This story takes place immediately after the episode Peace Pipe.

Relocation

By Rose Po

"[T]he Pine Ridge Sioux had 2,175 of 3,400 adults unemployed (yearly family income of $105)...." -- House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 1963^*

"[On the reservation] of the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota... 100 percent of the Indians had to haul all domestic water..." -- Report of the Public Health Service, 1964^*

"It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.... It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." -- Sherman Alexie, Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven

"...Gentlemen," started Chet Kelly, his blue eyes twinkling in an otherwise bland visage, "such hostility. I have a solution for this unfortunate argument."

John Gage turned away from his partner and studied Kelly's expression, sensing a trap. "What are you talking about?" he snapped.

"Well, apparently I have put friend against friend." The fireman shifted, his right hand held stiffly behind his back. "I want to remedy it."

"How?"

Kelly pulled a cheap plastic pipe from behind his back. Bedraggled ribbons hung from the stem. "Shall we smoke?" He met Johnny's glare, his face a mask of studied innocence.

Gage felt his throat tighten. First Kelly's needling, then DeSoto's enjoyment of the humor at his expense and now this mocking sacrilege. "That's not funny," he hissed, stalking out the back door, heading for the solitude of the hose tower...^**

Turning over restlessly, John gazed at the textured ceiling above his bed. Beside him Roy breathed deeply and beyond the partition Chet snored softly. Glad he can sleep, Gage thought sourly. Giving up on slumber, he sat up and reached under his pillow. He pulled a thick envelope from beneath the heavy institutional linens. The white paper caught the dim light as Johnny turned the packet over and traced the familiar handwriting with his finger. Quietly, he bent and picked up his rolled up bunker pants and boots. Holding the letter between his teeth and scratching his hip, he padded into the locker room.

******

Roy opened his eyes and stared into the twilight of the dorm, trying to figure out what woke him. He held his breath, listening. Hearing nothing, DeSoto sighed, rolled onto his side and began to drift back to sleep. He snapped awake again. John's bunk was empty and his turnout pants were missing. His partner was apparently conducting a late night food trapped in the refrigerator extrication. Kelly's dinner offering had been less than memorable and far from edible.

DeSoto smiled; the return of Johnny's appetite was a good sign. Gage had been quiet and withdrawn for much of the shift, picking at his meals. Even Chet had noticed Johnny's mood, realizing that perhaps over the past few weeks he had gone too far with his teasing. Lying in his bed, Roy remembered this afternoon. "It was one of those natural instincts the Anthro's talk about. It's an awful lot like a blanket and everybody knows us redskins have a big thing for our blankets." John had looked at Roy his lips smiling but not his eyes. Instead, they had been dark and heavy with old hurts. "10-4?" Gage had asked, inviting Roy to help him shut down Chet's mockery. DeSoto had looked at Gage in surprise then turned away not wanting to see his friend's pain. "10-4," he had answered.^** Roy shook his head.

DeSoto's stomach growled. Roy sat up, reaching slowly for his bunker pants and boots. He stood, slipped the suspenders over his shoulders, and quietly left the dorm.

Roy squinted in the relative brightness of the apparatus bay. As his vision cleared, he could see Johnny sitting on the rear bumper of the squad. The glow from the security light by the squad room door, reflected off the young man's disarranged hair. Gage held a piece of notebook paper, an envelope and a sheaf of snapshots in his hand. Lines of concern were deeply etched on John's features. "Johnny..." started DeSoto, his eyebrows rising..

Gage looked up, rapidly folding the paper to cover the photos. His expression hardened.

The tones shattered the night and the bay lights snapped on. "Station 51, Engine 36, Truck 127. Sprinkler activation alarm at the Warren Building. 7-0-2 Carson Street. Cross street Avalon. 7-0-2 Carson Street. Time out 3:17."

Johnny pushed past Roy. He grabbed his dark blue jacket from where it hung on the squad mirror, shoved the letter into the pocket and shrugged on the coat.

The rest of the men spilled from the dorm.

"10-4, KMG 365," acknowledged Captain Stanley.

Frowning, Gage climbed into the cab and pulled on his helmet, tightening the strap.

DeSoto sprinted toward the driver's side of the squad.

******

Roy scanned the nearly deserted street, deep in the state heightened awareness he acquired when driving code three. Beside him, John was quiet, still in the grip of whatever bad news those papers had contained. The radio by DeSoto's knee crackled with unexpectedly heavy traffic for this late an hour.

"All units responding to the Warren Building incident," announced the dispatcher, "additional information: an informant at the scene says there has been an explosion."

"10-4," acknowledged Captain Stanley.

The engine slowed at the signal at Avalon before pulling through the intersection against the light. As DeSoto followed, he got his first look at the building. People milled confusedly in a parking lot across the street. Glass fragments spread over the sidewalk and street glittered in the night.

"LA, Station 51 at scene." The radio flattened Stanley's usually deep voice. "We have a five-story office building with smoke showing and multiple casualties. Respond a second alarm assignment and two additional squads."

"10-4, 51." A cascade of callout tones sounded. "Engine 127, Station 116, Squad 36, and Battalion 14...."

Roy pulled past the Crown, staging just ahead of the engine. As he slammed the squad door, he glanced at Chet as the fireman fitted a hydrant wrench over the valve stem on the top of the fireplug. Marco already had the nozzle of the jump line and his determined expression told DeSoto that Kelly was going have to settle for hauling hose for this fire. Despite the circumstances, Roy grinned.

Behind the squad, smoke and dust billowed out of the opening of the underground parking lot beneath the office building. A thread-like gray plume leaked from the roof, rising into the night. The thin slats from venetian blinds dangled out the windowless casements suspended by their broken cords. In places the narrow metal strips, which had held the outer glass wall, were torn free and hung in twisted disarray, revealing the red-painted retaining clips bolted to the concrete floor decks.

DeSoto grabbed his turnout coat from the bay directly behind the cab. John brushed by him, already wearing his SCBA. Hurriedly, Roy pulled on his air tank and followed his partner. He dodged a pair of men from 127's dragging hoses from the back of the truck.

"Engine 36, take up position to charge the standpipe," hissed the HT in DeSoto's pocket.

A man in a private security guard's uniform emerged from the lobby doors at the far northeast corner of the shattered office building. Blood streamed down his head from his cut scalp, covering his face and trickling into his thick gray mustache. He grabbed Stanley's arm. "Don't know what happened... They haven't come down...." The guard was gasping for breath and his eyes were wide.

"Who? Are there people still in there?" demanded Stanley.

The guard's mouth opened but no sound emerged.

Stanley glanced over his shoulder. "Chet, Marco!" he yelled.

Johnny stepped forward, taking the guard's elbow. The paramedic's eyes met Stanley's and the officer nodded. "Sir, why you don't sit down," John said, easing the man onto the running board of the engine.

"Sir, are there still people in there?" repeated Hank.

"Third floor," the guard panted. "Securities firm... Night shift... Asian Markets... And a cleaning crew... Don't know where..." The man stopped to catch his breath. "There was a loud bang and then the lights went out...."

"Natural gas?" speculated Roy.

"Possibly, on our last inspection this place was mostly federal offices, tho'," mussed Hank. He watched smoke roil from the ramp that dipped beneath the building. Teams from the truck and engine companies disappeared into the billowing blackness. The stench of overheated plastics filled the air.

Squad 36 parked across the street from 51's; Stanley waved one of the arriving paramedics over. He turned his attention back to the security guard. "Is there anything in that building that could have caused an explosion?"

"Just offices, mostly government, selective service stuff like that...." The wounded man shook his head slowly. "Nothing."

"Ok." Hank examined the structure. "John and Chet, Roy and Marco, make a sweep of the third floor." He activated his HT. "LA, what is the ETA of Battalion 14 at our location?"

"Ten minutes, 51."

"10-4." Stanley watched DeSoto slip on his airmask. "Be careful."

Roy raised his hand in acknowledgement.

******

Johnny stepped from the darkened stairwell into a weak pool of light cast by an emergency lamp mounted by the open emergency door. A thin haze of smoke hung in the air, filtering up from the fire below. The third floor corridor turned sharply toward the suite of offices that the laminated floor plans fastened to the lobby security desk had indicated housed the securities firm. Gage turned right, following the hall, and then abruptly stopped.

The rest of the corridor was gone. In its place was a jumble of fallen ductwork and ceiling tiles. The thin curtain wall that had formed the right side of the passage was toppled and now lay at an acute angle, wedged against the opposite wall. Every few feet a loop of wire dangled from the bare ceiling, supporting the twisted remains of the framework that had once held the suspension ceiling. Papers from toppled file cabinets drifted over the rubble.

John lifted his flashlight, directing the beam beyond the wreckage at his feet. In the glow, a dark mass waved in the wind, blocking and unblocking the city lights visible through the broken windows at the far end of the building. A strip of the neoprene membrane, which had covered the roof, hung down through a gap in the ceiling that extended clear to the top of the structure. The bottom of the sheet disappeared into a hole in the floor. The occasional fragment of concrete or spill of dust sparkled in the shaft of light. The extreme edges of the fissure were ringed with the remnants of the floor deck and outer support pillars.

"My God," whispered Chet.

Tinny-voiced reports trickled from the portable radios, detailing the devastation crews below were finding: hallways blocked by slabs of concrete; impassible mounds of debris.

Gage pulled the radio from his pocket. "Cap, this is HT 51. We're on the third floor." He looked back at Roy; DeSoto's face was a pale blur in the dim light. "The entire southern end of the building, from the roof on down has collapsed."

******

Stanley stared at the radio he held in his hand, imagining he could see Gage's face. "HT 51, repeat. Did you say the roof had collapsed?"

"Engine 51, that is affirmative. The entire south end of the building has caved-in."

Tipping back his head, Hank looked at the dark hulk, a black, gray and silver shape against the blue-black sky. Through a glassless third floor window he could see stars which should have been blocked by the fourth floor. "10-4, HT 51." He paused. "LA advise Battalion 14 that we have a major structural collapse at our location."

"10 -4, Engine 51."

******

"Over?" asked DeSoto, looking at Gage.

John stooped inspecting the dark triangular space beneath wall. Wires, bent aluminum framing and trash blocked the path. Straightening, he nodded. "Looks like the easiest way to me." He studied the still standing wall estimating the distance to the office.

Marco poked the surface with the handle of his axe. "I think it will take your weight."

Gage lifted himself on to the wreckage. Gingerly, he crawled toward the suite, trying to stay over the centers of the hidden studs.

Roy watched Johnny ease across wallpaper covered surface. He couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was off-kilter in the midst of this devastation. DeSoto shook his head. Despite the force of the explosion, a picture still hung undisturbed in its frame but now lay pointed toward the ceiling. Abruptly Roy realized that John was not scrambling over the hall wall, but instead over the partitions that had separated the maze of offices. The two walls of the corridor had been sandwiched together by the blast. "Johnny," he began.

Gage inched forward. Suddenly the surface cracked, tumbling him into darkness.

"Johnny!" yelled Roy.

Marco dropped to his knees and peered beneath the wall.

"I'm OK." Gage's voice was muffled. His head reappeared through the newly-made hole in the drywall. Whitish dust covered his shoulders. "I'm all right," he repeated.

DeSoto sighed in relief. He joined Marco in clearing obstructions from the narrow passage beneath the toppled walls.

"Need to go on a diet, Gage?" asked Kelly.

"Ha, ha." John called to Roy. "I think we'll have to go under."

Roy pulled back out of the hole and stared at Johnny. His partner had the good grace to look faintly sheepish. "Yeah, thanks for telling me."

******

Gage sunk his axe into the brittle sheetrock. On the upstroke the head caught for a second and then yanked clear, sending a trickle of plaster chunks to the floor. Quickly John cut away the wall between the studs.

"Johnny?" asked Roy, adjusting his position behind John for a better view.

"Almost through," replied Gage giving the wall a final blow. The drywall fell pivoting around a length of phone cable. John tore the thin wires free and peered through the hole.

The beam of Gage's flashlight reflected on a broken picture frame, holding a photo of a young woman in a white bridal dress. Beyond the picture the room was a jumble of fallen ceiling tiles and walls. Papers, telephones, adding machines, and office supplies littered the dark maroon carpet. Silver backed swatches of insulation dotted the devastation.

"Hello," hailed Gage, turning on his side and sliding halfway through the opening. The narrow cone of light illuminated a pale shiny mass, streaked with red.

The blob moved and turned, transforming itself into a face of a bald headed man. He blinked in the sudden brightness. "Thank God," he gasped.

"Sir," started Johnny, crawling the rest of the way into the room. Behind him, he could hear DeSoto, Kelly and Lopez scrambling through the narrow gap. "Are you alone in here?"

"Jason is over there... somewhere. He was yelling earlier... don't hear him any more."

"Where?" asked Johnny, squinting into the shadows.

Grunting the man pointed. "On the phone when..." his words trailed off as he stopped, gasping and unable to describe what happened.

"Ok, we'll find him. You just take it easy," comforted DeSoto. Roy listened carefully to his victim's breathing. "Sir, are you hurt?"

"Just my head... I think," the man panted. "But something... holding me down."

"Roy, I'm going to look over there," grunted John, worming his way beneath a huge, fallen fluorescent light fixture.

"Ok," acknowledged DeSoto while surveying the debris trapping the man.

Tiny powder-coated, razor-edged fragments of glass from the shattered bulbs crunched under Johnny's gloved hands, as he advanced. Ahead of him the room dissolved into deeper chaos. Ranks of filing cabinets lay on their sides, supporting a toppled wall and blanketed with spongy ceiling tiles. A huge vertical file lay on its side pinning a man against the floor. A crust of blood caked the victim's lips.

"Roy, I found him!" called John. With his teeth, he pulled off his glove and pressed his fingers against the man's neck. A rapid, weak beat pulsed beneath his fingertips. The injured man's breathing was fast and labored.

Lopez wriggled into the rubble, following Gage. "I'll give you a hand, Johnny."

Gage examined the overlying debris. "I'm going to need a porta-power, backboard and the O₂," he called.

"Cap," said Kelly into his radio, "This is HT 51. We found them." The firefighter relayed Gage's request for equipment.

"10-4," crackled Stanley. "It's on the way."

"10-4, HT 51 out."

"Chet, you want to give me a hand with this." Roy wedged a pry bar beneath the edge of the toppled desk that was lying across the stockbroker's legs. Kelly joined him, levering the debris off the man.

******

"Push that in a bit more," directed John, pumping the handle of the porta-power one more time.

Macro strained to reach past Johnny and shove the wooden step block further under the edge of the cabinet. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and he was wedged uncomfortably against Gage.

"How is he, Johnny?" asked DeSoto, crowding into the tight space. Gage was twisted in a contorted pretzel that made Roy's back and hips ache just to watch. The spine board lay waiting for the patient. The victim already had a rigid collar wrapped around his neck.

"Not so good," he answered, frowning. Gingerly, John probed the space around the trapped man. "I think he has a collapsed lung. It's hard to tell at this angle, but it looks like his trachea is deviated and his respirations are really labored."

"Ok," replied Roy. "The ambulance is waiting." DeSoto pushed past Gage, getting ready to help move the man.

The hydraulic cylinder hissed as Gage raised the wreckage the final critical fraction of an inch. "He's clear," he announced, pushing to his knees and straddling the backboard. Carefully John placed his hands around the man's head, supporting his neck. "Let's get him out of here," he instructed.

******

Stanley studied the faces of the four men standing in front of him as he talked. "We still have two people missing. A security guard and a cleaning woman." Johnny shifted his weight from foot to foot, seemingly energized by the search and rescue activities. "Kelly, Gage search the second floor." Stanley eyed the pair uneasily; the two men had been at each other throats for days, settling down only when working. "Lopez, DeSoto join the crew working in the pit," ordered Hank, referring to the debris filled hole in the center of the building.

"Ok, Cap," replied DeSoto

" 'k, Cap," answered Johnny, turning quickly toward the entrance.

******

On the second level of the parking structure beneath the building, the darkness was nearly total. A pale shaft of light from an emergency lantern cut through the gloom. The edge of the luminous circle caught on a concrete support piling and glittered on the face of a cheap watch sticking out of the top of a bulky brown package strapped to the post.

Inside the watch, a minute steel dog lifted, allowing a gear to turn. The hour hand jumped. The motion of the gear carried one thin wire forward to touch another. The contact closed, current flowed, and driven by the flow of electrons a chemical reaction started.

******

John crawled froward, flat on his belly and peered through the narrow gap between the floor and the bottom of the elevator. The beam of his flashlight illuminated the heavy electrical governor cable looped beneath the car.

Chet leaned against the pry bar he carried, watching John. "If anyone fell in there, Gage, they'll be somewhere in the basement."

"This one only goes to the ground floor." His voice echoed into the darkness. Johnny slid further into the crevasse trying to illuminate the depths of the shaft. "I think I see something," he called.

Chet nervously studied the floor beneath the paramedic. The end of the corridor, by the elevator, was canted at an angle. The concrete supports for the floor below had shattered in the explosion, tilting the floor and twisting the gate into the shaft. A wide crack ran along the corridor and disappeared beneath Johnny. A battery-powered light glowed at the end of the hall and cast sharp shadows over the prone paramedic's legs. Every move John made on the slick, debris covered asphalt tiles caused him to slip closer to the opening. Kelly rested the pry bar against the wall, set down the HT and lay next to John, wrapping his hand around the other man's waistband. "Hurry up, Gage!" he urged. He hooked his legs around the doorframe of a nearby office, bracing himself against further movement.

"I can't tell for sure what's down there." Johnny inched deeper into the fissure.

Chet grunted as John's weight caused the doorjamb to dig painfully into the backs of his knees. "Gage!" He tightened his grip on the paramedic. Sharp fragments of cement gouged his arm through the tough fabric of his turnouts.

******

When the strained bonds in certain molecules are broken, enough energy is released to tear the electrons of atoms from their normal paths, sending them on crazed light emitting travels. In the split second the dynamite strapped to the pillar exploded, it radiated a burst of light that out shone the morning sun. Then the air filled with fragments of cement, metal and dust propelled by the rapidly expanding cloud of hot gases.

******

Suddenly the building bucked beneath Kelly and the emergency beacon flickered. "What the Hell!" The walls shook and the thunder of a second explosion filled the night. The floor crumbled in front him. Gage was torn from his grasp. His hands frantically clutched at the falling paramedic and for a split second his fingers touched the fabric of John's pant leg, only to close around thin air. The concrete floor disintegrated, plunging Chet into a choking, dust filled blackness.

******

Captain Stanley held the blueprint of the building in one hand and an HT in the other, imagining the positions of his teams, visualizing the three dimensional grid formed by the search pattern. The voice of the Battalion 14 Chief cracked over the radio. The ground trembled. Hank's eyes flew open in surprise as a booming roar engulfed him.

"Get out!" Stanley yelled into the handitalkie.

A cloud of dust rolled out the entrance to the underground parking lot. Shards of glass, dislodged by the concussion, rained from the few remaining glazed windows. Hank covered his face as waves of grit blasted past him. From the shattered windows and doors, rescue workers ran. Stanley saw Marco gracefully vault the sill of a window and reach back, hauling Roy through the opening. Hank began silently repeating the names of the men running out of the building, checking off a mental headcount.

"Where are Kelly and Gage?" he demanded. Stanley lifted the radio to his lips. "John! Chet!" Smoke curled from the ramp that ran into the depths of the garage.

Static answered him.

******

The concrete wailed, screaming as it fell. The endless noise penetrated his bones, burning into his soul. Chet realized he now knew what the end of the world would sound like -- its clamor would fill his dreams. Just when he thought the noise would last forever the onslaught abruptly ended. The relative silence following the collapse was deafening.

Kelly lay in the darkness listening to his body with the smell of smoke, sweat and dust filling his nostrils. He was face down on something yielding and rough. Gage’s turnout. For a split second he panicked, imagining himself lying atop a corpse, but then the surface beneath his cheek shifted. Cautiously, he lifted his head.

Dust sifted through the beam of Chet’s fallen flashlight and a thick blanket of gray grime covered everything. In the gloom, the debris in front of his face moved, lifting upwards. Johnny’s face appeared under the dust caked brim of his helmet.

Blinking at the powder falling on his cheeks, Gage stared upwards into the darkness and studied the overlaying wreckage that was trapping them in the pit at the bottom of the elevator shaft. He coughed.

"You OK?" asked Chet, looking distrustfully upwards.

Johnny nodded.

"Gage, you’re a disaster magnet!" accused Kelly. His observation was rewarded by a sharp poke in the middle as Johnny tried to bend his knee.

Groaning under the weight of his colleague, John shoved Chet. "Get off me ya jerk!" he hissed.

Chet scuttled crab-like off Johnny's fallen form.

Gage grunted as the mustached firefighter clumsily placed a hand on his stomach. "You're lucky that garbage you called dinner was inedible, or you'd be wearing it," he grumbled, pushing to his feet. John ducked his head to avoid a mangled length of rebar protruding from the mass of broken concrete.

"Last time I ever do a sweep with you."

