The Wildfire Season
Andrew Pyper
Haunted. Scarred. Alone.And the nightmare’s just beginning…The Wildfire Season is a remarkable tour de force – an edgy psychological thriller, a supernatural chiller, a terrifying tale of untamed nature and a poignant love story.The vast tracts of wilderness of the Canadian north are beautiful but dangerous – a place to lose yourself, or hide your secrets. For fire-fighter Miles McEwan, scarred and haunted by a terrible death, it is both.But the uneasy peace of his new life in the backwoods town of Ross River can't last. Violence is simmering in the vast forests around him and the past he thought he had escaped is about to catch up with him.Now Miles must fight the fires that rage around him as well the ones he had hoped to leave behind. All the time knowing that one of his friends must be a killer…
The Wildfire Season
ANDREW PYPER
For Heidi
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u1717abf5-a286-5798-94ff-df2485838d14)
Title Page (#u5dc57034-3b65-55ff-bde5-af9c3d7d0783)
Dedication (#ue253f7c3-39a0-5e50-820f-0952e03bef13)
Chapter 1 (#ub6da58d2-225b-5e1c-8f26-8d3ed9adabca)
Chapter 2 (#u0698743b-b890-53e9-a398-fc295d682810)
Chapter 3 (#uc3379c17-fe2b-5754-a074-475b83e71466)
Chapter 4 (#uaed4e8e9-3fd4-5f7d-bb2c-339d1ad5cf4b)
Chapter 5 (#u03a2dabd-896d-53a1-ad5a-3a0e6c766f45)
Chapter 6 (#u050bd0de-42fd-5a7f-9779-25b371cc2b97)
Chapter 7 (#uc52a0009-0f71-59dd-94ca-ec4fe98a821f)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_f5e65bcc-9673-5087-b67d-9e4ba8227b2c)
He must go far, but not too far. Someplace lightning would choose. A tree that is a foot or two taller than its neighbours, one with a drop sheet of needles around its base. Too much regrowth will only lead to a telltale explosion. On the other hand, there will have to be enough fuel to nurture the smoke, keep it alive while teaching it to go slow. The firestarter had assumed the perfect location would make itself plain once he was out here. Instead, nowhere looks right.
There are moments when he thinks he might be lost. His squinting attention to particular corners of the forest makes his head swim when he lifts it to get his bearings. He has never been afraid in the bush before. Then again, he isn’t himself, is he? Maybe he would never become lost so close to where he started, but the firestarter might.
Doing this thing, he refuses to think of himself as himself. A split personality, if only for today. It’s not shame that forces him to hide—he has his reasons for being here, or a set of compulsions anyway, even if he has trouble recalling them now, so occupied is he by the act alone. He is the firestarter and not himself mostly because it makes it easier. A man temporarily free of history, attachments, implications. For now, he’s a soldier on a mission, acting on faith in the wisdom of his orders.
As if folding its arms, the forest blocks his progress. He punches forward, kept on his feet by an elastic web of spruce branches. Once, he gets trapped in a standing coffin of twigs and is forced to hack his way out with his knife. As he thrashes free he hears himself whimper. A sound he doesn’t recognize as any he’s ever made before.
In time, he finds that he stands in a small clearing. Indiscernible from the dozen bald patches he has already passed through and dismissed as unsuitable.
Here.
Later, someone might even figure it out.
It started here.
He snaps the campfire sticks he picked up at the outfitter’s in Carmacks into cubes and drops them randomly, one at a time, as he paces. Will two sticks be enough? He decides three would be better, just to be sure. Then four. He takes the tin of kerosene from his pack and sprays it in spidery lines reaching out from the duff he has raked into a small pile with his hands. He thinks he may have overdone it a bit but reminds himself that whatever evidence he leaves behind will be turned to ash long before he makes it back to town.
The firestarter plucks the Zippo from his breast pocket. He pauses long enough to stroke his thumb over the illustration etched into its silver plate. A habit. One that is observed every time he holds the lighter in his palm before lifting the same thumb to turn the flint. Over the years, both in his own possession and those of its previous, anonymous owners, the drawing’s lines have been smoothed, the words printed beneath it faded, though still readable. New York City. Atop this caption, the Manhattan skyline is rendered from a thousand feet above the island’s south tip, so that the Chrysler Building is a pope’s hat in the distance and, looming in the foreground, the twin towers stand guarding all that lies behind them.
They were gone now, of course. He can’t believe it was nearly four years ago that he watched them collapse into aprons of dust on TV, then wonders what isn’t right about four years, whether it feels longer ago or more recent than that. Not that he’d ever seen them when they were still around. He’d never been to New York in his life. The distance between there and where he is now strikes him as preposterous, science-fictional.
