Colors Off at the Door
Linnea
The bell over the ambulance bay doors was supposed to ring softly. It was a small brass thing that Mrs. Teague, the day clerk, had hung there years ago because she said a hospital should sound friendly. At 1:58 in the morning it didn’t sound friendly. It sounded like someone had kicked the doors in.
Someone had.
I came around the nurses’ station with a cup of cold coffee still in my hand. Four men filled the doorway. Three of them were standing. The fourth was hanging between two of them, his head down, his boots dragging two red lines across the floor I had mopped at midnight.
Leather. Denim. The smell of road dust, gasoline and blood. On the back of the tallest man’s vest, a white skull in a pirate’s hat grinned at me over two crossed swords. Iron Corsairs. Tamarack Falls charter.
“Thigh,” said the man holding the kid’s other arm. His voice was flat and very calm. “Right side. High. Tourniquet on at one fifty-two. He laid the bike down for an elk on the pass road and went through a fence.”
I put my coffee on the counter. I didn’t remember deciding to do it.
“Trauma bay,” I said. “Straight ahead, the room with the big light. Put him on the table, on his back. Don’t touch the tourniquet.”
They moved. That was the first thing I noticed about them. They didn’t argue. They lifted the kid between them like he weighed nothing and laid him down under the lamp exactly where I pointed.
The second thing I noticed was the sign.
It hung on the wall beside the trauma bay door, laminated, in red letters. Malcolm Kemper from Northline Health had sent it from Spokane after a bar fight spilled into our waiting room last spring. NO CLUB COLORS OR GANG INSIGNIA PAST THIS POINT. VIOLATORS WILL BE REMOVED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT.
The nearest law enforcement was a deputy forty minutes away, probably asleep.
I snapped on gloves. “Colors off,” I said. “Or you wait in the lobby. He stays. You don’t.”
The tall one turned his head and looked at me.
He had to be six foot four. A copper-brown beard, cut close, grey coming in at the temples. Eyes the green of creek water over stones. He looked at me the way men in this valley looked at weather, as if he were reading something written in the sky above my head.
Then he shrugged the vest off his shoulders, folded it once, and set it on the chair outside the door.
The man with the flat voice did the same without a word. The third one, younger and leaner, with black hair falling in his eyes and a dimple that had no business showing up at a time like this, pulled his off last.
“For the record, nurse,” he said, “I’m only doing this because you said please.”
“I didn’t say please.”
“I heard it in your heart.”
“Hold this.” I pushed the handle of the procedure light into his hand. “Point it where I’m looking. If you faint, faint backward.”
He grinned and pointed the light.
The kid on the table was maybe twenty. Pale. Sweating. His lips were going grey. Someone had cut the right leg of his jeans away, and the wound was ugly, a deep gash high on the inner thigh, packed with what looked like a torn T-shirt. Above it, a black combat tourniquet was cranked tight. Someone had written T 0152 on the kid’s forehead in marker.
I looked at the flat-voiced man. He was standing at the head of the table. Pale grey eyes. Red-blond hair cropped close. A scar ran along the left side of his jaw. He had his hands pressed flat against his own thighs, and I understood why. They were shaking.
“You did this,” I said. “The tourniquet. The time.”
“Yes.”
“It’s good work.”
He didn’t answer. A muscle moved in his jaw.
“What’s his name?”
“Kip,” the tall one said. “Kip Langley. He’s a prospect. He’s ours.”
“Kip.” I leaned down where the boy could see me. “I’m Linnea. I’m your nurse. You’re in Tamarack Falls Community Hospital, and you’re going to be very mad at me in a minute, because I’m going to put two big needles in your arms. Squeeze my hand if you hear me.”
He squeezed. Weak, but there.
Here is what nobody tells you about working nights alone in a ten-bed hospital at the end of a mountain road. There is no trauma team. There is no surgeon down the hall. There is you, and a physician assistant on call twenty minutes away, and a helicopter that may or may not come. Tonight it would not come. I had known that since ten o’clock, when the flight crew in Missoula called to say the smoke from the Bitterbrush Ridge fire had grounded them until morning.