John scooped the flashlight from the blanket of fragments that coated the floor. "Is that a promise?" He directed the beam onto the overhanging wreckage. The cab of the elevator blocked the shaft, jammed on its twisted rails. Where the door had been, a huge chunk of concrete lay cantilevered over the edge of the opening and smaller fragments completely fill the gaps, sealing them inside the hoistway. The heavy metal gate, which had covered the opening on the lower floor, was crumbled like a sheet of discarded paper. The section of flooring, on top of which the two men had been lying, had apparently split along the crack, dropping it in the opposite direction from the rest of the deck and tumbling them into the shaft.

"That's gratitude for you." Kelly stood up, examining his surroundings.

"Do you plan to just run your mouth," demanded John, angrily, "or are you going to put some of your training to use?" Aggrieved silence greeted his comment. He reached his hand into a dark fissure, gingerly probing the opening. "Looks like more of the building has collapsed into the garage."

Chet sniffed at the acrid stench seeping through the wreckage. "Smells like dynamite," he remarked. "And..."

"I smell it." John fought down panic and tried to worm his way into the gap. He stopped half into the tunnel, twisting on his side, his hips pressing against the wreckage. "Dead end. Find the HT," he instructed, looking back at the fireman.

"...burning rubber." Kelly swallowed hard and began searching for the radio.

******

"John! Chet!" shrieked the radio in Marco's hand.

DeSoto was bent double, hands on his knees coughing from the clouds of dust. He raised his head and stared at the HT in horror. Behind him fresh plumes of smoke belched from the mouth of the parking garage. Lopez barely had enough time to catch the back of his colleague's turnout coat, as DeSoto dashed toward the building. "Roy," he commanded, "wait until they clear us go back in."

DeSoto pulled away. "They're still in there."

"I know," replied Marco quietly in the sudden silence.

Incredulously, Roy stared at Marco. DeSoto hung suspended between the devastated building and waiting rescue workers. Abruptly portables throughout the crowd began squawking confused queries and orders; a new symphony of callout tones erupted, shattering the crazy reverse gravity that held Roy immobile.

"They're my friends too," whispered Marco.

"DeSoto, Lopez," began the HT.

Roy ran.

******

Roy followed Hank through the wrecked door. The station officer stopped abruptly, forcing DeSoto to perform some fancy footwork to avoid plowing into the back of the other man. "Oh my God!" exclaimed Hank.

Stanley moved allowing DeSoto a clear view of the lobby. The smell of burning plastics filtered up from the gasoline fed fires below. The flashers on the apparatus outside reflected on the scraps of metal studding the two and half story high pile of rubble, making the hillock look like it was stained with blood. Instinctively Roy stepped back. His boot crunched on something lying on the formerly pristine marble. DeSoto glanced down and immediately recognized the portrait of a young bride, the picture he had seen in the damaged offices above. Startled, Roy pointed his flashlight upward. Instead of illuminating the remnants of the third floor corridor -- where less than 30 minutes ago he, Marco, John and Kelly had been working to extricate the stockbrokers -- the beam lanced through empty space. The burnished doors of the elevator shaft opened to thin air. "Johnny," he whispered.

Hank followed the paramedic's arm. "Oh my God," he repeated, this time as a prayer. He lifted his radio, "L.A. we have two men missing, possibly injured."

"10-4," acknowledged the dispatcher.

******

Chet knelt next to the buffer spring protruding from the bottom of the pit, panting. His breath echoed in the chamber, bouncing and doubling in the confinement, crowding out the faint voices on the radio. The volume had been steadily declining as he dug, as the batteries in the unit drained. He glared at the pile of debris burying the HT.

"Any luck?" asked Gage, his voice strained.

"No," Kelly called up to John. The paramedic had wedged himself into a promising gap in the rumble jamming the doorway to the shaft. "I haven't found it yet. You ok up there?"

John sighed and looked at the file cabinet blocking the passage in front of him. Grit shifted down from the wreckage, falling into his turnouts, eyes, ears, nose and mouth. A whiff of sewage gave a hint to the source of the dripping water he heard. The smell of smoke was nearly gone, the fire crews had apparently smothered the flames raging below. Johnny sneezed. "Yeah. Give me some cribbing and a porta-power and we'll be out of here in a week." Gage looked at the weak light from his nearly dead flashlight. "We're not gonna get out this way," he concluded, wiggling backwards, working his way out of the narrow channel.

Kelly carefully pushed aside a chunk of drywall. A trickle of plaster dust rolled past his hand. Chet looked up and scrambled to his feet. A large block of concrete slid down the slope, crashing to a stop where he had been kneeling. A cloud of dust filled the chamber.

"You ok?" demanded Gage, climbing down the wreckage.

"Yeah," breathed Kelly, staring at the piece of floor deck.

"We can't get out of here." John sat down on the lump of debris that had nearly ended his colleague's career.

Chet watched Johnny, incredulously.

"If we keep digging like this, we're just going to cave things in." Gage removed his helmet and scratched his sweat soaked hair. The paramedic's face was drawn and ashy, lined with exhaustion. "We're going to have to wait for them to find us," he concluded reluctantly.

******

DeSoto stood, stretching his stiff back. Turning, he watched the other rescuers scaling the piles of debris or tunneling deep into the structure. Come on, Johnny, Chet. Make some noise; let us know where you are. Closing his eyes, he rubbed the back of his neck. Fatigue and frustration were settling like twin blankets on his shoulders. The rescue efforts had become slower and more measured as the rising sun and passing hours had revealed exactly how unstable the hulk was. Roy chaffed at the restrictions imposed by the hazardous wreckage.

Beside DeSoto, Charlie Conrad pulled the long, thin Kennedy probe from the wreckage, removed the headset and sighed. There was no noise from within the void they had located deep inside the rumble. He looked at Roy and shook his head.

DeSoto turned away and bit his lip.

Charlie sat on the edge of a large slab of concrete, pushed back his helmet and wiped his brow. He and DeSoto had been crawling carefully over one small corner of the ruins since early morning, probing, shouting, digging and coming up cold.

Roy shifted from foot to foot, impatient with the delay. He squinted at the clear noon sky and estimated the time since Chet and Johnny had been buried. Eight hours. He tried not to think about how quickly a person could die of untreated crush injuries. He tried not to think that they might already be dead.

"Wanna take this for a while, my ears are shot?" Conrad held out the long brass tube tipped with a microphone.

Roy slipped the battery pack over his shoulder and picked his way across the debris field, intent on another promising location.

******

John opened his eyes, unable to tell the difference in the blackness. Disoriented for a second he panicked, unable to shake the nightmare about the day his blond-headed twin cousins had locked him in the abandoned grain elevator in Crawford. He raked his fingers across the floor of the shaft, feeling the sharp edges of the concrete fragments instead the soft fluff of wheat chafe. I fell asleep, he realized, groggily. Sighing, Johnny rolled on his side and hugged his legs against his chest trying to get warm. His throat ached with thirst and his stomach was growling. On the opposite side of the pit, Chet snored, loudly. Gage uncurled and sat up.

John reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter. Carefully he set the stack of photos on a lump of cement. He sat in the dark unable to read the words, and not needing to.

"...To answer your question, yes I drove down to Kyle to go to the clinic. The doctor says I have a little problem with my blood. That's why I have been having the headaches and dizziness. He wants me to come into the hospital for more tests. And, before you lecture me Cinksi, I will go. But, Agda is staying with us this winter, as she just can't live out there by herself anymore. She has been having some memory problems and your father worries about her. And with last summer's drought and the Landowner's Association court case coming up, you father needs nothing more to worry about. Once we get your grandmother settled in, I will go back...."

Johnny leaned back and rested his head against the wall. Combined with the phone conversation he had had with his Aunt Kate, it didn't take much reading between the lines to know her health problems were fairly serious. Diabetes, he guessed, recalling Kate mentioning that Marie was drinking a lot of sage tea -- a Lakhota folk remedy for the symptoms of diabetes. Mama, please take care of yourself.... Eyes closed and worrying, he drifted back into an exhausted stupor. "Why don't you come back?" accused his mother, speaking in Chet Kelly's voice, as John fell asleep.

******

Johnny wrapped his fingers around the handle of the knife, watching the skin on the backs of his knuckles blanch as he tightened his grip. He stood knee deep in a thicket of newly grown serviceberry bushes, sprouting around the remains of an old barbed wire fence. Below the yellow-gold leaves he could see the blackened roots of the older bushes, victims of a grass fire. Shifting uncomfortably, Gage rolled the haft between his hands. The sunlight glinted on the blade. He bowed his head and waited.

John's uncle, Howard Red Owl, held the rifle in the crook of his right arm and awkwardly used his left hand to fish a muslin bag of tobacco from his pocket. He waited quietly for a moment, gazing at the freshly shot white tail deer lying by his feet. Taking a pinch of the brown leaves between his fingers, he extended his hand and prayed. Reverently, he sprinkled the offering on the nose of deer. "Mitakuye oyasin," he concluded.

"Mitakuye oyasin," whispered John. He knelt, rolling the carcass out of the brush that choked the fence line and dragged it onto a clean span of grass under a cottonwood. He tied a short length of rope to the hind legs, hoisted the deer into the air securing it above the ground, and sliced through the skin over the breastbone. The open body cavity steamed in the cold air. Carefully, he peeled back the hide, occasionally using his knife to slice through the tough membrane anchoring the skin. The hide was slick with fat and blood. John tossed a scrap of the still warm fat to the watching magpie, perched atop a rotting fencepost. As he dressed the deer, a pickup truck came rattling down the dusty track along the top of the river bluff. Gage wiped his hands on the grass and shielded his eyes, staring into the glare. The truck stopped next to his uncle.

"Hau," hailed the driver. Joe Red Pipe rolled the window the rest of the way down and leaned his head through the gap.

"Hau," replied Howard. "Nicinca kin toktuka hwo?"

Johnny bowed his head, separating the muscles from the slender thighbones, while the two men talked in Indian. He dropped the meat into blue metal lard buckets.

"My boy came home today." Red Pipe switched to English, clearly intending Gage to understand his words. "He saw Dwayne in the hospital at Qui Nhon."

The hair on the back of John's neck stood up.

"He says Dwayne's leg is healin' good. He'll be goin' back to his unit soon."

Gage looked down at his bloody hands. He shuddered.

******

John parked in front of a tiny old log house nestled in a fold along Sage Creek. Barely visible on the horizon were the white bluffs by Wambli, their tops dark with pines. A slash of green traced the damp bottom of the fold, ending by the house. A tumble-down shade leaned next to the house, last summer's pine boughs brown and brittle. An old plank table sat under the arbor. Osier willows, wild plums and cottonwoods lined the banks of a narrow stream. A rusting hand pump, the only source of safe drinking water, stood between the house and an abandoned barn.

Gage slid from the seat and reached into the bed of the pickup, lifting out a bucket. Flies crawled on the white cheesecloth stretched across the mouth of the can, drawn by the smell of fresh blood. He waved his hand scattering the insects.

Johnny mounted the narrow stairs. "Grandma!" he called.

Agda Gage appeared at the door. The years had turned her blond hair mostly white and aged her fair skin. "Grandson," she welcomed, stepping out of the doorway. Her blue eyes twinkled.

John followed his grandmother into the front room. "Howard sent you some deer meat," he said, naming her son-in-law. He carried the pail into the kitchen and set it in the sink.

She pulled the cloth from the top of the bucket. "He could have brought it himself."

"Grandma, you know he won't." Johnny sat at the oilcloth covered kitchen table, watching Agda salt the venison and transfer it to a basin in preparation for canning. He tipped his chair back against the wall. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the kitchen window, touching the thin strips of paper cut in decorative scallops and tacked to the edges of the shelves.

"I know; Howard is a good relative," she sighed, referring to his observation of the custom of avoidance between son-in-laws and mother-in-laws. "But, I'm not a Sioux."

Johnny shrugged. "How's grandpa?"

"Some good, some bad." She wiped her hands on a dishtowel. "Go back and see him."

Gage hesitated in the bedroom door, his fingers wrapped around the edge of the faded quilt that hung in the opening. The old man lay beneath a thick handwoven coverlet. Shadows covered the sagging right side of his brown face. Last spring, Peter Gage had suffered a massive stroke, becoming wanagi ktepi -- ghost killed.

"Tah..." groaned Peter. He tried to turn his head to look at his grandson.

"Grandpa," said John, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking his grandfather's hand. The skin covering the old man's wasted limbs was papery and thin. When Johnny had been a toddler, Peter had held him in his powerful arms to give Gage his first horseback ride.

"Hmmnh," stammered Peter, trying to talk.

"Shhh, Grandpa," comforted Johnny. "Howard and I went deer hunting. Grandma's goin' make you some stew." Swallowing hard, he stared out the window, unable to look at his ailing grandfather anymore. The two men wordlessly watched the sunset. John shifted, breaking the silence, "Saw Joe Red Pipe today..."

"Johnny," called his Grandmother, "I fixed you something to eat."

Gage stood, glad of the excuse to escape. "I'll come back later, Grandpa."

******

The air in the kitchen was momentarily heavy with the tang of kerosene as the lamp guttered then flared to life. Johnny fitted the glass chimney back into place and snuffed out the match. The yellow light caught on the chipped, blue-painted rungs of the ladder-back kitchen chairs.

Agda set a red and white stoneware platter in front of Johnny. Half a dozen pale brown and white ruggmunk -- savory potato pancakes -- sat on the plate. She reached behind the calico drapes covering the shelves beneath the counter. Grunting slightly as she bent her arthritic knees, she pulled out one of her precious jars of imported ligonberry jam. Agda dropped glistening lumps of preserve onto the steaming rounds. "Eat. You are too skinny." She turned back to the counter and filled the pressure cooker with canning jars.

Johnny shoveled a forkful of potatoes and jam into his mouth. "Mmmm."

"Have you heard anything more about Dwayne?"

Gage chewed more quickly. "Sonny Red Pipe," he answered around a mouthful of pancake, "Joe's boy -- saw him in the hospital. Says he's getting better."

"Thank God," murmured Agda, the lamplight glimmering on her white hair. "War is terrible Johnny. Remember that." She pushed the dark bangs back from his forehead and kissed him.

******

"Hey! I hear something!"

Marco looked up. He held his breath as Eligio Carrenzia from 16's pressed flat against the debris, pressing his ear against a crevasse. Eligio's face went blank and abstracted as he listened. Lopez remained motionless, feeling the moment stretch. Come on Chet, give us a sign.

A huge grin split Carrenzia's face. "I hear shouting," he announced, rising.

Macro lifted his handitalkie. "Cap, this is HT 51. We found someone." He studied the layers of rubble. "I need help up here," Lopez described his position.

******

Carrenzia positioned the star bit and raised the hammer preparing to break away the last obstruction. He brought the hammer down sharply, rotating the bit with each blow. Lopez tied the safety line to his belt, tensing with each blow. With a deep animal rumble, the cut floor deck crumbled. Coughing slightly from the dust, Marco climbed down into the hole.

Lopez crouched beneath the slab, listening. The pounding of his heart and the hiss of his breath drowned out all other sounds. "Hello?" he called. A faint noise rewarded his shout. Slowly, he worked his way into a narrow gap. Loose fragments rattled though the layered slabs, striking his head and back. Marco grimaced. "Hello!" he repeated.

"Help me!" yelled an unfamiliar voice.

Disappointment flooded Marco's mouth, burning and bitter. He swallowed hard. "We are coming." He fought to keep the frustration and regret from his voice. "We'll get you out." He turned. "Eligio, we're going to have to tunnel. Call for some help."

"Is it them," asked the firefighter, activating his radio.

"No," replied Marco, his voice trembling for a second.

******

Chet stretched, pulling the tightness from his limbs. In the depths of the wreckage he could hear the steady dripping of water from ruptured pipes. The dampness was seeping into their chamber, moistening the dust on the floor and releasing the earthy breath of an open grave. Shuddering, Kelly rolled to his knees and stood. He had to do something to calm down. Chet closed his eyes and quieted his breathing, striving to dam off the rising flood of panic. The forced inactivity of his captivity left him unable transform his concern into action, so he paced from one corner of the shaft to the other, counting his steps as he walked.

Chet switched on his flashlight and looked at his watch. 10:37, I should be home, napping in the chaise lounge out back and catching some rays, not watching Gage sleep. He sighed and started to turn off the light, when the beam struck a pile of photographs next to Johnny's leg. Kelly bent, picking up the pictures.

A late middle-aged Indian woman, in an emerald-green blouse and dungarees, smiled out from the paper at him. She had the same fine features as Johnny and a lifetime of hard living etched in her laugh lines and crow's feet. Beside her stood a tall, unsmiling lean man with curly disarranged hair and a broad dark face. Behind the pair was a small, weathered frame house, tilting away from the incessant wind. The place had the grim look of rural poverty. Chet shuffled through the pile, extracting an aging black and white snapshot of an elderly couple -- a slump shouldered Indian man in a western shirt and jeans and a heavy-set white woman with her long, braided hair coiled atop her head. They stood smiling outside a log cabin.

"Save the batteries."

Kelly looked up. Gage was squinting at him. Chet turned off the flashlight and dropped it into his turnout pocket.

"And give me the photos."

He handed back the pictures. "Family?"

Johnny held the snapshots, imagining the faces. "Yeah, my mom, dad, my aunt, some cousins, grandpa and grandma. Mom found the photos and sent them."

"You never talk about them."

John shrugged.

"Didn't think you had any family."

"Little Indians come from big Indians. Unless your anthropology books have some other way for that to happen."

"I didn't say anything..."

"This time," snapped Gage. "But you're always going on about it. 'Semi-red brother'. Why does it matter so much to you -- to everyone?...."

******

Johnny stood watching the muscles beneath the smooth brown skin of Philip Pawnee Leggings' neck. Barefoot, he balanced on the Chicago Northwestern railroad track. The hot sun baked the smell of creosote from the ties under the rail and the wind carried the scent of drying alfalfa. The vibrations of a unit train, carrying coal to the East Coast, rose through the soles of his feet.

Philip stared at Gage his eyes hard and cold. The wind tugged the thin fabric of his shirt tight against his weightlifter's muscles. On the rail behind him stood Manny Adams, sweat glistening on his fat face, and Clay Kills Good swayed awkwardly next to Manny as he tried to stay atop the narrow metal bar.

"Jump!" screamed Barbara Pretty Weasel, her voice high and ringing. She stood next to a clump of sagebrush at the base of the embankment, her purse and schoolbooks lying at her feet. Her friend clung to her arm.

The train's whistle exploded in a series of short bursts, obliterating all other sounds. Manny jumped, skidding on the loose ballast stones. Clay swayed for a half a second more and then gave up his balancing act, rolling through the weeds to safety. Philip glared at Johnny, the bright sunlight highlighting the black rings at the edges of his brown irises, while John continued to stare at Pawnee Legging's neck. The engineer leaned on the airhorn, sounding a continuous wail. The track trembled and breathed like a living thing.

The skin on Philip's neck twitched. Suddenly, he was no longer there. Gage stood for a heartbeat more, then dived from the track. His slender body cut through the air and he hit the ground rolling. He lay curled in a ball, eyes closed, while inches the train hurtled by in a rush of hot air and diesel fumes. Grit blasted from the trackbed sprinkled down on him.

After the train passed, Johnny lay blinking his watering eyes. Even before his vision cleared, he could feel Pawnee Legging's stare as hot as the afternoon sun.

"Tell me if that train had hit you, would you be an Indian in heaven or a white man in hell?"

******

The roar of the crowd was a dull murmur, barely discernible beneath the sound of the wind and pounding of John's heart drumming beneath his breastbone. Everything was distilled into the pure rhythm of movement. He was numb, beyond the reach of fear, joy, pain or happiness, as boneless as a breath of air carried on the wind. It was like a good song or a dance with a beautiful girl, he never wanted it to end. But it did.

The light pressure of the finish tape across Gage's chest brought him crashing back to earth. The track jolted against his feet as he stumbled to a walk, feeling a deep burning start in his leg muscles. The yelling, cheering, clapping and booing in the stands welled up, nearly drowning out the announcer.

"Four-forty... First place -- John Gage, Holy Rosary High School; second place -- Leon Hallingdal, Sherman High School; third place -- Sylvester Gutknecht...."

Hands pressed against his back and gasping, Johnny walked slowly toward his teammates. They cheered for the team's victory not for his. Only Clement Brewster, who had his father's green eyes and fair hair, came over to give him a congratulatory slap on the back.

The cool night breeze dried his sweat, tightening the muscles in the backs of Gage's legs. He stopped at the curb, which separated the track from the sidelines, and braced his foot against the uneven concrete. As he stretched, the other runners walked past.

Leon paused next to John.

Gage tensed. Of their own volition his hands curled into fists. He stared at the wiry tuffs of needle and thread grass rising through a crack in the asphalt.

Hallingdal's sweat soaked purple and gray shirt stuck to his thin white chest. The block print name "Indians" rose and fell, following the contours of his ribs. His short blond hair bristled as his ran his hand over his head. "Not bad..." he hissed, brushing past Johnny and sending him reeling. "For a prairie nigger."

