Bitter Recoil

Chapter 25

The fire hugged the ground, bright enough to highlight the smoke clouds. The blaze generated its own breeze, which mixed with the morning updraft in the swale. Neither Estelle nor I could run up the mountain ahead of it.

Garcia’s shotgun lay beside the back of the tent, and I grabbed it to use as a crutch. Estelle hadn’t changed position, and her face was still frozen in that awful grimace.

“You have to help me, babe,” I said, resting my left hand on her forehead. One eyelid flickered a little, and she nodded slightly. “Can you understand me?”

Again she nodded just enough that I felt the motion of her head in my hand.

“I can’t carry you unless you can sit up some.” This time she opened her left eye just a crack. It was a terrible imitation of one of her favorite expressions of doubt, that wonderful raised eyebrow that I’d earned a thousand times over the years.

“We have to make it to the pool down by the spring,” I said. “The son of a bitch set the woods on fire.” I put my hand under her, at the base of her neck, trying to support both her head and shoulders with one hand. She pushed against the ground with both hands. Her teeth ground together with the effort. A sigh of pain escaped as she leaned on my shoulder. I paused to regain my breath. She was now sitting, her feet straight out in front of her. I was kneeling beside her, my arm around her shoulders.

“Do you think you can walk?” I asked.

“Uh,” she said.

The fire was now so loud that I had to shout. “Can you stand?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Shit,” I said. I looked over my shoulder, hoping to see a couple of ambulance attendants with a gurney. All I saw were bright flames, arching high into the sky, reaching to the very tops of the ponderosa pines. Smoke rolled in rich, thundering billows, obscuring the stars and moon. We didn’t have to worry about light. The fire would give us plenty-until it roasted us.

I could have easily picked her up if I’d had two good arms. If she weighed more than a hundred pounds, it was only because of the cop junk strapped to her waist and the bullet-proof vest that hadn’t done her head a bit of good.

“Hold onto my neck,” I said loudly. There was no immediate response. She’d drifted off into some other, less painful world.

I rolled Estelle onto her stomach. With the shotgun crutch jammed under my ruined right arm, I bent down just enough to grab the center of her Sam Browne belt.

If nothing else, my arms had gained some strength over the years with the constant exercise of pushing my own bulk up and out of chairs. I hauled Estelle up at the waist, the way an angry father might grab the belt of a three-year-old who’d been dashing for cover. She felt like a sack of grain, folded in the middle.

There wasn’t time to worry about prenatal care. If her pregnancy survived this night, the kid would be one tough hombre.

The effort brought her back to consciousness. She tried to balance, then fell backward against me. I knelt on my right knee, her weight resting on my left leg. I released her belt and flung my arm around her before she had a chance to fall on her face, then hugged her close.

“Now we’re both going to stand up,” I said after I caught my breath. Her left hand came up and held the top of her head. She turned slightly so that she could curl the other arm around my neck. My handkerchief was still glued to her skull. We both stood up, shaky and gasping. Any other time we would have collapsed with laughter.

Like two drunks tied together in a three-legged race, we lurched down the swale toward the fire. The wind was picking up as the fire generated its own vortices.

We passed the boulder that had been the gateway to the campsite. The first spring, high in the rocks to the right, dribbled a trickle of sweet sulfur water down into a puddle the size of a kitchen sink.

Farther on through thick, rank grasses, ferns, and mosses, the water collected. Fed by other springs, it spread and mingled with the pebbly granite and limestone. In one spot campers had dug out around several boulders, enlarging the natural pool.

On the downhill side of the pool, one of the rocks had seen duty as a wash slab. The remains of a bar of soap were glued to the rock near the waterline. I headed for that pool. I couldn’t have heard Estelle if she’d been screaming in my ear. The fire was seeking out heavy fuel, roaring up the hillsides on either side of the campsite and heading toward the massive stands of pine and fir up the slope.

We sank into the water. Compared to the blast of heat from the fire, the water was almost cool. The pool was eighteen inches deep where we snuggled next to the rock. The swale formed a natural chimney, and it would take the smoke and the fire quickly past us and up the hill. That’s what I hoped.