So there was me.
I worked. Two large IVs, one in each arm. Warm fluids on the pressure bags. I called out what I needed, and the three men brought it, and I didn’t have time to wonder how fast they learned where the warming cabinet was or which shelf held the gauze. Blood pressure eighty over forty. Heart rate one forty. I hung our first unit of O-negative and watched the dark red climb down the line into his arm.
Then I picked up the phone on the wall, pressed it between my ear and shoulder, and called Ingrid Kilbride.
“Talk to me,” Ingrid said. She sounded awake. Nobody in this valley was sleeping with that fire on the ridge.
“Twenty-year-old male. Bike versus fence. Deep laceration to the right upper inner thigh, probably a branch of the femoral. Field tourniquet holding since one fifty-two. One unit O-neg running. Pressure’s coming up. I need you to come close it.”
“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Fifteen if the elk stay off the road. Keep him warm, Linnea.”
“He’s warm.”
“Then keep him alive.”
She hung up. I put the phone back. When I turned around, all three men were looking at me.
The tall one spoke. “She’s coming?”
“She’s coming.”
“And you’re… what? You’re it?”
“I’m it.”
Something changed in his face. It was small. It was the look a man gives a bridge after he has driven across it and found that it held.
“Gunnar,” he said. “Gunnar Ashcroft.”
“I know who you are.” Everyone in Tamarack Falls knew who Gunnar Ashcroft was. He owned the lumber yard on the east end of town, and he was the president of the only motorcycle club for a hundred miles. My mother used to cross the street when his bike went by. “Linnea Haugen. I need someone to hold his leg still when the PA gets here, because it’s going to hurt, and he’s going to kick.”
“I’ll do it,” said Gunnar.
“I’ll do the talking,” said the one with the light. “I’m very soothing. Santi Vasquez. Road captain. Single.”
“Nobody asked, Santi,” said the man at the head of the table.
“She was going to.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. But I could feel the corner of my mouth lifting. It was two in the morning and a boy was bleeding on my table, and I wanted to laugh. That was how I knew the adrenaline had me.
I looked at the third man again. “And you?”
He took a long moment, as if his own name were heavy.
“Fergus McRae.”
“You were a medic.”
His eyes came up to mine. Grey, very clear, and wary as a dog that has been kicked. “Army. A long time ago.”
“Not that long,” I said. “Your tourniquet is textbook.”
He looked down at his hands. They were still shaking. “I put it on,” he said quietly. “Then I couldn’t do anything else. He’s ours. I couldn’t…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. I had seen that look before, on the faces of paramedics who could work a crash on a stranger without blinking and then come apart when the crash was their own kid.
“You got him here,” I said. “That was the job. Now give me your hands.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Your hands. On the packing. Here.” I took his wrists and pressed his palms down over the wound, just below the tourniquet. “Firm. Steady. Don’t let go until Ingrid tells you.”
For a moment his hands shook against the soaked cloth.
Then they stopped.
I watched it happen. The tremor ran out of his fingers like water draining from a sink. His shoulders came down. His breathing slowed. He looked at me over Kip’s body, and for one strange second the whole room went quiet, as if the four of us were standing inside a held breath.
“There you are,” I said softly.
He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t look away, either.
Ingrid arrived at 2:17 with her hair in a knot and a fleece jacket over her pajamas. She took one look at the three men in the trauma bay and raised her eyebrows at me.
“They’re helping,” I said.
“I can see that.” She washed her hands. “Okay, gentlemen. If anyone faints, faint backward.”
Santi looked at me, delighted. “She stole your line.”
“Everyone in this building says it,” I told him. “Hold the light.”
