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    This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel
    This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel
    This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel
    Ebook346 pages5 hours

    This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel

    By Curtis Bradley Vickers

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    About this ebook

    In this unflinching, dramatic adventure, modern-day wildland firefighters and cattle rustlers struggle for survival in a changing western landscape. Braiding the stories of two firefighters (Morgan and Jeremy) and an abrasive laundromat custodian turned cattle-rustling grandmother (Jacklynn), This Here Is Devil’s Work is a fiery ride through the small towns of Nevada and Montana and the rugged expanse that connects them.

    A twelve-year veteran of the fireline, Morgan believes he knows what his teenage half-brother (Jeremy) needs to do to shrug off boyhood: spend a single season fighting forest fires to earn money for auto mechanic school. But when Jeremy joins the Ruby Mountain Hotshots and earns the respect and admiration of their fire boss (Bailey), Morgan must battle his own demons before they destroy him.

    Meanwhile, life hasn’t been easy on Jacklynn—she longs to escape the small town in Montana where she has lived her whole life and reunite with her daughter and grandson in Tucson. Jacklynn wants to make up for a lifetime of missteps by protecting the boy and making sure her daughter stays on course. On the same day that an attractive stranger waltzes into her life, an opportunity for life-changing money presents itself in the form of a dozen pregnant heifers. The only trouble is, they aren’t hers—not yet, anyway.

    Morgan and Jacklynn’s paths cross when lightning ignites a blaze in the untamed Montana wilderness, and their choices force each other into
    the fury.

    Set against the backdrop of wildfires raging across the West and the firefighters who continue to put their lives on the line, This Here Is Devil’s Work explores how love and loneliness can sour, and how they can eventually lead to desperate and self-destructive acts even for those people we consider heroic. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateFeb 23, 2021
    ISBN9781647790059
    This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel

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      This Here Is Devil's Work - Curtis Bradley Vickers

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      I

      HUNT

      HOTSHOTS

      Morgan took hold of the rabbit’s wounded haunches, amid the cheatgrass and brush on the far side of Needlepoint Mountain.

      Jeremy watched.

      The animal squirmed and it screamed. And though the boy could only manage to twist his still-hot shotgun barrel, instead of hopping to, like he ought, Morgan was determined to make him finish this job and help him gut the rabbit. They needed to get it home to Cassie soon, for the last dinner before they both left her for the fire season—Morgan’s twelfth, Jeremy’s first—and if they brought it with its head still intact, there’d be hell to pay.

      Morgan knew.

      He’d only once brought an undressed rabbit home, and then only because he’d been caught in a flash storm, the water gathering and rolling down into the plains behind Needlepoint fast enough and hard enough for Morgan and his hunting partner that day, Bailey, to feel it necessary to tuck their kill into a grocery bag and seek shelter. When he’d gotten home, Cassie was sitting under the metal awning out front, listening to the radio, and saw the haunches of the animal slipped out of the skin in the first few incisions Morgan had made down the pelt, down the chest, purple meat and a thin layer of white holding the muscle to the bone. Ever since, she acted like that one time had been every time: "Don’t ever do that again. Ever."

      She wasn’t only talking about the half-skinned rabbit.

      Morgan grabbed the loose hide of the rabbit’s skull, drawing out a fresh cry from the downed animal, and exposed its neck.

      Go on.

      Jeremy pulled the knife from the ground, then passed it from one hand to the other and back.

      Just got to fucking do it.

      Jeremy reached to hold the skin beneath the rabbit’s mouth. It pressed its paws on his hand, though, and unready for the resistance, Jeremy let go of the animal.

      Morgan curled his own hand under the animal’s jaw.

      Be quick now.

      Jeremy sawed at the skin over the throat. Blood surfaced, and the legs flailed, the rabbit pushed. Jeremy dropped the knife and tucked his face into his sleeve.

