Falls Like Lightning (7 page)

The San Mateo Home for Boys. The foster homes. He wasn’t sure how much of his memories were from being five. But they lingered vividly in his head. “I guess I remember always being me.” A subtle hum of static filled the space after his words.

“Is this still a miracle to you?”

“What? The weather?”

“Life. Creation. All of it.”

“Absolutely. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t seem so different. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always known that there was something more in all this. That the sun and the trees and the wind, the smell and feel of it all, were . . .” He shook his head, searching for words. “I don’t know. Evidence of God, I guess. Of His Spirit. That He loved me.”

“
Loved?
”

“Yeah.”

“Not
loves?
”

Perceptive, that woman.
“That’s what it says in the Bible, doesn’t it? That ‘God so
loved
the world . . . ’ ”

The plane leaned to the right. “There’s the children’s hospital.”

“Where?”

“At our two o’clock.”

“I see it.”

“I’ll radio the tower and get us in the pattern to land.”

CHAPTER

09

I
t was only a cab ride, and Maddie sat beside Elle just the way she had so many other times, lap belted so she didn’t need her car seat. Why should one variable make Elle feel so awkward? Silas sat staring out the window, his arm stretched over the top of the backseat, behind Maddie and her. Elle forced herself to keep her face forward, though her eyes couldn’t help wandering to the black sparkled shoes on Madison’s dangling feet and then to Silas’s shirt that accented the subtle angles of his torso.

Green light. They rolled a block. Red light. Shadowed beneath the Tribune building and its giant clock tower in downtown Oakland. The thought she’d been suppressing crept in, like a stray cat slinking through an open door.

This had the feeling of a family.

The corners of his eyes bore the beginnings of wrinkles, a mark of maturity but not yet age. Outwardly he was the image of adult youthfulness. Inwardly . . . What did she see going on? Turbulence, perhaps? She knew a few things about that.

Why did she feel so old?

She was doing all right. Wasn’t she? Providing for Madison, doing what single moms do. Making it work.

It had been two years now, and the doctors weren’t any closer to finding a solution to Maddie’s seizures. They’d eliminated the obvious causes but couldn’t figure out why her little girl had suddenly and increasingly fallen victim to flash bolts of electricity firing off in her brain, sending her body into convulsions and drugging her mind into a postictal state until she woke wondering why her tongue was bleeding again.

This was Elle’s life now. Flying over fires and driving to doctors.

It was good for Silas to see this, to see the reality of a mother’s love and commitment. She didn’t want him to have any illusions. She wasn’t twenty-two and unfettered. Undoubtedly, he was already squirming in his seat, ready to bail and find something that better suited his capricious fancies.

———

She looked like a five-year-old version of her mother, bouncing on Elle’s shoulder with the rhythm of her stride.

How did that woman walk so fast with a sleeping five-year-old in arm? Silas had to skip-jog to keep up with her in the hospital corridor.

Elle flashed an irritated glance at him. “You really don’t have to follow us. The cafeteria here is actually pretty good.”

“Why don’t you let me carry her? She’s got to be lighter than my fireline pack.”

She let out a quick sigh. “I’m fine, thank you.” She turned down an adjoining hallway. Madison’s arm dangled like a pendulum.

They approached an intersecting corridor. Silas caught a glimpse of the numbering. Elle hooked left. Silas paused. “Two-eighteen, right?”

Elle turned, and Madison stirred.

“Here,” Silas brought out his hands. “Why don’t you let me take her?”

Elle stared at him. “It’s just down the hall.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been here lots of times, Silas. Plenty without any help.”

“I thought this was your first visit to this specialist.”

She exhaled and readjusted her daughter in her arms. Madison lifted her head. “Mommy. Where are we?”

Winded, she said, “We’re going to see a new—”

“A new what, Mommy?”

“Doctor, baby. New doctor.”

Elle lowered Madison to the floor. “Here, Maddie. I need you to walk.”

“But I’m tired.”

“No. This is your job right now.”

“I don’t want to walk.”

Elle strode ahead. Madison planted her feet together in the middle of the hallway. Elle turned, simmering with impatience.

