thunderheads, and thin tendrils of flame were visible from five miles away.
      The wind picked up even more, and the dry sage torched and ran in the direction of Hams Fork. Another B.L.M. Cat started cutting line along the edge of town, soon aided by two more colossal dozers from the open-pit coal mine. The plan was to flank the fire at the city limits with a Cat line and back-burn and push the head to the northeast, away from improvements and toward the river.
      Ash and I ran the burn-out operations along the Cat line on the southern flank. Bandannas over our faces like road agents, we worked as a team. I would drop a line of burning diesel fuel with the drip torch well inside the Cat line and Ash would walk behind me, filling in. I couldn't see her through the smoke, and it was easy to get disoriented. With burning-out in heavy smoke, it was possible to walk toward the fire coming at you. Or you could burn yourself into a corner. "Are ya with me?" I'd call, sometimes coughing out the words.
      "I'm with ya. Are you with me?" she'd answer, her voice hoarse from use and smoke.
      "Roger that," I'd say.
      Several hours had gone by when a Llama helicopter beat the wind overhead, filling drop-buckets in the Hams Fork River, then dumping its load at the head of the fire.
      Ash and I found ourselves in a bad place. We'd burned ourselves into a warm corner and become disoriented in the smoke. "Want me to call in the helicopter?" she asked, coughing.
      "Not just yet," I said, breathing hard. Calling in the helicopter meant a beating for your pride. It meant you'd made bad decisions and weren't as good at your job as you could be, or as good as someone else was. The main fire bore down on us from the northwest, and our escape route in the burn-out torched twelve-foot flames. It occurred to me then that if the main fire ran over us it would keep going, jump the Cat line and burn right through downtown Hams Fork; my nearsighted pride would be responsible for the devastation of the entire town.
      "O.K., yes, goddamnit, now!" I yelled to Ash, who was ready with her hand-held. For the first time all season I was concerned with something, someone, others, rather than just myself. I could see my world from the outside and it was small and rotten.
      "Echo Charlie Hotel, Elkind on net. We need water in a bad way."
      She gave Charlie Hotel our approximate location-where we were supposed to have been-and we could hear the rotors beating their way toward us. "Roger-Wilco, I've got you, Elkind," said the pilot. "Hit the dirt." Sage branches snapped and chunks of wet sand flew as 300 gallons of river water cut us a new safety route.
      "Thanks, Charlie Hotel," Ash said when she caught her breath. "You're a godsend."
      The fire coursed a definite track to the river, sparing Hams Fork. The sky tasted of ash. We took some lukewarm water and a melted candy bar, the sunset behind Utah a salmon-colored haze, and climbed onto a parked truck for a better view. The desert was cindered, lifeless. In the distance we could see the orange glow of the dump. The fire had taken the little shack and the wooden fenceposts around it, leaving snarled barbed wire surrounding four acres of hot embers that sparked in the wind. All of the surface trash was gone-the sofas, the televisions, the mattresses. What survived, and would last for centuries, was the refuse buried deep in the ground, like coal or fossils.
      The main fire was setting spot fires that stretched along the desert horizon. We were strapping our headlamps onto our hard hats for night duty, when Ash pointed back toward the main fire.
      Well in front of the fire's head, a herd of 200 pronghorn antelope fled toward the river. Behind them, just in front of the real heat, a wall of warrior grasshoppers-an entire plague of them-pushed eastward, the roar of their wings louder than the roar of sage combusting.
      The river was wide and murky and could have been oil for all the smoke. Hundreds of the hoppers didn't make the jump and landed in the water; the surface boiled with feeding whitefish, rainbow, and brook trout. As we watched the fish fattening on the insects, the fire spotted across the river, igniting the far bank. The grasshopper wall ran out in front. My fire could burn to the Atlantic Ocean for all we cared. Ash knew October was coming. The natural cycle of things would take back the desert.

Jon Billman is completing his MFA at Eastern Washington University. Summers he works as a wildland firefighter. He is appearing for the first time in print simultaneouly in this summer's The Missouri Review. E-mail: jbillman@ewu.edu.