When Giants Burn, page 7
I shake my head. “I stopped playing when I was eight.”
“Not too late to pick it back up!”
What does this woman know about me? I feel my breath push from my nose like a bull. “It is when your mom steals jewelry from your coach’s wife.”
“Hayes,” Mom gasps.
Jacey, though, laughs. It sounds like clinking glass. “Stay angry, little man. But I’ve got to warn you—it burns up more than it gives.”
I stomp down the hall and slam the door.
* * *
Late that night I wake to Charlie’s soft snores. He still hasn’t spoken to me since the fight. Mom tucked him in, kissing his nose and telling him she loved him, that he was “safe as houses” until the morning. It’s what she says to him every night. She used to say it to me, too, but the first night she tried after getting out, I rolled onto my side and put the pillow over my ear. Now she says, “Good night, Hayes. I love you.” And then she closes the door before I can answer. Or not answer.
“Safe as houses” is ridiculous. How are houses safer than anywhere else?
I can’t fall back asleep, so I creep to the kitchen for a glass of water. Jacey’s rough laugh, coming from the porch outside, stalls me in my tracks. “Of course I brought it!” I hear shuffling, and then the pop and click of a car’s trunk opening and closing. “Never leave home without it. Brought your old one too, Tara.”
Silent as I can, I step out onto the porch. Grandma Louise shoots me a glance, but Mom is focused on whatever Jacey is bringing toward her. It’s a tool with a long wooden handle. It looks like an ax, the top painted red, but it juts out on both sides. Opposite the ax is a wedge-shaped blade like a garden hoe.
“Whoa,” Mom gasps, and reaches for it. She cradles it on her lap. “Hey there, Polly.”
“What’s that?” Grandma Louise asks.
I sink down to sit on the porch next to the door. I’m mostly in shadow, but Mom sees me. She grins at me, but I look away.
“A Pulaski,” Jacey says. “Hand crews chunk out a fire line, along a road or creek. They’ll use these”—she mimes using the wedge side of the tool—“to clear anything that can burn—shrubs, trees, grass, any debris—until the dirt level. Stops the fire in its tracks.”
She sits down on the porch step. Mom lowers the Pulaski, running her fingers lightly across the handle. Jacey smiles. “Fire would be raging toward us, so hot that our lungs refused to suck in air, and Tara would be throwing down that line, keeping her crew going.”
“Weren’t you terrified?” Grandma Louise asks.
Jacey and Mom say “Always” in unison. They grin at each other, an unspoken joke, then Mom sighs. “You’ve got to understand, I was constantly terrified. In prison, out of it, I always felt like I was running from something. At least out there it made sense. I knew what threatened me.”
No one speaks, the silence thick and, even from where I perch, awkward. Do they want me out here, listening to this? Do I want to hear it?
Jacey says, “Besides, we knew enough. Like to keep a toe in the black.”
“What’s that mean?” Grandma Louise asks.
Jacey shrugs. “Charred land can’t burn. So long as we could run into the blackened area, we’d be okay. Skin-blistering hot, maybe, but alive.” I scrunch my eyebrows, trying to remember how I know this tactic. It was in Mrs. Freid’s office. Gerty said if I’m ever in a fire, to find land that’s already been scorched.
“Remember that duffer?” Mom asks, her eyes still on the Pulaski.
“Duffer?” Grandma Louise echoes, and I’m glad because I want to know what it means too. “I swear, you have a different language.”
Jacey says, “Fir or Douglas trees, their needles on fire, blowing through the air like dandelion puffs from hell, blowing all around you. That’s a duffer. The pine cones were blazing, acting like grenades as they rolled down the incline, ready to scorch whatever was in their path.” She pauses. “And they would’ve. If it weren’t for Tara’s crew.”
“You give me too much credit,” Mom whispers.
“You don’t give yourself enough.” Jacey shifts to face Grandma Louise. “Tara hacks out a line, ordering the squad to do the same, but they don’t stop at the soil level. No, they manage to dig a legit ditch in minutes, in the middle of a duffer. Those pine cones didn’t stand a chance. Probably saved acres. Definitely made life easier for the crew working the line below us.”