******

Chet looked toward Johnny's voice and imagined the other man's face in the impenetrable darkness -- the expression he envisioned made him turned away. "I don't know," he said, softly.

"Makes you sound like a bigot." Surprised by Kelly's changed tone, Gage faltered.

Chet closed his eyes, remembering the face and words of the grieving Mexican woman as he emerged from a burning tenement holding the limp body of her now dead son. 'You didn't even try! He's just some worthless wet-back to you. You don't care!' She had collapsed weeping at his feet. Finally, the woman's husband had wrapped his arms around her and carried her away. Chet was silent, as he had been then, unable to defend himself, unable to answer for a tragic history. Kelly licked his lips. "I'm not a bigot," he whispered at last.

"I know," sighed John. He leaned back against the concrete wall of the shaft. "You sure've sounded like one this week, though."

"I was just teasing...." Kelly hesitated. "You get so worked up. It makes it very hard to resist." His voice hardened. "Then when you said that stuff about whites -- it made me mad."

"It was all true."

"But, I wasn't there. I wasn't even born back then."

John sighed again. "Chet..." He wasn't sure he should bother to continue, experience had taught him there was no way to win this argument. As he debated, the fear of being buried alive returned, tickling at the back his mind. Gage shook his head. "What about today?"

"Today?" Chet's puzzled voice filled the space between the two men.

"Yeah, today. You don't think it ended back then? Why do you think all those Indians are marching clear across the country to D.C.?^†"

Chet shrugged. "People aren't exactly killing Indians today."

Johnny snorted. "Not with guns anyway, now it's done with laws, studies and good intentions."

"People are just trying to help solve the Indian Problem..."

Gage laughed softly. "Where I come from we call it the White Problem."

"If you feel that way, why didn't you stay on the reservation?"

******

"Bet'cha won't," dared Clay Kills Good, pointing across the dusty road with his chin. He sat on the driver's seat of his beat up old, mostly blue '51 Ford pickup, his long legs stretched out the open door. Clay threw the butt of his last cigarette into the dust.

"I'm not the one who needs the smokes," replied John. He squinted in the bright sunlight and watched the pleasantly curved form of Maggie Lecroix move behind the glass windows of Ostlund's store. Maggie was in her first year at the teachers' college in Spearfish and favored tight sweaters with lots of little buttons up the front. Johnny felt his face grow hot as he imagined his fingers busy with all those tiny buttons. He shifted.

Manny Adams elbowed Gage in the ribs and leaned back against the wall of the old OEO building. "Women like brave men."

Maggie had turned from the display in front of the window and was bending over, pulling something from a bottom shelf. "Huh?" mumbled John.

"It's like stealing horses, Hard-up."

John glared at Manny. "The Crow rez is that way." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

"But she's that way," replied Kills Good.

Johnny grimaced. "Just shut up."

"Ya know," smirked Clay, "John here would look pretty good in her outfit. After all he does seem to be a girl."

Manny snorted.

Gage shoved Adams, sending him sprawling, and started across the street. The two young men burst into laughter.

John paused outside the store and debated turning back. The harsh plains winter winds had blasted the walls, peeling the white paint and warping the green screen doors in their frames. The faded remnants of an old hand-lettered sign -- Lakhota Mazopiye -- had reemerged from beneath the layers of new paint. Gage opened the door.

Behind the checkout counter a rotund, balding white man stood, intently watching two junior-high age Indian girls, his face twisted into a suspicious frown. At the sound of the bell, he glanced toward the door. When he saw John, he smiled.

"Shit," whispered Gage, under his breath.

Old man Ostlund was a friend of his grandmother. When John had been a boy, Agda had taken her grandson with her whenever she went into town to shop. At Christmas the storekeeper always slipped a jar of pickled herring into Agda's bag -- a present, he'd tell her, from one Swede among the savages to another -- then he would pat Johnny on the head while giving him a few lemon drops. As a child, Gage had never been sure whether the old man had meant the Americans or the Indians. A couple years later, John had come in the store with his cousin and some friends. Ostlund had made all the boys, except Johnny, turn out their pockets because he was convinced one of the children had stolen a candy bar. Since then, Gage had known who the savages were.

The two girls had finally decided on Life Savers instead of chocolate. The old man rang up their purchase and gave an audible sigh, as the door slammed shut behind the youths.

Johnny wandered down the aisle pretending interest in the rows of long shelf-life staples -- macaroni, dried beans, rice, Jello, huge sacks of potatoes, dried milk, tubs of lard....

"Johnny," called the storekeeper, "How's your grandma?"

At Ostlund's voice John jumped. "Fine," he replied.

Maggie turned from her comparison of cans of baking soda to look at him. "Hi, Johnny," she giggled, imitating the old man's use of the diminutive.

Gage flushed. He ducked behind the shelf to read the label on a can of peaches, catching a whiff of her perfume as he moved. John fumbled as he tried to replace the container, sending the tin spiraling to the floor. Quickly he scooped up the can, shoved it onto the shelf, and headed over to the next aisle to begin an intense examination of different brands of flour. Behind the counter, Ostlund chuckled.

Johnny peeked out the corner of his eye at Maggie; framed in the window behind the woman were Clay and Manny. The two young men were making faces at him.

"Friends of yours?" she asked.

"Not for long." Gage walked up to the display case where the cigarettes were kept. He stared through the glass top.

"What can I get you, Johnny?"

Gage grabbed a handful of bubble gum from the cardboard box sitting on the counter. The sky blue and pink waxed-paper wrapped rectangles stuck to his sweating palm. He dumped the gum in front of Ostlund. "Some gum, sir." He dug in his pocket for loose change. Deliberately, John let the coins drop onto the counter top and roll off the edge onto the floor by the old man's feet. While Ostlund bent his stiff joints to retrieve the fallen money, Gage reached behind the counter and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. "Sorry." He shoved them into his jacket pocket.

"There you go," said Ostlund, dropping the change into Gage's hand.

"Thanks," mumbled John. The cellophane covered box of cigarettes felt like it weighted a ton. He had to consciously avoid slumping. Home free! he thought, closing his hand on the doorknob.

"Johnny," called the storekeeper, "come here."

Gage choked as his heart leapt into his mouth. Sweat poured down his sides. Slowly he walked toward the counter. The cigarettes bumped against his leg with every step. "Yes, Mr. Ostlund?"

The old man leaned close to John and whispered, "Next time pretend to read a magazine. It's easier to watch her that way."

Salvia flooded his mouth as he nearly threw up with relief. "Yes," he stammered, then ran through the door.

Manny grabbed John as he skidded to a stop by Clay's truck. "You get 'em?"

Gage tossed the pack onto Kills Good's lap.

Manny burst into laughter. "They're your brand too," he snickered, addressing Clay.

Johnny read the label -- Virginia Slims. He slumped against the side of the truck and started to laugh. "You've come a long way, baby."

******

Johnny fitted his bare foot into the triangle formed by the green painted steel lattice cross-bracing the beams, which supported the water tank. The thin metal bit into the soles of his feet and the skin on his fingers; the small pains kept his attention focused on each step. Flakes of paint and rust covered the backs of his forearms. The endless wind of the Great Plains dried the sweat trickling down his back and running beneath the waistband of his jeans. Steadily he climbed higher.

Halfway up the tower, Gage paused. Balancing on one foot, he leaned out and struck the thick guy wire stretched in a huge X's between the four legs of the water tower. An eerie low hum rose from the heavy cable, singing over the empty hill. "Aiyee. Aiyee," he yelped, imitating the coyote bark war cry used by the old Kit Fox warriors. When the sound stopped echoing, John resumed climbing.

Standing at the end of the service catwalk surrounding the tank, Johnny stepped onto a narrow ladder that extended to the conical top of the reservoir. At the apex, he inched out onto the circular bands that comprised the fall guard around the ladder, slow to trust his weight to the thin metal. Gage eased past the overhanging lip and pulled himself onto the conical roof. Bird droppings and feathers clung to the green paint, obscuring the rivets that tied the metal plates together. He crawled to the peak of the cone and hooked his arm around the thick lightening rod.

A hundred feet below stretched the town of Wambli. Water glittered in the gray gumbo ruts of the roads. Winter worn, faded shacks and weathered trailers lined the muddy tracks, in a stark opposition to the neat pastel bungalows of the BIA employee housing compound. Tender leaf buds formed yellow-green fuzz on the limbs of the cottonwoods in the creek bottom. On the hill opposite the tower was the Catholic cemetery, thin streamers of red, white, black and yellow cloth fluttering from tall sticks sprinkled amid the field of white crosses. The spring sunlight reflected off fragments of dark brown glass littering the dirt around the tower.

Graduation is two months away, thought Gage. What'cha gonna do? He debated working for his father. Not a good bet without those loans. Join Howard travelling around picking spuds and sugar beets? Johnny shook his head. The options seemed as grim as the still brown and winter burned prairie. Slowly he pulled from his pocket the pamphlet the Army recruiter had given him and smoothed out the wrinkles.

A dented red pickup drove up the slippery road. His cousin Selo Lebow and Lebow's girlfriend, Rachael Sits Poor, slid from behind the wheel, exiting the only working door on his cousin's truck. "Hey, you..." yelled Selo, following his salutation with an obscenity. "What the hell you doin' up there?"

"Thinking," called Gage. John walked to the edge of the tank, balancing lightly while watching the two teens below.

"It'll take too long for us to wait while you figur' out how to do that," grinned Selo. "Get down here. Dwayne is at the bus station in Martin. Your mother has gone to get him."

"I'll be right down!" John lay on his belly, dangling his legs over the edge. He scrambled down the guard outside the ladder.

"Be careful," shrieked Rachael.

Halfway down Gage let himself drop to the catwalk, Sits Poor's horrified screams rang in his ears as he landed. Dwayne! he thought, slipping beneath the railing and climbing onto the leg of the tower.

******

"If you feel that way why did you ever leave the reservation?" reiterated Kelly.

Johnny sighed. "Like I told you, the tribal environment had lost some its charm.^**" He stared up into the darkness imagining the elevator cab floor above and wishing Chet was on the other side of it.

"Too many white people," muttered Chet snidely.

Gage flushed with anger. "Too many bureaucrats..." His voice changed, becoming high pitched and bitter as he imitated the BIA, OEO, SDDA... officials -- an entire alphabet soup of paper pushers. "You must raise cattle. No, you have too many cattle, we will sell them for you -- below market value, but there is war on you know. You may not use trust land for collateral; you might default and lose your land. So you can't get a bank loan, but we will lease out the land for back taxes on improvements you managed to make to your property, anyway. You haven't improved this land; so we will rent it to a white man for the next fifty years, but don't worry we will put the money in an account and dole it out to you when we think you need it. Why, because your grandfather was ruled incompetent to manage his own affairs. What account?" John fell silent, slightly ashamed of his outburst.

Chet sat listening to the other man. Gage shifted and settled back against the wall. The air was tight with expended tension. Over the past year Kelly had provoked the paramedic into several tirades on Indian/white relations, but he had never considered that the bitterness and vehemence arose from something darker, something more personal. "Is that what happened to you? Is that why you left?"

Johnny exhaled sharply. "Chet, I'm tired. I want to sleep." He curled up, trying to find a warm and comfortable position. "If you want to talk, do it quietly."

The rustling across the chamber from Chet slowed and stilled. Suddenly a fragment Kelly had read, in the anthropology book he had checked out of the library to goad Gage, came back to haunt him. It compared the filled sacred pipe to the consecrated host. He remembered his days as an altar boy, watching the priest anoint the thin wafer. Guilt warred with fear and hunger in the pit of his stomach. "Johnny," he started.

"What?" sighed John.

"I'm sorry about the peace pipe joke."

"I know."

Kelly closed his eyes. "I just didn't know."

"Chet..." Gage stirred.

"Yes?"

"Tell it to your priest." The paramedic cradled his head in his folded arms.

******

"Hank..."

Stanley looked up from the floor plan he had been again studying. The outlines of walls, which might support fragments of collapsed ceilings and floors forming life saving voids, whirled before him. The elevator shafts, he thought, staring at the building. Along the unbroken walls of the elevator hoistways, the mound of debris sloped sharply upwards. When the blasts had torn the structure apart, the floors had swung backwards, resting against the solid fireproof walls of the shafts. There have to be gaps, holes above ground level. Gage and Kelly could be in one.... Unconsciously his hands tightened crumbling the paper.

"Why don't you go get some food," suggested Battalion Chief Anderson, looking at his watch. 51's officer had been on duty since the explosion.

"Later," Stanley mumbled, distractedly. In the distance he could hear a circular saw cutting more wood for shoring.

"Now, Hank," said Anderson, firmly. He pulled the blueprints from the station officer's hands. "I'm going to need you when the heavy equipment gets here."

"Chief," started Stanley.

The Battalion Chief just shook his head. "HT 36," he began, lifting his portable.

Rubbing his eyes wearily, Hank trudged toward the canteen truck. He walked slowly past the ranks of fresh personal. New crews were arriving and getting their assignments. A vanload of county construction workers had arrived, and they were preparing for the coming of the heavy equipment needed begin removing parts of the building -- a risky enterprise, which could further collapse the structure, but the only way to reach the depths of the wreckage. "Hang on Kelly, Gage," he whispered. "We'll find you."

******

In the corner, Chet's breathing had finally settled into even rhythms of sleep. Gage stared into the darkness, unable to sleep with the memories provoked by Kelly's casual comments.

******

"Thanks," called John as he vaulted over the side of the pickup bed. Selo waved to his cousin.

Gage started walking down the road to the house. Halfway down the track, he found himself running. He skidded to a stop by his bedroom window and peeked through the glass.

Through a gap in the drapes, John could see Dwayne asleep in the bed they had shared as boys. The quilts were bunched around his ears and he was curled into a tight ball. Marie had spread fresh sheets and blankets on the old army cot that Johnny used when Dwayne was home. Gage ran around the side of the house.

Marie Gage looked up as her son burst through the kitchen door. "He's asleep Johnny. Go help your father." She frowned at his filthy clothes. "And get cleaned up before you come back in."

******

Johnny stepped through the door of the machine shed, a squat metal prefab sitting next to the barn. The sharp smell of gasoline mixed with the odor of motor oil, dust and pesticides. The old Ferguson TO-20 sat in the middle of the shed, its gray hood raised and resting forward of the engine, making the tractor look like the open jaw of some great mechanical beast.

Roderick Gage rose from squatting beside the tractor and pointed with his square brown jaw toward the socket wrench on the workbench. Johnny held out the tool, but Roddy nodded toward the engine. John reached in and began unfastening the bolts securing the cylinder head.

His father was a man of gestures, using his head and huge blunt fingers instead of words. Only rarely did Roddy speak and then his voice was rough and awkward, its patterns shaped by the Swedish, Lakhota and broken English of his parents. As he worked John remembered his mother explaining his father's silences.

"When we were in school your father got in trouble for talking one time." His mother lifted another timpsila from the pile spread on the burlap sack lying at her feet. Grandmother Baptiste sat on a kitchen chair next to his mother, making a thick braid from the stems of the roots, which looked like stunted garlic dangling over the edge of her lap. "One of the Brothers -- the one we called The Kaiser behind his back because he was a fat, old German..."

"Yu!" hissed the old woman.

"He caned your father for not writing neatly. He did it in front of the whole class -- shamed your father before his relatives." Marie paused and studied the horizon, lost in thought. Her hands continued their task, stripping the tough outer skin back from the sweet white flesh and cutting the clump of slender roots from the bottom of the bulb. Sighing, Marie lowered her eyes and handed the long stemmed tuber to John. "Start another braid," she instructed.

"Micunksi, hokisila kin lusica ksto," warned his grandmother, pulling the root from John's hands and weaving it into her own braid.

"Anyway, your father started yelling at the Brother. The Kaiser must have thought your father was talking Indian, because we were all laughing, but he was cussing him in Swedish."

Johnny picked up one of the cut ends and scraped the thin sliver of flesh still clinging to the skin free with his teeth. As he sucked on the sweet fragment, he tried to imagine his father swearing.

"So they made your father kneel in the washroom and hold a piece of lye soap on his tongue -- to punish him for speaking Indian. Most boys spit it out pretty quickly, but your father, he was proud. He held it in his mouth and stared up at the wasicu, until The Kaiser finally forced his mouth open and made him spit it out. They say the Brother sweat so much he looked like he had fallen in the creek." Marie peeled another bulb. "Your father's tongue was all blistered up, he couldn't eat anything hot for weeks...."

Johnny sat on the edge of the porch feeling the root on his tongue and trying to imagine it swollen and burnt. Slowly he swallowed.

"Those Jesuits burned out that man's tongue," interrupted his grandmother, referring to her daughter's husband obliquely as good manners required.

John looked up, startled by the old woman's anger.

"He said plenty to me, Ina...." Marie looked down at the root in her lap, a slight smile on her lips.

"Tula...." began Grandmother Baptiste starting on another of her tirades about the lax behavior of the young.

Johnny shook his head as he lifted the cylinder head clear of the engine. He couldn't conceive of his tongue-tied father ever finding enough words in his amputated vocabulary to curse a teacher let alone attract his mother.

"It's good that your brother's back," announced Roddy, slowly.

"Uh huh," said John, setting the part on the workbench and pulling the gasket free. He dipped a rag in gasoline and carefully wiped the seal clean. His father's talkativeness was a sign of Roddy's good mood.

"He is good with machines. If he were doing this, it would be done already." The older man took the rag from John and scrubbed at the part.

Johnny clenched his jaw, crushing a fold of skin between his teeth. Stiff legged he walked out the door.

******

Marie patted the elastic dough between her hands, shaping it into soft rounds. She slid each carefully into a kettle of bubbling oil. A sharp sizzling rose around her. She turned, poured canned tomatoes into a glass dish and sprinkled sugar on top.

Johnny leaned against the mudroom door, watching his mother work at the stove. The smell of browning venison and frying potatoes made his mouth water. Marie lifted golden circles of frybread from the kettle and let them fall onto a plate lined with a piece of brown paper. Outside his father dropped his barn boots on the porch, making the two hollow thuds that served as the dinner bell. In the bedroom he could hear Dwayne stirring.

Gage reached past his mother and grabbed a piece of frybread, juggling it from hand to hand to keep from burning his fingers. He tore off an edge and scooped a mouthful of venison from the skillet with the hunk of the bread. He popped the whole thing in his mouth, chewed twice and swallowed. A drop of gravy ran unheeded down his wrist.

"Johnny," scolded his mother, elbowing him away from the stove.

He looked at the juices dripping down his arm. Absently he licked at the edge of his hand.

Marie shook her head. "Time was Indians had manners."

"Time was Indians had lots of things." Dwayne stood in the living room door.

Chewing, Johnny studied his cousin. He tried to read the changes wrought by his cousin's service in Vietnam. Ugly purple scars peppered Dwayne's arms; his hair was shaved close to his skull. Baptiste's civilian clothes hung loose on a now much lighter frame. Worst of all, his cousin's once cheerful eyes were sad.

Dwayne eyed John, looking him over from head to toe. "Misun," he started, hesitating. Then he stepped forward and threw his arms around John, pounding Gage on the back. "You're still as skinny as a snake," observed Dwayne grinning.

Johnny moved back from the embrace. "I'm not the only one."

Baptiste pulled the remaining frybread from Gage's fingers. "Mmmm," he said between bites. "I dreamt about this the whole time I was in-country."

******

Roy crawled through the seemingly endless tunnel, pushing the stokes and following the boots of 106's engineer. The light from the battery powered torch resting on the stretcher illuminated the even ranks of wooden shoring that held back the concrete and drywall. The smell of the fresh sawn lumber mixed with the scent of dust and other darker odors.

The engineer stopped to readjust his grip on the dead weight of the litter. DeSoto bowed his head, panting from the exertion. Under his knee were the shattered remains of a picture frame, holding a photograph of a young woman in her Sunday best with a baby on her knee and a toddler at her side. The child's hair stuck up slightly. Pencils and other desktop clutter, studded the wreckage. Part of him wanted to remain in the quiet warm darkness, nursing his aching head and forgetting what he had seen. But the ticking of the settling rubble reminded him of hours Johnny had been missing. Lifting his end of the stokes, Roy nodded to the man from 106's and resumed pushing the stretcher.

A faint light appeared at the end of the tunnel. His companion unconsciously sped up. DeSoto scrambled into the gaudy brightness of a clear Southern California late afternoon and stumbled to his feet. A strangely textured roil of voices surrounded him. Squinting, Roy looked for the source of the sound.

Beyond a strip of yellow tape, stood a pack of cameramen and reporters. Buzzing like the hungry flies that had penetrated the wreckage, they focused, snapped and chattered, all eager for a view of the heavy black body bag on the stretcher. One anchorwoman primped in front of the sideview mirror of a news van, smoothing her fashionably styled blond hair. Roy thought of the blond hair of the dead woman, matted with blood and brains, and his stomach turned. Only the prospect of his children seeing the television coverage kept DeSoto from making an obscene gesture at the mob.

"Sheesh, you'd think it was Saturday night at the ballpark," muttered 106's engineer, walking toward the sheltered area where the coroner's wagon waited.