Where had he gotten the Zippo, anyway? A gift, he thinks, or maybe not. He’s not sure who gave it to him if it is. It’s just one of those massproduced souvenirs that make their way around the world, a cousin in the family of Maid of the Mist pens and Mao alarm clocks, drifting from hand to hand, the original sentiment attached to its purchase long rubbed away.
The firestarter is ready now. All he needs to do is flick the lighter and touch the flame to the accelerants spilled around his boots. Yet, for another moment, he does nothing but study the words and grooves of the Zippo’s face with a pointless intensity. What does he want these familiar hieroglyphs to reveal? Now, after so long spent in his pockets, lying on dresser tops, lost and found in the chasms between sofa pillows?
He’s only waiting for the answer to why he has come here to return. Already, he’s learned that this is the problem with being two people at once. The motivations of one tend to slip away for stretches so that, acting as the other, he finds himself having thoughts he doesn’t know the beginning or end of.
Still, even the intentions of a stranger standing in the woods with a lighter in his hand aren’t difficult to guess.
With one more pass of his thumb over the lines of Manhattan, he starts a fire.
Then he bends to his knees, cups his hands on the ground, and starts another.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_17314fd5-9801-5ad0-aeb3-baf82ba72295)
Sometimes, Miles McEwan can tell a thing is about to happen before it does. A jar of pickles envisioned falling out of the fridge before the door is opened, and then, in the next instant, he is on his knees, plucking baby dills from the brine on the floor. A phone that rings on the bedside table only after he reaches for the receiver. Eyes shut against lightning a full moment before the flash.
Right now, for instance, he looks at the door across the room and knows it is about to open. When it does, a woman who is barely a memory and a girl he has never seen before will enter. The light behind them will roll out from between their feet to make a carpet of gold over the concrete. Until they step inside, their faces will be too shadowed to reveal any details, but their silhouettes will show that the little girl holds on to the woman’s hand, their two arms linked as a single causeway between the shapes of their bodies.
That’s as far as his premonition goes. No words, no motion, no gesture showing the way into the what-happens-next. He is aware that such a vision wouldn’t be in the least remarkable if it took place in any other barroom, restaurant or community hall, whatever the Welcome Inn Lounge is the closest to being. But here, it is a rare occurrence for anyone to appear in doorways who Miles doesn’t already know. A place cast so far from the rest of the world that it has no strangers.
Ross River. Better known to those few who have ever heard of it as Lost Liver, on account of the heroic, if mostly cheerless, drinking that goes on. A scattering of storage sheds and slumping log cabins three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, a dot absent from all but the most scrupulous maps. Miles knows where he is. But up here, when he throws his head back to take in the night sky, he feels closer to the dimmest stars than the ground beneath his feet.
He pushes his gaze through the whirring blades of an exhaust fan that does its best to pump out the smoke, the yeasty splatterings, the pine-scented deodorant pucks that only half mask the reek of backed-up sewage. Quarter to eleven and still light outside. He squints to see as far as he can. Over the rusting tin roofs of the road-maintenance building and the padlocked radio station, past the yearning faces of TV satellite dishes atop the long-immobilized mobile homes, to the huddled green domes of the St Cyr range that cuts all of them off from the rest of the Territory, the country, the continent.
A woman and child are about to open the door across the room. What troubles him is that he’s more certain of an event that has yet to occur than the past that has brought him here.
‘Miles?’
As the Welcome Inn’s bartender, concierge and night cook, it is Bonnie’s job to stick her hand into the beer fridge, toss keys to any guests who might be staying in one of the lopsided rooms out back, and slam the microwave door shut behind frozen mini-pizzas. As a rule, Miles never sits with others at one of the tables. It leaves him alone to watch Bonnie slide her elbows toward him, her face hovering close enough for him to glimpse the remaining caramel-coated molars in her smiling mouth and take in a whiff of the photo-developing fluid that is in fact the conditioner she uses to prolong the life of her perm. He nods and absently lifts his hand to trace the scars down the right side of his face. Furious striations broad and deep enough to fit whole fingertips into.
‘Thanks,’ Miles says, and feels Bonnie clink another bottle against the two others in front of him. She maintains the habit of not collecting empties until closing time so that, as the night goes on, the patrons display scorecards on their tables.
Miles looks around and does a quick tally on who’s winning so far this evening. Mungo Capoose. Sharing a table with the younger guys, Jerry McCormack and Crookedhead James. Along with Miles, they constitute four-fifths of the Ross River forest firefighting crew. Mungo, Jerry and Crookedhead, along with the absent King, are his ‘attack team’, though by the look of them, all they’re fit to attack is a tray of tequila shots followed by the pillows in their beds.
