Red Flag

Red Flag means fire.  Drought baked the foothills and the stock tanks ran low.  Heat squeezed the sap out of the douglas firs and the juniper trees and the pine-scented air felt combustible.  The wind was too much, spilling down the dry canyons and roaring across the bare hilltops.  Red Flag means fire or the risk of fire.  

Before things became too unbearably warm, Milt drove his pickup from the house up along the ridge road.  The bluffs broke into brown and pink cliffs with aprons of talus, broken like the shards of pots, at their base.  Milt told Billy that he had dreamed that a gate opening into the upper pasture had been left free to swing on its hinges.  Billy said that there were a couple of cattle grids in the gravel road under the upper pasture and that the cattle couldn’t cross over those.  “It’s open range anyway,” Billy said.

“Just humor me,” Milt said.  “I have the feeling that something’s wrong.”

Milt had the AC running full-blast but it wasn’t sufficient to cool the cab of the pick-up and so both of them had rolled down their side-windows.  The wind was enormous and buffeted their vehicle.  A few dust devils were twisting on the hillsides below the outcropped rock at the top of the bluffs.  

The road climbed in lazy switchbacks into the foothills.  The higher mountains were blisters of blue lava against the sky.   They bounced over the first cattle guard.  The road ran straight along a grassy terrace overlooked by low ridges lined with pines.  In the distance, Milt saw a pale plume rising over the road.  

“Fire?” Billy asked.

“I don’t think so,” Milt said.

At the base of the plume, there was green Impala lurching from side to side on the gravel road.  Milt saw the oncoming vehicle shudder as it barreled over a cattle grid a half mile away.  The car was dragging a wide tail of greyish-yellow road dust.  

“It’s odd that someone’s up here this time of day,” Milt said.  Billy nodded his head.  

The Impala didn’t exactly yield to them and, so, Milt pulled to the side of the gravel lane to let it pass.  The car’s sides were white with dust.  Inside, Milt saw a driver with his face masked and two passengers.  They had masks over their faces too, eyes popping beneath sun-burnt red foreheads.  Milt saluted the people in the car, but they ignored him, the Impala fishtailing through the loose gravel.  For some reason, the trunk of the car was open.  Milt looked in the rear-view mirror as the Impala passed and thought he saw something red glinting under the lid of the trunk.  

“They’re sure in a hurry,” Milt said.

“Fucking idiots,” Billy replied.

At the top of a rise, a mile down the road, Milt pulled over to inspect his gate.  It was federal land, but he had grazing rights under his lease.  The cattle were resting in the shade of trees beyond the drought-yellow meadow.  The gate was padlocked shut.  

“You see,” Billy said.

“I guess my dream lied to me,” Milt replied.  

As they were turning around, Billy said that he saw a slick of black smoke above the head of a canyon gouged into the hillside about two miles down the road.

“We better take a look,” Milt said.

A single-lane track ran from the county gravel road toward the canyon.  They bounced over the track.  In the shade of trees, they saw an old sheepherder’s trailer.  But there didn’t seem to be anyone around.  The road ruts ended at a point of land overlooking the canyon, a dry stony trench angling downhill between eroded banks of sand and gravel.  The grass was burnt at the overlook and a stain of sooty black was spreading across the hillside, oozing grey smoke at its edges.  

“Fire,” Milt said  

The wind flung handfuls of cinders at them and, as they looked down at the fire, burning ash fluttered up overhead and lit tufts of grass along the lane over which they had come.  The flame snaked across the meadow and ignited a pine tree.  

“We better get out of here,” Milt said.

As they drove back to the gravel road, the pine tree exploded into a shower of orange sparks.  

“I knew there was something wrong.” Milt said.

A tongue of flame crept along the side of the gravel road.  Milt stopped and drained his water bottle onto the fire.  Billy pissed on the flames.

“Not much chance of putting this out, I guess,” Milt said.

They drove a mile back toward the ranch and, then, Milt pulled over to call the Forestry Service to report the fire.  

The man at the Forestry Service said that someone else had reported the fire ten minutes earlier.  “He wouldn’t give his name,” the man said.  “He said that he was right there when the fire lighted up.”

“There was someone on the road,” Milt said.  “Going hell for leather down out of the hills.”

“Who knows?” the Forestry Service guy said.

“I had a feeling that something was wrong,” Milt said.  “It come to me in a dream.”

They drove down to the ranch.  Some planes with big silver bellies were hovering above the foothills, dropping water onto the grass and tree-tops to steer the fire away from the livestock.  

The wind blew the blaze down the canyon, funneling the flames into the valley below.  A crew of men with bulldozers on flatbed trucks inched up the Ridge Road.

Mid-afternoon, Milt and Billy went to the Cattlemen’s Lounge in town.  The dust-coated green Impala was parked among the pickups outside the bar.  The air-conditioners roared like jet turbines.  

Milt and Billy went into the tavern.  Three young men that they didn’t know were sitting at a corner booth, behind the pool tables.  The young men had a pitcher of beer sitting between them.  Their surgical masks were lying like limp, dead butterflies next to their glasses.  A half-dozen ranchers were watching football, an exhibition game. 

Milt went over to the corner booth. 

 “I thought I saw you up on the ridge road,” Milt said to the men.

One of them looked up at him, a little startled.  His eyes were wide and staring and his forehead and the bald patch on his skull were sunburned.

“We don’t know the area,” the man said.  

“What’s the ‘Ridge Road’?” one of the others asked.

Billy had come up behind Milt.  “We seen your green Impala,” he said.

“Yeah, we’re in a green Impala,” the man with the sunburned bald patch said.  “What of it?”

“Well, what were you doing up there?” Billy asked.

“Well, friend, that’s none of your business, is it?” 

Billy shrugged.

The other man said: “I think you’re mistaken.”

“You were wearing masks,” Milt said.

“You want to make this into some kind of political situation?” the sunburned man asked.

“Nah, but you’re not wearing masks now,” Billy said.

“Not required in this establishment,” the man said.  “We inquired.”

Milt said: “I thought I saw a red gas can in the trunk of your car.”

“How could you see into the trunk of the car?  You have x-ray vision or something?”

“It was open,” Billy said.  “I seen too.”

“Are you making an accusation?”  the man with the bald patch said.

The other two strangers shifted uneasily in the booth.

A sheriff’s deputy came into the bar and said that the town had to be evacuated.  The wind had suddenly shifted and the fire was coming in their direction.

“No need to panic,” the sheriff’s deputy said.

People filed out of the tavern, handing cash to the owner who stood by the door. A hillside about a mile away was burnt black between copses of trees that were blazing like torches.  The air smelled of smoke and burning tree-resin.  Billy wanted to follow the strangers in their Impala down the highway in the procession of vehicles leaving town.  But Milt said that they had to get up to ranch to get some of their personal effects and valuable papers.  Wild fires were common in the foothills and it was Red Flag weather and so, like most folks, they had suitcases packed and important documents wrapped-up in rubber bands in plastic bags in a duffel bag.    

As they bumped down the drive-way from the ranch house, Milt asked Billy: “Did you get their driver’s license?”

“I didn’t see the plate,” Billy said.

“That’s a damn shame,” Milt said.

“Was there a fire-pit up there by that sheepherder’s trailer?” Milt asked.

“You know, I didn’t think to look,” Billy said.

Smoke drifted over the highway and the ditches were burning.  Their eyes stung and it was hard to see.