Chapter Six
REDHEADS BLUSH AT THE DROP OF A HAT. OR A DRINK. BUT at least the fuss with the spill covered my reaction to Jack the Knack.
I jumped to my feet, apologizing, while he backed away from the flood. It spread swiftly to the table edge and cascaded to the floor in long brown streamers. Laughing faces turned toward us from other tables, and then the waitress appeared to mop up the mess with practiced nonchalance. The whole thing took only moments, but by the time she departed I had my face under control. Sort of.
“Think it’s safe to sit down?”
The gold-brown eyes crinkled as he said it, and he slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. He wore his jeans snug beneath a blue denim shirt with the tails out and the cuffs rolled back. Both jeans and shirt were as pale and as sun-bleached as his tousled hair.
“Of course,” I said, and sat myself. My cheeks were burning again, hotter than ever.
Dammit, he hasn’t changed a bit.
Jack, for his part, seemed untouched by thoughts of the past. But he was uncomfortable about something in the present. As he took B.J.’s seat, his face assumed a formal, almost embarrassed expression, and he tried to say something appropriate about Brian Thiel.
“I’m sorry about your cousin. He, uh, he was a good firefighter. Very strong. Looked like he was going to be a good jumper, too. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks, Jack, but you can relax. We weren’t close. In fact, I hardly knew him.”
“All right, then, I guess I’ve done my duty.” He smiled his killer smile, one that came rarely but with devastating effect. He waved at the waitress for a beer, but after it came the smile faded. “There is one other thing, though. About Brian and B.J. It’s none of my business if they were—”
“Old friends,” I supplied hastily. “They dated once, remember?”
“I remember. Carnegie, I don’t know how to say this to B.J., but maybe you can.” Jack winced. “She’s been pestering people about the accident. Asking questions, calling attention to herself. People are starting to wonder about her and Brian. She’s a married woman, and this is a small town, you know?”
“I know. I’ll... I’ll talk to her.” I made a last-ditch defense. “But surely everyone’s upset about this?”
“Of course. All the jumpers are edgy, especially since we don’t know exactly why he fell. That’s why everyone’s drinking so hard tonight, even though Thiel wasn’t the most popular guy.” Jack’s gaze dropped to the tabletop. “Everyone’s thinking, sometimes Big Ernie just hands you a bad deal.”
Big Ernie is the god of smoke jumpers, a twisted joke of a deity. He appears in costume at the initiation rites for new jumpers, and demands worship from the veterans in the form of prodigious beer consumption.
And yet he isn’t quite a joke. Fate or luck or destiny, whatever tips the delicate balance between life and death, that was Big Ernie, too. A faulty chute that unfurls at the last possible second, a flaming snag that falls a mortal moment too soon. Or a letdown rope knotted wrong, dead wrong.
Uneasy with these images, I tried to change the subject. “B.J. mentioned that she talked to you about Boot Creek. I thought you were retiring?”
“Oh, I am. But I’ve been hanging on since this heat came up so sudden and we had all these lightning fires. I promised Tracy I wouldn’t jump after the wedding, though. And since we’re all off the active list this week, that means I’m done jumping for good.” Jack frowned at his beer bottle, then took a long pull and set it down. “Well, that was then, this is now, right? How are things with you, Carnegie? It’s been a long time since you were here.”
Since I was in your bed that night,
I added silently. My blood was rushing around my body in objectionable ways.
Don’t you even remember?
But all I said was “Yes, a long time. Things are fine. Busy.”
“Good.” He nodded. “It’s good to be busy.”
A pause. A long one. We looked away from each other, and then straight into each other’s eyes.
Oh,
I thought in sudden dismay.
Oh, dear. He remembers.
“Carnegie—”
“Jack—”
On the very brink of madness, I came to my senses. “Jack, I haven’t congratulated you yet! It’s wonderful about you and Tracy. Just wonderful.”
“Thanks.” He shifted in his seat and blinked. “Thanks very much. I’m a lucky man.”
If I held a different view on that point, I kept it to myself. But at least my blood was back where it belonged. “The wedding plans sound spectacular. I think I’ll be helping out a little, but I’ll have to talk with Cissy about that—”
“I knew it, I knew it, she’s hitting on the groom!” B.J. was back, her tears scrubbed away and a manic note in her voice. “Girl, I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I? What’s Tracy going to say?”
