The Winemaker's Daughter, page 7
“Chinese pork,” he announces, sweat dripping off his nose. “Everybody dig in. C’mon, you Neds.”
The jumpers welcome the taste of something salty to go with their drinks. Everybody eats but Tozzie; he stares upward, beyond the ridge where they jumped at dawn.
“I want it back,” Tozzie Cresthawk says to Niccolo. “Want my jump back.”
“Got your native honor on the line?”
“I’m on a losing streak. Feels like Big Ernie’s following me.”
“It’s down below where we gotta worry about Big Ernie. In the orchards.”
In the evening the sun is a plum-colored splotch through the dirtied sheet of the sky. Niccolo talks with the Incident Commander at base camp, and the IC has one bit of good news: The humidity is up, a harbinger of possible rain. The winds have died as well. The jumpers will rest for a few hours, then get up around three in order to hit the Johnny Blackjack flank in first light. They try to sleep, some of them using the folded rectangle of their fire shelters for pillows. The shelters are a last-ditch cover designed to withstand flames and heat up to 600 degrees, with straps for handles and footholds, no floor. Jumpers call them shake-and-bakes. The moon appears through the smoke, lighting the edge of the trees. The fire seems groggy now, somewhat distant. Two nights ago, when Teddy took in the view at his high camp with Brunella—dew-coated wildflowers, dwarfed firs, and heather—it looked like a Japanese garden, serene and bent by the wind. Now everything that pokes from the ground is fuel.
When the jumpers rise the winds are still down, the fire still slumbering out of sight. They use their headlamps to pack out. The smoke is thicker, and it does not move, hanging in their hair, their nostrils, their eyes. The jumpers strap on masks and aim for the direction of a roar that grows louder with each step. The word from the IC is that a low-pressure system is moving in from the northwest, bringing some rain. Teddy asks if they can wait it out, in the hope that a storm will do their job. No chance. A new advance of the fire is too close to homes and property—the urban interface, they call it—which does not give them any choice. People in the valleys are sitting on their roofs with hoses, the IC says. Talk radio is a clatter of panic, blame, and invective, like Mrs. Flax at the party: Do something! The rumor is that somebody is trying to drive the irrigators out, using fire as the knockout blow after the long drought.
Niccolo still has his confidence, but now he is edgy. The soldier should not think. It is not a summer adventure anymore but a wet bag of thoughts on how many things can go wrong. He asks the IC to patch him through to Angelo. The phone rings for several minutes before Niccolo’s father comes on the line. His voice sounds wan, out of breath.
“I’ve been up on the roof,” Angelo says to Niccolo, “and we dug a line around the vineyard.”
“How close, Dad?”
“It sounds like it’s here now.”
“What?”
“Sounds like jet engines on every side of me.”
“You have to evacuate.”
“I’ll never leave. You know that. A Cartolano does not desert his land. I have some help. Miguel’s here. We have other water.”
“Stay off the roof. You’re going to fall. How close is the fire?”
“I told you.”
“How close?”
“The Flax orchard.”
“Get out!”
“You know what, Niccolo? I’m scared. Ho paura. But I feel very . . . calm. I like my chances, Niccolo. I’m more worried about the grapes.”
They stumble through an oven of haze to the edge of the Johnny Blackjack. Niccolo radios base camp: change of plans. They are ordered into a draw on another side of the fire, the one closest to a bench of new homes above the coulee. They trudge forward in a wordless march led by Niccolo.
“Think like a dipper,” Teddy says to Niccolo.
“Fucking dippers. They know better than to walk into a fire.”
They arrive at an unburned forest of brown needles, branches dry as potato chips, huckleberry bushes so barren of leaves they could have been in winter dormancy, the grass long dead. Everything looks spent. They can hear the main fire well before they see it; it is the Johnny Blackjack’s own storm system—fierce gusts, the roar of crackling wood, limbs and tops falling away, and a constant pop-pop-pop.
“We start our burn here,” Niccolo says. “Take advantage of the winds being down, and then get the hell out.”
“This sucker’s gonna go up like a pile of tires,” says the Old Man. “You sure you wanna start it here?”