      Morgan waited for the rabbit to bleed out. But it continued to scream and buck, and Jeremy wouldn’t look at the job he’d botched.

      J, Morgan said, his jaw tightening. You only fail if you don’t finish.

      But he didn’t finish, and each passing second was a fresh torture to the creature.

      So Morgan took the animal, flipped it on its side, and put his knee on its ear. He grabbed the knife and buried it in the throat, pierced the esophagus and jerked through the flesh. The blood now poured, from the fresh slit and from the mouth, dampening the rabbit’s screams. When he’d felt its last shiver, Morgan lifted his weight off the body.

      Cassie would moan to him, later, about how Jeremy was still too young—for the hunt, for the fire season—and would use his performance today as the evidence. But a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, Jeremy wasn’t too young for his first hunt. He was too old. Dad should have taken the boy on this hunt five years before, but there was much that Dad hadn’t done for Morgan’s half-brother.

      Pay attention, now, Morgan said.

      He pulled an Iron Kids bread bag out of his pocket, lay it next to the kill. He turned the animal onto its back, slit it open along the sternum, down to the anus. He flipped the skin open, held the rabbit up in the air by its forepaws. He pulled the warm intestines out with two fingers curved behind the heart and stomach. He slipped his fingers under the belly, pulled the skin off the back feet and then over the head with one final yank, turning the pelt inside out.

      Not the way his father had taught him. Dad had taught him to open the animal at the spine and pull the legs through the slit down the back, like a woman stepping out of a dress. He’d snap the thighs off at the spine, drop the shanks in separate sandwich bags. Each piece received its own bag, and each bag filled, the blood draining out the flesh his father hacked from the bone, bulging the sacks of meat.

      Morgan had done things this way until just three summers before. That was the year he’d met his first girl hotshot, a rookie, Bailey. They’d worked side by side. Him on the half-ax/half-pick Pulaski tool, breaking through roots to make the initial efforts to clear the land of needles and leaves ahead of one of the summer’s advancing blazes. Her, one man behind him, pulling out of the fireline anything he’d missed, embers raining down on their helmets. For fourteen hours. A good day’s work.

      At camp that evening, Bailey erected her pup tent near Morgan’s and the two cracked open their MRES together, seasoned with the smoke clinging to their hands.

      Bailey smiled and talked about hunting with her brothers, how just the winter before she took down a sixteen-pointer with a clean shot. Just solid, you know? she said. Deer slug. Down he goes.

      Morgan hadn’t tasted elk meat in his life, but he was certain his dreams that night would be filled with mounds of it. Bailey doling out a share for him with her bare fingers.

      Don’t have elk back home, but we got rabbit, Morgan said.

      Good meat, she said.

      It is, he said, not knowing how to work the conversation around to his need for a partner, now that his father had left town. Cassie, as with all things outdoors, had shown no interest in joining him. One of the many differences Morgan had tallied between her and the hotshot that summer.

      I haven’t been rabbit hunting in years, she said.

      She looked down at her processed BBQ chicken sandwich on unleavened bread.

      Like to, though.

      Yeah?

      After the fire season had ended, deep in November, just before the chill really set in, the two spent a gray dusk together. She let him skin the first rabbit they took down, initially, but seeing the massacre he was making of it, she showed him the superior way he’d used ever since. The clean line down the belly, the swift tearing of skin from flesh.

      Just like that, she said. Easy peasy.

      Later, he’d started the process on their second kill, but before he could break the head off, a flashflood had covered the land and sent Bailey and Morgan to find shelter in the cramped cab of her S-10 pickup truck, their second kill just half-skinned and bagged, while they waited to see what would come next.

      Now, Morgan removed the skin from the rabbit’s body, like a glove from a hand swollen in the cold. Leaving the body raw and fresh as a newborn baby boy. For Cassie’s sake, he twisted the head off, then broke the bones above the feet and slit the tendons, holding them to the animal. Left the head for the coyotes.

