Page 34 of Into the Fire

He touched the box. “Yeah,” he said, and handed me the witness binder.

We split the contents of the box. Boone turned pages beside me and took notes. He slid the weather record across without a word. I read the wind column and handed it back.

“Upvalley all day,” I said. “Same as Whitmore.”

Boone nodded. He set it down to his left, on a pile he was building. It was one of three.

“You’re making stacks.”

“Yes, I’m sorting.”

“Is there a system, or do the stacks just trust you?”

“Read your binder, Vega.”

He’d shoved his sleeves up to work. I tried not to look at his forearms, but that meant I watched his lips when he spoke instead.

The witness statements were separated by tabs with names on them, and Nash’s was first.

It closed with; I fell on the burned slope during egress. Kroeger returned to my position. He signed it.

Fellhauer came next. It was two paragraphs. He’d been on the south flank with Boone and saw smoke and little else.

Boone’s was shorter than Nash’s. His entire afternoon had happened a quarter mile from the fork, holding a line on the south flank, and the statement read like Boone talking: times, positions, and radio traffic. He embellished nothing.

Halfway down was a line about receiving a lookout transmission regarding possible unidentified personnel.

I put the page down.

I’d save that for later.

Boone looked up. “Something there?” Before I could answer, he came around the table to my side.

There was a tab with my name on it. It held one page, single-spaced, no signature block or interview header.

“Statement summary,” Boone said.

“That’s not—” I pulled the binder toward me. “I talked for an hour. Probably more.”

The summary said Jumper D. Vega sustained a head injury during egress and was treated at the base. It said his recollections following the injury were fragmented, and he could not provide a consistent account of the sequence or of his own position during the entrapment. It said he reported unusual fire behavior on the north side that could not be reconciled with observed weather conditions. The observations could not be independently verified.

I read it to the end, and then I sat very still. Every sentence was true.

I had a head injury. My recollections were fragmented. I couldn’t give a consistent sequence. The fire behavior I reported couldn’t be reconciled with the weather, but that was why I wanted somebody to investigate it.

Each line was defensible.

But it wasn’t an account of what I said. It was a statement about why nobody should listen to me.

I read it again.

Boone had returned to the box, digging through it to find what this page summarized.

My details were gone. I’d sat on a cot and told them a man had been on the far side of the fork, below the crew, where nobody had any reason to be. I’d said it more than once, because I was confident about it. I’d radioed it in before the snag, before the injury they kept citing, when my head was clear. And this page didn’t mention it.

“There’s nothing,” Boone said from the box. “No interview notes. No recording log or long version of what we read in the summary.” He checked the empty binder pocket a second time, as if paper might have arrived since the first check. “A summary of a statement that isn’t anywhere.”

I had one hand flat on the table. The other held the summary page, and it was shaking.