Page 80 of Into the Fire

Dante was whole.

“Helmet,” Dante said.

We got it off him slowly, my hands bracketing his head while Hollis worked the strap. His hair was soaked flat, and he smelled like crushed hay and sweat. He lay there in the stubble, looking up at the sky.

“Where’d the main land?” he asked.

“East edge of the meadow,” Hollis said. “In the grass. I marked it off the truck.”

“Nobody touches it.”

“I’m keeping them away,” I said.

He nodded up at the sky and let his head settle back. He closed his eyes for a second.

I put my hand on the side of his neck, thumb along his jaw below the scrape. His pulse was pounding hard under my fingers.

Dante rode over to the canopy, sitting up on the tailgate because lying flat hurt too much. He winced getting off and stood over the canopy with his arms crossed against the bruising.

The three of us looked at what had nearly killed him.

Laid out on the ground, it didn’t look like much. Fabric and lines. The wind moved a panel, and then it settled.

Hollis crouched at the skirt. He didn’t lift anything, and he walked the edge of it in a squat, following the rigging by eye until the line crossed the top of the canopy. He stopped and looked at it for a long time, hands on his knees.

“Line-over,” he said. “One line was caught over the canopy from the moment it opened. That’s what I had from the ground.”

Hollis duck-walked a few more feet along the lines. He checked the order they’d been packed in, or what the deployment had left of it. “Nothing’s cut,” he said. “No burns or tears. The line isn’t damaged, it’s just—it’s over the top. That happens in the bag or it happens at packing. It doesn’t happen in the air.”

“I know where it happens.”

“I’m saying it for the record, not for you.” He straightened up. “A line-over’s a packing malfunction. First one the book teaches. And a man’s first season back, packing his own main—” He shook his head, once. “Five years is five years, Boone. I’ve seen guys throw one after five weeks of winter. It wouldn’t need to be anybody’s fault. Bad luck and a fold in the wrong place. That’s all it would have to be.”

He didn’t mean to sound cruel. That was the thing about Hollis. He’d absorbed the evidence and reached a conclusion. Reasonable. Professional. Every word defensible.

Dante didn’t move. He was gray around the mouth and shaking as the adrenaline left him. He looked at the line lying over the top of the canopy where a line could only be if the man who packed it had put it there.

Then he looked at me.

“I packed it right.”

I’d stood at the end of the loft table the night before and watched every fold.

“I know,” I said.

Hollis said nothing. He pulled the truck keys out of his pocket.

I photographed the main where it lay before anybody moved. Then we marked the corners of it with stakes from the truck and left it where it lay.

“You’re staying with it,” I told Hollis.

“Yep.”

“Nobody comes near it. Not ground crew or a deputy without me. Nobody. I don’t care whose name is on their shirt.”

“Understood.”

I keyed the radio. The Otter had landed while we worked; I heard the base in the background when Marty answered.