Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [175]
The acrid stench of smoke rose high and wide, seeping toward Santa Clara with the fire following behind, and smoke settled across the wide pueblo terrain beyond the Rio Grande as far as the Sangre de Cristos themselves. One after another, families began arriving at Pajarito, where the Montoyas helped unload horses, dogs and cats and caged birds, a dozen children of all ages, another dozen women and men, friends some of them, others friends of friends. The night was going to be long, but hopes were high that the thing would be under control by morning.
It was not. Flames fanned by winds that they themselves created worked their way through lifeless homes, up and down streets razed like flinted tinder to the ground as crews ran out of water, and the fire raged from block to block toward and then past concrete bunkers berthing explosives and others housing fireproof containers of radioactive inventory. White Rock nearby had thus far been spared by the widening inferno, and with it innumerable drums and fiberglass chalices of asbestos, PCBs, plutonium waste. But the next day brought no relief. Four thousand scorched acres became sixteen, then twenty; a hundred annihilated houses were soon two hundred. Then three dozen more. Blackened chimneys and charred swing sets and rubbled foundations. Residents watched their houses being destroyed over and again on newscasts. All they could do in Nambé was wait. Sarah had completely lost touch with half her staff, and her patients had been distributed to shelters or sent home to their families as the fish swam unaware in the long aquarium tank whose aerator had gone off with the power failure, resurging at the behest of a generator good for another day.
It seemed as if the world were on fire. An hour east of the Hill another blaze burned, Manuelitas and Canoncito near Las Vegas covered in flames. And another down where Delfino used to live, Cloudcroft and Weed, the towns with the pretty names Ariel had seen on her map, years ago now, when she drove from El Paso to Chimayó, in the forests above Tularosa, which sank in smoke as three thousand acres were scorched in a handful of hours.
Meantime the fire on the Hill was given a name, Cerro Grande, as the destroyed acreage neared fifty thousand, and questions began to be asked about the tritium and uranium and plutonium remnants in the brush and soil of those canyons where Brice and Kip had once played. Then, not as quickly as it began—a week had passed since Sarah made that first urgent call to Ariel—the fire faltered under calm skies, firefighters grabbed the advantage, and the largest fire in New Mexico’s history was over.
Family by family they left Pajarito, as did thousands from other refuges, some returning to find scorched shards, others to houses that reeked of smoke and fire retardants but were still intact. The workers handed them Teddy bears as they boarded buses for the tour of their town. Some horses were repastured at other ranches, some were bought and sold. The convalescent center remained unscathed, while Bonnie’s place, though not burned, lay under a carpet of ash, looking for all the world like an outlandish cocoon. Her geraniums, her patio, the evasive lizard—gone. But she and her family were among the fortunate ones.
Granna’s house was another story. Little remained but the foundation and the wrought-iron grille on her screen door. A pan, a pot, the ruined battleship of her old Frigidaire. Ariel and Bonnie walked its ruins together, Bonnie weeping, Ariel in disbelief. The little library, burned to nothing. The bed in which the woman had slept for so many years, first with her husband and then by herself, scorched beyond their ability to so much as find it. The photos, the family