It took forty minutes. Ingrid found the bleeding vessel and tied it off. Kip screamed once, a raw sound that made Gunnar’s big hands tighten on the boy’s knee, and then the morphine caught up with him and he went limp and quiet. By three o’clock his blood pressure was a hundred and ten. By three thirty he was asking if his bike was okay, and Santi was telling him the bike was fine, which I suspected was a lie, and Fergus was standing at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, watching the monitor the way other men watch a game on television.
“He’ll keep the leg,” Ingrid said to me in the hall, peeling off her gown. “He’ll keep his life. You did that, you know. That kid got lucky twice tonight. Once when Mr. Silent in there put the tourniquet on, and once when he landed on your shift.”
“He landed on the only shift there is.”
“Not for much longer.” Ingrid looked at me, and her face went tired. “You heard about the review?”
I had heard. Everybody had heard. Northline Health was reviewing our numbers. Small hospitals at the end of mountain roads did not make money. Malcolm Kemper had used the word unsustainable three times on the last staff call.
“I heard,” I said.
“Go get some air,” Ingrid said. “I’ll watch him.”
I went out through the ambulance bay doors. The brass bell rang behind me, softer this time.
The three of them were in the lot, leaning against their bikes. They had put their vests back on, and the white skulls on their backs caught the yellow light of the parking lot lamps. Santi was rolling something small and shiny across his knuckles. A guitar pick, I saw when I came closer. Tortoiseshell. It went over and under his fingers like it was alive.
Gunnar pushed off his bike when he saw me.
“Thank you,” he said.
It was not a big word. But he said it like it was. Like he had carried it up a mountain and set it down at my feet.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Next time, maybe nobody goes through a fence.”
“Next time,” Santi said, “we’re bringing you donuts. A dozen. No. Two dozen.”
“I don’t eat donuts.”
He put a hand over his heart. “I can’t love a woman who doesn’t eat donuts.”
“Then that’s settled.”
Fergus said nothing. He was looking past me, at the sky.
I turned to see what he saw.
West of town, beyond the river, the night had a seam in it. A long orange line glowed along the dark shape of the ridges, brighter than it had been at midnight. Much brighter. Ash was falling in the lamplight, soft and grey, drifting down around us like the first snow of winter. It landed on my scrubs. It landed in Gunnar’s beard.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out with ash on my fingers.
It was an alert from the county. LEVEL 3 EVACUATION: GO NOW. The map under it showed the whole valley floor in red. The river. The town. The hospital.
Then the phone rang. Malcolm Kemper. At four in the morning.
“Linnea,” Kemper said, before I could speak. “The fire jumped the river an hour ago. The county is evacuating the nursing home and both schools. Every ambulance in three counties is committed. The south highway is closed. I need you to hold your patients until transport is available.”
“Hold them where?” I said. “The hospital is in the red zone.”
“Hold them in place.”
“The fire will be at the edge of town by noon.”
“Transport will be available by noon.”
“You don’t know that.”
There was a pause. In it, I could almost hear his house in Spokane, warm and quiet, hundreds of miles from any fire. “Those are the instructions, Ms. Haugen. Northline cannot authorize a private transfer. The liability alone…”
I hung up on him. I had never hung up on anyone in my life.
I had three patients. Kip, two hours out from almost losing his leg. Orrin Brekke, seventy-eight, a rancher with lungs like wet paper, on oxygen for pneumonia. And Della Finch, twenty-six years old, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, admitted at eleven with a blood pressure that scared me. Her husband was a hotshot. He was on the fire line right now, somewhere on the ridge that was glowing.
I stood in the falling ash and did math. I didn’t like any of the answers.
“Nurse,” Gunnar said.
I looked up. He was close now. He smelled like leather and smoke and cedar. He had a way of standing still that made the rest of the world look restless.
“The road north is open,” he said. “It goes up to the Bench. We have a place up there. The old ranger station. Steel roof, stone walls. Fifty yards of bare dirt all the way around it, because I bulldozed it myself after the last fire. A generator that can run for a week. A well.”
“You’re asking me to move my patients,” I said slowly, “into your clubhouse.”
“No.” He held my eyes. “I’m asking you to let us carry them.”