“We burn this strip and we choke off the Johnny Blackjack right here and now. Otherwise it runs through this firetrap of a fucking forest and charges right into the coulee.”
Niccolo gathers his crew around a map. They can’t see more than a few feet one way or another, which makes it hard to get grounded. They test small mikes on their shoulders, so that everyone is part of an audio link, and attach compasses to their fire shirts.
“Take a reading . . . northwest, thirty-five degrees. If you need cover, follow that direction and you’ll find an old burn. If you don’t find it, reverse course and go to the fresh black.”
“Which way’s the fresh black?” says Tozzie. “Can’t see anything.”
“Black is due west. The ground’s gonna be hot, still smoking, but the fire will have gone.”
A grouse hops around in a spiral near the jumpers, the feathers on one wing burned off and a foot severed. Niccolo reaches for the bird and it bites him. The Old Man puts his hand on Niccolo’s shoulder and looks him in the eyes.
“I trust you, kid, you know that. But we’ve been going over the various scenarios, Suzanne, Laura, and me, and we don’t think we should burn here, Nick. Not without pumps.”
“You want pumps?” says Niccolo, unblinking. “Using what water? This basin is sucked dry. Look at the way everything is burning. There can’t be any groundwater left.”
“Let’s get the pumps, Nick. For insurance.”
“A fucking orchard is on fire below, dude!” Niccolo shouts. “My father is trapped!” He turns, mumbling to himself, fall-away words, and radios the IC to patch him through to Angelo again.
“Dad,” he says, after a long delay. “You still on the roof?”
“Not going anywhere. I told you, son, I intend to die in this place. That’s been my wish since I first put in the grapes.”
“Gotta ask you something, and then I want you to get out. We got a guy here, wants us to get some pumps dropped in. But I’ll be honest with you, I’m kinda confused. I don’t think there’s any water left in this basin.”
“Dovè stai?”
“Dad, you gotta speak English to me here.”
“Where you at?”
“We’re at thirty-six hundred feet. You know where the old mine shafts are, where the canyon walls—”
“Should be plenty of water in that basin.”
“You sure?”
“Plenty of water!”
“How do you know?”
“Trust me.”
“Okay. Stay off the roof, Dad. Get outta there now. G-to-G. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
He reconnects with the IC, telling him he wants an airlift of pumps. The IC says it will take two hours, which is too much time, given the pressure he is under.
“Then I think I’m just going to sit,” Niccolo tells him. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“You’re insubordinate.”
“Why don’t you give us a couple of bucket drops while we’re waiting for the pumps? Should be a reservoir just above the coulee. It’s close enough to the fire to get a few dumps on the Johnny before we go in.”
The IC agrees to send a helicopter with a bucketload of water and to airlift three small pumps to the jumpers. Each of the two-cycle engines can draw seventy gallons a minute, enough to have three strong hoses pouring water on the line, and a fallback position that makes everyone feel they have a true firewall. The jumpers sit in a circle and wait, all but Niccolo. He can’t get his heart to settle. He paces and looks skyward.
The sky wrings out a mist that barely falls. Still, it’s a relief. Heads back, the jumpers let the drizzle coat their faces. Teddy lights a cigar and opens his talisman, the leather-bound book that goes everywhere he goes. One of the Indians offers a prayer of thanks.
“Probably won’t even need the pumps now, huh, Teddy?” Tozzie says. “Gonna rain this fire out. We’re done. We’re home.”
“Let me see what the IC’s got in mind.”
When he calls the base, he is told there is no rain, no drizzle even, in the lower elevations.
“But we got a steady mist up here,” says Niccolo.
“It’s vapor. It’ll be gone in minutes. There’s no rain coming your way, Cartolano. Nothing. The forecast was wrong. The humidity’s going the other way now.”
“Where the hell’s our bucket drop?”
“The pilot couldn’t find that reservoir.”
“What do you mean he couldn’t find it?”
“Smoke is real thick on the ground. We got a dry cold front down here. Winds’ll be picking up soon.”