Jack rose at her approach. Back in the Muffy summer they had charmed me to pieces, these old-fashioned courtesies from lean, laconic Jack the Knack. B.J., less easily charmed, stayed standing and aimed a playful punch at his middle.
“You two taking up where you left off? Where
is
Tracy, anyway?”
Jack was unfazed. “Still in Portland. Gets back in the morning. How you doing, B.J.?”
“I’m fine, Jack.” She fumbled for her wallet and dropped some bills on the table. “My treat. Hey, let’s get over to the bar. They’re starting the Talent Show!”
“Talent Show?” I had a momentary vision of karaoke, or worse, but B.J. bounded away before I could ask. As we followed her toward the boisterous crowd at the other end of the room, she sent me a look over her shoulder that said the rest of our conversation about Brian Thiel was going to come later—if it came at all.
“The Talent Show’s a jumper thing, started last season.” Jack grabbed a couple of beers from a passing tray and handed me one. I noticed the friendly wink he gave the young waitress, and the flustered smile she offered in return. The notorious Knack was still operational. “The Tyke takes on a guy at arm wrestling, and if he loses he has to perform. Watch.”
Everyone in the place was watching, gathered in a tight, shifting semicircle around two stools at the bar. On one of them sat a woman in her twenties, stocky and suntanned in shorts and flip-flops, with a honey-brown ponytail pulled through the back of her red baseball cap. Her turned-up nose might have been cutesy on someone else, but on that broad-boned Nordic countenance it just looked cocky, ready for a fight. Her legs were muscled like a marathoner’s, and her biceps were fit for a Nautilus ad.
Suddenly I felt pale and stringy, like spaghetti.
The Tyke said something to the brawny fellow on the second stool, and he nodded his blond crew-cut head. I couldn’t see his face, but he was obviously another firefighter: the back of his T-shirt read “You Can’t Send Us To Hell, We’d Put It Out!”
Slowly, deliberately, the two of them planted their right elbows on the bar, then locked fists. The crowd bellowed.
“Who’s the challenger?” I asked Jack.
“Todd Gibson. We call him Odd Todd. He’s a Ned.”
Decades ago, “Ned Newboy” was the nickname for a firstseason smoke jumper, and the “Ned” part stuck around as another word for “rookie.” A second-year jumper was a “Sned” or a “Snookie.” These guys loved nicknames.
It occurred to me that the Tyke and Odd Todd were two of the jumpers who found Brian’s body. I looked around for the third, Danny Kane, but couldn’t spot him.
“Tyke, Tyke, Tyke!” the crowd began chanting, with an occasional cry of “Yo, Toddy!”
The wrestlers’ fists were trembling, but still upright. Seconds passed. The Tyke bared small, even teeth, and her opponent’s arm inched back and downward ever so slightly. I found myself gulping beer just to break the tension.
Abruptly the Tyke grunted low in her throat, Todd’s shoulders twisted in defeat, and his knuckles smacked the surface of the bar with a sound that was drowned by a new chant and a chorus of shouts.
“Talent Show, Talent Show, Talent Show!”
“Sing a song, Toddy!”
“No, dancing!”
“Yeah, belly dancing!”
But Todd, nursing his arm with a good-natured groan, deferred to the victor. The Tyke, it seemed, was the only one who could pronounce the loser’s penalty. She hiked herself up to sit triumphantly on the bar and raised a mug, which trembled enough to slop beer down her arm.
“Todd Gibson,” the Tyke declared, in a low but somehow girlish voice, “your best talent is... Shut up, you bastards! Todd, your best talent is . . . one-armed push-ups! Gimme ten!”
I couldn’t do ten push-ups if I had three arms. But Todd Gibson just beamed all over his big, square, heavy-boned face. He was young, early twenties at most, and would have made a stereotypical farm boy if he’d had jug-handle ears to go with his lantern jaw. Instead his ears were small and delicate, and just now they were glowing cherry red, though with exertion or embarrassment I couldn’t tell.
In either case, he dropped promptly to the floor and carried out his sentence, to the roaring approval of the onlookers counting him down.
“
Seven.
Come on, bro, you can do it!”
“
Eight.
Right on, Toddy!”
“Nine!”
“Ten!”