I try to picture that, Mom saving the forest. For some reason it makes me think of Gerty and how she wants to join CAP to save Pando. Gerty said maybe Mom had leaned against the sequoias so she could pretend to be as strong as them. What if she already was that strong? What if firefighting was what made her realize it?
“How did you know what to do?” Grandma Louise asks.
Mom shrugs. “I had to do what I could. At fire camp—”
“Camp?” I interrupt, even though I’m pretending not to pay attention.
Mom snorts. “I know, makes it sound fun, right? Fire camp is a command center for wildfires. Where all the overhead—the supervisors and other people in charge—and crews live during a fire. We kept mostly separate in our own quarters, but it’s basically a temp city for firefighters.”
Jacey leans forward. “I met a smoke jumper there. A guy who was so seasoned, he kept steaks wrapped in foil, onions and potatoes diced up with them, in his freezer. Would slip the packet in his lower leg pocket before heading out on a call. Afterward, he’d toss the steak onto the fire, and some lucky fool would have something much better than an MRE.”
“Meals ready to eat,” Mom cuts in before Grandma can ask.
“Or meals rarely edible, as we called them.” Jacey laughs.
“Eh, the meat loaf wasn’t so bad.”
“Anyway,” Jacey says, “we all decided Tara should get the steak dinner that night.”
“That was a good day.” Mom lifts the Pulaski and tucks it under her seat.
“You know what that guy told me?” Jacey says. I lean forward to catch her suddenly hushed words. “He said people either spend one season at camp, or they’re there the rest of their lives.” She tilts her head toward me. “He nodded to Tara and said, ‘That one. She’s a lifer. Has fire in her veins.’ ”
“Mom isn’t a firefighter anymore,” I say. Jacey’s jaw flexes as she narrows her eyes at me.
“Well,” Grandma Louise says after too long a pause. “Maybe she once was. But now she’s back with us.” Grandma plants her hands on the armrests of the rocker and begins to stand. I follow her inside, not wanting to be alone with Mom and Jacey. It feels weird, like I’m a stranger at a birthday party, to be around the two of them. But soon I am back by the living room window, crouched down and peering out to the porch.
I’m not sure what I missed, but neither Mom nor Jacey is smiling anymore. Mom is as still as a statue, her arms crossed. “It’s over. There’s no path for me.” Even in the moonlight I can see the wiry muscles in her arms straining and her jaw clenching. “Not with my record, Jacey.”
“You can get it expunged.” Jacey is on her feet now. She strides forward and then crouches in front of Mom’s chair so they’re at the same eye level. “That new law. We can clear your record, get you back into the crew, Tara. Any crew!”
“I already told the captain here. About my record. It wouldn’t matter.” Mom doesn’t look at her.
“Then come back to Cali! You’d be a squad leader in no time. Think about it! Remember what it’s like, really living life, saving people, making a difference. Being a hero.”
My heart hammers in my chest. Back to California? What about me? What about Charlie?
Mom pushes the rocker back. It screeches across the cement porch. “I deserve that record,” she says, and starts to stand. My hands curl and open, curl and open, but the thoughts stick. The memories of our life out there—when she was taking those pills, when they ran out, when Charlie and I were alone more than we weren’t—won’t budge.
Jacey puts her hand on Mom’s shoulder, keeping her in place. “You served your time. It isn’t a scarlet letter. You get to move on from it.”
Mom shakes her head. “Fire camp can take months. I took enough from my kids. I won’t leave them again.”
Jacey moves back now as Mom stands. She gets up, tucks her hands in her back pockets and whispers, “So you stay here. Raking yourself over the coals again and again. A different sentence, huh?”
“You don’t know what it’s like.” Now Mom’s words are brittle and harsh. Her careful calm shattered for a moment. “We’re rebuilding,” Tara says. “Charlie and I are good, or at least getting there. Hayes, he’s just… he’s lost so much. He thinks he hates me. Maybe he does.” Her chin lifts. “Maybe I deserve it.”