******

Stanley watched DeSoto sign the medical examiner's forms. "Roy," he called as DeSoto set down the pen.

"Any word on Johnny and Chet?" asked Roy, walking toward the officer.

Hank shook his head, meeting the other man's gaze. He took the paramedic's arm, steered him to the engine, and forced DeSoto to sit on the running board. "When did you last eat or drink anything?"

Roy shrugged.

"I want you to go to the canteen truck and get some chow."

"Cap," started DeSoto.

The older man nodded toward the Battalion Chief, leaning against the door of his car. "Do you want me to tell the Chief you need relieved?"

Roy clenched his jaw in frustration. "No."

"Then do what I tell you."

"Yes, sir."

Stanley's expression softened. "We'll find them Roy. And Gage will be griping about how hungry and thirsty he is, and Kelly will be griping about Gage."

DeSoto forced a smile. "Yeah, Cap."

"Go on." Hank pointed at the truck with his chin.

Roy stood and walked slowly toward the canteen, staring at his boots. He kept seeing Johnny's anguished expression, just before DeSoto had caught him sitting in the darkened apparatus bay.

"Excuse me."

Startled Roy looked up. A short, heavyset Latina in a cleaning woman's uniform stood in his path. "Ma'am, you shouldn't be here."

"I saw you bring out the body."

Roy took her elbow, guiding her back to the police line. "Ma'am, this area is off limits."

She stopped, and craned her neck to look into his eyes. "I have to know. Was it Kendra?"

"Ma'am," Roy began, lowering his eyes and remembering the nametag pinned to the woman's stilled breast. "I can't tell you anything."

"It was, wasn't it?" Her eyes filled with tears. "She worked for me for years. A gentle soul, lived in a world of her own..."

DeSoto stopped at the thin band of plastic, which held the spectators at bay. He caught the eye of the officer working crowd control and waved him over. As the policeman approached Roy drew a sharp breath; it was Johnny's friend Drew Burke. "You'll have to wait for the authorities to contact the next of kin ma'am," said DeSoto, nodding to Drew.

"Ma'am." Drew lifted the tape, easing the woman under and back away from the shattered building. "Johnny?" asked Burke.

Roy shook his head. "Not yet."

"You're missing someone too," called the woman, leaning across the yellow band to grab Roy's hand.

"Ma'am," started Drew.

"May God grant you better luck," she prayed, releasing DeSoto and disappearing into the crowd.

******

Paramedic Bob Belliveau watched the crane peel back another layer of the debris. The huge slab of flooring swayed slightly, causing shifting shadows in the hot bluish-white glow of the floodlights. The piece of debris was lowered with a slight thump. The team leader cautiously assessed the newly revealed wreckage. "All clear," he called.

Bob pulled his gloves out of his pocket and looked at his green, new partner. "Ready to start earning your paycheck, Craig -- uh -- Brice?" he asked, stumbling over the last name his colleague insisted he use.

"Always, Belliveau," replied the young man, his face and tone serious. Brice climbed onto the mounded concrete, working his way methodically toward the top, carefully inspecting each crack and crevasse.

Bob smiled slightly at his partner's tight formality and followed him onto the debris field.

******

John rolled onto his back. The darkness seemed thicker and more complete than it had earlier. The fear which he had been holding at bay was growing stronger, the voice of mortality howling just beneath the surface of his skin. The low rumbling, which had awakened him earlier, had now stopped. Everything was still. Even the building seemed to have stopped its pained groaning. Kelly's heavy breathing was the only hint of life remaining in the cold hulk. The batteries in the buried HT had died hours ago and he found it increasingly difficult to believe rescue teams were still searching.... No, he commanded firmly, you're not going to do this.

Wearily, John scrubbed his palms across his face, welcoming the little flashes and pinpoints of light caused by the pressure of his hands. He thought of the fish he had read about once. Living deep in a cave somewhere back east, they had lost the use of their eyes and were now blind and colorless. All the lights faded from view, except one deep gray -- nearly black -- patch. Lying on the dank floor, the reek of the old oil stirred up by his movements filling his nose, the paramedic waited for the glow to disappear, leaving him alone. It stayed.

Gage touched his face, checking whether his eyelids were open or closed. They were open. He sat up, staring at the spot. Slowly it resolved into a small triangle of lighter black. Quietly, John stood and walked over to the wall of debris. A faint breeze blew down against his face.

"Chet!" Johnny called to his sleeping colleague. "I see light."

"Huh?" moaned Kelly.

"I see light!"

"You saw the light...." he mumbled, turning over. "That's nice. Tell me about it.... Later...."

Gage kicked loose fragments of flooring at the fireman. "Not the light. A light!" He turned back to the wall. "An opening."

"What?" asked Kelly, rolling to his feet, suddenly awake. He stood next to John. "I don't see it."

"Look!" Johnny grabbed Chet's shoulder, forcing him around.

"No... Wait! Yes!" Kelly switched on his flashlight and directed it upwards.

Blinking in the sudden glare, Johnny peered at the rubble blocking the bottom of the door to the shaft. A small triangular cleft, about the width of his forearm and several feet long, led into a larger gap that seemed to open to the surface. "This wasn't there before." John pulled himself onto the tilted shelf formed by the collapsed floor and picked his way across the slanted surface. Cautiously, he probed the ruins. "The wreckage must have shifted." Concrete dust and gravel fell from the edges of the hole.

"Can we dig out?" asked Kelly staring at the hole.

Gage examined the strata of rubble. "Too unstable," he decided, jumping down. Despite his words he was unable to take his eyes off the narrow gap.

"You give up too easily," accused Chet, shoving the flashlight into Johnny's hands. "We're trapped, without food and water. We're going to die down here." Kelly's voice cracked. "We don't have time to play it safe."

"Chet," started Gage.

Kelly ignored him and clambered onto the slab. "Shine the light up here." He pointed.

"There is way too much loose stuff..."

"At least we can yell." Kelly climbed up the slope.

"Not without shoring it up some." John pointed to a wedge shaped wall formed of fragments of flooring and sheetrock, which was sandwiched between two large slabs of concrete. "There's too much pressure. One false move and it's all gonna fall."

"Gage, do you see a rig down here? Where do you plan to get wood and tools?"

"Maybe there is something around we can use." Johnny turned, directing the beam into the corners, looking for a prop to support the unstable mass.

"Gage!" bellowed Chet. He crouched motionless in the dark.

"Sorry." John pointed the light back toward the fireman. "Come down from there, before you get hurt."

Kelly inched toward the hole. He opened his mouth to yell. A softball-sized lump of cement broke free and smashed into his fingers. "Argh!" he yelled, "Shit!" He pulled back abruptly, planting his foot on a pile of large chunks of concrete. The mound buckled under his weight and fell. Chet slid down the slope, clawing for a purchase. Above him a section of the debris bowed and then crumbled. A choking and blinding cloud of dust engulfed Kelly. The world collapsed around him -- again.

******

Johnny took another swallow of the thick, sweet wine. The liquid burned his throat, tasting a little like cough syrup. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and passed the bottle to Manny. In the distance the whistle of the CNW freight wailed, echoing in the void the wine had awakened in Gage's blood. John tipped back his head and gazed at the sky. A thick veil of stars covered the coulee where the group of teens sat beside Selo and Clay's pickups, drinking.

Gage turned and looked at Anna Murphy sitting next to him. The glow from the small campfire outlined her dark brown hair, shaped into the stiff waves of the latest fashion, and sparkled in her hazel eyes. The warm light spilled from her pale brown checks onto her soft breasts. John reached for her.

Anna caught his hand and forced it against the earth next to her legs.

The heat from the girl's thigh drove the night chill from his fingers. He swallowed hard.

Manny was already drunk and singing to Harley White's little sister. He alternated between Little Richard hits and Forty-nines. The girls giggled as Manny launched straight from Blueberry Hill into an old night dance song.

Gage took a shallow breath. "I'm goin' to war, I could die..." he began, leaning toward Murphy. The clean smell of her skin and hair was as intoxicating as the wine. He pulled his hand free and reached for the button on the collar of her blouse.

"Then I shall cry," she announced, standing. She walked over and sat by White.

Across the fire from him, Adams pounded frantically on the ground. "I should'd brought a drum," he slurred, squinting into the darkness.

Clay glanced toward his truck and ran his hands nervously through his slicked back hair. "He starts beatin' on my hood, I'm goin' kill him."

Selo chuckled. "He's too pissed to find your truck." He leaned back against the clay wall of the wash and wrapped his arm around Rachael.

Manny started a rabbit dance song, banging the bottle on the earth. He overbalanced and fell into White's lap. Laughing the girl rolled him off her legs.

"Careful, stupid," said Kills Good, prying the wine from Adam's hand. "You're gonna spill it." He looked at Johnny and raised the bottle. "To our new soldier!" He took a huge swallow of the burning red liquid. "Akcita hokisila...."

Manny hooted. Anna and Harley's sister trilled the brave heart cry, their inexperienced tongues tangling in the sound. Clay handed the bottle back to Johnny.

"Listen!" called Selo.

From the rim of the cut, the teens could hear the grinding of an engine. The bright beams of headlights reflected in the sky. The sodden grin slid from Manny's lips. "Shit, the cops," he whispered panic crossing his round face.

A car door slammed in the dark. Anna blanched and touched the crucifix at her neck. "Mother and Sister Agnes will kill me." Gagging the girl crawled to a clump of sagebrush and threw up.

John listened to the swishing in the grass above. The uneven sound was familiar. "Dwayne!"

Baptiste skidded down the embankment, raising a pale cloud of gray dust. The powder settled into the stunned silence, each particle's fall loud in the night.

"Dwayne, you startled us," laughed John.

Roughly, Baptiste grabbed Gage, pulling him to his feet. His dark brown eyes blazed like the flames reflected on their surface.

"How'd ya find us?" asked Johnny, his words and mind blurred by the wine.

The muscles in Dwayne's forearm bunched as he twisted his cousin's arm, pulling him close. His scowl deepened at the smell of John's breath on his face.

"Ow! Let go...."

"You fool," hissed Dwayne in John's ear. "I expected no better of them, but you..."

"They're my friends," insisted John angrily. He struggled in Baptiste's grip. The heavier man easily pushed his arm higher against his back, increasing the pressure on his already aching shoulder. He inhaled sharply.

"Then don't embarrass yourself in front of them." Baptiste dragged Gage to the car.

******

Dwayne threw John to the floor of the machine shed. The rough concrete tore the skin on Johnny's elbows. Tossing a pair of musty old quilts across Gage's legs, Baptiste announced, "You can sleep it off here. Mama would die if she saw you like this. She's already upset enough."

Sprawled on the ground Gage stared up at his cousin. "I was just celebrating. What're you so mad about?" he asked, pushing to his knees.

"You signed up."

"Yes." John smiled. "I'm going to be a warrior."

"No you're goin' to be a wolf for the whiteman. This has nothing to do with defending the People." Dwayne's eyes shone strangely in the light of the naked bulb. "Let them fight their own wars! We have no business bein' over there."

A swell of anger pushed at John's stomach, burning like a slow fire. He looked at Dwayne. "Just because you're a coward..."

Baptiste's face darkened. Suddenly he seized John's hair and yanked back his head. "You're a drunken, stupid child."

"No! Ow!" Gage arched his neck trying to ease the pain at the back of his head. Desperately, he grabbed at Baptiste's forearm, struggling to break Dwayne's grip. The scars left on his cousin's arms by the white phosphorus fragments from exploding incendiary rounds felt hard and slick beneath his fingers. "Let go of me."

"Are you ready to crawl through the jungle waiting for things to jump out and kill you?" He shook Johnny's head.

John choked back a cry of pain.

"Are you ready to shoot someone because he is shooting at you, then roll the body over to find the enemy looks like your kid brother?" Dwayne's tone was the bleak voice of dark memories. Gasping he released Gage's hair, letting him fall forward.

John lay on the floor panting, watching the dust stir with each breath. Sweat trickled down his back. He felt something inside his alcohol saturated brain crumble, releasing a tide of rage.

"Are you ready to kill?"

Gage staggered to his feet. He shoved Dwayne backwards. "You sound like one of those yellow..." The blow to the chin caught him by surprise, tumbling him backwards.

Stunned Gage lay on the floor, staring at Baptiste. A salty flow of blood filled his mouth, choking him. He spat. The bloody spittle was black on the oil stained concrete. Slowly he stood and drew back his arm....

******

The weight of Dwayne's fists pushed John against the ground. Gage could no longer smell the sour stench of his wine-saturated sweat through his swollen, bleeding nose. The harsh sound of their breathing was loud in the tiny shed. Squinting he gazed up at his cousin. Baptiste's eyes were distant and clouded and his face reddened from blows.

Suddenly a pair of hands pulled Dwayne off John. Baptiste fell heavily against the workbench, rattling tools and engine parts. Freed, Gage curled into a ball around his aching stomach. The black rubber of his father's boots filled his view.

Roddy Gage stood in the middle of the machine shed. He was naked from the waist up and his light blue pajama bottoms were a pale blur in the night. His dark eyes regarded first Dwayne and then John. "Brothers fighting." Roddy's voice was heavy and his words tight. "You shame your blood." He turned his back on them and walked away.

John rocked slowly back and forth hugging his arms across his chest. Blood dripped onto the ground from his split lip and smashed nose.

Dwayne lay panting, his expression glittering and wild. Slowly he slumped, something deep inside unwinding and the anger draining from his face. He looked at Gage. Baptiste lurched upright. He lifted Johnny to his feet, hugging the beaten teen to his chest. "Misun," he whispered, his voice breaking.

John shivered.

******

Johnny shifted his arm, moving to block the light falling across his face. He moaned as his forearm brushed his inflamed eye. Taking a deep breath he tried to go back to sleep. But the pressure in his bladder couldn't be ignored and his head throbbed with a cheap wine hangover. Gage gave up. Groaning, he slid one leg off the edge of the cot. His ribs and belly hurt where Dwayne's fists had landed, his lip was puffy and still oozed blood, and he had to breathe through his mouth. John levered himself upright, trying not to bend his tender middle.

The old iron bed was empty. The faded quilt was pulled tight and smooth over the mattress. Dwayne's boots were gone.

John staggered into the kitchen. He gazed into the mirror over the washstand in the mudroom, his battered and bruised face stared back. His nose had acquired a slight bend that had not been there the day before. The smell of coffee made his stomach twist beneath his sore ribs. Panting, he grabbed his letter jacket and darted out the door, trotting to the outhouse.

Outside, rain fell from a steel sky, dripping in shimmering veils from the shingles of the house and outbuildings. Still feeling queasy and a little dizzy, Gage walked along the side of the muddy path back to the house and climbed the porch stairs. He drew gulping breaths of the cool damp air. Gradually his belly quieted. Slumping against the porch railing, Johnny looked up to the crest of the hill, scanning the horizon for lightening.

On the ridge behind the house, his mother stood next to the barbed wire fence that bisected the slope. The rains had turned her dress to a sodden sheet, which the wind wrapped around her legs.

John shrugged the jacket over his head. He jumped off the porch, taking the steps two at a time. Puddles splashed Gage's legs as he ran. "Mama?"

Marie's shoulders shook.

Johnny let the coat slip down onto his back. "What's wrong, Mama?" he asked, his voice brittle with alarm. Suddenly he recalled the empty bed. "Where's Dwayne?"

Marie turned. Her tears blended with the rain streaming down her face.

"Mama?"

"Heyabiyaye...." she wailed, her voice blending with the wind.

"English," he begged.

Marie took a deep breath, forcing down her sobs. "He went away," she repeated flatly, stepping away from John.

"Why?" The cold water matted his hair against his head and trickled into his ears. "Where?" he demanded.

Marie faced John. Her expression was cold.

Gage shuddered as she accused him with her eyes.

"Johnny, I don't want to see you right now." She turned her back on her son.

He stood, rain dripping down his neck and stared at his mother's back. After a long moment, John ran down the hill, away from the house.

******

The long wet grass, tangled around Gage's feet tumbling him to the ground. He lay panting, hot sweat and cold rainwater soaking his jacket, hair and pants. His newly broken nose hampered his efforts to catch his breath. The green taste of spring grass filled his mouth. A stabbing pain radiated from his side and his body ached. John buried his face in the stems.

"Mooo." One of the cows, owned by the white man who leased the Stands In Sight's place, stood in the middle of Bear Kills a Woman Creek looking at him. Tendrils of grass hung from the corner of its mouth.

Gage pushed to his feet, holding his arm clamped firmly against his side. He staggered into the decaying old house near the eastern bank of the creek.

Inside the rain was mostly held at bay and drummed on the curling tin roof. Water ran down the empty window frame. Many hot summers and bitter winters had shrunk the wood, making huge gaps appear between the silvery gray boards. The west wall leaned away from the wind. On the dirt floor lay an old mattress, its cover long ago eaten away by mice.

John dropped onto the rusting springs. The ancient wire protested under his weight. Gasping, Gage stared at the owl's nest in the rafters and thought. Soft downy feathers waved among the twigs in the faint breeze. Gradually his breathing quieted and his hair dried. He kept remembering his mother's face, so hurt and angry.

Gage's hand slipped from the edge of the mattress and hit cold hard glass. He turned his head. A pile of brown beer and green Thunderbird bottles spread across the floor crowding against the wall. The sight filled him with rage.

John sat up and grabbed one of the shiny brown containers. He gripped it tightly, until the raised printing of the brand name was pressed into his skin. Gage kept squeezing, thinking of the bottles in which Dwayne's parents had drown themselves, leading to him becoming a stranger in his own home. Thinking of the one he had drunk from, which had caused him to fight with his own brother.

Johnny hurled the bottle against the opposite wall, listening to the glass shatter and fall. "Dwayne!" he yelled, throwing bottles against the wall until a blanket of glittering shards covered the floor and quiet came again.

******

In the weak glow of Chet's flashlight, Johnny stared incredulously at the rubble covering his legs and chest. Dust floated and sparkled in the air, making his eyes water. A gunmetal gray metal office chair with green vinyl upholstery balanced neatly atop the chunks of concrete, slabs of dry wall and strips of carpet covering his thighs. A split second later the pain came with stunning intensity, leaving him gasping for breath, unable to scream. Razor sharp knives of agony stabbed through his belly to his back, filling his head with nightmare images of being impaled on lengths of rusty rebar and shiny shards of glass. He tried to curl around his aching abdomen but was held flat by the weight of the debris.

Chet was motionless, the sound the collapse still echoing in his ears. Below him the avalanche had stopped. He pointed the flashlight downwards, scanning the corners, looking for Johnny. They were empty. Then Chet saw him, directly below, pinned on his back on the floor, unmoving. His heart skipped a beat. "Gage!" shouted Kelly climbing and slipping down the wreckage.

Soundlessly Johnny opened and closed his mouth. He could hear Kelly's voice, but could not understand his words. Gage tried to push upright and clear away the rubbish. Instead of sitting, he only managed to lift his head and shoulders. Cold sweat began to pool beneath his flanks.

John moved and suddenly Chet could breathe and move again. "Gage!" Kelly yelled, leaping to the floor, grabbing the chair and throwing it into the shadows. The metallic thump ricocheted off the walls, setting his head pounding in time with his heart. "Johnny are you ok?"

"Get this stuff off me," John groaned, slumping. He swallowed, forcing down a wave of nausea.

Kelly wedged his flashlight into a crack between two large slabs of floor, and frantically dug into the pile covering John. 'Chet, you slack-jawed, half-witted idiot, what did you do now?' He again heard his father's voice and his face flushed with remembered shame. "Sorry," apologized Kelly, his throat tightening.

A triangular sheet of dry wall, covered with fist-sized lumps of concrete and heaps of gravel and dust, pressed on Gage's chest. A large piece of what appeared to have been an office floor, still covered with greenish flecked asphalt tiles, pinned the sheetrock against John. The paramedic gasped for breath. Chet cleared the surface with a wide sweep of his arm. "Hang on."

" 'k," hissed Gage from between clenched teeth.

Kelly pulled the forcible entry tool from the front of his turnout, braced his knee beneath the sheet and swung the tool into the plaster next to the flooring, snapping the brittle drywall. He tossed it aside.

The pressure released, John tried to catch his breath. Pain shot from his hips down his legs and up his back, making his teeth ache. The breathlessness eased slightly. Johnny's legs and stomach were covered with fragments of floor deck and tangled aluminum studs.

Chet raked his gloved hands through the rubbish, pain radiated from the fingers smashed by falling debris. He lifted the long metal strips and stared at them for a second -- they trembled, moving with his shaking hands. A slab of concrete as long as Kelly's arm and half as wide, lay across Gage's right hip, one corner resting on the floor of the pit. When he touched it, John cried out.

Gage's vision went white. "Stop!"

"Sorry!"

"Brace it," wheezed Johnny. " 's slipping."

Chet grabbed his flashlight and scanned the rubbish covering the floor, looking for an appropriate wedge. He found a small length of wood, the nameplate from the desk of someone named Nathan Moore. Grunting, he jammed it beneath the edge of the block and lifted.