The pumps land in midmorning, three engines at the end of small chutes, each weighing under twenty pounds. Niccolo makes sure they are gassed and oiled before he caches them around a small spring. Then the crew advances on the Johnny Blackjack, unable to see more than a few feet ahead, moving in the direction of the heat, soldiers on the attack.
“I’m not going any closer,” Tozzie shouts into his radio collar.
“Get your fusees out and let’s start the burn.”
Niccolo pees his pants. His eyes tear and blur. His hands are wet in the gloves, and his legs cramp. Ahead of him, he sees maroon and purple balls seeking oxygen. He smells burning hair. It is raining fire, a storm of embers. It takes only a few seconds to ignite the backburn, and only a few seconds to realize it is a mistake. For an instant, the dead forest just ahead of them is still, and then it blows up. The backburn was supposed to take off from the ground up until it met the advance of the Johnny Blackjack, but the old forest blows up as if it had been coated with kerosene. It blows up and sucks out all the oxygen from where the jumpers stand, and then reaches inside for the big fire and grabs it, pulls it along, until the backburn is engulfed, and the two fires are one, stampeding for fuel. The upwelling flames are higher than the oldest pines, the trees at the edge of the coulee. Flames jump sideways, reaching at anything. Burning branches and bursting cones shower down on them, and white ashes fall like a blizzard. Even boulders look like they are on fire, their coatings of dry lichen orange in flame. The jumpers drop their fusees and sprint in retreat to the base of the springs, against the slope. Nobody looks back. They are trapped at the point where the canyon wall meets the springs, but they have their pumps, their hydraulic fortress. Niccolo, Teddy, and Tozzie unspool hoses. Laura and Suzanne place the suction end of the pumps in the fetid seeps of the springs. The Old Man looks around for other water sources. Niccolo is worried that the embers falling from the sky will cause the pumps to explode before they can put them to work. They start the engines and face the oncoming firestorm, ready to pour more than two hundred gallons a minute on the ground just ahead of them.
The jumpers hold tight to their flaccid hoses, desperate to feel the pulse of water as the fire closes in against them. The heat sears the exposed skin of their noses, and embers catch their hair and necks.
“The pumps!” Niccolo shouts. “Goddammit, what’s holding ’em up?”
“They’re on!” says Laura.
“Can’t hold this hose anymore,” says Tozzie. “My gloves are burning.”
“Just wait another second. The water’s gotta come.”
Niccolo can hear the whine of the pump engines, and he checks the connection of the hoses. Everything is in place, but only a bare trickle of water comes forth. His crew will be dead from asphyxiation or overcome by the heat or burned alive if they do not abandon the line now and crawl for cover. Do you die two times—choked by the gas, then burned—or three, in anticipation? How many times have they asked the old jumper question?
“Head for the black!” Niccolo shouts, ordering the jumpers to the part of the forest that has just been burned. To get there, they will have to dash into the flames, running through the heart of the fire to reach uncertain deliverance on the other side. Nobody moves.
“Get to the black!” The Old Man bolts forward, disappears, and then reappears in a stagger, the reflector on his hard hat melted.
Only Teddy still clutches a hose, waiting for it to fill, trusting a machine over a gamble. “I can’t get through the wall, Nick! I’m afraid. I just won’t make it.”
“Fire shelters!” Niccolo shouts. “Grab your shelters and get inside!” The jumpers scramble for a piece of ground to claim as a last hope, a place to dig in. Dying a first time. Fire gusts knock several jumpers down as soon as they unfurl the shelters. They stumble, jittery hot hands trying to shake out shelters, find the hand straps, and face the shake-and-bake into the oncoming fire. If they can get inside quick enough, the fire should bounce over them. The wind takes the Old Man’s fire shelter as he tries to unfold it. He’s defenseless.
“Come with me!” Niccolo shouts, but the Old Man is lost. Only Teddy stays on the fireline, still holding the flat hose, even as Niccolo yells at him to give it up. Now he screams; his face has caught fire, the flesh peeling back like tissue paper set to a torch. His nose blackens. Teddy falls down in a spasm of pain, rolling and flopping, trying to snuff out the blaze that is eating away his face. He jumps up and runs through the flames and into the gut of the Johnny Blackjack.
