“Then come.I can use you.”
“I’m heading for my car now.”
She hung up.He pocketed the phone and looked west.The smoke was darker now, closer.He could hear the fire, a low, steady roar like a river in the distance, except rivers didn’t glow orange.The fire was maybe a quarter-mile from the road, now.He estimated it was thirty minutes out from the fire break.
He climbed down and started the fire engine’s pump.Checked the hose connections.Ran through the procedure in his head, a textbook procedure he’d memorized weeks ago sitting in a booth at Rose’s Diner.
Theory was about to become practice.
21
Bonnie arrived at the fire line in time to see the county’s road grader rumble into sight, and to hear the cheer that went up from close to a hundred sweaty, tired volunteers.In that moment she understood something about small towns that she’d been too close to Cobbler Cove see for the past four years.
Nobody had called a meeting.Nobody had filed paperwork.Nobody had formed a committee or consulted a manual or waited for authorization from a higher authority.A fire was burning toward Cobbler Cove, and the town had simplycome.
Men and women, young and old.People she didn’t recognize.People she did—from the diner and the post office and the school pickup line.They did backbreaking work together in a field with shovels because someone had called for help and they showed up.
As she arrived at forward staging area in a field roughly in the middle of the firebreak on the east edge of County Road 10, the big grader lumbered past her.Its blade dropped and the engine strained as the blade bit into matted grass.
An eight-foot wide strip of sod climbed the curved blade and did a summersault to one side of the machine.In its wake, a wide swath of bare earth was uncovered.
The grader picked up speed, and dead grass rolled up in front of it like a brown wave and fell aside in ragged windrows.It was doing in minutes what the shovel crews had been working at frantically for the better part of an hour.
She parked behind Tucker’s ambulance and got out.The wind hit her face, unnaturally hot, carrying the smell of smoke and the sharp, acrid smell of burning grass.It coated the back of her throat and made her eyes sting.
The fire was visible now.Not just as smoke but as actual flame.A long orange line moving across the valley like a serpent, bending and surging with the wind, eating the dead grass with a roar of consuming hunger she could hear even from here.
Abruptly, she understood in a visceral way how eight men had died in that barn.Fire was fast and merciless, and it did not care about the things in its path.
She found Gray on the running board of the fire engine, phone in one hand, binoculars in the other, directing the operation with focused intensity.
He didn’t look like a man playing at being a firefighter.He looked like a man who’d found his calling.
“I need someone at the south end to coordinate with Cooper,” he called out to no one in particular.“He’s got no way to tell the grader operator where his crew down there needs help.”
“I’ll go,” she replied from behind him.
His head snapped up.Their gazes met.A flash of something crossed his face—gratitude, pride, fear for her—the complicated tangle of loving someone who was about to walk toward a fire line.It lasted less than a second.Then the commander of fire operations was back.
“Take Tucker’s truck,” he said briskly.“Key’s in the ignition.It’s got a CB radio.Channel seven.I’ll relay from here.”
The next half-hour was the longest of Bonnie’s life and also the shortest.
She found Cooper at the south end of the fire break with Boone and dozen other men, mostly ranchers from across the valley, all of them soot-streaked and sweating.They’d scraped a section of bare earth thirty feet wide, but the fire was sliding south a bit, threatening to flank them.
“We need the grader down here!”Cooper shouted to her over the howl of the wind and roar of the fire.
Bonnie keyed the CB.“Gray.The south end’s getting flanked.Can you redirect the grader?”
His voice came back steady and clear.“Sending it now.Tell Cooper to pull his people back out of the way and let the grader do its things.I’m bringing the hose truck down there, now.”
She relayed the instructions.Cooper nodded briskly and started pulling people back.The grader appeared three minutes later, blade down, carving a brutal swath of bare dirt through the grass as it raced the fire south.
It took a couple of minutes, but the grader got a hundred yards or so south of the fire.It turned around and started back toward the clustered people, doubling the width of the scraped earth strip.
The fire approached the break.
Bonnie stood beside Gray’s truck and watched it come.