Involuntarily, Johnny yelped as the weight was removed from his pelvis. He gritted his teeth.

"Sorry!"

"Will you quit saying that," ordered John, closing his eyes.

******

John followed the woman up the dark narrow stairs and through the door into the apartment above the cigar store. Narrow bands of neon red light leaked through the venetian blinds and marched across the polished wooden floor. Silhouetted against windows, Becky leaned forward and turned on a small lamp. A thin piece of red cloth was draped across the shade, and the pale pink light caressed her face. Gage studied her shape against the slashes of light, remembering how they had meet.

He had been in a club a few miles from Fort Polk, away from the base for the first time since arriving in Louisiana. He first saw her bent over the jukebox dropping in nickels and pushing buttons, her blue silk blouse closely following the gentle curves of her body. She had blond hair, light blue eyes, a soft Louisiana drawl, and full lips outlined sharply in a waxy red. Her eyes smiled when she looked at him. John bought her a cheeseburger and fries and talked importantly of basic training, spilling ketchup all over the potatoes as he watched her slender hands move and dive. While he talked, her eyes went wide and attentive, drawing him in. Smiling shyly, she gave him her name and told him of running away from home after graduation: "I didn't want to be like my mother, fat, forty and dead -- just not knowing it...." Then they danced, her cheek pressing on his shoulder and her hip bones shifting gracefully against his thighs. Gage's heart pounded at the memory of her movements.

"I'll be right back," Becky said, disappearing into the tiny bathroom.

Gage nodded. From behind the door came the sound of running water. He walked over to a dark, varnished dressing table. A clutter of cut glass perfume bottles covered the top. A spill of talcum powder spread across the surface. Johnny reached down and dragged his finger through the white powder, drawing a crooked circle. A cream colored slip hung over the back of the chair. John touched the fabric, the cool smoothness snagging on his now rough fingers. He blushed.

"My brother was a solider," called Becky. "He died in the hills north of Plieku."

John felt a shiver run up his spine, suddenly he was cold. "I'm sorry," he stammered.

Becky emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a peacock blue dressing gown. Bare, smooth, and shapely her feet and legs turned and moved like a dancer's.

John stepped closer, wanting the heat of her body to drive away his chill.

She put her arms on Gage's shoulders. Slowly, Becky ran her hands up the sides of his neck, rubbing her fingers over his close cropped hair. "You have pretty eyes." The thin gown shifted, falling open, revealing a triangular slash of milky skin.

John stared at the soft white flesh and the crescent of shadow beneath her breast. The room grew hot and close, he gasped for breath. With a start, he found himself thinking of the models, the centerfolds, the women on the TV's in the store fronts in Rapid -- all the perfect white women Madison Avenue sold, teaching Indian women to think they were ugly and Indian men to have different set of desires. An image from an old western, of John Wayne vowing to kill his niece for having been with Indians, floated before his eyes and he thought of counting coup. Gage blinked. He ran the back of his index finger up Becky's neck, gently grasping her chin. The pattern of dark and light made by his fingers against the skin of her face amazed him. Tipping back Becky's head, Johnny kissed her. Her lips tasted of cheeseburger, wax, and the dust of a thousand reservation romances.

Becky let her hands slip from his shoulders to his waist. Slowly she unfastened the polished brass buckle that held up his uniform pants. Her fingers wrapped around the button of his fly.

John buried his face in her pale hair. The air smelled of tobacco and jasmine.

******

Gage bent, picking up his duffel bag. A blast of dust and heat raised by the departing bus rolled over him, the grit settling on his stiff new uniform. He had a ten day furlough before shipping out. He shouldered the bag and walked slowly to the edge of the town of Martin and toward home.

An old white man, sitting in a dark green, scallop-backed metal chair on the porch of a yellow frame house, squinted at him. John started to sweat. The residents of this Anglo town in the middle of the 'ceded' portion of the reservation lived an uneasy truce with their Lakhota neighbors, each side watching the other, neither getting too close. Stiffly the old man tottered to his feet and saluted. Startled, Johnny returned the salute. "God bless you," called the man.

Grinning, Gage walked down Hwy 18 toward Sewitt and BIA 4.

******

John parked his father's truck on the shoulder of the pitted, washboard surface of Red Shirt Table road. Slowly he climbed from behind the wheel. Grasshoppers, exploded from the knee high grass, rattling against the sheet metal sides of the truck and stinging his flesh as they struck. To the west, over the Black Hills a storm gathered rumbling with distant thunder.

On the other side of the hard, gray gumbo clay a pair of bent metal posts and torn barbwire dangled into the eroded mouth of the Badlands. Gage crossed the road and stopped. Beyond the tips of his boots, the high table land dropped sharply into the White River basin a hundred feet below. At the bottom was the crumbled and blackened hulk of Clay's pickup. As he stared into the depths, he relived the day he had learned of Kills Good's and Adam's deaths.

The letter came, startling him after all the weeks without any word from home. John slipped the envelope, unopened, into his pocket. While the company trudged through the Louisiana swamp he kept touching the letter, feeling the outlines of the paper through the thick fabric of his trousers and swallowing down his excitement. That night, risking a reprimand, he slipped behind the barracks into the bayou to read. After the first sentence, Gage dropped to his knees in the stinking mud -- stricken....

Johnny half slid, half climbed down the gray and pink-banded sandstone and clay wall. Sharp stones sliced into his palms and dug through the heavy fabric of his jeans cutting into his knees. A pair of swallows rose from the canyon, catching the mayflies disturbed by his passage. Their forked tails flicked through the air, a harbinger of the coming rain. His boots crunched loudly on the bottom of the dry wash.

The truck sat against base of a slender butte. John imagined he could still smell the putrid stench of Manny and Clay's burned flesh. Covering his mouth with a handkerchief, Gage approached the wreck and stared through the broken windshield. Every flake of paint, scrap of cloth and piece of rubber had burned away. The gasoline fed fire had burned so fiercely that even the earthen pillar against which the truck had come to rest was blackened. Through the shattered glass, the charred springs of the front seat were visible, bent into the shape of their final occupants. Sheltered from the wind and rain, a spider had spun a web over the layer of ashes beneath the seat. Johnny turned away recalling the many times he had sat there, sandwiched between his friends. Blinking he studied the sky. In the distant creek bottom the mournful voices of cicadas sang.

Gage dug a fossilized buffalo vertebra from its ancient clay nest in the side of the butte and turned the bone in his hand. One side was blackened with soot, leaving dark streaks on his hands, the other was a sun-bleached white. He smeared the black over the back of his hand. Johnny stared at the smudges, thinking about the darkness that seemed swallow all his hopes. In the few weeks he had been gone everything seemed to have slipped away. Angrily, Johnny threw the charred bone, watching it ricochet off the hardened earth.

A crack of thunder rolled up the narrow canyon and heavy raindrops spattered on the thirsty ground. The water ran off Gage's head and behind his ears. He lifted his face to the cold downpour.

******

Johnny gazed into his bowl of cornflakes and listened to a meadowlark sing from its perch on the barbed wire fence by the barn. In the distance he could hear the rattle of the haybine as his father mowed the north field. Today was his last day at home and tomorrow he would have to travel back to the base. With that realization the butterflies that had been fluttering in his stomach all week again awakened.

Across the kitchen table, his mother sat with a bucket of wild plums beside her chair. With a small paring knife she slit the reddish purple skin of each plum, pulled out the pit and dropped the fruit into sterilized canning jars. The clacking of the pits as Marie threw them into the dishpan, reminded him of his great-grandmother and her kansu, plum stone dice. When he was a child, he would watch as the old woman and her ancient friends sat in the shade of the cottonwoods outside the house, drinking coffee, telling stories, and playing endless games. They would read the burned-on patterns of turtles, spiders, and lizards, adding up points with counting sticks made from the ribs of an old umbrella, and remembering their childhood days in the tipi camps -- days when proud women gambled their finery on a toss of the seeds. A spasm of homesickness squeezed his heart.

Marie filled the last jar. She stood and lifted the pot of hot syrup from the stove. "Johnny," she said, pouring the liquid slowly into each jar.

Gage glanced at his mother.

"Dwayne, wanted me to give that to you." She pointed with her chin toward a heavy brown envelope sitting on the counter.

John leaned his chair back and snagged the packet. Through the paper he could feel the outlines of an eagle feather.

"He said, it kept him safe over there." Marie's voice broke. "It'll keep you safe." She was frozen with her hand still in the bowl of water covering the canning lids.

Before averting his eyes, Gage could see tears begin to run down her face. "Mama," he started.

"Make sure you come back to me, Johnny," whispered Marie.

******

"Are you ok?" asked Chet again.

Experimentally Johnny tried to move his legs. Raising his head, he lifted his left leg and succeeded in only worsening the dull ache in his right hip. Clenching his jaw, he raised his right leg a fraction of an inch; the move wrung a gasp of pain from him.

Squatting beside Gage, Kelly flinched at the sound.

Bone ground on bone, like sand between Johnny's gritted teeth. Sweat prickled on his upper lip and his heart pounded. He let his head fall back. "I broke something, I think," he sighed, again closing his eyes. John lay feeling a slow burn begin to spread from between his hips through his lower abdomen and preformed a quick assessment. Probable pelvic fracture, he decided, reviewing the rather lengthy list of organ and vascular damage, which often accompanied such injuries. "We need to get out of here."

Chet stood up.

******

Stiff and groggy, Gage stumbled from the brown McCord Air Force bus onto the gray concrete of Seattle-Tacoma Airport. The Washington sky hung low and gray, cutting off the head of Mt. Rainer. Pressed against the chain link fence was a group of young men and women in colorful civilian clothes. They held signs and yelled insults. The thick neck of the red-headed man walking in front of John flushed with rage. Johnny was too numbed with exhaustion and overwhelmed by the onslaught of paperwork he had just endured to sort out the words. Their protests belong to a different world. Quickly he crossed the too open tarmac, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.

Inside the terminal people, in their traveling best, hurried back and forth or waited with an air of patient boredom. Dully, John stepped away from the heavy metal door through which the returning vets had been escorted. In a line by the Pan Am ticket counter across the terminal, two small boys sat between suitcases playing with a model plane. He stared at the boys. Children? he thought, suddenly realizing he was truly back home. The young mother, seeing his stare, grabbed her sons' hands, hauled them to their feet, whispered warningly in their ears and hustled them away.

"Johnny!"

Gage turned to see his cousin step out of the line of people waiting by the door. Baptiste's hair had grown well past his ears and was reaching for his collar. He wore a stiff pair of go-to-town jeans and a new shirt. "Dwayne," greeted John in a surprised voice.

The bigger man seized Johnny's shoulders squeezing them for a second and then shrugged. "Let's go to my place, have some dinner." He lifted Gage's bag and headed for the parking lot.

******

Johnny stepped out of the tiny shower stall. Slowly and deliberately, he stretched, enjoying the feel of clean warm water streaming from his wet hair down his back and legs. The slight chill of evaporation seemed an unbelievable luxury after the unrelenting steaminess of Vietnam. Gage buried his face in the nap of the threadbare towel and wiped his eyes. He carefully dried, working gradually toward his battered feet, savoring the feel of clean linens.

Gage reached for his underwear sitting on the back of the toilet tank, when he stopped. Lying across the folded white material was a long, yellow-green braid of sweetgrass and a beat up old lighter. Gently he picked up the herb, squeezing the shiny slightly rough stems between his finger, accepting Dwayne's gift of purification.

The stubby white bases of the stems, blazed briefly in the flame and then smoldered. Johnny closed his eyes. Imitating the old men back home, he cupped his hand, washing the fragrant smoke over his face and chest. The sweet odor buried the foreign smells of war. He held his palm aloft in supplication and thanksgiving to whatever powers that had brought him home safely.

******

Johnny jolted awake. Coolness instead of hot humid air surrounded him. Disoriented he lay on the clean sheets in the only bed in Baptiste's crowded efficiency, listening to his heart race. The quiet of the surroundings left him uncomfortably alert. He found himself half sitting, scanning the corners of the room nervously. Gage slumped back against the pillows and scratched his head.

A pool of light bathed the head of the broken down sofa. Dwayne was sitting up with a book in his lap. A cup of tea steamed on the scratched end table and filled the air with a warm bittersweet smell. He looked over at John.

"You want the bed?" Gage pushed himself up on one elbow. "The couch won't bother me." He started to sit up.

Dwayne closed the book, marking his page with his finger. "No. I," he stopped, changing his mind about what he had been about to say. "I can't put this book down." Baptiste studied Gage's face.

Johnny looked at the cover, trying to read the title. "Really? I never have that problem."

Baptiste laughed. "That's 'cause you never read anything other than Playboy."

Gage smiled. He slid an arm behind his head and watched his cousin. "I'm sorry I made you leave," he said slowly, fidgeting with the edge of the blanket.

For a second Dwayne stared at John uncomprehendingly. "You were just an excuse," he stated after a long minute. His words seemed to confirm something he had been thinking. "Just an excuse."

John was still for a time, looking at the shadows in the small kitchen alcove. He tried to find the anger that had so filled him after Dwayne's departure, but it seemed to have vanished into the pit the past year had left in his heart. "Why did you leave?"

Baptiste sighed and took a large swallow of his tea. "I couldn't stay. There was nothing there for me anymore." He stared into the cup. "Family is important but... I don't want to live there."

Gage didn't meet his cousin's eyes. He lay thinking of the air of poisonous defeat, which permeated the very land, and the paralyzing weight of colonization. "I know what you mean," he whispered finally.

"Go to sleep, misun," said Dwayne, reopening his book.

Johnny relaxed, covering his eyes with his arm. I'm not going back either, he decided.

******

Johnny watched Chet climb gingerly back down the debris-coated slab. Kelly was moving cautiously, hesitating at every shift and rattle. The curly-haired fireman had spent the last half an hour with his face pressed against the opening, yelling himself hoarse, trying to attract the rescuers' attention.

"Let me rest my voice a minute and I'll try again," croaked Kelly, jumping to the floor of the pit. His shoulders slumped and his face was lined with exhaustion.

John opened his mouth to encourage Chet but instead of speaking he gagged. Gage turned his head to the side and struggled onto one shoulder. He vomited.

Chet scrambled to John's side.

The dark hole filled with stars as John's abdominal muscles spasmed. Stomach acid burned his mouth and nose. A wave of dry heaves broke over him. Each movement tried to rip him apart, moving the ends of the broken bones. A loud moaning filled his ears.

"....Johnny!"

Gage forced his watering eyes open. Kelly was kneeling beside his head, supporting his shoulder. The firefighter had his gloves off, ready to clear John's airway if needed.

"Johnny?" yelled Chet.

Shaking John struggled to speak, to reassure Chet he could breathe. " 'k," he panted. He spat.

Gently, Kelly helped Gage roll onto his back.

Check the emesis for blood, John ordered, turning his head slightly. The movement dizzied him, making his stomach muscles tense. A flash of white-hot light left him blinking at the afterimage. He gave up and lay still. "Blood?" he hissed.

Kelly directed his beam onto the puddle, the muscles along his jaw tightened. "No." He brushed a handful of dust over the vomit to absorb the liquid. He looked at the paramedic, Johnny was shivering despite his bunkers. Chet removed his turnout coat and draped it over John's chest, drawing it carefully up to Gage's chin.

Gage held as still as he was able, trying to ignore his dizziness and lightheadedness. He studied the fireman's face in the dim light, remembering one of the first responses he had been on at 51's. John had watched his annoying colleague worm his way into a crushed station wagon, squeezing beneath the asbestos blanket next to the trapped victim. Kelly had held the frightened woman's slender black fingers in his beefy hand while Gage and DeSoto had rolled the dash away from the woman's crushed legs. Roy had given John a surprised look when Chet, at the victim's request, joined her in reciting Bible verses. Kelly had stayed at the woman's side until transport.

"Your face is bleeding," commented Johnny dreamily.

Kelly touched the cut on his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers. "I cut it."

"Yeah."

Pulling on his gloves, Chet stood. "I'm going to try again," he said, clambering onto the wreckage.

******

Belliveau grabbed the metal bar protruding from between the bits of floor deck and support column and pulled himself up. He looked down at Brice toiling up the slope. "Here, give me your hand," he offered, tightening his grip on the rod and extending his hand. Bob grunted as he pulled up his partner. "Brice, I do believe you're getting fat."

Brice pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at the other man's stockier frame. "I think, you will find I am in prefect cardiovascular condition. As for my weight, I keep a journal as part of my training regime. I would notice any fluctuations." Craig bent inspecting the surrounding rubble.

Belliveau snorted and rolled his eyes. "That was humor, Brice," Bob's voice trailed off as he took a second look at his handhold. The hexagonal bar had a flattered end and bore little resemblance to rebar, conduit, or office furniture. He tugged on the length of metal and was surprised when it slipped from the pile -- it was a department issue pry bar. "Brice!" Belliveau held up the tool.

Craig gazed at the bar. "Anyone lose a pry bar," he called.

Turning Belliveau examined wreckage. A dark opening was barely visible beneath a tangle of drywall, metal studs and Romex, next to where the bar had been wedged. In the brief silence that followed Brice's announcement, he heard a faint sound. "Quiet!" Bob bellowed.

"Hey, we're down here."

Bob flung aside rubbish. "Gage! Kelly!" He thrust his head into the gap. A narrow channel led deep into the mountain of debris.

"Yes!"

"Kelly?"

"Bob!"

"Yes." Belliveau sensed Brice kneeling beside him; he held up his hand, signaling for his partner to wait. "Is Gage with you?"

"Yeah. Johnny's hurt pretty bad." Kelly paused. "You got to get us out."

"We will," reassured Bob.

"Get a Kennedy probe up here," ordered Brice, holding the HT to his lips.

Bob pulled back and looked up. Craig was frozen, his expression intent as he stared at the gap, as though summoning the men from the depths. Behind the two paramedics the rest of the team was gathering. "We found them," he mouthed to the nearby firemen. Capt. Jerry Beck, scrambled up the side of the slope, holding the listening device.

"Thanks, Cap," said Craig screwing the threaded rods together and plugging in the wires.

Bob bent yelling into the opening. "Kelly, can you tell me anything about where you are?" Beck handed Belliveau the headset and Brice inserted the microphone tipped rod into the channel.

"We're in the bottom of the elevator shaft." Amplified by the electronics the firefighter's voice sounded tired and strained. "The one that only goes down as far as the first floor."

Belliveau jerked back his head, glancing at the face of the shaft. A hatch was ten feet above their heads.

"Bob, the cab is stuck just a story and half above us."

Bob met his Captain's eyes and the officer shook his head. "Ok. We'll figure something out." The paramedic took a deep breath. "What's wrong with Gage?"

"I think, he has a broken hip or something." Kelly hesitated. "He is in shock."

Bob frowned. "Ok. We be down just as soon as we can."

Craig peered into the darkness estimating the amount of rubble, which would have to be removed to reach the ground floor door. He pursed his lips in frustration and tipped back his head. The dark outline of the still intact stairwells and roof at the north end of the building blocked the night sky. Suddenly Brice stood. "Cap, we can go in through the machine room," he pointed to the tiny cubical. "It'll be faster to cut through the floor of the car and bring them up that way."

Beck's gaze followed the paramedic's pointing finger. "Get a team together."

"Cap," called Belliveau, removing the headset and handing it to another fireman, who took his place beside the gap. "Want me up there?"

"Go on," replied Beck, pulling his radio from his turnout pocket and nodding to the two men. "Get some help." He switched on the radio. "HT 16 to Battalion 14."

"Go ahead, HT 16."

"Battalion 14, we found them."

"10-4," crackled Chief Anderson. In the background, Stanley could be heard calling to one of his men.

******

Roy burst through the steel stairwell door onto the devastated roof, his radio still in his hand. The slight, newly-certified paramedic, Craig Brice, was already busy with a Halligan tool at the locked door of the elevator machine room. A coil of bright pink Kermantle rope was slung across his chest. Stanley, Lopez, Beck, Belliveau and a couple of men he did not recognize stood next to the paramedic. Brice's glasses were balanced precariously on the end of his nose. Hank's face revealed his desire to yank the forcible entry tool from the young man's hands and tear the doorjamb apart himself. A pair of men positioned flood lamps and a portable generator. DeSoto skirted the gapping hole in the roof and joined the group at the entrance.

Roy stared down into the flayed building. Beside the fireman, the roof and floors slumped into a two-story mound of broken concrete, plasterboard and office furniture, which covered the doors to the elevator shaft, entombing Johnny and Chet. The men still working were dwarfed by the destruction. The face of the shaft had been laid bare; the gates to the top three floors stood closed, shorn of their hallways and offices. Sheets of paper swirled upwards carried on a gust of wind streaming through the glassless walls. Roy closed his eyes and turned away, remembering the crushed skull he had unearthed earlier, clumps of long blond hair still clinging to the bloody bone....