‘Where’s King?’ Miles asks Mungo. The old man who is not as old as he looks lifts his head slowly, as though pulling his attention away from an intriguing calculation involving the slivers in the plywood next to his hands.
‘Working the radio.’
‘Do me a favour? Go check on him when you’re done that beer.’
‘You sending me out on a wake-up call?’
‘I wouldn’t trust anybody else.’
Miles would check on King himself except, the truth is, he’s not crazy about being alone around the kid. He would rather not have to let King give him that look of his, the hooded stare that seems to be focused at a point slightly higher than the eyes. It makes Miles think the kid is reading a signed confession nailed to his forehead.
‘Hear they got a smoker up near Dawson,’ Jerry says. He has just lit his cigarette and stares at the open lighter in his hand as though its flame has informed him of larger blazes elsewhere.
‘That’s right,’ Miles answers.
‘Big?’
‘Not too big.’
‘Will it get their crew a renewal?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Big enough, then.’
‘What do you think?’ Crookedhead James asks Miles. ‘We going to get our own smoke to bury anytime soon?’
‘Maybe King is getting coordinates from a spotter right now.’
‘I’m almost done,’ Mungo says, taking the hint. ‘I just hate leaving a bottle with something in it.’
Mungo says this in the same fateful tone that Miles remembers him using when asked why people in Ross River possess such a thirst. ‘It’s not that there’s nothing to do but drink,’ Mungo clarified. ‘It’s that there’s nothing better to do but drink.’
Aside from jobs on the attack team and a handful of come-and-go government positions, the men in town have little opportunity for employment. Some describe themselves as hunting guides, but Margot Lemontagne is the only one who makes her living at it. Margot and Wade Fuerst run Ross River’s one registered guiding business, catering to the occasional hunters from Outside who come in search of moose, Dall sheep and, most prized of all, the last of the giant inland grizzly bears on the planet. It is also generally admitted that she is the best tracker in town. This praise would be surprising if only because Margot is a woman but is even more remarkable when that woman is thirty-two, and a Métis without any local Kaska relations.
Although he sits outside her peripheral vision, she feels Miles’s eyes on her and abruptly turns to face him. She neither laughs nor smiles, but to Miles the effect is as if she had. Her brown eyes lively. The brows pulled high in mock surprise.
It’s looks like this—semi-secret, girlish, vaguely flirtatious—that Wade feels he doesn’t get as many of as he used to. They are also expressions he finds increasingly hard to tolerate Margot’s offering other men, especially Miles. Soon after he arrived in town, alone, and with that scar glowing down his face that both threatened others and acted as a beacon for sympathy, Wade knew that Miles would be the one to somehow bring about the end of his brief dream of contentment. It has proved a rare instance of Wade’s instincts being not wholly wrong.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Wade Fuerst is at heart a bitter, irredeemable son of a bitch, Miles can’t help but like him some. It may be for no better reason than Miles is, at heart, an irredeemable son of a bitch himself. Under different circumstances, this might have made them brothers of a kind, a pair of feared and unloved outlaws. And it’s true that during his first couple of years in town, Miles could feel that male hunger for friendship radiating from Wade, a furtive longing to stand next to someone and know there is agreement between them on matters that they, men of similar age and experience, considered of real importance. But not now. Not after Miles had done what he’d done. They have never spoken of it, though the crime travels through their glances all the same. It’s why Wade wishes him dead and, in part, why Miles sometimes wonders if it would be better if he were.
‘Isn’t that right, Jackson?’ a voice calls out. Female, American, from one of those midwestern states close enough to the South to get half-mired in drawl. Elsie Bader’s voice. Wife of Jackson Bader, to whom she is now repeating herself. ‘Isn’t that right?’
As has become his habit over the last twenty years of marriage, Jackson Bader looks at his wife but does not answer her. When he was still working he loved to talk, to yell, to make those who entered his office at Louisville Steel feel like old friends or the newly unemployed. Even now, three days shy of his seventieth birthday, he can still summon intimidating glares that remind lessers of who they are, of the lengths to which a cloudy-eyed retiree like himself is prepared to go in the name of realizing his whims. His wife may be the only person left he would never level such a look at. He loves her, and supposes that’s why he doesn’t. He still loves her, yes—in a grateful, loyalty rewarding way—and doesn’t want to frighten her. But sometimes he wishes she would only twitter on to herself and not ask him questions, which require a response from him, and because he hadn’t really been listening, he has nothing to say.