Silas squatted next to Madison. “Hey, Maddie.”

She stared at her mom a moment longer, then turned to Silas and smiled. “Can you carry me, Silas?”

He angled his jaw and glanced at Elle. He reached into his pocket. “How about this, Maddie. I’ll make you a bet.”

“What’s a bet?”

“See this quarter?” He held it up.

“Ooh. Can I have it?”

Silas palmed it and shook his head. “Nope.”

“Why?”

“You haven’t heard the bet yet.”

“What is it?”

“I bet that I can make this quarter come out from behind your ear.”

She giggled. “No.”

“Really.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Yeah, watch.” He motioned with the hand holding the quarter, appearing to transfer it into his opposite fist, which he held up in the air.

Maddie reached for the fist.

“Wait,” Silas said. “First our bet. If I can make this quarter appear behind your ear, then you walk the rest of the way.”

She pulled at his fingers, trying to pry open his fist. “Let me see it.”

“Nope. You have to bet.”

“What if I get this quarter out of here?”

“And it doesn’t appear behind your ear?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, you not only get to keep the quarter, but your mom will carry you the rest of the way to the doctor’s office.”

At that, Madison smiled in realization and looked up at Elle, who stood with hands on hips.

“So—” Silas held up his fist—“do you bet that I can’t make this quarter appear behind your ear?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He let her pry loose his fingers. His palm lay empty.

“Hey!”

“Hey, what?”

“Where is it?”

With the quarter still palmed in his opposite hand, Silas reached behind her ear and produced it in his fingers.

Madison gasped.

Silas took her little hand, turned it palm upward, and dropped the coin into it. He stood, took her other hand, and coaxed her on.

She stepped forward. “How did you do that? Can I keep it?”

Silas nodded.

She gripped two of his fingers and, with her other hand, played pulling the coin from behind her ear—feigning surprise every time she held it in front of her face. They strolled up to Elle, who looked on with an expression at the same time dumbfounded, grateful, and irritated.

Silas grinned. “Quarter for your thoughts?”

Elle huffed and led the way to a nearby office door. It led to a waiting room, where he sat one vacant seat away from Elle and thumbed through a copy of
Newsweek.
Madison sat opposite a plastic baby on a play rug, telling the doll to watch her fist in the air while pulling the quarter out from behind its ear. Elle sat with back straight and hands pressed between her knees, eyes moving from Madison to the reception desk window. She pulled her cell phone from her purse to check the time. Someone flipped the water cooler tap and filled a paper cup.

A nurse appeared at the exam-room door and called Madison’s name. Silas smiled respectfully and watched Elle follow her daughter in.

CHAPTER

10

B
o Mansfield moved as molasses under a southern sun. He liked it that way. When others tuckered out, he kept on grubbing, helmet set low on his brow, riding on the perch of his shoulders that moved with the perspiring rhythm of his Pulaski axe through the duff.

He could contentedly work for hours without speaking. Dialogue aplenty, but little of it aloud. He worked as the cleanup caboose on the crew. He couldn’t leave anything living along the line. Just bare mineral soil. Bare mineral soil.

The guys in front could afford to let a root or a patch of grass pass along to the next. But it all stopped with him. And Pendleton had assigned Bo to the back, knowing that he would make sure it ended there.

This time, Spotter Pendleton had them cutting a distinctly indirect path to stop the fire. Bo knew the maps. They were sacrificing a lot of forest land by cutting this far from the main fire. Maybe it was just Pendleton being his overly cautious self. Pendleton was calculating, textbook precise. He checked and rechecked and agonizingly evaluated situations, but he wasn’t cowardly. Bo had cut hot line with him many times, choking on woodsmoke thicker than that of a pig roast to save little more than a jackpot of endangered flora. They’d been through enough that he trusted Pendleton.

But Caleb . . .

It was a weird dynamic having Pendleton on the ground with them for the first time in a long while. Caleb Parson was jumper in charge, and though Pendleton was technically the boss, Caleb carried an unspoken weight of authority with the crew and had, Bo believed, a stronger than normal influence over Pendleton’s decisions.