Finn had miscalculated. He’d started the fire too close to the campsite. If he’d been a better arsonist, he’d have waited until he was near the highway, so the blaze would have had time to reach fire-storm proportions by the time it got to us.

As it was, there wasn’t much fuel in the campsite other than grass and limb wood. The fire raced upward, seeking the timber. I pulled my right arm up across my chest, wincing as the water touched the wound in my shoulder. I breathed through the soaked cloth of my shirt sleeve. My left arm was around Estelle, and I made sure my wet uniform sleeve covered her nose and mouth.

Like two forlorn trolls, we rested in the small pool. I had never felt so goddamned helpless. The smoke swirled around us and I coughed, pressing my head down into the wet cloth and squirming back against the rock. Estelle was quiet. She’d passed out again. That was all right. She’d miss the show.

A juniper tree exploded a hundred feet away, and I flinched. I cracked open one eye. The surface of the pool was turning light gray. I splashed water on us and pulled Estelle close, trying to find a pocket of half-clean air under the slight overhang of the rock. I focused my mind on H. T. Finn.

***

“Just breathe in,” the voice said. The bedroom light was a uniform gray. The face in front of me a blur. He was trying to jam something over my nose and mouth. “Easy now, sir.”

The rich smell of woodsmoke brought a moment of panic. At first I imagined I’d been pulled from my burning house.

Someone else shouted something, much too loud. I tried to suck my head in, like a hurt turtle. Nothing worked. Nothing was in order.

“We need to bring her out first,” the voice said, and another mumbled something unintelligible. I closed my eyes and somewhere deep inside my skull a switch clicked. I jarred to consciousness and coughed violently. “Easy now. Just hold still.”

I felt the mask repositioned on my face and opened my eyes. Like a long lens on a television camera, they focused first far away, on the smoking hillside.

The blaze had moved up the mountain, and its steady roar was like a freight train in the distance. I struggled to distinguish the face in front of me. There were several now and eager hands reaching down into our little pool of gray water.

“Be careful,” I tried to say. I pushed the oxygen mask away. “Be careful,” I said again, and this time I think he understood me.

“Looks like a head injury on this one,” he said. Hands far more expert than mine cradled Estelle Reye’s head-her hair now gray from ash, the strands caked and thick like fresh cement. She was lifted from the pool and placed on the backboard.

Someone wiped my face and with the curtain of ash removed I recognized faces. Sheriff Pat Tate was kneeling in the goddamned pool of water. A shout from up-canyon pulled him to his feet before I had a chance to say a word.

“Just take it easy,” Tate said to me, and he charged away. I turned in panic. Estelle Reyes was already gone, her stretcher headed downhill. I flailed wildly, and what seemed like half a dozen hands provided support.

“I can stand,” I croaked, knowing damn well that I couldn’t. It must have been a hell of a sight as a gray ash-man rose from the pool. The EMTs weren’t much interested in what I had to say about my own rescue. Someone messed with my right shoulder even as other hands arranged my bulk on the backboard.

I was strapped down like a crazy man trussed in a strait-jacket. I couldn’t do anything but relax and enjoy the trip. That gave me some time to think, to try to put some of the pieces together.

The helicopter rested at the east end of the parking lot, a stone’s throw from the highway. My nerves tensed. The canyon was narrow and the air currents would be squirrelly.

“Maybe just a ride to town in an ambulance would be safer,” I muttered, but no one listened to me. My stretcher was secured in the Jet Ranger even as the turbines increased their whine and the rotors flashed.

Estelle’s stretcher was on the opposite side of the machine, and I wanted the damn mask off so I could ask about her.

I tensed as the helicopter lifted, ducked its nose, rotated in place, and then sped south, thumping up and out of the canyon. I caught a glimpse of the pall of smoke that hung on the southwest side of Quebrada Mesa and extended up the face of the mountain to the north.

It banked smoothly away from the valley. We had already gained enough altitude to establish a direct course to Albuquerque, skimming the mesas and foothills.

I shifted position, trying to see who else was in the helicopter with us. It was impossible to see, impossible to hear or even sit up. I settled back, wondering if Francis Guzman was with Estelle. I was going to have a hell of a time trying to explain this mess to him.