The Baders are here to hunt. That is, Jackson Bader is here to shoot one of what he calls ‘those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks,’ and Elsie Bader is here to take the photos when he brings the animal down. It’s all he talked about at his retirement party. ‘What are you going to do now that you’ve got the time, Jack?’ his successor, a boy with a head stuffed with nothing but bleached teeth and a Stanford MBA, had asked him while lifting a glass of white wine—white wine!—to his lips, and Bader had silenced the pup by growling, ‘Thought I’d go up to Canada to bag me one of those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks.’ Three years passed without his mentioning it again. Then, one morning this past November, he had abruptly muted the recroom big screen—an unheard-of interruption of a Vikings vs. Redskins game—turned to his wife and said, ‘You want to go hunting with me in the spring?’ It had been so long since her husband had surveyed her wants that she had said yes and giggled with an overflow of pleasure before she wondered if she actually wanted to witness somebody kill a bear or not.
Miles watches Jackson Bader look about him distractedly, pale and string-necked, and has the impression that the old man isn’t sure what he’s doing here. It’s not the confusion that comes with age or with discovering oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Bader is simply the kind of man who finds the company of strangers slightly absurd, useless, an expenditure of energy on those who, in all likelihood, you will never see again. Miles meets the man’s eyes and wonders if Bader has identified the same distance in him.
Now that he thinks of it, Miles has to concede that everyone here likely sees him as Bader does: the near-silent burn victim, friendless and grotesque. What people wonder about more than anything else are his scars. The muddy splotches that spill down the one side of his neck, his rib cage, and disappear below his waist. All anybody is sure of is they have reason not to ask him about it. Within months of his arrival, Miles earned a reputation as a merciless barfighter on the nights when the drink goes down him the wrong way, or if provoked, or if merely spoken to in what he interprets to be an unfavourable tone. Currently, he is one victim short of sending an even halfdozen down to Whitehorse on free medevac rides.
On these occasions, Miles spends the night under Terry Gray’s watch in the single cell of the RCMP office, apologizing for keeping Terry up late, and Terry telling him that he’s a lousy sleeper at the best of times and that he’d rather type up the assault charges against Miles than lie awake all night in his trailer. Most recently, it concerned a visiting miner who had affronted Ross River’s meagre charms by saying of Bonnie, ‘There’s better-looking barmaids back in the goddamn hole,’ referring to the all-male open pit mine in which he’d spent the last three weeks. For this offence, Miles had beaten the man into a long and dreamless sleep.
Terry Gray has started getting calls. ‘Hear you’ve got a real wild man on your hands up there, Sheriff,’ the superintendent down in Whitehorse will joke with him, but Terry knows it’s getting less funny all the time. He also knows about the stories. Tales of a monster whose rage has pursued him to the end of the world. He killed a pregnant woman in Prince George. He scarred his face blowing up a Hells Angels clubhouse in Edmonton, and a pack of murderous bikers have been spotted as far north as Carcross, asking after a guy with a fucked-up face. And a dozen other improvised myths. In fact, the Welcome Inn has become as famous in the rest of the territory for the brooding fire ranger who drinks in its bar as for its mouldy, overpriced rooms.
Mungo Capoose sees his boss differently.
‘Miles McEwan? He’s not so mean,’ is how Mungo likes to conclude any conversations concerning his boss’s character. ‘He’s just running away.’
‘From what?’ someone will ask.
‘From his face.’
‘But you can’t run from that.’
‘That’s why he’s gone as far as he has.’
There is also a figure visible to Miles alone. Standing in the shadows on the far side of the pool table that’s been too slanted to play an honest game on since Miles piledrived Wade onto it the first and only time he called him Scarface. Miles couldn’t say how long the figure has been there. It’s only when he stares at the one spot for a while that he can make out the outline of a person at all. The slumped shoulders. The pale reflection of unblinking eyes.
It stays where it is long enough that Miles wonders if it is only his own idle creation. Yet the figure is too inarguably there for him to pretend it couldn’t be. Its stillness prevents it from being wholly alive. This is what Miles tries to tell himself. The man in the shadows will remain a shadow until it can move.
And then it moves.
As it slides toward him, Miles counts the ways the shadow takes on colour. Khaki work pants splashed with what looks like machine oil. Eyes showing themselves to be unnaturally wide and red-rimmed. The head so bald it’s missing ears as well as hair.
Miles watches the man emerge from where there was nothing before, as though stepping out of the wall itself. When the tips of his boots slide into the light cast by the bare bulb nearest him, he stops.
Although the figure is tall, Miles can see that it belongs to a young man. A kid stretching his neck to show a face burned black. And smiling. His teeth long and shining as ivory keys.
With a spastic lurch Miles swings around on his stool. He pounds his fist against his chest to show the room it’s only a swig of beer that’s gone down the wrong way. Even when the others return to their conversations Miles refuses to look beyond the pool table.
‘Nice one.’
‘She is.’
‘Where’d you get her?’
‘Come up on a flatbed to Carmacks.’
‘Used?’
‘They’re all used. But this one’s not as used as others.’
