Rush (10 page)

“What frightens you, Jake?”

“Nothing.”

“Dying? Are you afraid of death?”

“No.”

“How about losing your family?”

“No. Pretty much lost them already.”

“Tell me about Scottie.” Mox whispers. “Where'd he end up?”

“My—No idea. I don't care.”

Mox breathes hard. “Are you two close?”

“Turn on the light. I'm too old for ghost stories.”

“Are you? Tell me about Salome Lee.”

“You already know who she is. There's nothing to tell.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

I walk toward Mox. “There's nothing to tell.”

“Are you afraid of losing her?”

I pause, then say the first uncomfortable thing in this conversation. “Yes.”

I feel his breath. A hand grabs my shirt, balls it tight. “Jake King, I hate this. I hate you here. It's everything I fight against. Underprepared. Untested. I hate you on my crew. But this isn't your fault. So I'm giving you some advice: flunk out of training.” His voice lowers. “Or bug out now like your brother. Because I didn't pull your cert, and life on my crew won't be pleasant.”

He flicks on the lights, and I squint and blink.

“Sorry about the eyes. I focus better in the dark.” He smiles. The menace is gone, and his other personality speaks. “If the burn is unreachable by truck, they drop my crew. We hike miles in with hundred-pound packs on our backs. We kill that fire and haul those packs out. If she sparks up again and headquarters has to send someone else after us to mop up, we've failed.” Mox backhands my chest. “We don't fail.” He reaches for the door. “Come meet the guys.”

Back in the lobby, there are high fives and back-slaps, and I can't believe these are the same men who stared me down when I arrived. They don't speak much. They don't respond to verbal greetings. But if they're pissed I'm here, they hide it well.

Two of them are a matched set, leaning short and built like bulldozers. Their gazes flit around the room. Jumpy fellas.

The other guy is different. Tall and massive and scarred. A sweep of thick blond hair on top and a goatee, and the only one of the four without a brown jacket. There's no jumpy in him. His gaze is soft and reaching.

“Fez, Fatty, Koss, may I present Jake King,” Mox says. “Should he pass smoke-jumper recs, he'll be a probationary member of our crew. Now to the Jeep.”

“Hold up. I need to tell a friend my news.” I smile. “Then I have to reserve a room at the villa. So if you don't mind—”

“She'll wait. Let Salome wait.” Mox walks up to me. “And my crew doesn't sweat small stuff. If you survive training, you'll live with us.”

I stare at him. It's a command, and I bristle. I joined five minutes ago, and his invisible tentacles already try to wrap up every part of my life.

“I'm going to see her, now,” I say. “If the apartment offer stands after that, I'll take it.”

Fatty and Fez stop jostling in the doorway. Mox is unreadable.

“Let him go, Mox.” Koss, the watcher, slaps my back and stares into me. “It's not every day you join a hotshot rappelling crew.”

Mox nods, grins. “It was just a suggestion, kid.” He reaches into his pocket and tosses me an apartment key. “Three Vista Estates. See you in a few months. Maybe.” His face darkens, and his voice lowers. “Take my advice. Come on, guys.” Mox shoves Fatty and Fez out of the building.

Koss doesn't move. He looks down, then raises his gaze. “Do you trust your friend?” He speaks so low, I'm not certain he spoke.

“Salome?” I ask.

He doesn't twitch.

“With my life.”

“Then visit her often. It's those guys who have nobody on the outside . . . they can't stand up against it.”

I shrug and nod.

He nods back. “Scottie is a good man. No matter what you hear—he isn't a rat, and he didn't bail.”

“Koss!” Mox's head pokes through the door. “You coming?”

Koss slowly turns. “Talking training with the new guy.” He looks over his shoulder. “Those suggestions help?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Appreciate it.”

Koss steps out and leaves me alone. I swallow hard.

It. What
it
am I supposed to stand against?

I peek out the door. Mox leans over the front bar of his Jeep. His hand flexes and tightens. I do the same with mine.

APRIL COMES IN HOT
and lonely.