Bitterness fills my mouth. Do I hate her? Sometimes, like when I see her running her hand along the Pulaski again, I do. I really do. But most of the time I simply hate how loving my mom used to be so easy. I hate how much I miss that. I hate that I don’t know if it’ll ever get better.
“You don’t deserve that,” Jacey says, her voice firm. “But you do deserve a life, one of your own. You’ve earned it.”
I force myself to breathe when my lungs crackle and burn. My heart is ramming against my ribs. She thinks I hate her. Maybe I do. But even more I hate that she’d even think about leaving me again. She didn’t have a choice before.
“I can’t leave them,” Mom whispers. And I realize right away what she didn’t say. She didn’t say she doesn’t want to leave us.
“I see you with those boys, Tara,” Jacey whispers. “They don’t have you now.” She bends and picks up the Pulaski, then holds it out to Mom handle first. “I stopped at a forester station on the way up here. There’s a fire, calling it the Bryce Canyon, heading north toward Fishlake. I’m going there tomorrow. They need more hands. I’ll put in a good word for you.”
Mom takes the Pulaski as my heart leaps into my throat. But then she lowers it to the porch. “I don’t think so, Jacey.”
The smaller woman seems to loom over Mom. She lets out a long breath. “Think about it. You want to be here for those boys? First you’ve got to show up for yourself.” She snorts. “Keep one toe in your own black.”
10 GERTY
Before I even open my eyes the next morning, I decide.
I’m going to tell Alex and Jennifer about the airplane today. Then I’ll break it to them about CAP. It’ll be fine. I bet they’ll even be proud of me for building the plane. Maybe they’ll put me in charge of building more things around the property.
It’s chilly when I wake, the house still dark and the pine plank floor so cold, my toes curl as I push my feet into my slippers to start the morning chores.
The whole house is quiet. Lilith must’ve slept through the night, because the fire in the woodstove has burned out. I peek in my sister’s crib and watch her chest rise and fall. Alex and Jennifer’s bed is right beside the crib, and Jennifer’s arm is to the side, like she fell asleep with her hand on Lilith. Even though it’s only early September, the nights are cold in our woods, so we usually keep the stove on a low burn overnight.
I go to the woodpile stacked beside the house and bring in an armful of logs. My toes are freezing from the cold dew, and I have to juggle the logs while kicking off my damp slippers on the rag rug inside the door. I stack the wood inside the stove. The embers are out, which is no good at all. I sigh and nest a bunch of smaller, dryer pieces of kindling under the logs. Smoke curls out around me, and I know if it were a school day, I’d be in for Jaxson complaining that “someone smells like a campfire.”
Next, I grab the blue enamel percolator from the counter and fill it with coffee grounds and then water. The tap is running on a drizzle, which also is no good at all. Alex is going to be in a bad mood about that. He’s always thinking about water. Sometimes I think Alex’s whole brain is a lake, sloshing from one thought to another. We have a water tower he made from plastic barrels. He fills other barrels at the community well, drags them back to our house in a trailer pulled by his four-wheeler, and then dumps them into the water tanks. It takes all weekend. The tanks are connected to a bunch of tubes. He says they’re gravity fed. I think they’re not eating nearly enough gravity, because some days they just plain don’t work. There’s a full bucket beside the sink, and I consider using that water instead for the coffee, even though I know Jennifer pulled it from the water lines in the canals she and Alex dug from the house to the stream in the woods. It’s for washing and flushing toilets, not for drinking. The coffee is boiling hot, though, right? I could add some iodine…. No, I can’t do that.
I sigh and wait out the dribbling faucet to fill the pot. I’ve got to show my parents I am independent and smart if they’re ever going to let me fly that plane.
I realize then what would really make a difference, what would truly show them that I’m practically an adult. I could start the generator.
* * *
During the night, if we need any electricity—like when I had pneumonia and we had to run a humidifier as I slept—we get power from a few golf cart batteries Alex rigged together. But during the day all our power comes from the generator. It’s Saturday, so Jennifer will be spending the day on laundry and meal prep for the week, which means the kitchen needs to be bright and buzzing.