      You paying attention, boy?

      When the head rolled toward Jeremy’s feet, the boy jumped back. His face was pale.

      Morgan whipped the Iron Kids bread bag open and slid the meat in. He tossed the pelt to the side, wiped his blade again on a fresh tuft of cheatgrass and sheathed it.

      You want to get Morgan, sweetie? Cassie said to the boy, who stood near her, adding seasoning to the rabbit stew.

      Morgan had been relaxing in a wingback chair, the sounds of supper soothing him nearly to sleep. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, pulled his socked feet off the iron belly of the pellet stove.

      Smells good, he said. He came into the kitchen and put his arm around Cassie’s waist. I said, it smells good.

      Morgan pinched Cassie’s side, just above the hip of her jeans. She slapped at his wrist, so he pinched her butt. Stop it.

      You love it, he said.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

      But she did, and every once in a while, for a moment, things were good enough between them. Good like their first night together, four years ago. When his muscles were still swollen from a long season swinging the Pulaski and pulling trunks of willows from dried riverbeds. Her tilting her head back. Her putting her hand on his thigh. Laughing. Laughing at the sheer pleasure of watching Morgan peel the twenties off the gangster’s roll he always had in September in those days. That all you got? she said and slid her body closer to his, her denim shorts bunching up on the north side of her thigh.

      Remembering that tight body, he said, More there to pinch than there used to be.

      Watch it.

      He grabbed her at the chin and tilted her head up. Kissed her, tasted the Irish Rose she drank in the summers and in the days leading up to them.

      After he let go of her, Morgan winked at Jeremy. The boy blushed.

      Cassie dished up bowls of stew for the three of them, then pulled out her pack of Salems and lit up, watched her family.

      The boy ate with the kind of vigor you only feel after a long, satisfying day of work. After the hunt, he’d spent the evening working on one of Mike’s Camaros, coming home sweaty, streaks of grease up to his elbows.

      Mike told me to tell you, you ever want to sell your El Camino, he’s all over it.

      Mike was a sore spot with Morgan. The man owned the R Stop Garage and Convenience Store, and he’d done well enough by the boy, teaching him how to wrench when Jeremy showed not only an inclination but a damn fine skill at it, like Dad. But he’d refused to give him paid status, on the basis that the boy needed to be ASE certified before he could justify that move. And, in that way, Mike was a sore spot for Cassie, too, because for the boy, ASE certified meant either working full-time, officially, for Mike for a good, long while, or going to mechanic school. And mechanic school was how the urgency for the boy to earn money had come about in the first place, the whole reason he was going to join the hotshots the very next day. One season on the fireline. Quick, big bucks. With some help from Morgan, it’d be enough to put him through mechanic school. Get him through school, Mike had said and clapped Morgan’s shoulder, and I’ll take him on—he’s a good kid—but not a minute sooner.

      Morgan said, Motherfucker’s been after my Elco since Dad gave it to me.

      Said he’d give you a fair price.

      "Make you work for nothing, then act like he’s going to treat me fair? Fuck him."

      He’s just passing along a message, Cassie said.

      This is exactly why he should be in the hotshots, by the way. Twelve years, and they’ve never once screwed me on a check. Time-and-a-half. Double-time pay—

      Morgan—

      Overtime pay. Hazard pay. Never no pay. Goddamn.

      I don’t want to talk about this.

      Morgan spooned a piece of rabbit to his mouth.

      I’m just saying.

      I heard what you’re just saying. You’ve been saying it and saying it.

      She stubbed her cigarette out and grabbed her spoon.

      I’m just saying, Mike is no boss. Barnes, he’s a damn good—

      Cassie closed her eyes, shook her head. But Barnes isn’t his boss, is he?