Behind him, Santi had stopped rolling the pick. Fergus had turned from the sky and was looking at me, only at me, as if the fire did not exist.
The ash kept falling. Somewhere down in the town, the first siren started to wail.
What the Wind Wants
Gunnar
Fire is not a monster. People call it that because it is easier to hate a monster than to understand a thing. But I jumped fire for eleven years out of Missoula, before a dead pine caught my parachute and put three steel pins in my left knee, and I know what fire is.
Fire is hunger with a direction. It wants to go uphill. It wants to go where the wind goes. It wants dry grass and old timber and the shingles on your grandmother’s roof. And if you learn what it wants, you can sometimes stand in the one place it doesn’t.
That morning, the wind wanted the valley.
I could feel it on the back of my neck while we loaded the hospital van. Hot, dry, pushing from the southwest in long, steady breaths. The sky over the river was the color of a bruise, purple at the edges and sick yellow in the middle. The sun came up behind the smoke as a red coin you could stare at without blinking.
“Oxygen first,” Linnea said. “Then Mr. Brekke. Then the monitor. Then Della. Kip goes last, flat, and nobody bends that leg.”
She was standing in the ambulance bay with a clipboard she didn’t need, because every word on it was already in her head. Her scrubs were navy blue and smeared with ash. Her black hair was coming out of its braid. She was maybe five foot three, and she was giving orders to twelve men in leather like she had been born doing it.
My brothers had come down the mountain in twenty minutes when I called. Nobody asked why. That is what a patch means, when it means anything. You call, and they come.
Now they were carrying oxygen cylinders out of a hospital that had a sign on the wall saying they weren’t allowed in it.
“Ashcroft.” Linnea didn’t look up from her clipboard. “Your knee is bad.”
I stopped. “What?”
“Left knee. You’re favoring it. You’ve been favoring it since you held Kip’s leg. Don’t carry the heavy end of anything.”
Santi, passing behind her with a box of IV bags, made a face at me that said she has your number, old man. I ignored him.
“It’s an old knee,” I said.
“Then treat it like one.” Now she looked up. Brown eyes, dark and tired and steady. “I don’t have time for a fourth patient.”
I have been told what to do by smokejumper captains and federal judges and one very angry grizzly sow. I had never wanted so badly to obey.
Orrin Brekke would not get in the van.
He sat in his wheelchair at the curb with his oxygen tubing in his nose and his hat on his head and his arms folded over a flannel shirt older than me. He was seventy-eight years old and weighed about as much as a sack of feed, and he would not move.
“My dogs,” he said. “Moss and Flint. They’re at the ranch. On the river road.”
“Mr. Brekke.” Linnea crouched beside his chair. “The river road is closed. The fire is a mile from your fence.”
“Then they’ll burn.” His voice cracked. “Fourteen years I’ve had Moss. She sleeps on my feet. You’re going to tell me to leave her to burn?”
Linnea looked at me. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I knew what I wanted to say, which was the truth, which was that nobody should drive down the river road this morning for anything, not dogs, not houses, not money.
“We’ll go when we can,” I said instead. “When the wind lets us.”
Orrin squinted up at me. Old men in this valley know what a promise from a man in a patch is worth. Some of them think it is worth nothing. Some of them think it is worth more than a bank.
He unfolded his arms. “You’d better,” he said, and let Fergus lift him into the van.
Della Finch held Linnea’s hand the whole way up the mountain.
I drove. Linnea sat in the back between the stretchers with a blood pressure cuff in one hand and Della’s fingers in the other. Every few minutes the cuff hissed and the numbers came up and Linnea’s face did nothing at all, which told me the numbers were bad.
“Joel’s on that ridge,” Della said. She said it the way you say a prayer. “His crew was digging line on the west flank last night.”
“Then he’s on the side the fire already burned,” Linnea said. “That’s the safest place on the whole mountain. Breathe with me. In. Hold. Out.”
