• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1640 0

place, like they say, but since Franny had never disclosed what she knew to either family, it hadn’t grown smaller yet. What good could come of her telling anyone about the chance convergence? Clifford probably would appreciate it, she thought. He seemed more spaced out than ever, but also much happier now that her parents had brought him back home to live. Next time she went out to visit, maybe she’d let him in on the secret. Just the kind of thing Kip would have found amusing. Dear Kip who’d tried his best to father her through the bad old days. She would always be grateful that he’d taken an interest, pushed her in the right direction. Sarah, too, and Marcos in his way, as well. She’d always think of herself, like Kip, as an honorary Montoya.

But look, here she was at the studio. Time to lay aside these memories. Time to shine.

In Bandelier the parched brush had accumulated. The fuel load was high. Park service workers, some of whom had been around for the fire on Burnt Mesa back in seventy-seven, which took out entire ponderosa forests that hadn’t burned for a century, didn’t like what they saw. Wheatgrass had sprouted up fast under the spring sunshine, and throughout the monument—up on Escobas and over toward State Road 4—gambel oak thrived in sere acorned thickets, narrowleaf cottonwoods with them, chokecherry and desert olive, piñon-juniper woodlands that promised choice kindling for a lightning bolt or dropped cigarette. They used to pursue a policy of outright fire suppression back in the old days, but controlled burning was the new methodology, the science of which was simply to cheat a potential blaze out of the woodland fuel that would allow it to jump from tree to tree, mesa to mesa. Just as the surgeon cuts to cure, the park service burned to prevent fire.

There had already been some wildfires around the state. When Marcos and Ariel Montoya made the millennium pilgrimage to Chimayó, one fire was raging down in Ruidoso and another near Farmington. April had been a month of winds this year and though there had been some showers the river was skinny, and the mountains, usually still covered with deep fields of winter snow even now, were nearly bald. Chimayó valley was tawny with dust, and the murder of two pilgrim youngsters from the Hill cast a pall over the annual celebration. The promise of calamity hung in the drought-dry air.

Ariel, well along with her second child, left Miranda in Delfino’s care, watching in horror the television news about what had begun to transpire in Los Alamos. Sarah had phoned minutes before from the center, breathless, more apprehensive than Ariel had ever heard her. They were evacuating not just the convalescent facility and hospital, but all fourteen thousand people on the Hill.

“Make up every spare bed we’ve got and get Marcos to clear out the greatroom. We’ve got to put up a lot of folks,” she said. “And tell Carl to make space for more horses.”

“How many?”

“As many as he can manage.”

“Should we come up there to help?”

“The police’ll just turn you back.”

“Sarah, are you in danger?”

“They’re saying people’s houses are already starting to go up on the northwest edge of town. I’m leaving now.”

“Sarah?”

But the line went dead and when Ariel redialed she got a fast busy signal. She ran down to the barn where Marcos was working with Carl. Together they dashed to the upper pasture and could see it, the massive plume of gray obscuring the Jemez. Carl tried to call Sarah from the stable, but by then a recorded message was advising that all lines were currently busy, please try again later. Bonnie Jean did manage to get through to the ranch, and Delfino told her to come straight down with Charlie and Sam, there was plenty of room.

The wind got worse, and within hours all hope of early containment had vanished. Los Alamos had not seen such an exodus since the days of secret practice drills in the forties and fifties, rehearsal evacuations trialed to get Hill personnel and families away from the then-fledgling nuclear lab as quickly as possible in case of enemy attack. Down