Inside, I'm cold. There are too many things about Salome I don't understand. Why she can't see the difference between her brother and me, why she stopped coming over, why she couldn't bear to say good-bye. It's just stupid. And she's not stupid.

I roll onto my back and stare at the coils on the bunk above mine. It's my first visit to Herndon, and one night in, I already hate it.

I roll over and stare out at sleeping giants. The Cascade Foothills and the Trinity Alps surround.

“Everybody up.” A dark silhouette fills the doorway. “My name is Clancy. My job is to get you in shape. Whether you end up suited for aerial delivery, Type I hand-crew work, or ecosystem management, you all must be prepared for isolated-wildland fire suppression. Which means you will go through me.”

I scratch my head. “Isn't this firefighter training?”

He walks toward me, leans over, and stares. “All of you except for one know the rigors of fighting wildfire. But none of you has any idea what it's like to hurtle out of a DC-3, twisting and free-falling into hell on earth. To watch your chute deploy, to land butt up in a one-hundred-fifty-foot ponderosa. To let down into charred field, run top speed five miles into the teeth of a blaze with near a hundred pounds on your back.

“Up!”

I jump up, my body quivering with the thought. “What are we doing standing here?” I spin a circle and watch twenty men groan and shake their heads. “What's first?”

Clancy chuckles, then laughs, and slowly others join in. “So green. Let me take a look at the young King.” He stares hard, but his eyes gleam. “So far you live up to your reputation. Everyone, meet me outside in five minutes for a light run.”

I'm outside in two, stretching and jumping and watching men who want nothing to do with me spill out of our quarters. They gather in a circle, twenty paces from where I sit and stretch. Clancy plops down beside me.

“You don't deserve to be here. The other men aren't gonna like you.” Clancy stares straight ahead.

“I'm used to that.”

“I'm supposed to be hard on you.”

“I'm used to that, too.”

Clancy smiles. “These guys are veterans. They know what a run through the woods is like. That in mind, you want to lead? The path is clearly marked. Five miles. If you run out of gas, well, I'm sure they'd all appreciate a leisurely pace on Day One.”

“Yeah!”

We walk to the trailhead.

“Jake here has offered to take point.” Clancy shouts. “Keep your feet up. Go, Jake.”

I leap into the woods, weave around trees, and skip over fallen branches. Behind me there is a smattering of voices, then all falls silent but my breath and the crackling of the twigs.

A crunch behind me. I glance over my shoulder. It's Clancy. Gaining. I quicken my pace, he quickens his, and when I reach the end of the loop, he's only ten paces back.

I break back into the clearing, bounce, and stretch. “Can we go again?”

Clancy stumbles around, his mouth hanging open, hands clasped firmly on top of his head. He glances at the stopwatch.

“Twenty-five minutes.” He gulps air. “That was twenty-five minutes.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I'll go faster.”

He tries to laugh, grabs his waist, and winces. “You will never lead again.”

 

 

MY FIRST WEEKS PASS
, and I'm in heaven. We learn parachute landings and airplane exits and letdowns from eighty-foot pine giants. Then we add the gear. Sixty pounds of weight accompany us on our runs. It will not slow me down. I lap most of the group on seven-mile full-pack runs. Twice, I win.

I love it, love it all. The tree-climbing, the firefighting techniques, safety school . . . but Clancy wakes us on a beautiful Monday with the best news of all. “We're going up.”

This will be a clear-sky jump onto a wide-open field. We clamor into the plane, spiral higher, and pull the door. The engine roars, the draft licks my hands, and even from this height the air smells of sweet pine.

I turn into the plane. Our load is six. Four peaked faces, Grandier—a French guy not too much older than me—and myself.

Hankinson, our jump instructor, runs it all our first time out. He whips draft streamers out the open door, watches them flutter in red and blue, and yells toward the pilot.

“It's good.”

We cruise to 2,700 feet, and my heart pulses. I'm here. Completely. I'm alive. Completely. How I got here does not matter. Dad's calls and my lack of experience fade away. Heaven has reached down, and for this instant, I'm a believer.

