Leon’s Fire

Samson, our shot‐crew foreman, came to the Thunder Basin Hotshots in 1998 on a Greyhound ticket bought with money he made selling his hair to a wig shop. He said Navajo hair was the best because it was black and straight, and the wig makers liked it because it didn’t burn as easily when they straightened or curled it with heating irons. Soon after he showed up, his entire ranch went to hell after an assignment in southern Arizona. A few of us had to go there and help him pull his horses out of the mud with a skid steer. Two of the horses broke their legs when we tried to pull them out and for an hour they bayed and flopped and corkscrewed in the wet crabgrass until a guy named Leon, a local ranch hand and a stern-looking Ojibwa, stepped forward with his .357 and volunteered to shoot them. He wore a sleazy, thin black leather vest, and his hair was braided tightly to his scalp like the lacing on a pair of military boots. After half an hour of watching the horses twitch in the milky bog, Samson gave a slight nod and turned away, and Leon shot them in quick succession and hauled them off on his friend’s flatbed. That’s how Leon met Samson, and that’s how he got hired to fight fire with the Hotshots in 2004.

Stephanie Shieldhouse

Leon was a loser, but a tough loser trapped in a linebacker’s body. He wasn’t a vindictive person, or a hateful person, but there were long gaps in his disposition where you could tell a certain kind of dimness was setting in, the kind of dimness you see in someone’s eyes at the end of a cruel act, like the one on Samson’s ranch.

I don’t give shit about shit, he would say. But it would be more like, I don-give-shi-bout-shi. Or even, I-no-shi-bou-shit, I-no-shi-bou-shit, I-no-shi-bou-shit, real fast-like, frenzied.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said once after work when he accused me of breaking a fire tool in the crew carrier. “What the fuck are you saying? Who the fuck are you?” I turned to Samson. “Who is this guy?”

But Leon went on and on because he was drunk off his ass and he kept accusing me of intentionally breaking the “pig dick,” a fire tool that was like a sledgehammer or mining pick that we used to construct fire line through the volcanic rock in western New Mexico.

“You fuckin’ broke that tool on purpose.” He pointed the tip of his beer bottle at me. “You can’t f-f-f-fuckin’ handle it, that’s why you broke it. That’s what they say about you.”

“F-f-f-f-fuck you? Is that what you’re trying to say, because you sound like a retard,” I said.

He punched me in the face. We wrestled in the volleyball court behind the crew trailers until one of the squad bosses pulled us apart. He was always drunk, and he fought sloppily, and emotionally, and when he threw punches he went for long haymakers that you could see a mile away.

“Native pride! Native pride, Leon! Keep it alive!” I had him in a headlock and the skin between his tight braids was bright pink, his ears trembling. “Keep it alive!”

He hated me after that, and a few other natives on the crew hated me as well. I was just a white boy to them, probably whiter than the usual crewmember around New Mexico. I was out of college, and I had a nice truck, and Samson put me in positions of responsibility despite the fact that I didn’t have anywhere near the amount of fire experience that they had. Some talked shit about me in Navajo or Acoma or Zuni. Others stared at me flatly when I was wasting their time...