I glanced in the mirror. Della was breathing. Linnea was breathing with her. And Kip, flat on the floor with his leg wrapped like a mummy, was watching Linnea with the stunned, faithful look of a puppy who has just met God.
The road climbed out of the smoke in long switchbacks through the larch trees. The needles were just turning gold. At the top, the trees fell away and the Bench opened up in front of us, a wide shelf of land above the river, and in the middle of it, the Station.
It had been a Forest Service ranger station once. Stone walls a foot thick. A steel roof painted dark green. A big main hall with a fireplace you could stand inside, a bunk wing, a kitchen, a garage that used to hold fire trucks and now held our bikes. The government sold it off twenty years ago. The club bought it a few years later. After the fire of 2017, I took a borrowed dozer and scraped the ground around it down to bare dirt and rock, fifty yards in every direction.
My brothers said I was paranoid.
Nobody said it that morning.
Linnea climbed out of the van and stood in the gravel and looked at it. At the steel and the stone and the wide, empty ring of dirt. At the generator shed, already humming. At the well pump in the yard, and the women of the club carrying blankets in through the big double doors.
Then she looked down the mountain, at the valley full of smoke, at the orange light crawling along the far side of the river.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. Yes.”
I don’t know why that undid me more than anything else she had said. Maybe because I had never wanted anyone to look at something I built and say yes.
By noon the main hall was a hospital.
We pushed the pool table against the wall and covered it with a sheet, and Linnea used it for supplies. We dragged three of the good beds out of the bunk wing and lined them up near the fireplace, away from the windows. Orrin got the one closest to the oxygen. Della got the one with the most pillows. Kip got the one where he could see the television, because Santi said a prospect who almost died deserved to watch whatever he wanted.
He wanted cartoons.
Ingrid called at one to say the nursing home was out and the hospital was empty and she was riding out with the last county bus over the north pass. Linnea put the phone on speaker so I could hear.
“How are your three?” Ingrid asked.
“Stable,” Linnea said. “Della’s pressure is high but holding. I gave her the magnesium like you said. If she goes into labor…”
“Then you deliver a baby,” Ingrid said. “You’ve done it before.”
“In a hospital.”
“You’re in a stone building with a generator and a medic. That’s better than half the births in history. Call me if you need me. I’ll answer if there’s a tower standing.”
The fire reached the western edge of town at three. We watched it from the yard. You could see the smoke columns rising off the old mill, black and fat and twisting. You could see little lights moving on the river road that were fire engines, and bigger lights on the ridge that were trees going up like matches. The wind was still out of the southwest. Still pushing.
Linnea stood beside me with her arms wrapped around herself. She hadn’t slept in thirty hours. I could see it in the way she swayed, very slightly, like a tall grass.
“The hospital,” she said.
“It’s on the east side. The river bends there. The wind will push the fire along the water first.” I pointed. “See how the smoke leans? It’s running north. Up the valley. Not across it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I used to jump out of airplanes into fires like this one.”
She turned and looked up at me. “On purpose?”
“They paid me.”
“How much?”
“Not enough.”
She laughed. It surprised her, I think. It came out of her in a short, cracked burst, and she put her hand over her mouth like she wanted to catch it and put it back. Ash was caught in her eyelashes. I wanted to brush it away. I put my hands in my pockets instead.
“Eat something,” I said. “Then sleep. Two hours. Fergus can watch them.”
“Fergus can’t…” She stopped.
“Fergus can,” I said. “He couldn’t last night. He’s been a combat medic and a sergeant-at-arms and the best man I know for fifteen years, and last night he couldn’t, because it was Kip. That’s not the same as can’t.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You love them,” she said. “All of them.”
“They’re mine.” I didn’t know a better way to say it. “I’m theirs. That’s the deal.”
“That sounds like a lot of weight.”
“It is.” I looked down at her. “You carry three patients up a mountain because a man in Spokane told you to sit still and burn. You know about weight.”