A high pitched squeal of stressed metal accompanied Craig's effort to bend the frame away from the hasp of the lock. Suddenly it snapped and the door swung open. Balancing lightly against the pry bar, Brice leaned forward and scooped up 16's drug box and biophone. Roy grabbed the bag of climbing gear and claimed one of the lifebelts. Beck gave him a hard look as Roy fastened the thick leather and nylon belt. "DeSoto, you've been on too long..."

"Cap, it's my partner down there," replied Roy. For a long moment, he held the officer's gaze.

Beck slowly nodded.

DeSoto followed Brice onto the strip of concrete stretching between the two back to back banks of elevators. The smell of old oil was heavy in the still air. A series of chains and posts rimmed the walkway between the pair elevators on the one side and the solitary shaft into which Kelly and Gage had plunged. A thick metal wheel, coupled by a complex array of gears to a large motor -- the drive sheave -- perched on I-beams atop the chasm. Head high, blue metal control cabinets stood like a giant's building blocks next to the hoistway. Everything was lightly coated with powdery black brake dust.

"Shit," murmured Brice.

Startled DeSoto stared at the fireman.

Craig had removed the coil of rope and was lying on his stomach, peering over the edge into the concrete channel. The round beam of his flashlight danced on the gray walls. He turned his head and looked at DeSoto. The light from the floodlights streaming through the open door, reflected off his glasses' lenses and obscured Roy's view of his eyes.

DeSoto dropped to his belly and joined Brice, following his pointing hand. Roy's eyes slowly adjusted to the relative darkness of the hoistway. The dark blurs in the corners of the shaft resolved into four t-shaped metal guideways, each glistening with a dark mix of grease and dirt, disappearing around the corners of the boxy metal passenger compartment into the depths. He studied the cab stuck in the middle of the shaft. One side of the compartment roof was covered by heavy debris, which had spilled through the broken third floor doorway. A thick, sharp slab of floor deck leaned against the heavy cables. A bright slash of metal, scraped clean of its layers of grime, glittered evilly in the gloom.

"Shit," whispered DeSoto, echoing Brice.

******

Chet crouched next to John. The paramedic's face was drawn, his skin waxen and moist, and his eyes closed. Dust was caked on Gage's dry lips. What the hell is taking so long? wondered Kelly, looking away from Gage's face. One of Johnny's arms had slipped from beneath the turnout coat; Kelly eased the limb back beneath the covers. The injured man did not move. Panic squeezed Chet's chest and he desperately needed to hear Gage's voice. "Johnny," he whispered.

"Hmmm," mumbled John.

"Why did you really leave the reservation?"

"To have... a... refrigerator." Gage's voice was weak and abstracted.

Chet stared at John's face, unnerved by the injured man's incoherent answer. Gage's brown eyes looked back, a hint of amusement visible beneath the pain. Kelly forced a weak smile and tried for a bantering tone, wanting to reassure Gage and himself. "Figures. You're always thinking about food."

"I got... my priorities..." Johnny grimaced and gasped.

Alarmed Chet touched John's shoulder. "What hurts?"

Gage listened to his body, feeling the burning pain, which had spilled from his groin through his entire abdomen. He no longer remembered what it was like to be warm. "My hips... and stomach."

"Anything I can do?"

Johnny twitched restlessly, knowing time was running out. "No." Swallowing, he forced himself to focus on Chet. "I left... see the world.... Guess, saw too much.... Couldn't... go back..." His voice trailed off as he panted for air.

Chet leapt up, pacing nervously as he listened.

Gage watched. "They'll... be here... soon.... Why did you..." he puffed.

"Become a fireman?" finished Kelly.

Johnny nodded.

Chet shrugged. "Family tradition, I guess." He strained to catch the sound of the men working at the top of the shaft. "Granddad was a fireman in Chelsea, dad in Sacramento." Kelly tried to imagine what the rescue crew was doing. "My family didn't have the money to send all us kids to school, besides my sister and brother got the brains in the family. So I...." He listened but he longer heard the paramedic moving. "Johnny?"

Silence.

"Johnny!" said Kelly, sharply. He turned on his flashlight, knelt next to Gage and touched his arm.

John didn't move.

******

John braced his heels against the pull of the mortar-laden wheelbarrow rolling down the wooden ramp. Sweat streamed into the corners of his eyes, burning.

"Gage!"

Shielding his eyes against the glare, Johnny looked up. The foreman stood at the edge of the excavation. "Yeah?"

"I need to talk to you," said the man walking away.

John climbed out of the partially completed basement and followed his boss to the trailer at the edge of the construction site. A small group of men stood by the wooden steps. "Uh oh," he whispered.

The foreman cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. "We -- uh -- we're overbudget. I'm afraid I'm going to have to lay you men off...." He handed each of them an envelope, containing their last paycheck.

Johnny looked at the faces of the men around him --the two black cousins from Mississippi, the Mexican father of four, the Yaqui teen from Arizona -- and understood. "But," he objected.

"Sorry, Gage, but you men have the least seniority..."

"And the darkest skins," added Gage bitterly.

******

"John," yelled his landlady.

Gage stopped on the dark, narrow wooden stairs. "Yes, Mrs. McManus?" He watched a spider scurry across the dirty wall, while the old woman climbed. His feet ached from walking from building to building, construction site to construction site looking for work that didn't exist.

"Maybe you've forgotten, but it's the beginning of the week." The harsh light from the naked bulb shone on the woman's face, revealing a thick coating of pink powder spread up to her plucked eyebrows and down over the wispy hairs covering her upper lip.

"Mrs. McManus, I got laid off. I'll have the rent for you next week. I'm sure I'll find a job tomorrow," promised John.

"Tomorrow. You'll have it tomorrow or I'll call the Sheriff." The old woman's voice rose to a near shriek. The thin cotton anklets she wore below her housecoat, slithered down against her slippers, trying to escape the noise. The skinny Mexican man, who lived next to Johnny, leaned out his door watching. "He'll take your truck."

He'll have to push it, thought John. It isn't gonna go far without gas.

"I've had Indian boys stay here before. You always start drinking and get fired...."

John took a deep breath, regretting yet again telling the woman he was an Indian and not a Mexican when she had complimented his English. "I was laid off," repeated Gage coldly. He turned and climbed the stairs to his room, leaving the old woman to rant at his back.

******

Johnny stared at the plate of fried potatoes and boiled pinto beans flavored with a little bacon grease. Enjoy, because this is it, he thought, setting down a glass of water. Sighing, he lifted a forkful of beans and potatoes to his mouth, closed his eyes, and pretended he was eating steak. Gage ate slowly, knowing this would be his last meal for a while. Finished, John rested his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his hands.

The voices of his neighbors rose in a loud, drunken argument. A toilet flushed noisily above him. Opening his eyes he watched the grimy institutional green walls of the cheap rooming house close in. Even the sunlight was smudged and thick. The image of an eagle he had once seen caught in white rancher's coyote trap floated before him. Drawn by the prospect of an easy meal the bird had traded freedom for death. And you've exchanged one trap for another.

John leapt from the table, upsetting the cracked vinyl chair, grabbed the cardboard box that served as his nightstand and began emptying the worn dresser. He washed the dinner dishes and set them in the laundry basket, next to the pillowslip holding his toiletries. With in a few minutes Gage was packed. All that remained was his shiny new radio, lying on the sagging mattress. He picked it up.

******

John hesitated in the door; the pawnshop was dim crowded hole. The faint odor of marijuana hung in the still air. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, ranks of TV's, radios, typewriters, guns, and guitars appeared out of the gloom. Instead of the family heirlooms of beadwork and leather that the pawnshops back home trafficked, this glass case glittered with the golden gleam of wedding rings and watches. Gage was hard-pressed to decide which was more pathetic.

John stepped up to the counter. He needed gas money to head north toward Stockton and Lodi, through the orchards and fields of the San Joaquin valley, where he thought he might be able to pick up work.

"Can I help you?" A barrel-chested man in a soiled Harley-Davison t-shirt, stared over his wire-rim glasses at John.

"Yes," stammered John, holding up his radio.

"Three dollars," offered the man, smoothing his bushy beard and pushing the pawn ticket across the counter.

"Aw man, I paid four times that for it."

"Three dollars. Take it or leave it." The man went back to reading the newspaper.

Reluctantly, Gage laid the radio on the counter. Three dollars would almost get him there.

The pawnshop owner watched John fill out the form and pointed at his waist. "Hey, I like that belt buckle. Give you five bucks for it."

Johnny looked down. He had forgotten he was wearing his go-to-town jeans and the beaded buckle that his mom had made for him. The blue cut-bead background sparkled in the dim light, reminding him of the summer sky back home. Money for food. Closing his eyes and biting his lip, he slowly removed the belt.

******

Stanley and two of the men from 16's shoved a length of heavy wooden 4 x 4 through the spoke of the drive sheave wheel. The ends of the wood jammed against the two metal beams on either side of the wheel, preventing it from turning. "Ok," he called.

Brice clipped his ladder belt to the chain railing and leaned out over the chasm. His booted feet pivoted on the edge as he stretched, reaching.

Roy bit his lip, watching Craig wrap the heavy nylon webbing around the beam supporting the sheave. In his exhaustion everything was unnaturally intense, the yellow anchor band practically blinded him from across the room and the murmuring of the team assembling the lifting and braking system behind him sounded like shouts. Beneath the chemical stench of lubricants he imagined he smelled blood -- Johnny's blood. DeSoto pulled off his glove and rubbed his eyes.

Craig removed the anchor plate he was holding clenched between his teeth from his mouth and slipped it over the heavy caribineers attached to the webbing. Carefully he screwed the gates closed, double checked his work and gave the whole assemblage an experimental tug before attaching the pulley. "DeSoto," said Brice, holding out his hand and nodding toward the coil rope by DeSoto's feet.

Roy handed him the line, chafing at his forced inactivity. While Brice threaded the rope over the pulley, DeSoto fingered his ladder belt, thinking about how much damage falling masonry can inflict on the human body.

"Captain." Brice grunted as Belliveau pulled him back onto solid ground. "I..."

"Cap, I'll go down and check the cables," interrupted Roy looking at Beck and Stanley.

The two officers looked at each other. "DeSoto, Brice is going..." began Beck.

"Jerry," said Hank.

"You sure you're up to this?" asked Beck, studying DeSoto's face. "If we foul up, we could kill those two men."

Roy bit his lip and slowly nodded. Never taking his blue eyes off 16's Captain, he lifted the end of the rope.

******

"Halt!" yelled DeSoto. His descent stopped. Roy hung sideways a few feet above the roof the elevator cab, his legs braced against the wall of the shaft.

"How's it look?" called Hank, peering down at the paramedic.

Roy tightened his grip on the rope and looked at I-shaped steel crosshead that spanned the top of the elevator. A large slab of cement had fallen onto the right side of the beam and now lay across the roof, neatly split in the center. The jagged outer edge had scraped the cables. DeSoto studied the damage. Each cable was as wide as his thumb and surrounded by a tube of metal webbing where it passed though the anchor holes in the crosshead. The concrete had cut the protective sheathing and on one cable, had inflicted a deep cut, slicing through some of the twisted metal strands. "One cable is badly gouged."

"Think it will take a team's weight?" Beck stood next to Stanley, leaning carefully over the rail.

DeSoto looked at the concrete, estimating its weight. "There's already a big load on the top, maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds, pretty close to the weight limit."

"What about the safeties?" asked Hank, referring to the emergency system designed to arrest falls.

"Give me a minute, Cap. I can't see from here." Sidestepping DeSoto edged toward the guides surrounding the counterweights. "Lower me a bit," he ordered. Roy stepped down the wall, closer toward the cab. The harness pulled tighter around his middle as his center of gravity shifted. "Stop!" DeSoto grabbed the guide rail and looked down the side of the car. In the shadows surrounding the cab, Roy could just make out a thick metal wedge forced into a grooved track. He swung to the other side of the shaft. He peered into the narrow opening. "They're ok!"

Roy tightened his grip on the rope and pivotted upright. His shoes scrapped loudly on the roof. He pulled the bolt cutters from the loop on his belt and cut the damaged latch holding shut the escape hatch. "Let's get moving!"

******

"Stop!" Brice's feet touched the floor of the elevator. The beam from his flashlight reflected off the burnished metal walls, illuminating the pitch-black corners of the cab. He unhooked from the line, leaving the rope swinging slowly against the sides of the roof escape hatch. "Off rope," he yelled, kneeling, setting down the light and pulling a utility knife from its holster on the ladder belt that encircled his narrow waist. Methodically, Craig slashed through the carpeting covering the metal floor.

"Cap, send down the K-12," requested Roy, looking away from the hole. He crouched on the roof of the cab, staring down through hatch, chewing his upper lip and listening to the thumping of his colleagues above lashing together the equipment they would need to cut through the floor, to Gage and Kelly. A fine glitter of dust rose as Brice ripped away the carpet. Just a few more minutes. Be patient, DeSoto counseled himself, watching the saw lower slowly down the shaft. The rhythmic tapping of Brice sounding the floor deck of the elevator car in search of the best spot to cut reminded him too strongly of a ticking clock. He suppressed a grunt of impatience.

In the chamber beneath the elevator, Kelly worriedly examined Gage's clammy, gray face and listening to the pounding on the elevator car above him. "Hey!" he shouted to the crew above him.

The faint but unmistakable voice of Chet Kelly leaked up the edges of the shaft. "Chet!" bellowed DeSoto, untying the rope from the handle of the K-12.

At the sound of DeSoto's voice, Chet began to grin a little. Trust DeSoto to home in on Gage. "Roy!"

"We'll be down in a few minutes!" replied DeSoto.

"Roy," Stanley called down. "We'll send your gear down next." The line disappeared back up the shaft.

Unruffled by the shouting, Craig marked the outlines of an area free of support members using a thick stick of chalk. He crawled slowly across the floor.

"Brice," warned Roy, leaning through the opening, handing down the saw and face shield.

"Thank you." Craig held his gloves between his knees as he removed his helmet and slid on the protective plastic shield. Before starting the motor, he rapped sharply on the floor. "Cover your faces and stand clear!"

Chet lifted his turnout, bent low over Johnny, and stretched the coat over both their heads. "This is your job, Gage," he whispered, closing his eyes. "Figures you can't even get a simple thing like this right." Kelly's hand brushed the paramedic's slick skin and he choked on his own words.

Craig started the K-12 and pressed the blade into the flooring. The carbide blade threw a thick arc of sparks into the air, releasing a galaxy of stars into the shadows. Legs braced against the awkward position forced on him by the confined space and shoulder muscles tensed, Brice precisely guided the saw around the chalk marks he had made.

******

Just after dawn, John pulled out of the gas station and headed for the freeway. The rat race hustle of rush hour was just starting. The early morning sunlight peeking over the mountains, gilded the graffiti covered RTD stops and the drunks sleeping in doorways and weedy vacant lots. A nuthatch perched on a fire escape sang. He rolled down the window to let in the dawn breeze.

As Johnny moved away from the southern end of the city, the rows of Latino markets, used car dealerships and liquor stores gave way to clean new streets, manicured lawns, and neat homes. He drove slowly, looking at the rows of suburban homes and trying to picture the lives of people inside those fancy houses, with their indoor plumbing and electric gadgets. Gage wondered whether they were that different from those of his people. The causal violence of life on the rez was missing. He tried to imagine an elderly woman freezing to death inside one of those pretty houses, or a child who played on one of these neat lawns going to bed without food, or the desperate hunger for the poison of alcohol making a teen in this neighborhood drink antifreeze.... He failed at the task. John shook his head, trying to dispel his gathering depression.

On the sidewalk beside the road, an old man labored up the hill with bags of groceries. Johnny could see he had once been a strong man, but was now stoop shouldered and broken with age and illness. Shifting the weight awkwardly from one arm to the other, the man continued trudging along. Gage slowed, pulled along side the curb, and stopped.

"Sir, you need a lift?" asked John through the open window.

The old man looked a Gage, suspicion clouding his eyes. He studied John's face, then suddenly nodded. "Yes, thank you." The man dropped his groceries into the bed of the pickup. He opened the door and slid onto the seat. "My name is Bill McCracken...." he said, extending his hand.

******

Gage stood in the living room, studying the room and listening to the clatter of cups and saucers in the kitchen. The golden wood paneled walls were covered with photographs and framed crewel pictures of flowers. Among the old pictures of children and a portly blond woman, were a half a dozen photos of burning buildings. John looked at one of the dark hulks, flames shooting through its broken windows, the base surrounded by trucks and busy men dressed in long dark coats and sloped leather helmets.

"Cream or sugar?" asked McCracken, limping into the room.

The smell from the cups on the small lacquered tray made John's mouth water. "Black, thank you," he answered turning his head.

Bill set down the platter, hobbled along side Johnny and stared at the picture. He pressed a cup into the Gage's hand. "That was a good fire," he commented, taking a sip of coffee. "An old warehouse down at Marina Del Rey. Three alarm. We worked all night, to put her out."

John looked out the corner of his eye at the old man.

"I was a fireman for twenty-five years."

Gage swallowed the strong coffee. "Oh."

Bill turned away from the pictures and sat in a well-used recliner. "What do you do, John?"

"Construction, or at least I did. Got laid off." Johnny's words trailed off as he took another sip of coffee.

McCracken looked over the top his cup. "Outta work, huh?"

Gage nodded, suddenly nervous.

"Explains why a young man like you has time to sit around and drink coffee with an old man like me." He grinned. "Well, that is the problem with construction, work comes and goes. Are you a laborer or do you have a trade, John?"

"Laborer."

"But good with your hands?"

Johnny shrugged. "Ok, I guess. Not like my brother, he was the one who was always good with machines. But I grew up on a ranch -- you learn things...." He shrugged. The old man's questioning made him uneasy. Gage finished his coffee and set the mug on the tray.

Bill nodded toward the young man's still short hair. "Just out of the army and don't want to go back to that little town, now that you've seen the world," he commented.

"Thank you for the coffee, sir. But I need to be going." He shifted nervously.

"Sorry, I was being nosey, wasn't I." The old man climbed stiffly out of the chair. "Surely you have time for some breakfast?"

"No, thank you..." Johnny started to decline but his stomach growled.

McCracken laughed and limped toward the kitchen. "Keep an old man company for a bit longer. I get lonely now that my wife is gone." An instant of pain ran through his voice. "Besides after twenty-five years in a firehouse, I'm a pretty good cook. You don't want to leave without tasting my famous hashbrowns."

******

Gage pulled off the road and climbed from the cab of his truck. Slowly, he arched his back and stretched, shaking away the stiffness that had settled in his body. He reached through the open passenger window and grabbed the two paper wrapped sandwiches McCracken had placed in his hands as he had left the old man's house.

John climbed down the embankment beside the road and walked to the edge of the field of peppers. He sat on the side of the irrigation ditch, unwrapped the sandwiches and ate. Chewing, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clipping from the L.A. Times. "Notice of testing dates for admission into the Los Angles County Fire Department Training Academy," he read. He remembered the old man, unable to find scissors, laying a ruler on the newspaper, carefully ripping out the ad. The whole time he had talked about what a good career fire fighting had been.

Career, Johnny thought, finishing the last sandwich. All his life people had talked about trades and jobs, but never careers. The whole idea seemed exotic, frightening and attractive. Gage read the announcement one last time, memorizing the date.

******

The scratchy army blanket clung to Johnny, smelling of damp wool, lost dreams and old sweat. He awoke hot and perspiring. The man in the next cot coughed loudly. Gage kicked away the covers and sat up.

The pre-dawn sky made a pale pink triangle in the tent door. John put on the cleanest of his shirts, grabbed his hat and stepped into the morning. The rising breeze cooled his feverish skin. Outside, women were beginning to cook breakfast. The air was heavy with the odor of wood smoke, hot oil, dust and apricots from the orchard below. Quickly he walked past the makeshift showers, a group of plywood cubicles next to a tanker truck, skirting the muddy run-off.

Gage stopped at a large tent. A half a dozen children of various ages sat on the ground outside: three playing with a broken toy truck, one girl braiding another girl's hair, and a boy with a blind eye holding a skinny yellow-brown puppy. At the side, two women, probably sisters, worked at a makeshift counter set atop wooden fruit crates. An old lady, with gray streaked hair and deep lines spreading from the corners of her eyes and mouth, sat on another crate patting small balls of pale yellow masa into thin rounds. John watched in fascination as she dropped the dough onto a blackened sheet of metal inches above a bed of coals. Nimbly her thick callused fingers turned the steaming tortillas.

"Buenas dias, Juan," greeted the woman sitting by the fire.

"Um. Buenas dias, Señora Medrano." Johnny paused trying to recall the right words, "¿Como esta usted?" He handed one of the sisters a nickel.

The old woman lifted six warm tortillas and wrapped them in a brown square of shopping bag. "Bien."

"Gracias," said John accepting the bundle.

"De nada. Adios."

"Adios." He headed for his pickup.

Gage sat on the passenger seat with his legs stretched out the door, the packet of bread unrolled in his lap. Carelessly he folded one of the rounds into quarters and took a huge bite. The tortilla was warm and slightly bitter. Chewing Johnny reached over, opened the glove compartment and pulled out a letter he had picked up at the post office box he had rented in town. He unfolded the paper.