      After twenty years on the line, Barnes’s body had finally given in. Hard to believe the same big, burly man who’d recruited a room full of high school students twelve years before, Morgan included, had finally broken down. But he had. The second half of his last fire season hadn’t been the same, and it was only well into winter that Morgan had learned the cause of the shift. Last July, Barnes had had a stroke. Took a weekend off, and then was back on the line, but he was never the same again. Never again the man who’d stood in front of that room full of high school students and demanded their attention, demanded they listen if they want to know what it means to be a man—not one of these pussies these schools turn out. Morgan was hooked, then, by the bravado of the man, and over the years, he’d learned Barnes never blustered—only talked a truth backed up by a hard life on the line. Around the time Bailey showed up and started looking at him with the same admiration he’d looked at Barnes, he knew he’d chosen wisely in living the life of a hotshot. All brass, no brash.

      Won’t be any diff—

      Cassie turned away, to Jeremy. She said, How is it?

      Good, real good.

      And, damn it, I’ll—

      Spicy enough?

      Oh, my gosh, yes.

      Morgan stared at Cassie, but she wouldn’t return his gaze. Doesn’t understand the first thing about what makes a man. Would keep you a boy, she had it her way. Put a diaper on you. Coo at you until you threw up on her shoulder, shit yourself.

      Oh, I understand, she said. I understand completely. You’re fixing to take my beautiful boy up there and bring him back looking like Chisholm.

      Who’s Chisholm? Jeremy said.

      Morgan chewed a piece of thigh meat.

      Go ahead. Tell him. Tell him what he can look forward to.

      Chisholm had been a rookie years back. A flake at fire guard school, no doubt. Yet, he’d been called up to fight a burn in Colorado with his shitty-ass crew out of California. With the fire a ways off and the rest of the crew still punching their own line, Chisholm and the boys in his squad took their packs off, broke out the bologna and American cheese sandwiches the grub truck had given them that morning, and sat down for five on the line they’d just scratched. While they ate and cracked jokes, the fire crept closer, slow and quiet, until—at last—conditions were just right, and the thing blew up, leaped out toward the three firefighters. Chisholm’s drip torch, used to light back-burns, flash heated in the resulting firewhorl, exploded and sprayed the squad with flaming diesel. Chisholm got the worst of it. The skin that had given character and shape to his face slipped off into his hands, like butter off warm pancakes.

      That really happened? Jeremy said.

      Morgan shrugged. It had happened, but Cassie didn’t have to bring it up right now. It’s good to scare a recruit, but you don’t teach him to be fearful. You teach him to overcome that fear by showing him you have.

      You don’t have to go, you know? Cassie said and touched Jeremy’s forearm. No one can make you.

      He wants to go, Morgan said. Chisholm’s not going to happen to him. He knows that. You should have seen the way he smoked that rabbit out there.

      What’s that got to do with anything?

      Means he’s aware. Means he’s sharp. Means he’s smart, like you always say, and he’s going to keep his head on him. Means he’s got brass, and your bogeyman story’s not going to scare him off. Means he’s going to kick ass in fire guard school, and he’ll stay right with the Ruby Mountain Hotshots, the best goddamn crew this side of the Lolos. Morgan paused. What happened to Chisholm’s not going to happen to him. He’s too smart for it. And besides, I’ll be right there.

      That really happened? Jeremy said.

      Hey, don’t worry, kid. You’re a pup, but you’re twice the man that pretty boy Chisholm was, Morgan said. Besides, I’ll keep you right in my hip pocket, if I have to.

      Cassie smiled. Thought your hip pocket was already full, come summertime.

      She shrugged.

      Seems that way to me, she said. Sometimes it seems full even on into November.

      I came home, didn’t I? And I’ve been right here ever since.

      "Except when you head back out each and every summer—and, when you came home, you weren’t alone, were you?"

      I go back for the mon—

      Yeah, for the money. But it’s not just for the money. Is it?

      Fuck. Listen. The last time I talked to her, she was about this fucking close to dragging that man of hers down to Vegas, putting the ring on his finger, how hard up she is to marry him.