She didn’t answer. But she let me walk her to the kitchen, and she let Santi put a plate of eggs in front of her, and when she was done she let me show her to my room at the end of the bunk wing. It was the only room with a door that locked from the inside. I wanted her to have that.
“This is yours,” she said, looking at the big bed, the woodstove, the shelf of paperbacks with broken spines.
“It’s yours tonight.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I won’t.”
She studied me. Then she sat down on the edge of my bed and pulled off her shoes, and she was asleep before I closed the door.
At nine that night I found her on the roof.
There is a ladder on the back of the Station, bolted into the stone, that goes up to a flat section of the roof where the old fire lookouts used to stand with their binoculars. I go up there when I can’t think. Apparently, so did she, now.
She was sitting with her knees pulled up and a wool blanket around her shoulders. Below us, the valley was a field of embers. Orange lines crawled across the black hills like writing in a language I could almost read.
I sat down beside her. My knee told me what it thought of ladders. I ignored it.
“I checked on them,” she said. “Della’s asleep. Her pressure came down a little. Orrin’s asking about his dogs every twenty minutes. Kip asked Fergus to marry him.”
“What did Fergus say?”
“He said he’d think about it.” She smiled at the fire. “He’s good. He’s really good, Gunnar. He did Orrin’s breathing treatment and he didn’t shake at all.”
“Because you were there.”
She turned her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means I watched him last night. He was falling apart, and you put his hands on that wound and told him to hold, and he held. I’ve known him fifteen years. I’ve never been able to do that for him.” I looked at her. “You walked into our lives eighteen hours ago and you did it in one sentence.”
The wind moved her hair across her face. She didn’t push it back.
“Why did you take it off?” she asked.
“Take what off?”
“Your vest. Your colors. At the door. Every man I’ve ever seen in a club patch would rather lose a finger. Santi told me. And you just… took it off. Folded it. Like it was a dish towel.”
I thought about how to say it.
“It was your house,” I said finally. “Your floor. Your rules. A man who can’t take off his coat in another man’s house doesn’t deserve to be let in. Why should it be different in a woman’s?”
She studied me in silence. Her face was lit orange on one side and dark on the other, and I could not tell what she was thinking. I only knew I wanted to find out. I wanted it more than I had wanted anything in years.
“Gunnar,” she said.
“Linnea.”
She leaned toward me. Just a little. Just enough that I could feel the heat of her through the blanket, smell the hospital soap and smoke in her hair.
I didn’t move.
“You’re not going to kiss me,” she said. It was half a question.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you haven’t asked me to.” I kept my voice low. “And because you’ve been awake for two days, and you’re scared, and the whole world is on fire. I want you to ask me on a day when it isn’t.”
Her lips parted. I saw her swallow. “And if I ask you now?”
“Then I’ll wait for you to ask again tomorrow. To make sure.”
She laughed, very softly, and put her forehead down against my shoulder. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to feel how much of her weight she was letting me hold.
“Not yet, then,” she whispered.
“Not yet,” I agreed. “But I’m a patient man.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“The wind will turn at midnight,” I told her, because I needed to say something that was not stay. “There’s a cold front coming down from Canada. Feel that? On your left cheek? The air’s cooler. When it hits, it’ll push the fire back onto its own burn. Nothing left to eat there. Tomorrow you’ll see the sky.”
She lifted her head. “You can feel that? On your cheek?”
“I can feel a lot of things.”
Before she could answer, the radio on my belt cracked open.
It was Fergus. I knew it in the first syllable, and I knew something else, too, because Fergus McRae does not raise his voice. Not in a bar fight. Not under fire. Not ever.
He was shouting.
“Gunnar. Santi went down the river road for the old man’s dogs. Fire crossed behind him. He’s down at the Brekke place. He’s burned, Gunnar, he’s burned, I’m going in after him…”
The radio hissed and went to static.
Linnea was already on her feet. The blanket fell off her shoulders and slid down the steel roof into the dark, and she didn’t even look at it.
“Get me to that truck,” she said.