Without asking, Miles knows that Wade and Crookedhead are talking about trucks. Men speak of half-tons up here in the same covetous, technical way that others might speak of power tools, laptop computers or women. Everything else that happens in Ross River might ultimately boil down to a tale of foolishness or mild humiliation to cling to its subject for years, but trucks alone are taken seriously. If he closes his eyes and listens selectively to the drinkers around him, Miles can pick out the names of the Big Three manufacturers, each brand spoken with reverence, as though ancient gods. Dodge. Ford. Chevy. Once, and only once, a Toyota made an appearance so scorned that its owner, Crookedhead James, was compelled to drive it to Whitehorse and sell it, coming home on the once-a-week bus with a hangover that made his nose run, four hundred dollars, and a gym bag of newish skin magazines.
‘Nice truck,’ Wade says again, although this time about a new arrival in the parking lot.
‘Wade?’ Margot calls. ‘Bring me and the Baders here another round, would you?’
After a time long enough to let Margot know she will later pay for addressing him in this way, Wade turns to the bar and leaves Crookedhead to follow whatever movement there is outside.
‘Thank you, Wade,’ Mrs Bader gushes. ‘I’m not sure when I last had so much beer to drink. I mean, usually I just have a single gin, and that’s only at functions!’
Jackson Bader says nothing. Everyone in the room except for his wife has heard someone at the door, and they have shifted in their seats to see who will open it.
‘Oh, Margot. You’re so lucky to live way up here, where you can do things like this all the time—not just drink beer, but enjoy the real things. The wilderness. Cowboys and Indians! Good heavens. You’re not supposed to say Indian anymore, are you? And most of you are—well, I only meant—’
Elsie Bader’s face is slashed by the light coming in through the open door. It is against this illumination that two strangers appear. A woman in her late twenties holding the hand of a little girl.
The two of them come inside but the door remains jammed on a raised crack. The woman lifts her sunglasses. Without a change in either of their expressions she spots Miles and, after the most brief of pauses, the two step toward him.
The Welcome Inn patrons are a transfixed audience to their march. Everyone hopes, no matter what is about to take place, that the woman doesn’t ask Miles about the mottled burns that, in the sudden light, look like crimson ink splashed from his temple to his shirt collar.
Miles’s eyes won’t leave the little girl holding the woman’s hand. Her just-brushed hair shining blue against the twilight. A summer dress patterned with strawberries down to her mosquito-bitten knees. Maybe five. Maybe six.
He doesn’t recognize the woman next to her. Not at first. But although Miles is certain he’s never seen the girl in the strawberry dress before, she smiles his way, and without thinking, without touching his scar, without the ongoing work of forgetting what demands to be remembered, he smiles back.
The girl smiles at him and he smiles back and he knows.
Less than fifteen miles away, where the even ground outside Ross River gives way to the first sloping of the St Cyr foothills, a cold rain falls windless and straight on the deadfall. For the past three weeks there has been little other precipitation than this. Dark clouds that cluster and begin their low murmurings, and within seconds the air drops three degrees, leaving a bristling anticipation in the spruce needles. When the rain comes, it does not fall so much as collapse. The air crushed with white noise in which anything from whispered voices to gunfire can be heard.
And then it’s over.
The rain had soaked the bear through to the skin, but her fur is already dry, porcupined in dark spikes. She has marched close enough to town to detect traces of the man-made: diesel exhaust, woodsmoke, the sugary temptations of the dump. It keeps her nose low. Inhaling the clean, mineralized scent of soil turning to mud.
Behind her, two male cubs follow. They are no more than twenty months old but are already bigger than sheepdogs. And yet the length of the sow’s stride requires an awkward half-run of the cubs to keep up. Two sulking brothers with ears standing atop their heads like a pair of children’s mittens.
Faraway sheet lightning casts its shadows across the wall of pine trunks. The three animals shuffle diagonally up the slope, their movements deliberate but weary. They have come from elsewhere but the sow has been here before, though her memories of it only make her want to move farther on.
She stops as abruptly as the rain. The cub closest to her bumps his head against her hind legs and she swings around, demanding attention. Water bends the branches lower and spills off their ends so that, for the first minute, there is no sound but a chorus of pissing.
The she-grizzly slowly rises. Her nose stretched high, the tip of a shaggy antenna. When she is standing at her full height, towering ten feet over her cubs, she swivels her head and takes in so many small sniffs that, when she exhales, it comes out in a grunt. With eyes closed she holds herself still. Her nostrils stretched wide, tasting the new, almost undetectable breeze from the south.
The sow recognizes something in it that her cubs have never smelled before. The odour of a danger equal to the burnt-butter stink of men.