"You have been accepted into the Los Angles County Fire Academy...." He reread the words, willing them not to change. A wave of nervous anticipation broke over him. The paper trembled in his hand. For the first time since he had come to the city there was a chance for a better life than the one he had had on the rez. John sat remembering Bill McCracken's face as the old man had talked about his days with the fire department, and imaging doing something with his life that mattered.

Clutching the letter Gage watched the sun climb above the horizon.

******

Craig dropped through the newly-made hole into darkness. The narrow chamber stank of oil, sweat and urine. He turned his flashlight. Frozen in the beam of light, Chet blinked bleary-eyed, hunkered next to a pile of rags. The passenger cab floor creaked and groaned overhead as DeSoto lowered their supplies into the pit. Slowly, Brice's eyes adjusted and the rags turned into two turnout coats covering DeSoto's fallen partner. He scuttled toward the pair.

"Gage!" said Brice sharply, kneeling next to Gage and pulling off his gloves. He placed his hand first on John's neck and then on his diaphragm.

Johnny's eyes remained closed. His chest heaved with shallow, rapid breaths.

"He was talking to me about ten minutes ago," commented Chet, looking worriedly at Brice. The curly haired fireman's face was streaked with grime and drying blood.

Behind the two men, Roy scrambled through the hole in the bottom of the elevator. "Johnny," he whispered, staring at Gage's crumbled form. "Chet, what happened? How far did he fall?"

Kelly bit his lip. "He didn't fall. I -- uh -- I climbed up trying to open up that hole," he answered, pointing up into the shadows. "I guess I put a foot in the wrong place or something. A bunch of debris fell down on him." Clearing his throat nervously, Chet bowed his head, staring at the floor.

Roy looked at the shattered concrete littering the floor around Gage. He shuddered, imagining the fragments raining out the darkness.

"Gage, look at me," ordered Brice. "John, open your eyes!" Craig, took the injured man's wrist. Johnny's hand was cold. "DeSoto, 124 and thready. Respiration 36."

DeSoto returned his attention to his partner. Johnny's face was gray and his lips dusky. Dark tracks traced the path of icy beads of sweat through the dust covering Gage's face. Roy's mouth went dry. "Chet, get the O₂."

Kelly scrambled toward the cylinder.

Brice wrapped the c-collar around Gage's neck. "Gage, open your eyes," he repeated, sharply.

Johnny tried to focus on Brice's instructions but the paramedic's voice was distant and slow. Craig's words blurred and wavered, drifting in and out of English, until the pounding of Gage's heart completely drowned out the sound. His lips and face tingled. "Huh?" he moaned as Brice knuckled his sternum. John's eyelids fluttered.

Roy pulled out the HT and squatted next to Gage and Brice. "Cap, we're going to need a backboard and stokes."

"10-4, on the way down." Stanley's voice crackled. "Roy, how are they?"

DeSoto looked at his partner. "Chet's ok," he replied slowly.

"Gage, where do you hurt?" asked Brice. He slid his bandage scissors beneath the collar of John's undershirt and quickly sliced away the material, exposing Johnny's body for a more thorough examination. He began a head to toe survey.

"Mmmm..." John's voice trailed off. Weak shivers shook his body.

"He said his hip and belly hurt." Chet slid the mask over Johnny's mouth, careful not to move Gage's head. John mumbled unintelligibly as the plastic touched his face.

Craig listened to John's lungs. "Breath sounds are ok," he announced, removing the stethoscope from his ears.

Roy wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Gage's arm. He leaned forward, taking a reading. "86/42." Roy scribbled the numbers into the notebook and opened the biophone.

Brice pressed gently on the upper edges of Gage's hips, checking the stability of the pelvis. The bone shifted slightly under his palms.

John groped blindly for Craig's wrist. "Stop," he groaned. His voice was barely audible.

At the sound, DeSoto lifted his head and his hands faltered. Silently he cursed his inattention, turned back to the biophone and screwed the antenna in place, forcing himself to ignore his partner's pain.

"Gage, settle down. I have to check your abdomen," instructed Craig, carefully palpitating the injured man's belly. Instead of releasing Brice's arm, Johnny's fingers tightened.

Roy activated the field radio. "Rampart, this is Squad 51. How do you read me?"

"DeSoto, possible broken pelvis. Distension, tenderness, and rigidity of the lower quadrants of the abdomen." Craig rapidly traced his hands down each of John's legs. "No other apparent fractures." He pulled off Gage's boots. "Distal pulses ok. Looks like," he said, bending to get a better view in the poor light, "ecchymosis of the right flank."

Roy waited a long moment, shifting impatiently. "Rampart, this is Squad 51," he said, his voice hardening.

"Pupils equal and reactive." Brice's boots squeaked loudly in the confined space as he bent over Gage's head. John moaned again in response to the bright light.

Roy scribbled quickly in the notebook. "Come on," he whispered, glancing up at Kelly, acutely aware of each passing second. "Rampart..."

"Unit calling repeat." Morton's voice snapped and hissed.

"This is Squad 51. How do you read me?" asked Roy.

"Loud and clear, go ahead 51."

"Rampart, we have a male, age 24, victim of a building collapse. Patient is semiconscious, responsive to painful stimuli. Prior to losing consciousness, he complained of hip and abdominal pain. Pulse 124, respirations 36, bp 86/42. Pupils are equal and reactive. Skin is pale, and cool. Patient is diaphoretic." Roy grappled with his exhaustion, trying to maintain the level detachment necessary to help his friend.

Overhead the backboard and stokes scraped on the rough edges of the hole as they were lowered into the passenger compartment. "Hey!" yelled one of the firefighters from the top of the shaft.

"Kelly, you want to get that." Brice pointed toward the opening.

"Yeah." Chet carefully climbed across the rubble strewn floor and reached up through the floor of the elevator cab. The faint square of light leaking through the opening from the flood lamps above illuminated his pale, tense face.

Roy touched the pen point to the list, checking off each item. "Possible pelvic fracture. Abdomen is distended and tender with rigidity. Bruising apparent on right flank. Pedal pulses intact. Do you copy?" In the background he could hear Stanley yelling something unintelligible to the Kelly.

"10 - 4, 51."

"We have started O₂, 15L. Request permission to start two IV's, ringers."

"10-4, 51. Draw a red top and start two IV's ringers lactate, full open."

Roy nodded to Brice, who was pulling two administration kits from the drug box.

Morton took a breath. "How long until you can transport?"

Roy sighed. He watched Chet who already had the backboard out of the Stokes and was laying it next Gage. "Patient is at the bottom of an elevator shaft, it may take as long as fifteen minutes to extricate." A tremor marred his report. Kelly glanced at him.

"10 - 4. 51, monitor bp and transport as soon as possible."

"10 - 4. IV's ringers lactate. Monitor pressure and transport," read Roy, repeating back the orders. He set down the biophone and reached past Brice, pulling a bag of ringer's solution from the drug box. Using his teeth, DeSoto ripped away the paper wrapper. "Johnny, we're goin' to start a couple of IV's," he explained while attaching the tubing to the bag and flushing the air from the line. He selected a 14 gauge needle and started to inflate the blood pressure cuff.

Amid a loud hissing, Johnny felt someone take hold of his arm. He tried to open his eyes but failed. The fingers were hot against his skin and he wished they would hold still, the heat was soothing. But, the hands kept moving leaving short-lived patches of warmth, which quickly cooled, leaving him even more chilled. Gage shivered again, renewing the throbbing in his belly. A sharp pain accompanied the movement on his forearm. An IV, he slowly realized, every movement familiar yet frightening, a big one too. "Uhhh."

DeSoto glanced up, from the tube filling with his friend's blood. Gage's shivering had subsided, only an occasional faint tremor shook his body. John's skin glistened with clammy sweat. "Almost done Johnny. We'll have you out of here in a few minutes." Hang in there, Junior. Lying nearly motionless atop the remains of his clothing Johnny no longer resembled the tough firefighter Roy had seen crawling into the wreckage. Instead Gage reminded him of the teenagers he had seen broken and bleeding in the back of the Army evac. helicopter.

DeSoto bit his upper lip, forced himself to focus his attention on each step of the various tasks he had to perform and blocked out his friend's suffering. Silently, he recited the steps as he worked: remove the sample tube, connect the IV tubing, and secure the catheter and line. As he taped the armboard to Johnny's forearm, he could hear the crackle of Velcro as Brice wrapped the tourniquet around the other arm.

******

Hank watched the line quiver as the stokes and backboard dropped into shaft. He remembered Roy's words and shifted nervously. "Chet's ok." Every station officer feared this day -- the day when he stood waiting, helpless to aid one of his men.

The metal mesh of the litter scraped on the rough edges of the gap hacked through the floor of the car. Stanley's heart skipped a beat when he saw Kelly's face framed in the hole. Waiting across the mouth of the shaft, Marco closed his eyes for a second at the sight of his friend. "Johnny?" Hank called down.

Chet studied the wooden surface of the spineboard for moment. Then he shook his head. "Not so good," he mouthed.

Hank turned back to the men around him. "We've got a badly injured man coming up, we need to give him a gentle ride," he instructed unnecessarily. He glanced at Jerry Beck, who nodded slightly and supportively.

******

"On three," ordered Brice, adjusting his grip on Gage's thighs.

Chet's knuckles blanched as he tightened his fingers around the handles of the backboard.

"One. Two. Three."

The room tipped around Gage. A lightening strike of pain cleaved his body from head to toe. Burning waves of nausea rippled through him. Sweat popped out on his forehead and trickled into his eyes; John gasped, open mouthed, for breath. Far away he could hear someone scream.

Chet cringed as Johnny cried out in pain. He eased the spineboard flat as the paramedics log-rolled Gage onto the hard surface. Craig efficiently secured the straps, while Roy wrapped thick strips of adhesive tape around the end of the board and over Johnny's brow, immobilizing the injured man's head. John's lips trembled and he stared blindly upwards, his eyes huge, dark and glittering in the harsh illumination of their flashlights. Kelly turned away.

Roy did not let himself glance at his partner's face until he was done packaging John for transport. When he finally looked, Johnny was again unconscious.

Half-standing, half-crouching DeSoto helped carry the loaded backboard to the waiting stokes. The twisted wire mesh cut into Roy's fingers as they lowered Johnny. He stared numbly at his hand pinned in place between the litter and the board. He yanked free, some distant level of his mind registering the pain of his pinched and torn digits, and groped in his pocket for the two lengths of webbing he kept in the event he needed an emergency harness. Rapidly, he worked to tie the spineboard to the metal basket, hearing the voice of the instructor at Del Valle tangle with the voice of his own fears. "Secure the backboard to the stokes; don't support both the weight of the victim and backboard with the lashing...." Every time his eyes closed he could see diagrams of the rich supply of blood vessels passing beneath the pelvic bones, each leaking in eye blink long hemorrhages.

"Ok, we're all set here," Chet grunted as he tested the stretcher harness one last time, pulling on the wedge shaped spider.

Brice ripped open the bag containing a yellow rescue blanket and wrapped the sheet around Gage. Beneath his hands John began struggling feebly and moaning.

"Easy, Johnny," murmured Roy. "Lie still." He touched Gage's shoulder. To his surprise Johnny's eyes opened. "We have you immobilized, so you just take it easy and keep still." He let his hand linger.

" 'k," breathed Gage, calming. "Hurts." His words were slurred.

"I know." Roy canted his head toward Craig, watching the young man thread a crisscross of rope over John. "Be gentle," he snapped.

The paramedic glanced over the top of his glasses and continued his work without comment.

Roy flushed, realizing he was taking out his anxiety on the man.

"We'll be out of here in a few minutes," said Kelly to Gage. The firefighter looked up from attaching the tag line to the foot of the stretcher. "Fresh air, water.... pretty nurses."

The corners of Gage's lips quirked upwards as his eyelids closed.

Roy stood, clipping his belt to one of the ropes dangling through the gap. "Let's get him out of here." He lifted the HT. "Pull me up level with the top of the cab," he instructed. The belt tightened against DeSoto's waist as he rose. Pushing with his gloved hand, Roy forced his body away from the razorlike metal edges. The assent took a subjective eternity. His muscles ached with weariness and strain as he scrambled onto the roof of the elevator car. DeSoto acknowledged that he was operating sheerly on adrenaline and training reflex. "Pull him up! Slowly!" He stood, staring down at the head of the stokes framed by the twin holes and praying he would not make a mistake.

******

The sound of the ratchet on the safety brake reminded Stanley of antique Regulator clock Captain McConnike had kept in his office. Every morning before line-up, McConnike would stand next to the clock, wind the movement and think of new ways to make his engineer's life miserable. Shaking his head, Hank examined the gate of the caribineer on his ladder belt, making sure he was secured before leaning over the edge of the hoistway. Below him, DeSoto hung from a rope alongside the stokes, stabilizing the stretcher. Stanley could just barely see Kelly's and Brice's feet, as the firefighters braced, leaned back and held the tag line taunt

The top of the litter rose above the floor. He reached out and seized the upper rail, starting to pivot the stretcher horizontal. A sharp snap told him Belliveau had fastened off next to him.

"Slack," yelled Hank. The rope loosened, Stanley and Belliveau dragged the stretcher onto solid ground. He looked down. Gage's face was the damp gray he recognized as a hallmark of shock. "Johnny?" Hank scrambled over the chain, unclipped his belt and squatted next to the litter. "Johnny?" he asked again. The injured paramedic didn't move. Stanley frowned.

Belliveau grunted as he hauled DeSoto over the edge. He climbed over the chain leaving Roy unfastening from the rescue line. He squatted next to the stokes and pulled the bags of IV solution from beneath Gage's shoulders. He nodded to Lopez and Stoker. "Get him outta here."

DeSoto dropped the line and trotted after the litter.

******

Kelly watched the biophone and drug box, tied to a rope, rise through the hole in floor of the elevator. Brice scanned the nooks and crannies of the pit, compulsively checking for forgotten equipment. The beam from his flashlight passed over the stack of photographs Gage had left lying on a pile of debris. A sheet of notebook paper, covered with neat handwriting fluttered against the rubble. Brice hesitated, the circle of light illuminated the mementos a moment and then moved on.

Chet ducked into the shadows. Bending, he picked up the pictures, folding them carefully into the letter. He dropped them into the pocket his turnout coat.

"Kelly," called Brice, holding out end of the rescue line.

Kelly slipped the loop tied in the end of the rope over the hook on his ladder belt. "On belay," he yelled. The ladder belt tightened around his waist and at long last his feet left the floor of the elevator shaft.

******

The lights from the ambulance flashed on the walls of the surrounding office buildings and reflected on Brice's glasses lenses as the paramedic bent next to the squad, stowing climbing gear in one of the rear compartments. Chet set down the two cases he had carried and watched the rig pull past the barricades. Roy and Bob were visible through the windows. DeSoto had the stethoscope in his ears again. The ambulance driver hit the siren as he pulled out of the cordoned-off area.

Chet looked at the darkened sky beyond the circle of light cast by Light 103's flood lamps. The low pulsating of the generators on a dozen rigs filled the space around him and made his teeth hurt. The hum of power saws and pounding of hammers was too loud. Kelly bowed his head, suddenly disoriented. A mix of sawdust and glass fragments crunched beneath his boots.

"I want to dress that laceration and look at your hand." Craig gestured Chet toward the back bumper of 16's squad.

Kelly shook his head. "I'm fine." He looked up, watching the ambulance disappear in the maze of downtown streets.

"I," began Brice.

"You heard the man, Kelly," interrupted Stanley. He met Chet's eyes and held the man's gaze until Kelly sat. Marco stood behind the station officer leaning wearily on a pry bar and looking worriedly at his friend.

"Aww, Cap..."

Calmly, Hank cut off Chet protests. "Brice, take him into Rampart and have the docs check him out," he said over Kelly's head. He looked down at the firefighter. "Marco or I will pick you up."

"Yes, sir," replied Brice, rolling up Kelly's sleeve. He ignored Chet's glare and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around the firefighter's arm. "After I get your vitals, I'll clean that up and take you in."

Sighing, Kelly closed his eyes and imagined the ambulance's route to Rampart, estimating the transport time. "Johnny, I'm sorry," he whispered.

******

John dropped low, ducking beneath the killing heat. His breath folded back against his face inside the mask and sweat ran down his thighs and calves into his boots. He could taste his own adrenaline edged excitement. A still unlocated fire had transformed the modest house in a blue-collar neighborhood into an alien world. Black smoke surrounded him, cutting off the cooler human world. Only the stiff water filled canvas umbilical between his hands provided a link to that other realm. Its movements reminded him that the tough veteran, Ellison Reed, was hauling hose behind him. As they had gone in, the older man had leaned close and whispered, "Enjoy it, because the only time you're not gonna to have to fight me for this nozzle is when you're rookie scum."

A flicker of reddish-orange appeared for a split second in the darkness. Fire, John thought, his heart pounding in his ears. He opened the valve, pointed the stream at the fleeting light, and moved it in a wide circle. The fine spray vaporized into fire killing steam. Hot water dripped across the faceplate of his mask. He inched blindly forward.

From somewhere nearby came a crash, the distinctive sound of an axe smashing a window. Always break the top first and clear the frame, Gage, so the glass doesn't fall down and cut your hand off, whispered the remembered voice of one of his instructors. Thinner gray spots appeared in the smoke. The flashes of light became longer and yellower. Charred furniture and hungry flames appeared. Jerry Giovonni materialized out of the haze, squatting at the other end of the room, dousing the fire with the stream from his hose.

The alarm on Johnny's airpack sounded. Another firefighter stepped forward, took the nozzle from his hands, and turned him toward the door. Pulling off his mask, John walked out of the house into the daylight. On the narrow porch he paused, feeling limp, drained and transported -- like his uncle always said he felt after a sweat. Slowly Gage picked his way through the puddles back to the truck. As he attached a new bottle to his regulator and slipped the tank back onto his shoulders, he realized he had stepped over another threshold going into that house. The fire had burned away his old life.

******

For a long moment Gage sat in his truck in Station 10's parking lot, nervously twisting the strap of his backpack around his fingers and studying the pattern made by the webbing. Today was his first assignment since the end of his probationary period. A new house, a new group of people and possibly new troubles. John remembered the silences, the stiff hostile body language, the pompier axe inscribed 'Gage's tomahawk', and the invisible wall that seemed to separate him from his colleagues -- all the little things which conveyed the true feelings many had for the department's efforts to increase minority representation.

Gage sighed. Thirty minutes early, he thought, resting his hands on the steering wheel and looking at his watch. Through the screen door at the back of the station, he could see the pale green walls of the mess. A stocky black man scrubbed the counters with long careful strokes and said something to a short blond haired man sitting at the table with a newspaper folded in his lap. The blond threw back his head, laughed, and grabbed a dishtowel laying on the table snapping it at the other firefighter. The sight cheered John. He lifted his bag.

******

"Gage, go!"

Johnny looked up at the instructor, Jerry Birdwell, standing above him. The man's face was in shadow as he leaned over the edge. John was hanging ten feet down the side of the hundred-foot tower at the Del Valle Technical Rescue School, and directly below the Birdwell's feet.

"Go."

John relaxed his left hand slightly, loosened the tension on the rope he held beneath his right hip and pushed away from the surface of the wall. The line slipped smoothly over his hip, around the metal descender and through his hand. He dropped twelve feet before his boots touched the blackened concrete surface. Above, he could hear the instructor saying something to the other students about edge protection. Gage kicked away from the wall. The heat generated by the line passing over Johnny's glove spread from his palm through his entire body. The fact that he needed to complete this course at the top of his class, so he could get a permanent assignment to the Rescue Squad at 10's, was far from his mind as he pushed off again. Instead, he thought about flying.

Too soon his feet touched the ground. Quickly, he unwrapped the line from his belt. "Off rope!" he yelled to the waiting student.

For a minute Gage stood at the bottom of the tower, looking up and scratching his nose. A hot wind stirred over the eroded weedy lot surrounding the tower, raising a layer of dust, which stuck to the sweat soaked back of his neck.

The next firefighter in line climbed over the edge, leaned back, and slid down the rope. The man's face was pale and peeling with sunburn. He made short, slow hops. Johnny watched him work the rest of the way down. Gage turned and ran up the stairs.

The last student was sliding over the wall and getting his balance. Birdwell inclined his head toward John. "Gage?" he asked, never taking his gray eyes off the descending trainee.

"I thought... Well," stammered John, catching his breath, "I thought maybe I should do it again." He stopped, studying the instructor's face, in sharp profile against the hazy sky. The man's expression did not alter. "Make sure I get it down," he concluded, lamely.

Jerry's lips pulled into a thin line as he suppressed a smile. "You really want to be a rescue man, don't you, Gage?"

"Yes, sir. I do."

"Why?"

"Why?" echoed John.

"Yes. Why? Hauling hose is perfectly respectable work."

"Yes, sir it is." Johnny shifted nervously, uncertain why, or even if, the man was challenging him. "But, I want this. I want to do it, I can do it and I'll be good at it."

"We'll see," said the man, nodding toward the now empty rope.

John stepped forward.