Hankinson slaps my back, screams in my ear. “Little draft. It's all you, Jake. To the door.”

The world whips by, yanks at me, tugs at my heart.

“Jump!”

I leap forward. All senses fire, and I free-fall.

“Jump one thousand, look one thousand, reach one thousand . . .”

I stabilize and hurtle like a bullet for the ground. I reach for the pull cord, force my hand loose.

“Wait one thousand, pull one thous—!”

My torso thrusts back, and the red chute unfurls against the blue sky.

“Whoa!”

I glance toward the ground. I'm too far left. I yank the toggle and float gently into the field. I hit soft, roll, and stand as the chute collapses over me.

I fight out, raise my arms, and scream.

“Again! Yeah. Do it again!”

This is my life. My time.

The following weeks, we practice leaping into terrain, collapsing into trees. We learn to use the tools and chainsaw trees and set back fires. There is nothing better than this job and the rush it brings.

Then training ends.

I feel lost. Here in Herndon I've found what I've been looking for. Why rappel from a copter when you could leap from an airplane?

But it's not right either. Salome's laugh isn't here. And while she finished senior year, graduated, shared that laugh with her friends, I've almost forgotten what it sounds like.

On our last day, I wake early and wander to the tarmac. I run my hands over the planes, now my friends, that carried me to thrill after thrill.

“I'm sorry I wasn't able to push you.” Clancy stands at my side. “But you pushed yourself plenty.” He looks at me, and I drop my gaze. “I finished my report. I ranked you as high as they come. Should be enough for Richardson.”

I nod and stare off.

“That is what you wanted, isn't that right, son?”

“I guess so.”

“Mox is as good a fighter as I've ever known. You'll learn a ton about rappelling.” He breathes deep. “But when you're done in Brockton, after you get your years in, you come back. There's a place for you here. You're one heck of a kid.”

I force a smile.
Then why won't she return my texts?

MY NEW HOME RESTS JUST
outside of town and overlooks the Apido Valley. Apart from a few Immortals, it's quiet and ghostlike during winter, but now that summer's here, Vista Estates bustles with crazies and do-gooders all here to do one thing: knock the crap out of wildfires.

It's a rowdy bunch, more than half born-and-bred Brockton boys. Kyle had lived here. Had Scottie stuck around, it would have been his home, too.

I haul my stuff to number three. Mox's crew is housed nearest the helicopters and apart from the fifty other full- and part-timers. Judging from the AC/DC that blares out his open window, it's likely those others don't mind.

“Will you look at that?”

I glance over my shoulder and set down my duffel.

Will and the rest of Bulldozer Crew #1 walk up to me. “You better just be visiting.”

Chuckles change to stone-faced seriousness.

I shake my head. “Mox picked me up.”

The thin, balding fighter on the right—the one with Scottie's expressions—tenses. “The Forest Service
has
turned into a Forest Circus. You have no fire experience except backyard barbecues, and you're on a rappel team?”

“He's got a daddy. Ain't that right?” This speaker is new to Brockton, but he's already up on the situation. “A daddy with Richardson's ear.”

I want to tell them that I didn't ask for Dad's help. That if a certain friend of mine would study journalism in Anchorage, I'd have no quarrel smoke-jumping in Alaska. What they say is true—I don't belong here. I know Dad worked the phone, and Mox hates that I came.

“Leave him alone.” Will steps up and shakes my hand. “If there's better proof of Moxie's character, I've not heard it.” Will throws his arms around his two buddies. “And after the toll the King family has taken on him. What was your brother thinking? Mox is a saint of a man, I'd say.”

I shrug. “I don't keep track of what Scottie does, but I've never heard him lie. Ever.”

Will lowers his arms and points at the open window. “He caused a great man pain. Mox has lost a lot of young men to stupidity. He deserves better than the investigation your brother put him, and all of us, through.” His gaze turns to me. “Make it up to him. Listen and do what he says. Come on, guys.”