      It wasn’t long after the November hunt that Bailey had taken to a boy at her university, and the next thing Morgan knew the two had shacked up.

      Cassie walked over to the answering machine by the refrigerator. That so?

      That’s the straight shit, he said, gripping his spoon tight.

      She pushed the play button on the recording machine, and as it clicked on, she reached above the fridge and pulled down the bottle of Irish Rose.

      Morgie, it’s me. Listen, I’m coming through Wendover this afternoon. I thought maybe you’d want to meet up. Maybe get some lunch, talk about the crew? Maybe introduce me to your brother? Why aren’t you answering your phone? Come on, man. Anyway, I’ll give you a buzz later. We got a lot of catching up to do. Haven’t talked in forever. Anyway, back to single life for me. Ha ha. I’ll tell you all about it. Talk to you then, big guy.

      Cassie let the machine click and say, End of messages, and let another second or two draw out before she said, You want something to drink while I’m up, big guy?

      Morgan felt his ears burn. He buried his spoon deep into his bowl of stew and turned over discs of sliced carrot. He said, Calls everyone that.

      I bet she does—Morgie.

      Cassie poured herself a glass of the Irish Rose and drank it, leaning against the edge of the sink.

      Who is that? Jeremy said.

      That, Cassie said, is your boss. That’s the woman’s going to lead you out to fight those fires that tear up men’s faces. Barely older than you.

      Morgan pinned a piece of rabbit to the bottom of his bowl and shredded it with the blunt edge of his spoon. It was true, she’d jumped Morgan for the position, what with her university degree and paper qualification, and although that had had its own sting, at the moment he wasn’t worried about it. He wasn’t even thinking about it. He kept rolling her words over in his mouth: back to the single life for me.

      Later that night while the boy packed, Morgan took his spot at the pellet stove, absently scratching his pup Blue Rust’s neck under the collar, wondering what the single life was like for Bailey. How she’d filled her Friday nights. How she hoped to fill them, now on. If she thought, ever, about the what-ifs he pondered. If she wondered what might have happened had the winter after that first hunt not been so hairy and they’d repeated the excursion. Wondered if the single kiss they’d shared in the cramped cab of her S-10 pickup truck would have been repeated. Wondered if it would have been advanced.

      Wondered what it meant that she had thought to mention the breakup right away.

      Cassie put her hand on Morgan’s shoulder and said, I just can’t go along with it. It’s too dangerous. I’ve given up on you, but whether he’ll admit it or not, Jeremy’s scared.

      No, you’re scared.

      Damn right, I’m scared. Scared of him getting hurt. Scared of being alone. It was bad enough when it was just you. And her.

      It’s five months, Morgan said, surprised by how calm she talked about it now. Her words were not that different in intent than other years—feel guilty, you son of a bitch—but her tone was nearly somber. It wouldn’t change his mind—he’d decided to go and to bring the boy, and he was certain it was the right move—but this new tactic of hers, of trying to be reasonable, or to seem it, did give him pause. And that’s it. I’ve gone twelve years without getting hurt. I can bring him through one season safe. I’ll strap him to my back, I have to.

      She said, "I know where you’re coming from. It’s just, if I was going to say okay, I’d much rather see him go to a real school come fall. Like college college. Besides, what if— she leaned in closer so the boy wouldn’t hear, what if he gets sent to another crew, and you’re not there to keep him safe?"

      First, he won’t get sent to another crew. He’ll be good enough, Morgan said and hoped saying so would make it so. After all, fire guard school was short, but it was effective in separating the chaff from the wheat, and no chaff would be tolerated on the Ruby Mountain Hotshots. "Second, he doesn’t want college college. He doesn’t need that kind of school. He wants to fix cars. Nothing wrong with that."

      I know, she said. She opened her mouth, started to say something else, but didn’t.

      You know another way to get him in school, get him back here, and take over Mike’s shop, I’m all ears.