She smells smoke.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_76814183-3549-5a88-9655-27c751944cd3)
As she steps toward him, Miles notices how the child’s knees poke out below the hem of her dress, one and then the other, like turtle’s heads. It’s been so long since he’s seen a girl of her age in a dress that it looks like a costume to him. Among the details he’s lost hold of in the last few years are holidays—what dates they fall on and whether the Raven Nest Grocery will be closed on account of it. Because of this, and because of the dress, Miles has an idea that the girl is about to pull a pillowcase from behind her back and demand ‘Trick or treat!’
The Welcome Inn drinkers lift their heads to take a measure of the newcomers, studying the woman and girl without the reluctance to stare that one finds elsewhere. All of them notice how the woman’s eyes don’t move about the room. Instead, she raises her chin half an inch and peers straight ahead. It may be a way of seeing into the dark, or a gesture of confirmation, or fearlessness. Whether reflex or signal, she steps forward with her face lifted to them, which allows everyone to note the length of her neck as well as the colour of her eyes, green as quarry water.
The woman and girl breach the invisible circle usually afforded the fire supervisor and stand within handshaking range, though no hand is offered. Miles inhales and takes them in. A flavouring of citronella insect repellent and sweat.
‘Rachel,’ the woman says, pulling the child forward to stand in front of her. ‘This is Miles.’
The man with the scarred face and the girl in the strawberry dress nod at each other, once, at the same time.
If forest firefighters are asked why, among all the kinds of physical labour a person might do for money, they chose this particularly wilting, occasionally life-threatening work, the answer offered more than any other is that they love it. More odd is that if they are then asked to substantiate this love, they will have little, if anything, to offer. Most end up shrugging. Always the same shrug, one that makes it clear that there is no single reason they could state and at the same time believe to be true.
Miles thought he might have been slightly different on this count. He loved the job no less than the other men and women he has worked with, but he believed that in his case he could take a stab at explaining why.
‘Fire isn’t like us,’ he would tell Alex when she asked what he saw when he came closest to the flames. ‘It never forgives.’
Sometimes, when he watched how a low, desultory smoker would tiptoe far enough along to touch off a dry thicket, Miles could see himself in the orange spirals, his own hunger devouring the arthritic limbs. He had heard fires described as cruel but he never saw them that way. What he recognized instead was how they were destructive only because they could be, the flames liberated by perfect indifference. Even before he was burned, he had this same talent himself.
This is why he’d come to this place out of all the end-of-the-world places he could have run to. There was nobody here that he knew, to remind him of who he was. Nobody he’d made a promise to or ever would. And there was fire.
For a while, though, he considered other options. For the better part of his first year on the road, driving from prairie town to prairie town across Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Montana, Alberta and back again in a flat, pointless circle, he thought about bartending. He was spending most of every night in bars at the time anyway, and could see himself on the other side of the divide, pulling the taps and free pouring the rye, keeping an eye on the loudmouths and, when need be, directing the worst of them out the door with the end of his boot. There wouldn’t be much trouble on his shifts, at any rate. He found that the scars did a lot to maintain order all on their own. There was a warning in the marks on his cheek that common, hayseed pugilists had to take into consideration. But even with all of these qualifications, Miles knew he wouldn’t last a week. It wouldn’t be the job, but the temptation to talk. He might be invited to barbecues or bowling tournaments or waitresses’ rented rooms, and be asked questions that, over time, he would allow himself to answer.
For these reasons, Miles knew that if he wanted to run away he’d have to come back to fires. To his surprise, this was fine with him. Even after what had happened he still loved them, his dreams recalling the purposeful digging at the feet of a blaze he’d arrived at early enough to contain at least as often as the Mazko River blowup, the one fire he had ever been caught in. Alex knew all of this about him. It was the only clue that, once he was gone, she believed might lead her to him. And now it has.
‘Have you been here the whole time? In this town, I mean?’
They are the first words either of them has spoken since they walked out of the Welcome Inn. The sun had not yet surrendered to the reach of the hills, and there was enough light left in the evening sky to blind them. For the first few minutes the three of them could only shuffle, stunned, through the gravel streets.
‘Ross River,’ Miles says.
That’s it. I saw the name on the sign.’
‘Five years.’
‘You must like it.’
‘Five years isn’t that long.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Not so long that you have to like where you spent them.’
Alex and Miles walk with their heads down, the girl running ahead and back again like a herd dog, circling behind and nudging their calves. They take the road down to the river, past the tiny, unpainted church, with its steeple of shining aluminum. Beyond it, they find the path through the empty lot where Lloyd’s Gas & Tackle once was. Miles glances up at the one remaining pump standing crooked, its glass face cracked, and sees it as a bespectacled man struggling to his feet after a beating.
