Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4

Coming off the fire, Tim should be out of it for another dozen-hour night of sleep, but the Alaskan summer light did things to you. Running on three to four hours sleep just seemed natural this time of year and even a half decade away hadn’t changed that old pattern. Of course if he’d remembered to close the blackout curtains in his childhood bedroom it might have helped.

Three-thirty in the morning and he was wide awake. His old room faced to the east, so the sun punched directly into his face making him squint as he struggled to find fresh clothes in his kit bag. It was a good thing he’d left a jacket here, he’d forgotten that Larch Creek in the summer wasn’t all that much warmer than Oregon in the winter.

When he tried to pull it on, the old denim barely fit.

Last time he’d worn it was his rookie summer as a hotshot eight years ago. Despite having a long, lean frame, like every other person who worked wildfire he’d bulked up over the season. And the last two years with MHA he’d fought the Australian season as well. His good polar fleece was still down at the MHA camp in Oregon.

He struggled with his favorite jacket a moment longer then hung it back on the door and opted for a sweater he’d left in the old dresser because it was too warm for the Lower Forty-eight. It was too heavy, but Ms. Maypole had knit it just for him so the sleeves were right on his long arms without the body having the bulk of a triple-XL. It would do until he could hit a store in Fairbanks.

His room was unchanged. A pile of plastic trophies for basketball and track-and-field. Posters that proved his teenage taste in music had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with how hot the solo female vocalist was. Most of them weren’t even on his playlist anymore.

It had started with Madonna, despite her being older than his mother—a comparison he wasn’t liking at the moment. Even though he still listened to her sometimes, he pulled the thumbtacks and rolled her up. Then Britney followed her. Gaga, Aguilera, Swift when she was about fourteen. Whitney and Mariah came down as well. Tina Turner was a classic, but older than his grandmother; what had he been thinking? Soon they were all down and his walls looked strangely barren.

All that was left was the “picture window” as he’d always called it—a big corkboard his dad had helped him mount years ago. It was covered with photos. Mostly his family…and Stephen Tyler. It was rare to have a photo of him without Stephen.

And even rarer to have a photo of the two of them without Mace Tyler stuck in the background somewhere. The picnic up on Sushana River where they’d all nearly died of blood loss to the mosquitoes, at least it had felt that way and the three of them had certainly looked it—bright red with bites despite gallons of bug spray. There she was, front seat on the school bleachers during a basketball game when the Snow Angels had trounced the Fairbanks Nanooks. He and Stephen dressed for the prom, and the gawky eighth-grader Mace sandwiched between them for the pre-event photo.

He’d figure out what to put up on the rest of the walls later, if anything.

Tim tapped Mace’s nose in the prom photo, because it used to drive her stone cold nuts when he did it in real life. He wondered if it still did? He should try it and find out. Actually, her vengeance had always been lethal, so maybe not.

The upstairs of the house was quiet as he snuck down. Q2 the cat—who he’d named for the Star Trek character, Q the First was buried out under a blueberry bush—was curled up in a corner of the living room so close to the wood stove that it was always a surprise he didn’t spontaneously combust.

“Getting lazy there, boy,” Tim gave him a scritch that Q2 barely bothered to wake up for. Even as a kitten the little beast had known better than to let something as trivial as attention interfere with a good nap. Lazy was the cat’s middle name, only the sound of kibble striking his cat bowl broke through that nonplussed attitude.

Dad was still out cold or there would be coffee on the stove. He could hear Mom already typing away in her office. It could be hours, or even days before she surfaced, depending on where she was in the next book; and interrupting her when she was on a roll ranked as an unacceptable safety risk.

Tim eased out into the morning sunshine of central Alaska. Again, the air was so different here. Even though the MHA camp was high on the face of Mount Hood and claimed some of the freshest air in the state as it rolled down off the high glaciers, Central Alaska was different. It was so fresh that it felt as if it had been just created.

Not quite sure why, Tim crunched himself into the SUV and drove down into Larch Creek rather than walking. Carl opened French Pete’s when he woke up. If you got there before he was up and about, he didn’t mind someone else going in and starting the coffee.

Four in the morning, the sun already a handspan above the valley walls, the town was awake. No one was doing any of the noisy work; that was just plain rude before six, but folks were out and about. They’d squint at his strange car, stark in its rental whiteness, and then wave cheerily when they spotted his face practically mashed up against the windshield. He needed to go by Mark’s and see if the mechanic could fix the seat for him, but the garage would still be locked up.

Despite his need for coffee Tim drove past French Pete’s, “Just seeing the old town again” he told himself. He was most of the way to the Tyler’s house, just to sort of see if Mace was awake yet or—

Stephen’s truck was parked at the old Mason place. It was the same blue as most other trucks in town, but he remembered the night they’d put that big dent in the side panel.

It jolted him to a stop with a loud skid on the coarse gravel.

He could only stare at it.

Not possible—

Then he spotted the bumper sticker which declared: My Other Car Is A Bell LongRanger! And the other: Auntie Em, There’s No Craft Like Rotorcraft!

Mace must have taken Stephen’s truck after he died.

The cottage, which had been a run down piece of crap that Mason had never kept up for one moment in the forty years he’d been there, was so transformed he barely recognized it. Now it was a neat little cottage with a copper-toned metal roof and a garden busy with flowers.

Sitting out on the front porch, eyeing him like he was a total lunatic, was Mace Tyler and a knee-high-sized dog that looked part lab and part husky.

Tim left the SUV where it was, Buck Street didn’t have anything fancy like a curb to pull up to. He clambered out and waved.

Mace didn’t wave back.

Crap! Tim hadn’t expected her to be that mad at him.