As Todd scrambled to his feet, Jack moved away from me to join his comrades in the last act of the Show: spraying beer over winner and loser alike. The Tyke shrieked and fired back at them, while Todd stood unmoving, exhausted but pleased, like a little boy who’s finally been allowed to play with the big kids. I wondered if the beer shower was the usual Talent Show finale or something special for tonight, to take the edge off everyone’s nerves.
I leaned down to B.J. “What happens if she loses?”
“She almost never does. She’s strong as hell and she knows just how to brace herself on the bar. But if she does lose, that’s the joke. Everybody tells the winner that the Tyke’s best talent is arm wrestling, and she already did it. Then they all drink some more.”
I chuckled. “Work hard, play hard?”
“You got it. Say, Muffy...” B.J. bit her lip. “Did I embarrass you with that crack about hitting on the groom? I mean, is it bothering you to see Jack after all this time?”
“Not at all,” I said firmly. “Ancient history. But you look a little strung out. Maybe we should go home?”
“No way!” She turned in a slow, wobbly circle to survey the crowd. “You hardly ever come to Ketchum; you’ve got to meet all these terrific people. Hey, Tyke, meet a friend of mine!”
She grabbed the younger woman by the elbow—they were almost the same height—and tugged her away from the melee. The smoke jumper frowned at first, but shook hands like a gentleman.
“Pari Noskin Taichert,” she announced. “And you are?”
“Carnegie...Kincaid,” I replied, leaving out the Bernice. Her hand was wet with beer.
“You’re Thiel’s cousin,” she said gruffly. “Sorry.”
“We weren’t close,” I said again. “Actually, I’m an old friend of B.J.’s. We used to work together in Sun Valley, along with Tracy Kane.”
“Oh. The actress.” From her tone, she intended the word “actress” to mean “despicable civilian who’s making Jack Packard give up his job.”
The crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder by now, and a couple of guys cut between us on their way to the bar. When they’d passed, the Tyke was already turning away.
“Am I imagining things,” I asked B.J., “or does she hate Tracy’s guts?”
B.J. laughed gleefully at that, too loud and too long, drunk on emotion as much as on beer.
“I think the Tyke used to have an eye on Jack herself,” she said slyly. Or rather, she shouted. The noise level had risen to a dense, hammering clamor you could almost see in the air. “Maybe more than her eye, you know?”
“Interesting!” I shouted back.
This used to be so much fun,
I thought, my head throbbing and my throat raw.
Drink way
too much, yell all evening, get up early for work, and then do it all
over again. Was it really that much fun?
But I was hot and thirsty, the beer was cold, and eventually the alcohol worked its tingling, numbing voodoo, even on me. The blur of voices and faces grew friendlier and more familiar, until I found myself wanting to stay all night in that golden glow.
At one point I was kidding around with a bunch of men, feeling like one of the guys, and soon after I was in the rest room with a cluster of women, all of them comforting me on the loss of my dear cousin. Pretty soon I was crying myself.
Another blur, time passing, and then we were back out in the crowd, B.J. laughing again and waving her beer bottle in the air. “Hey, there’s Danny. Yo, Dan the Man! Here’s your old pal Carnegie.”
“Who? Oh, hello.”
Danny Kane hadn’t changed much, except for accelerating baldness. His dark eyes and narrow nose and mouth were small and bunched closely together, so that the space between them and his retreating hairline had a vacant, unoccupied look. Tonight the high curve of his forehead shone with sweat, and his eyes were stupefied.
Well, this was only Monday. Not forty-eight hours ago Danny had seen his comrade lying dead, in the kind of accident that could just as easily have happened to him. Big Ernie never rests, and we all drown our demons as best we can.
“I’m sorry about your cousin,” he said mournfully.
“We weren’t... I mean, thanks. It must have been hard for you guys.”
He tried to reply and faltered, but B.J. interrupted him anyway. Her mood was flying higher and higher. “Carnegie’s going to stay for Tracy’s wedding. It’s going to be absolutely fabulous!”
“Absolutely,” Danny echoed, nodding. His head dropped lower with each nod, and we stood there, an awkward little island of silence in the beating, deafening surf of hilarity. The night’s false euphoria was ebbing away. I could picture the guest bed in the loft of B.J.’s cabin, and I wanted to climb into the picture and sleep for a long, long time.
“B.J., why don’t we get out of—h-hey, watch it!” Someone knocked me hard behind the knees, and I jostled into Danny. B.J.’s crowing laughter rose again, accompanied by... barking?