******

Johnny stopped in the hallway and read the hand lettered sign taped to the frosted glass window of the door, 'Paramedic questions answered here. Last day, today. R. DeSoto FF.' Gage tapped lightly on the glass. There was no response. "Hello," he called pushing the door open. A dark wooden desk had been dragged into the middle of the small conference room and a wooden chair was positioned in front of the desk. The sluggish breeze from a window air conditioning unit stirred a stack of applications held down by a glass full of pens and pencils. Other than the furniture and rattling papers the room was still and empty.

Gage stepped back into the hall and let the door fall shut. He looked down at the partially completed application; instead of seeing the form, he saw the face of the wife of the SoCal Edison lineman and remembered the bitter taste of sweat dripping into his mouth as he uselessly did CPR. John shook his head. Hesitating, he twisted the paper and listened to two men standing outside the door to the Public Relations Officer's office. "That was a really great fire," said one man to the other. The absence of the interim training officer began to seem like a blessing. John turned...

...And almost ran into a tall, slouch shouldered man wearing working blues and holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. The man fixed his blue eyes on Gage. "You looking for me?"

Johnny pursed his lips and started to shake his head. Everything he had read and heard about PM11307, the bill to authorize trained fire department personnel to administer aid in the field, suggested it was a quick route away from the rescue work he loved. He'd tell the man no, and spend the drive back to his apartment figuring out what to tell his station officer. Gage opened his mouth.

"Looks like you were," he said, nodding at the forms in John's hand. "Come in." He opened the door and gestured to the chair in front of the desk. The firefighter walked behind the desk, light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures reflecting off his strawberry blond hair. "Roy DeSoto." He thrust out his hand.

"John Gage." He shook Roy's hand. "Squad 43?" Gage asked, trying to recall if he had ever worked with DeSoto

Roy nodded, watching the young firefighter. He reached out and pulled the application from John's hand. The metal office chair squeaked and sighed as he sat down.

Unnerved by the intensity of DeSoto's gaze, Gage turned his chair slightly before sitting. The fair fireman reminded him of the young men and women who came to the reservation every summer to work at the various church missions -- clean-cut, earnest and possessed of a missionary's zeal.

DeSoto took a sip of his coffee, looked at the form and put the cup down. Leaning forward, he slid the paper across the desk. "This application isn't signed," he said gently.

"I wanted to talk to you first," began John.^††

******

"Is this seat taken?"

Gage pressed his finger against the page to mark his place and head swimming from a discussion of acid-base balance, bicarbonate buffers and respiration, he looked up. DeSoto stood next to the table John had staked out in the corner of the busy Rampart cafeteria. Johnny scooped up the books and placed them on the floor next to his feet. "Go ahead," he said pointing to the now empty space and gathering his notes.

"Thanks." Roy sat. He lifted the bun of his hamburger, pulled off the tomato slices and tossed the vegetables onto his tray. Looking curiously at Gage, he took a bite.

John squirmed under the scrutiny, becoming aware of his loosened tie and the lab coat draped sloppily across back of the chair. Surreptitiously, he reached up and snugged the knot tight around his neck. DeSoto hid his grin in a cup of coffee. Gage blushed.

Roy nodded toward the two cheese sandwiches lying atop a rumpled brown sack. "You'd better eat up. Class starts in a half an hour."

"Huh?" mumbled John, still in the grips of his reading. "Oh yeah." Carelessly he lifted a wedge of sandwich and devoured it in four huge bites. Chewing, he gestured toward the sandwiches offering one to DeSoto.

Startled Roy shook his head. He picked up the one book still sitting on the table and flipped it over, examining the cover. The heavy yellow CSU-DH call number tag caught his attention. "Doing some extra reading?"

"Yeah," replied Gage, mouth full of bread, cheese, and the odd discomfort that DeSoto's questions always seemed to evoke. John felt like he was being tested. Across the table, the firefighter set down the book. The silence stretched between them. "My schooling didn't exactly prepare me for this," said Johnny finally.

"Where did you go to school?"

Shrugging, Gage swallowed nervously. "Far away from here." He picked up another half of the sandwich and ate, watching DeSoto out the corner of his eye. John remembered telling the battalion chief that he was too stupid to take advantage the opportunity offered by the paramedic training. And today in the presence of DeSoto's quiet assurance, Gage knew he had been right.

Roy set down the burger, his expression changing. He pointed toward John's notes. "Hardest thing I ever did." Pushing the plate of fries smothered in ketchup toward Gage, DeSoto reached over and flipped open the text, reading.

Johnny took a french fry and picked up his notes.

******

Roy DeSoto's world had narrowed to the glittering liquid falling in the drip chambers of the IV's and the frantic rhythm on the cardiac monitor. The sound of the wheels on the road cot snapping into place brought him back. Shaking his head, DeSoto clambered down the bumper of the ambulance and followed Belliveau through the doors of Receiving, holding the almost empty bags of Ringer's solution aloft. Cold sweat trickled down his sides as he realized Johnny was silent as the litter jolted over the threshold. During transport, every pothole and crack had made the injured paramedic moan, but now Gage was silent.

"Bob?" asked Brackett as Dixie guided the stretcher into the treatment room.

"Nearly 2L of Ringer's in transport. His bp is down: 70/40. Pulse 130, respirations 38," recited Belliveau, preparing to lift the backboard. "He became unresponsive a few minutes ago."

DeSoto attempted to slip the IV bags onto the stand. His hands refused to work right; it took him three tries to get the hooks through the tabs on the bags.

"On three," instructed Dixie, ducking beneath Roy's upraised arm. "One -- two -- three." She grunted as they lifted Gage onto the table.

DeSoto hurriedly pulled the datascope off John's legs, untangling the cable and attaching it to the scope on the crash cart. He watched the thin line of light for a second, reassuring himself that his partner was still alive. Mike Morton pushed past him, stripping the blanket from Johnny's unmoving form. Roy found himself staring at the rumpled plastic sheet as it landed in the corner. The bright yellow made his tired eyes burn and tear.

The handsome resident leaned over Gage, pressing a stethoscope against John's heaving chest, listening. Behind him, a dark haired nurse pulled an instrument tray from the cabinet. Another nurse inflated the blood pressure cuff wrapped around Johnny's arm. "Chest's clear," Morton said, removing the earpieces.

"The red top?" asked Brackett, probing Gage's abdomen. He frowned as he moved his fingers across the paramedic's swollen belly.

"Here." Belliveau handed the Vacutainer to the older nurse. He held the clipboard with the patient care form out and she hastily signed the paper.

Bracket looked up at McCall. "Dixie, let's set up for a peritoneal lavage."

The nurse nodded, slitting the cover on a plastic tray. She began unwrapping a length of tubing.

A portable x-ray machine burst through the door, forcing Roy to step further away from the exam table. "Get films of the lateral c-spine, chest, pelvis and lower extremities. Flat plate of the abdomen and set up to do an IVP," began Brackett.

Listening to Kel, Roy looked through the crowd of people and equipment surrounding Johnny. The bright lights of exam room gave everything an overwhelming clarity. His friend's face was dirty and a huge bruise covered the lower right side of Gage's stomach, disappearing beneath his bony hip. Sweat and filth matted John's hair. The voices of the medical staff dissolved into a dissonant tide, as DeSoto watched them work.

Morton looked up from the tubes and needles of the test he was about to administer and locked eyes with DeSoto. "Get him outta here," snapped Mike.

McCall glanced out the corner of her eye at DeSoto, her hands remaining busy with the tubing and Gage. Roy's face was alarmingly blank and his eyes red rimmed and moist. "Bob, take him to the waiting room," she ordered.

Bob placed 16's datascope in Roy's hands. "Come on, Roy," murmured Belliveau, soothingly, taking DeSoto's arm. "Let's give them some room to work."

Roy looked over his shoulder as the treatment room door closed, wondering whether he would every see Johnny again.

******

The sharp smell of the disinfectant tickled the inside of his nose, making DeSoto sneeze. He turned away from the bucket and rags kept in the bay for cleaning the rigs and sneezed again. The paramedic sat on the ground outside the ambulance entrance to Emergency. Sighing, Roy leaned his head back against the fading warmth of the cement wall and pulled his knees against his chest. He stared at the street lamps twinkling on the flanks of the Angeles Mountains.

"Roy." Dixie stood inside the door to receiving. She squinted into the shadows filling the bay. The overhead lights glittered on her platinum hair.

DeSoto pushed to his feet. "Dix," he said, straightening and pressing a hand to his stiff back, "How's Johnny?" He studied her tired face. The head nurse should have been off-shift hours ago.

McCall gestured for him to come back into the hospital. "They have taken him up to surgery."

Roy followed the nurse down the hall to the staff lounge. "And?" The tall, slender table lamp on the end table next to the couch cast a pool of yellow tinted light in the dim room. A rumpled copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association lay half off the edge of the table. Nervously touching his tongue against his upper lip, DeSoto watched her.

Dixie removed two mugs from the shelf and filled them from the large coffee urn. She sat on the couch and held a cup out to the firefighter, studying the dark circles beneath his eyes. "He's lost a lot of blood. Kel isn't sure how extensive the internal injuries are. We got frank blood in the peritoneal lavage." Leaning her head back, she kicked off her shoes and sipped gingerly at the steaming liquid.

DeSoto took the cup and stared into the depths, recalling the grim outcomes of the severe pelvic fractures he had seen over the years. "Is he..." He swallowed hard. "Is..."

"Is he going to be OK?"

Roy nodded.

"It's hard to say." Dixie met Roy's gaze. "Johnny is strong. We'll do everything we can for him."

Bowing his head DeSoto studied his boots.

McCall pursed her lips. "Chet is upstairs waiting."

"How is he?"

"Worried sick."

"He's not alone," sighed DeSoto.

******

Chet jumped when Marco's stomach growled. He had been mesmerized, studying his taped fingers and reliving the moment when he injured them.

"Sorry, man," murmured Lopez. On the couch to the left of the chairs where the two men sat, Joanne was cradling her sleeping husband's head in her lap. At the sound of Marco's voice Roy stirred and mumbled.

Nodding Kelly fixed his gaze on the window behind Joanne, staring into predawn darkness covering the parking lot. He pulled the packet of Gage's pictures from his shirt pocket and turned it over and over in his hands. The cheap paper was rough beneath his fingers. An hour ago Brackett and an unfamiliar doctor had come in and told them Johnny was out of surgery, but not yet out of danger. Suddenly, it seemed very important for Gage to have the little support pictures his family might offer.

Marco's stomach growled again.

Stanley looked up; he had been alternately reading and dozing over a magazine. "Why don't you go get something to eat," he whispered, glancing across the room at Roy.

Kelly shook his head.

Mike stood and seized Kelly's arm, pulling Chet to his feet. "That wasn't a request. That was an order," he explained as he and Marco hustled the firefighter into the hall.

"Surely that finely honed mechanism you call a body is in need of some fuel," teased Lopez. "You're almost as bad as Johnny."

At the mention of Gage's name his stomach gave an acid heave. "I'm not hungry...." He pulled away from the two men. "I'm going to get some air," he said jerking his thumb toward the elevator. "Go on without me."

******

Chet stepped from the elevator on the ninth floor and headed for the ICU. At the entrance to the unit he unconsciously began to tiptoe, unable to shake the feeling he was trespassing -- which he was.

"Can I help you?" asked a slender, red-headed nurse. She stepped in front of him, blocking his path.

"I want to give these to John Gage."

The nurse looked at him. "I'll give them to him," she said, holding out her hand.

Kelly met her green eyes, imagining what she saw. Mike had brought his overnight bag from the station. After the doctors had finished with him, Chet had changed in the restroom -- fresh clothes, more deodorant... He had cleaned up as much as he could, but his hair was dirty and he needed a shower. His taped fingers and sutured face ached. Sensing her disapproval, Kelly returned the pictures to his pocket. "Naah, I'll," he faltered. "I'll give them to him later."

The young woman looked at his bandaged cheek. Her expression softened. "Come with me. We'll put those where Mr. Gage will find them when he wakes up."

Chet followed the nurse into a small curtained room. Johnny's hair still carried traces of the sickly recovery room odor of anaesthetic and he lay far too still. Tubes and wires sprouted from all over the paramedic's body. Kelly stared at the even rise and fall of Gage's chest. He looked away, only to see various drainage tubes emerging from beneath the covers. "Oh my God," he whispered. Fatigue finally caught him and his knees wobbled.

The nurse grabbed his elbow. "You alright?"

Kelly nodded. Gently, he slid the packet of pictures under John's fingers.

******

Marco stood next elevator door and watched Chet walk down the hall from the ICU. His partner looked on the verge of collapse; Kelly's face was white and his eyes sunken back into dark circles. "You're going to go home," declared Lopez quietly.

"Marco," started Chet.

Lopez's dark eyes meet Kelly's. He shook his head slowly and firmly.

Kelly sighed. He knew that expression all too well. Defeated Chet looked down, studying the toes his boots while they waited for the elevator.

******

Wearing a worn pair of shorts and rubbing his wet hair with the thick pink bath towel that his sister was still trying to find, Chet stumbled into his living room/dining room/kitchen, following a spicy mouthwatering smell. Marco stood at the stove, stirring the contents of a skillet. A filmy bag, imprinted with the logo of the market around the corner, sat on counter.

"Is cooking against your religion or something?" Lopez pointed to a greasy pizza box wedged in the top the trash can.

"Hey that was dinner!"

Marco listened to Chet's tone. The firefighter sounded better now that he was away from the hospital. "It had fur. I thought it might be your roommate."

Chet sputtered.

Lopez ignored Kelly's performance. He pulled two plates from the dish drainer and spooned up the contents of the skillet. He slid the dishes onto the table. "Eat," he instructed, pouring two glasses of orange juice.

Kelly stared at the steaming plate of chorizo, nopales and eggs, the thick slices of mango and the seashell shaped sweet roll. "Macro chili in the morning...." he began the familiar station refrain about Macro's breakfasts.

"A man whose refrigerator contains only wheat germ, a jar of mayonnaise, a six pack, and a box of Kodachrome, shouldn't complain. He should shut up and eat his breakfast." He watched his colleague swallow a mouthful of eggs and give the concoction on his plate an appreciative nod. "I don't know what it is with you and Gage, don't either of you ever go to the store?"

Kelly set down his fork.

Marco immediately regretted his mention of the paramedic. "Chet it's not your fault."

Chet pushed his chair away from the table and tipped it back, resting his head against the avocado green door of the refrigerator. He closed his eyes. "You weren't there, Marco," he answered at last, his voice weary and rough.

"No, I wasn't. But Roy told me what happened."

"Roy wasn't there either." Chet opened his eyes and at stared to the ceiling. The surface of his eyes glittered in the early morning sunlight spilling through the windows.

Lopez waited, listening.

"He told you I was climbing up toward a hole in the debris and knocked stuff down on Gage."

Marco nodded.

"Well, I didn't quite tell him everything." Chet took a deep breath. "Johnny and I fought about whether I should even climb up there...." He could feel Marco's eyes on him as he recounted the events.

When Kelly had finished, Lopez sat studying iridescent simmer of the grease from the sausage on his empty plate. "Chet," he sighed, setting down the fork, "it still sounds like an accident."

Abruptly Kelly pushed to his feet and paced violently in front of the window, until the toll extracted by the past two days caught him and he stopped. He stood shaking in the bright light. When he spoke his voice was nearly inaudible. "I panicked."

Rising to stand behind his friend, Marco started to speak," Chet..."

Kelly turned to face Lopez. "I kept imagining myself slowly dying of dehydration and starvation, trapped in that dark hole. I didn't care what Gage said -- maybe I even knew he was right. I just had to get out of there."

"Everyone has their limits." Lopez shook his head, recalling the day he had found his. "But, I've worked with you. I doubt you freaked out."

"How can I ever trust myself again?" he asked plaintively.

Lopez studied Kelly's face. "I trust you."

******

Roy stopped just inside the cubical in the far corner of the ICU. The shapely dark haired nurse in blue scrubs, who had escorted him to John's bedside, stood by his side speaking to him in a soft low voice. He nodded, too tired to sort out her words. She patted Roy's arm and left. DeSoto slipped quietly into the chair beside the bed and watched his partner sleep.

John's face was ashen and slack. The dark lashes lay motionless on his partner's cheeks. The purple and red beginnings of a bruise marked his cheekbone. A unit of blood hung on the IV stand next to a bag of normal saline, the dark tubing snaking across Gage's still form. He drew slow deep breaths beneath an oxygen mask. A NG tube was taped to the paramedic's face and blankets were draped over Johnny, obscuring but not completely concealing the framework of bars, screws and nuts that supported his broken pelvis. Roy cringed as he counted the small bumps in the covers caused by the thin metal pins sticking through John's skin into the bones. Beneath Gage's hand lay a bundle of photographs.

Roy looked wistfully at the blood pressure cuff on the wall and debated checking Johnny's vital signs. Instead he slumped forward, elbows on his knees. His fingers raked through his dust caked hair as his forehead came to rest on his palms. Other than napping while Johnny was in surgery, he hadn't really slept in over 36 hours. The room swam. Blinking desperately, DeSoto fought to think clearly, making a list of things he needed to do: move Gage's truck from the station, get John's toothbrush...

Johnny sat on the hard wooden chair beside Roy's desk at headquarters, listening to the firefighter explain what would be involved in paramedic training. He squirmed on the unyielding surface, his hips and abdomen aching. The room seemed too dark and the other man far away.

"...get your toothbrush," instructed DeSoto.

"Huh?" asked Gage, turning to look at the paramedic. Instead of getting clearer, DeSoto's face dissolved in a wash of blackness and pain.

Roy looked up as John moaned, realizing he had been talking as he planned. The young man's voice was weak and raspy. "Johnny?" DeSoto asked. The heavy fabric of his turnouts rustled as he stood. He surrendered to his earlier urge and lifted Gage's wrist, feeling a steady pulse.

Gage forced open his eyes. The blurry image slowly resolved into his partner's face. With difficulty he licked his lips and swallowed. A thick fog filled his head. His hip and stomach felt tight and hot, the discomfort fast becoming pain.

Roy shifted uncomfortably beside the bed. "Take it easy. You're in Rampart and you've just had surgery."

"Mmm." John tried to understand what Roy was saying, but his leaden brain refused. A warm numbing tide washed over him, carrying him away.

"Want me to call anyone back home?"

Go back home? Johnny took a deep breath, tightening his fingers around the photographs. "This..." he whispered.

Roy leaned closer, straining to hear the words.

"is... home..." finished Gage.

The nurse came back into the cubical. "Time to go, Mr. DeSoto."

Roy stood, stumbling in his weariness. He looked over his shoulder at his friend. "Go back to sleep, Johnny. Rest and get better." But, Gage's eyes were already closed.

-------------<51>-------------

^* Excerpts of government reports from The New Indians by Stan Steiner, New York: Delta Books, 1968.

^** From "Peace Pipe" written by Michael Donovan, directed by Christian Nyby and produced by R.A. Cinader.

^† The Trail of Broken Treaties occurred late summer and fall of 1972 and was a cross country march intended to draw national attention to conditions on Indian reservations and in urban Native communities. The march ended with the unplanned occupation of the BIA offices, a result of numerous logistical and communications breakdowns and hundreds of years of frustration at the arbitrary control the Bureau has over Native peoples' lives.

^†† From "The Wedsworth-Townsend Act" written by Harold Jack Bloom and R.A. Cinader, directed by Jack Webb.

author's notes: I would like to thank MA, Kate S., CB, KJ, Grey, Pat, RK and Mary for their help and patience. I like to salute my brave beta-readers Jeff and Meggan. And a special thanks to Celia Not Help Him.

The title of this story refers to the federal policy of the '50's and 60's to relocate Native people to the cities and terminate the trust status of reservation land, opening it for sale to and development by non-Indian people. This act drastically changed the relationship of the tribes to the US, reviving the on going 'Indian Wars'.

The 1960's were an era of enormous change for Indian people. For the first time more than half of all Native people were urban rather than rural, and the cycle of travel between the cities and reservations brought new ideas, new mobility, and a new awareness of the difference between tribal and mainstream life. The economic boom, which had changed the standard of living for the rest of the country, had left Indian people behind. The price of admission to that booming economy was assimilation. Native languages, traditions and land bases were critically threatened. A new, more dominant culture savvy leadership, comprised largely of WWII vets, was in power within tribal government. The GI Bill had provided wider access to higher education, laying the intellectual framework for the infant Red Power movement. Mel Thom, Clyde Warrior, Shirley Witt and Lee Brightman were inspiring and training the next generation of activists. The National Indian Youth Council was at the height of its influence, thousands of Native students read ABC (American Before Columbus). For the first time a message of pride and an image of success WITHOUT assimilation, became widely available.

In this climate, the assertion of tribal sovereignty by the tribes of the Pacific Northwest (who were facing the extinction of their way of life due to increased commercial fishing) was the spark that started a brushfire. These flames -- contrary to popular opinion -- were not extinguished at Wounded Knee in 1973, but have profoundly changed the landscape of current Native politics and life. No longer do we merely survive but We Live.