I’ve watched Alex turn on the generator lots of times, but I’ve never done it by myself. The generator is the most expensive thing we own. When it didn’t start a few months ago, Alex lost a whole day of roofing work in town because he had to go back and forth from the library, YouTubing ways to repair it, and I had to go to school the next day with my pants still damp because the washing didn’t have time to dry on the line. If Alex knew he could depend on me to help with the generator, then I know he’d be much more likely to hear me out on the CAP and airplane secrets. He goes into town all the time for supplies and work. Once he learns about the airplane, maybe he’ll even put me in charge of the generator!
Donald the rooster screeches as I shove my feet into Alex’s boots. Mine are right next to his, but I’d have to untie them and then lace them back up, and I’m eager to get started proving myself. Alex’s feet are a lot bigger than mine, but I’m just going a few yards to where the generator, a big black-and-silver boxlike machine, stands beside the house, so I’ll deal with the floppy steps. “Not now, Donald,” I snap at the rooster. He fluffs up his feathers but runs off into the trees instead of chasing me. I yank the full gas can out from under the tarp where Alex keeps it and other yard tools, then trudge toward the generator. I twist off the cap at the top as I walk. A whistle and rustling come from the woods. Donald, I guess, is telling me off chicken-style.
“I don’t like you, either!” I mutter as I carry the gas can, holding it tight against my chest. Alex must’ve filled it on his trip into town yesterday, because it’s super heavy and full. I hear the fuel sloshing in the can.
A twig snaps behind me, too loudly for it to have been Donald. I startle and gasoline splashes onto my shirt and up to my chin. The smell, sharp and painful, makes me gasp. “Ah, that’s not nice,” says a high-pitched voice. “We haven’t even met yet!”
Between the spilled gasoline and the stranger, I’m startled. That’s not even right. I’m weak. All I know is narrowed to two things—spilled fuel and a stranger—and both of those are bad. My dull human instincts take over. I step backward, still sucking in gasoline-tinged air, and trip when the heel of Alex’s too-big boot hits the edge of the generator. I land, hard, on my tailbone, my legs in the air against the generator, gasoline covering all of me and it. The rusty edge of the can somehow scraped my arm, just above the elbow, and a bead of blood blooms.
From the shadows edging the woods steps a tall, scraggly man with bright red hair. Half his mouth is pulled back in a mocking smile as though pulled by a fishhook. His eyes are cold as they sweep over me, weak and on the ground. My heart hammers in my chest, cataloging my mistakes—wearing too-big boots, not telling anyone what I was doing, being unaware of my surroundings, and, worst of all, spilling fuel all over the generator and myself.
The man, though, is seemingly as calm as can be, the air going in and out of his crooked nose like a teakettle about to boil. Slowly, so slowly, he pulls a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. Standing just a few feet from me, he shakes one out and slips it into his mouth. He winks as he then pulls out a match. I want to scream at him to stop—he’s too close to me, to the generator, to the spilled fuel, my sleeping family—but nothing comes out of my mouth. I can’t breathe, can’t hear him, can’t do anything but sit there, sprawled on the ground, my crowded brain suddenly empty of anything but panic.
“Step away from my daughter.” Alex. I don’t see him, didn’t even hear him approach, but suddenly he’s there. My dad is tall, with coiled muscle, a bushy brown beard, and shaggy hair. He’s wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt and jeans. No shoes. They’re the clothes he wore last night; he must’ve thrown them on and run out, somehow knowing from inside the house that something was wrong and that I was too soft to notice, despite being in the thick of it.
My eyes slide back to the man, whose snort comes out again as a whistle. He rolls the cigarette around his mouth, then pulls it down with a cupped hand and half a smile. “Didn’t mean to startle the little lady,” the man says. “Name’s… Waylan.” The man’s mouth twitches as he says the fake name. “Yeah. Waylan. Let’s go with that.”
“What are you doing on our land, Waylan?” Alex grabs me by the elbow, his thumb brushing the scrape, and yanks me to my feet. My arm barks in protest. Alex’s nose scrunches as he takes in the smell, and his eyes flick to the gas can, still on its side, gas falling from the top in slow glugs. I lunge to grab it, but Alex’s grip on my elbow tightens. I still. Slowly he rights the can with his bare foot.