When they reach the banks of the Pelly they watch the lengthening curls and peek-a-boo whirlpools of the current. The water heavy as oil, a glinting purple that conceals its depths. There are no sounds except for the buzz of the first mosquitoes awakening from the reeds, along with the river’s gulps and spits.
In the absence of words, Miles feels the first tickles of the moment’s strangeness. It seems to him that the woman and girl stand unnecessarily close, and a flurry of options occur to him. He might fall to his knees and explode into tears. Beg forgiveness. He might swing out his arms and knock them back.
All he can think of to hold off some show of madness is to keep talking. He tells them of how, last summer, he had been standing where they are now watching Margot play fetch with her dog, Missie. Over and over Margot would throw a stick out, and each time Missie would leap in, snatching it and cutting back to shore. Once, Margot threw the stick ten feet farther than before. Missie splashed into the swirls. This time, when she turned around with the stick in her mouth, the current grabbed her from below. The dog’s front legs punched forward in panic but she couldn’t break free of the water’s hold. Miles and Margot started out after her only to see that she was already too far, speeding out of sight around the bend behind the churchyard, down to join the Yukon and, eventually, the delta that empties into the Beaufort Sea.
‘Poor Missie,’ Alex says. ‘Poor Margot.’
‘It’s terrible. Now she’s only got Wade to follow her around.’
Miles tries at a laugh, but it comes out in a messy sneeze. And now that he’s told the story of the drowned dog, he realizes it was more grim than he remembered, and wonders if the girl might do something awkward. But instead, Rachel cups her chin in her palm, studying the site of the tragedy. When she turns to him her forehead is scrunched into serious ripples.
‘We can’t go swimming in that river,’ she says.
‘I’d advise against it.’
She shakes her head in regret. Then, in the next second, she snaps out of her grown-up considerations and sprints back up the road toward town.
Alex and Miles follow her past what Bonnie likes to call the Welcome Inn’s courtyard, no more than a patch of grass with what, from a distance, looks to be a garden gnome stepping out of his lederhosen. They turn right, past a row of squat mobile homes, most with something left out in their front yards. A standing stepladder. A pickup truck raised on its rims, its hood agape. A Mr Turtle wading pool.
They round the property of a cabin that appears to be made of nailed-together outhouses, all with grass growing high atop their roofs. Across the road, two boys sit side by side on a bench in front of a cinderblock building. Off to the side there’s a swing set, along with climbing bars that could be a cage from which something has already escaped, and between them, a slide designed to look like a dinosaur’s tongue.
‘Can I go play?’ the girl asks.
‘Play away, kiddo.’
‘How old is she?’ Miles asks once she has run off into the weed-riddled sand of the playground.
‘Five and a half.’
‘Really?’
‘How old do you think she could be?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I don’t have much experience on what five and a half is. What they’re capable of at that age.’
‘Rachel is capable of pretty much anything.’
They crunch over the stones at the side of the road, watch the girl scramble up the ladder of the dinosaur’s back and slide down its tongue. When she reaches the bottom she remains sitting on the aluminum lip. He tries to meet the girl’s eyes but she’s watching the two Kaska kids on the bench—Mungo’s son, Tom, and one of his more-silentthan-most friends, Miles can see now. After a time of wondering what to do next in a second-rate playground while being observed by two teenaged Indian boys, Rachel abruptly runs around and up the dinosaur’s back again. She pauses at the top and surveys the monkshood poking through the sand below. Then, with a regal salute, she plops on her bum and slides earthward a second time.
‘There must be kids around here,’ Alex says, as though answering a question she had asked herself. ‘That looks like it could be a school, anyway.’
‘It is. And the library, town hall and RCMP detachment, all rolled into one. You’re looking at civilization over there.’
‘Doesn’t look like much.’
‘We’re the shit end of the stick out here, I guess.’
‘Worse than anywhere else?’
‘Worse than the towns whose native bands have signed the government land claim offers. Places that get to at least think about building a new school. Or a sewage system that can cut down on the number of times your bathtub fills up with what your neighbour flushed down his toilet five minutes ago.’ Miles looks down at his boots. ‘There’s drugs here, and a lot of drinking,’ he says. ‘And I’m talking about the kids.’
‘Isn’t there a counsellor or someone?’
‘There’s nobody.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m not paid to be a difference maker. It’s not my job, it’s yours.’
‘That sounded a little like contempt.’
‘You just heard it wrong.’
Tom and his friend have slouched their way over to the playground’s edge, where they stand with their hands in their pockets, asking Rachel questions that Miles and Alex cannot hear. The girl says something in return that brings goofy smiles to their faces.
‘You still teaching?’ Miles asks her.
‘It’s that or waitressing.’
‘You used to love it.’
‘I’m just tired. It’s a lot to—’ Alex lets her thought turn into a shrug.
‘You’re on your own?’
‘As far as Rachel goes, yes.’
