第4章 Ready, Not Go

The Harkwood School was a low brick building with a gym bolted onto one end and a playground with a chain-link fence that had been hit by a truck one year and mended with wire. Bryn parked behind the deputy's cruiser and walked in through the gym doors, and the air inside was ten degrees cooler and smelled of floor wax and dust and, faintly, of the popcorn the lunchroom sold at ballgames. Deputy Cassia Ryland was sitting on the bleachers with a clipboard and a phone, and she looked up when Bryn came in, and Bryn read the situation in her face before a word was spoken. Cassia was in her forties and had the flat, patient expression of a person who had spent twenty years telling people things they did not want to hear. "You're the fire behavior person," Cassia said. "Bryn Adair." "I've had three calls from dispatch about you in the last hour. Rennick says you want a mandatory evacuation." She set the clipboard down. "I can't give you one. Not on my own. That's the sheriff, and the sheriff is at a budget hearing two counties over, and the emergency manager won't move on a Level One until he has a forecast he can point at." "I have a forecast he can point at." Bryn sat down on the bleacher below her and unfolded the map. "It's about thirty-six hours old and it's wrong in the direction of worse. Cold front, northeast wind, single-digit humidity, and a fire that's already built a thunderstorm over itself. That column is going to fall down on this valley like a lid." Cassia listened with her hands folded. When Bryn finished, she said, "How certain are you? In court certain. Because if I sign a mandatory and nothing happens, I answer for it. And if I sign a mandatory and the fire comes, the first thing anyone will ask is why we didn't sign it yesterday, and the second thing is why we didn't sign it a week ago, and there's no answer to that one for anybody." "There's no answer to that one for anybody because there wasn't a signal a week ago. There's a signal now." Bryn tapped the map. "You want certainty. I'll give you the only certainty I have. I am certain the fire will be on this side of that ridge. I am certain the wind will be northeast. I cannot tell you the hour, and I cannot tell you that it will reach the school. What I can tell you is that when it does, the road out is going to be full of people who waited for somebody to say a word that never came." Junia Kerns came in from the hallway with an armful of cardboard, saw them, and stopped. She was a broad, quick woman with gray in her hair and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, and she ran the school and had run its evacuation drills for years on the theory that a valley with one road should know how to use it. "I heard there's a fire behavior analyst on the campus," Junia said. "Is this the meeting where we decide whether I start calling parents?" "This is the meeting," Bryn said. Junia dropped the cardboard and sat down. "Then start at the beginning and don't dumb it down. I've got three hundred kids in this building during the week and half their parents work down the valley, and if I ring that bell I want to know what I'm ringing it for." So Bryn told it a third time, and this time she told it as a story rather than a briefing, because Junia was the kind of listener who wanted the whole shape of a thing before she would trust the parts. She told her about the night run and the dead timber and the column that had turned into a cloud, and about the embers she had watched travel east on the upper air while the ground wind sat still, and about the map line she had drawn across the valley. When she finished, Junia pulled her glasses down and looked at the map, and then at Cassia. "Ready or go?" Junia said. "Ready," Cassia said. "For now." Junia looked at her a long moment, and Bryn watched the decision happen, and then Junia stood up and said, "All right. I'm going to do the thing I can do without anybody's signature. I'm going to call every parent on the roster and tell them there's a fire on Galt Ridge and they should pack a bag and think about where they'd go. That's not an order either. That's a phone call. Nobody puts a phone call on my record." "That's more than the county will give you," Bryn said. "That's more than the county can stop me doing," Junia said, and went to find her roster. Bryn and Tova spent the next two hours doing what she had come to town to do, which was walk up to houses and knock on doors and tell the truth. It was the least efficient method of warning people ever devised, and it was also the only one that worked, because a person who hears a siren hears weather, and a person who opens her screen door and finds a firefighter standing on the step with soot on her sleeves hears a fact. They split the streets along Dunlin Creek. Bryn took the north side, Tova the south, and they compared notes by radio every twenty minutes. Some people listened. An old man with a walker said he'd get his sister to drive him down to the highway. A woman with three dogs said she'd need the truck for the dogs and the car for the kids and would the road be open by evening. A young man in a T-shirt with a beer in his hand said, "Lady, we get smoke every summer," and shut the door, and Bryn stood on his step for a second and then wrote the address in her notebook, because she would be back. At the far end of the creek, near the head of the valley, the houses thinned out and the fields began, and the last place on the road was a ranch with a barn and a corral and a windmill that turned slowly against the copper light. Two horses stood at the fence with their heads down. A dog lay on the porch. And on the porch, in a chair, sat a man with a shotgun across his knees that he was cleaning, because that was what he had been doing when she walked up, and the cleaning had nothing to do with her. "You're one of the fire people," he said, without looking up. "Bryn Adair. You're Delmar Fain." "Everybody's Delmar Fain." He ran the cloth down the barrel. He was old and lean and his hands were the hands of a man who had worked with them every day of his life. "You've come to tell me to leave." "I've come to tell you what the fire's doing. I'll let you decide what to do about it." "That's the difference between you and the last three." He looked at her then, and his eyes were clear and unafraid and entirely fixed on staying. "I've lived in this house sixty years. My wife is buried up the hill behind it. I've got two horses that won't fit in your car and a grandson in the house who won't leave without me, and I've seen a fire come to the top of that ridge three times and stop, every time, because the wind turns at night in this valley and always has. So tell me what's different this time." Bryn looked at the ridge, and at the column standing over it like a fist, and at the windmill turning, and she chose not to soften anything. "What's different is that it's not going to stop," she said. "The wind that turns at night is a valley wind. This fire is making its own wind now, and its own clouds, and when the northeast wind comes tomorrow it will come down this valley faster than a man can saddle a horse. That windmill will be gone. The fence will be gone. The grass will be gone, and if you're in the house you'll be gone with it, and that grandson will be alive somewhere down the valley with no one left to raise him, and he will know exactly who decided that." Delmar Fain looked at her for a long time. Then he set the shotgun down and stood up, and he was taller than she had expected, and older. "My grandson's name is Judd," he said. "He's fifteen and he's stubborn. If you can make me believe it, maybe you can make him believe it." He picked up his hat. "Come inside. I'll put coffee on and you can show me your map. I'm not saying I'll go. I'm saying I'll look." It was not a yes. It was a crack of light, and Bryn took it, because in a valley with one road, a crack of light was how you got a whole ranch to move. ---