Perhaps that lent some explanation to the indirect line they were cutting. But even so . . .

Bo shook off the thoughts. He was a working man. Let the men in charge make the command decisions. Bo would keep his head down, grubbing at the soil, unceasing in the repetitive motions of clearing the line.

He let his mind fill with the atmosphere of the forest. The scent of woodsmoke and turned earth. The chatter and singsong of birds. The rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers and the skitter of Rodentia. The swirling and changing of the wind and the temperature and the humidity.

His musing reverie was soon interrupted by the rest of the crew.

Richard “Rapunzel” Strothesby, with his fuzzy beard and long braided ponytail stretching to his midback, scraped the earth one tool length in front of Bo. Beyond him worked a sinewy twenty-two-year-old Mississippi native named Jason “Sippi” Fines.

Rapunzel grinned at the dirt. “Sippi, what’re you going to do when you get married?”

Sippi spit from a golf-ball-sized chaw in his lip. “Who the—Who went and said anything about getting married?”

Rapunzel shook his head. “That ain’t what I asked you.”

“And you’re not answering
my
question. Ain’t nobody here been talking about getting married.”

“Sippi, for once, just use your imagination to envision the future.”

Sippi ran his tongue under his lip, stopped and looked up at the crown of the trees, and then nodded. “Yep.”

“Yep, what?”

“Yep, I see it.”

“What do you see?”

“I see a mansion with seventy virgins waving the confederate flag.”

Bo almost broke his rhythm. But he’d known these fools too long to let something stupid like that get to him. He knew exactly where the comment was rooted from. Unlike these veritably illiterate members of his crew, Bo’s reading interests swathed far and wide. And it was somewhere between
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi,
and
The Old Man and the Sea
that Rapunzel and Sippi had witnessed him perusing a copy of the Koran. Since then he had been a Muslim to them. If he so much as knelt to lace up his boots, he might as well have been facing Mecca to pray. He wondered how he would’ve been labeled had they seen him reading
Mein Kampf.

Let them think what they wanted.

Rapunzel grubbed away in the dirt. “Sippi, you’ve gone and upstaged my joke already.”

“You ain’t told no joke.”

“It’s amusing enough just listening to you.”

“If it was about mister and misses Sippi again, you can listen for my fist to come upside your head.”

Pendleton glanced down the line. “Bump it up.”

He moved down the line with his half-shovel, half-pick combi-tool in hand like a walking stick. “We aren’t yet halfway to the ridgeline, and light is waning. Unless you want to dig into your MREs in the dark, I suggest you keep your heads down and your tools in the dirt.”

Meals, Ready-to-Eat.
Bo had a chicken pasta with marinara sauce sitting in the top of his pack. He could eat it now or in five years, would still taste the same. Couldn’t be healthy.

A voice came from farther up the line. “How much line we cutting?”

“Forty chains.”

“Total?”

“Forty chains more.”

A collective groan let out from the crew. Forty chains meant half a mile. Half a mile of three-foot-wide line cut down to mineral soil. Eight guys dropped from the sky, fighting fire without water. It’s what they did. But this indirect route had the feeling of a fool’s errand. Why weren’t they in the thick of it—felling trees and backburning to halt the fire’s progress?

This felt like underutilization. They were the best at what they did. Or at least the stupidest to work so hard for GS-5 pay.

Sometimes Bo wondered.

Like the other guys, Bo didn’t have a family of his own. But unlike them, he worked to support his two little sisters in college. Since his dad’s death he’d taken something of a fatherly role. With overtime and hazard pay, the job brought home enough to pay a big part of the girls’ tuitions. They still had to cover their room and board.

The decision to become a wildland firefighter had saved him years earlier. When at a community job fair Pendleton talked Bo into applying for a seasonal position on his hotshot crew, little did Pendleton know that he had thrown a drowning man a line.

No college degree, between minimum wage jobs, scraping just to keep from being evicted out of his ghetto apartment. He never imagined he’d soon be out in the West, jumping out of planes and scraping through the dirt with a rabble of rednecks.