Free Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick Page A

overhead.
    “Smoke jumpers from the McCall base,” the Deadhead told Adam. “Headed into the Nez
     Percé.”
    “Smoke jumpers?”
    “Guys who jump into fires so they can fight them inside out.”
    “Pretty heroic.”
    “Yup. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them.”
    “And the rest?”
    “Don’t quote me. Let’s just say it might not be past a disgruntled guy to add a few
     days’ work by dropping a burning briquette on the way to a jump site.”
    In the middle of the night, Adam awoke to a red glow hovering over the ridge of the
     opposite bank of the river and Omar’s cheeks dusted with ashes. Back in Detroit, there
     was a letter from his mother with a copy of an editorial she’d clipped on the misguided
     zealousness of the old Smokey Bear policy: the snuffing out of all fires had prevented
     the natural clearing of the underbrush by smaller conflagrations, leaving a tinderbox
     primed to set off the inferno then taking place. Across the top of the Smokey Bear
     clipping, she’d printed in her precise hand The Tragedy of Good Intentions.
    Adam picks up the remote. “This shot here, wait, I’ll stop it.”
    He hits the pause button, freezing an image of a woman, her back to the camera, framed
     by a rough-hewn doorway, her eyes presumably locked on something she sees in the distance.
    “If you’re going to butcher this by talking through the whole thing and stopping it
     every five seconds, I’m going to go take a shower,” Rachida says.
    Myra surveys her family. Her grandson is lying on the couch with his head in her lap,
     his legs propped on Eva’s thighs. Rachida is perched on the desk chair, no longer
     looking at the screen. Caro sits in the velvet wing chair with her feet up on the
     piano bench. Adam, still standing, is fiddling with the remote.
    In the next scene, the reverend, who is also the captain of the Texas Rangers, arrives
     to round up volunteers for a band of men to retrieve some stolen cattle. The reverend
     stares into the camera while the departing Ethan Edwards bends to tenderly kiss his
     brother’s wife on the brow. Again, Adam stops the film. “The entire motivation for
     the film is captured in this frame.”
    Rachida stands. Myra exchanges glances with her daughter. Caro shrugs her shoulders.
     Oblivious, it seems, to Rachida’s departure, Adam restarts the film, which, like the
     mood in the room, is taking a darker and darker cast as the fear of an Indian raid
     falls over the adults who have remained to tend to the homestead. Realizing what her
     parents are suspecting, the older daughter, a teenager, breaks into an eye-popping
     scream.
    Myra looks at Omar and then at Adam to see if he wants to stop the movie, perhaps
     it is too much for a six-year-old, but Adam’s gaze is fixed on the screen. The phone
     rings. Before Myra can untangle herself from Omar to get it, the ringing stops.
    Forty miles away, Ethan, with inhuman calm, informs the search party that they have
     been duped: the cattle theft, he understands now, was a ploy to draw them away from
     the homestead so the remaining settlers could be ambushed. In an excruciating display
     of discipline, Ethan waters and feeds his exhausted horse before beginning the long
     journey back to his brother’s family.
    To Myra’s relief, Omar turns inward on the couch. With his deepening breath, he appears
     to be falling asleep. Myra strokes her grandson’s dark head of hair, her fingers massaging
     his scalp. She can’t shake the thought that Rachida picked up the phone knowing the
     call would be for her—her angry departure over Adam’s annotations a ploy like the
     cattle theft.
    Eva has drawn her knees up to her chest and is chewing a finger.
    As Ethan approaches the homestead, the camera cuts away from John Wayne’s face to
     the valley below. A red swatch of flame defines the roof of the burning homestead,
     drawing nearer and nearer with each pound of the horse’s hooves.
    Eva gasps. She buries her face