The jumpers who are able to get inside their shake-and-bakes have trouble keeping the covers over them, wrestling with the winds, and now the fire is upon them. The temptation is to get up rather than cook, to run. One of the shelters explodes; the jumper inside never removed his backpack, which held the fusee. Niccolo clutches his flapping foil roof and burrows into the dirt, trying to dig a small airhole with his nose, to corner a pocket of hot oxygen to keep him alive for the few minutes he needs until the storm passes. The shelter is pounded with embers and flaming branches. He knows that a fire hot enough to blow up, quickly exceeding 1,000 degrees, is hot enough to vaporize the glue of the shelter’s seams. Face to the ground, he cringes at the heat that penetrates his fire shirt and his pants, scalding his skin. With his nose and chin, he scrapes away at the hardpan and keeps digging, digging, even though the ground is impenetrable. Every breath is a lungful of hot gas, burning the inside of his chest. His skin bubbles, blisters, and he chokes and coughs and cries, a weak human sound against a fire that runs up the ridge, and beyond, and burns for two more weeks.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN THE PUGET SOUND fog has thinned to a pale broth, the city comes out for the day. The fishing pier is crowded with rusting hulks that have not faced an ocean swell in decades, small wooden boats fresh-oiled to a shine like that of a horse saddle, and other boats topped by wind-shredded blue tarps. The oddest vessel, listing to starboard, is a long-retired ferry, once considered the most daring maritime design of its time. She looks like a bar of soap with little portholes and served in her final years as headquarters of the Fishing Sons of Norway. When the last Son of Norway died, the ferry was condemned. Brunella has two hours to kill before the press conference, and she wants to see once more what Waddy Kornflint’s vision will replace. She has already written No Significant Impact on the consultant’s report that Kornflint will use to clear any objections based on city preservation laws. She feels she has been deliberate and honest, passing judgment on five generations of American life on this small piece of real estate. Yes, it was once something mighty and industrious, a home port for a salmon fleet that roamed the Pacific, bringing to canneries a bounty that fed the American army in the Great War. But what is it now? Rust, hardened oil, dry rot, and wet rot. Memories, barely.
She drops into the small deli, Svenson’s, where she skips the pickled herring on special today and orders a meal-sized helping of lefse, potato flatbread. If only the Scandinavians had discovered garlic, maybe this place would have been able to hang on. The walls are covered with pictures of John Olerud, and that’s all anyone can talk about—Ole, Ole, Ole, the great first baseman for the Mariners, a local kid who hit .400 going into August one year, and too bad he always seemed to lose his swing against the Yanks. But what a sweet swing. Eat up, says Svenson, it’ll soon be gone. For the final six months of his lease, he plans a new menu, getting rid of the lefse and herring and offering pocket pitas and frappacinos. Brunella likes Svenson and made a personal appeal in her report for Waddy Kornflint to accommodate him. Ethan has assured her they will. Outside, she watches the live-aboards, the squatters in long-retired tugs, hanging their clothes and basking like seals in the weak sun. A flock of gulls hops from towline to dock, the low growl of engines in the distance. A clump of sagging cedar shacks, each about the size of a large bedroom, cling to the edge of the water, next to a closed-up fabricating plant and warehouses where crab pots, nets, and flotation balls are piled to the rafters. The most vibrant color is at the entrance of the Purple Door Tavern, which has been drawing a crowd of regulars, usually around breakfast, since World War II—Greeks, Sicilians, Croats, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, a community of people once tied to the sea, now bound to nothing but bar stools.
There will still be salmon fishermen, Brunella wrote in her report, just not here, on this broken-down pier. Kornflint has taken care of that, and he has been rather generous. The contrast between this decaying heap of fishing detritus and the gleaming new pier on the other side of the bay is stark. Across the water, the new pier is full of pleasure craft and yachts, spotless and without nicks. The old pier is only a slouch with no purpose. Of course, if it did not stand in the way of the biggest waterfront development in half a century, nobody would care how many slugs nested in old Salmon Bay.