      I just—

      You just what?

      I get where you’re coming from. I do. And maybe if it was someone else’s kid, I’d think the same way, she said, forgetting—as she often did—that he was someone else’s kid. Morgan loved and cared for the boy, but he could honor the difference between a brother in need and a son. But I just keep thinking that if he was our boy—

      Cassie—

      "If he was our boy, you wouldn’t be so eager to put him on the fireline. There, she said and raised her hands, I said it. All right?"

      Morgan ran his fingers through his hair, closed his eyes. "If I was to have a son—if—and I had it in my power to set my son up for the life he’s best fit for—teach him a trade, make him a man a woman would be proud to have—and if that meant letting him serve one fire season—one—you goddamn bet I’d put him on the fireline."

      Like Chisholm?

      Yes, goddamn it, yes.

      The dog began moaning, growling as he came up close to consciousness. Cassie ran her toes over the dog’s fur. It adjusted its bones and quickly fell back to sleep.

      Doesn’t matter, though. Because he ain’t—ours.

      Doesn’t make any difference, she said.

      Morgan slept uneasy, woke thirsty, his shirt sweaty and wrinkled. He went to the bathroom, pissed a thick orange stream that foamed like apple juice.

      He got a glass of milk, leaned his weight on the kitchen counter with one hand and held the cool glass with the other. Through the bars separating the kitchen from the living room, he listened to the O.K. Corral movie Jeremy had fallen asleep to.

      Morgan took a long chug of his milk and put down the glass, an inch of white still sloshing in the bottom. In the dim and shifting glow the TV cast, he watched Jeremy sleep. Mouth open, a trail of drool down onto the arm cushion, hand tucked between his legs. Morgan had been thirteen when Jeremy was born. Old enough, he thought, to handle the news that his father had conceived a child outside of his marriage with his mother, old enough to understand the duty the man had to his mistress, the right his mother had to kick him out the door.

      He was left instead to imagine what Dad and Jeremy’s mother had worked out, figuring that the money he sent in Jeremy’s birthday cards each year was good enough. Jeremy had used the last set of bills to buy the Greyhound to Wendover, to find the return address the envelopes bore, right next to a date stamp seven years past. The handwriting, the address, the uneven scrawl of their father’s name: Leonard, Lenny to his friends and exes. Dad, all right, as hard as it was for Morgan to believe.

      The trouble was, by the time the boy got around to finding Leonard, he had moved on. Last Morgan had heard of him, he had taken a cocktail waitress from the Peppermill up to Sturgis. She returned six months later, the bruise upside her head the only tale she told about her adventures, but he never did come back. Morgan held little hope he’d see the man again, and he wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. For him, or for Jeremy.

      Morgan had all but decided to turn Jeremy in to the state when Cassie came home, heard the tale the boy had to tell, and sat him down to a dinner of cube steak and homemade French fries. And when they lay down to bed that evening, the strange boy in the room across the hall, Morgan stayed awake most of the night, listening to her speculate on the nature of Jeremy’s mother and how little concern she must have paid Jeremy.

      It’s just not right. It’s not natural. He’s a good one, and she’s not done him any favors.

      I’ll tell you what’s not natural, Morgan said. Bringing in a boy you don’t know from Adam, feeding him, and putting him to bed under your roof, just so he can tie you up in the middle of the night, do things to you—take each toe off at the knuckle, stuff shit in your ears, drop goldfish down your throat—then finally finish us off with a butter knife to the neck.

      Oh, shut up, she said and laughed. He’s harmless.

      Maybe, Morgan said.

      There’s no maybe about it, she said. He’s family. We can do better for him.

      Maybe, he said and thought about what little solace Cassie should take in the notion of having another of his father’s boys in the house—she hadn’t witnessed the bruise on that waitress’s head. Yet, he saw even then the boy’s potential to put to rest, at least for a while, Cassie’s demands that he give her a child of their

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