‘That can’t be easy. And the kids you work with are even worse—mentally challenged, or whatever—it must be that much tougher to—’
‘You’re right. They’ll kill you. You’re helping and helping all day, and at the end of it, if you’ve done your job, they just need you more. You know?’
‘Not really.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
From across the parking lot, Mungo Capoose strolls into view, his arm held over his head in a wave, as though Alex and Miles are a half mile distant instead of a hundred feet away.
‘Where you off to?’ Miles calls to him.
‘Just following orders.’
‘What orders?’
‘You wanted me to check on King, didn’t you?’
Mungo grins at them. At Alex, anyway. Miles has forgotten that, in Ross River, Alex will appear not only as an obvious stranger but as uncommonly beautiful. For the first time, Miles acknowledges this as well. Green eyes, freckles, dark hair shining down the back of her neck.
‘The fire office is the other way,’ Miles tells him.
‘That I know. Just want to share a word with my son here.’
Mungo keeps his eyes on Alex a moment longer, and when Miles glances to see if she is meeting the older man’s gaze, he finds her smiling back at him.
‘He seems nice.’
‘Nice? I suppose Mungo’s nice. The sad truth is he’s the best man on my crew.’
‘You’ve got friends up here, at least.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
Mungo grabs Tom by the shoulders and gives him a shake. Tom’s friend repeats whatever story he’s already told Rachel and all of them laugh, with Mungo adding something at the end that brings another round of guffaws.
‘She’s good at that,’ Alex says.
‘Good at what?’
‘Figuring out strangers in a hurry.’
‘It’s a hell of a skill to have.’
‘When you’re on the road with just your mom around to keep an eye on you, it’s a good thing to know who might be bad news.’
‘What do you mean, on the road?’
Alex takes a step forward so that she can look directly up into Miles’s face. Her lips white, bloodless. He’s certain she is about to throw her fist into his face and he spreads his feet apart to keep his balance when it comes.
‘Four summers in a row,’ she says instead. ‘Looking for you.’
Miles turns away. Over Alex’s shoulder, he watches Mungo give Rachel a courtly bow, before taking Tom and his friend by the collars and pulling them off with him, squeezing the boys against his sides as they make a show of trying to escape his grip.
‘I can walk you by where I live. I have a dog. His name is Stump,’ Miles offers in a rush.
‘Rachel?’ The girl runs up behind Alex, grinning. But when she looks at Miles, her face is instantly emptied of expression. ‘Would you like to meet a dog named Stump?’
‘Stump?’ She swallows, as though tasting the name. ‘Grumpy lump! Let’s see Stump!’
Miles leads them past the prefab utility shed that once housed the radio station but now stands locked, the hastily painted CHRV-FM 88.9 sign over the door peeling away in rolls, the transmitting antenna bent to the side from kids using the shed as an observation tower.
‘Can we hear it? On the radio in the truck?’ Rachel asks him. No longer rushing ahead, the girl now lingers twenty feet behind Miles and Alex, kicking at stones that nip the backs of their ankles.
‘They’ve closed it down.’
‘But when it did work, who talked on it?’
‘Anybody that wanted to.’
‘So if it worked now, could I go on and talk?’
‘There wouldn’t be anybody to stop you.’
Now that he thinks of it, Miles misses tuning in during his first year here, finding only static most of the time, but also unexpected treats. Bonnie reading from her grandmother’s recipe box. Mungo playing the same side of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire LP three times in a row. A bunch of preschoolers giggling for a half-hour straight. All of it reaching no farther than a two-mile radius of wilderness and perhaps a half-dozen others who may have been listening. There was a comfort in it, though. Sitting alone and having voices come to him. Confirming for whoever might be doing the talking or listening that they were here, together, even if what was being said and heard made no trace of difference in the world.
As they walk toward his cabin, Miles and Alex ask questions of each other for the girl’s sake—Had Alex taken Rachel to see the dancing Gertie Girls in Dawson? Does Miles get a chance to go south in the winters?—but most of what passes between them comes in versions of the unsaid. No matter what caution they bring to their words, everything delivers both of them to the life they had discovered together, no greater in length than the time they have now been apart. They remember in the silence of shared understanding, two listeners tuned to the same voice. One that tells a story they already know but that surprises them anyway, leading them from what they had to what they lost, to Miles running away, to fire.
An afternoon rain has forced it underground. It hides beneath the surface, gnawing along roots far enough down to be untouched by moisture. The fire can find any number of hosts without ever showing itself to the world, living in oil shales, petroleum seeps or coal veins for weeks, even years. For now, tiny and unnamed, it allows itself to sleep.
A stethoscope placed on the ground would hear nothing, but a cheek could feel its warmth. In land like this, there may be a hundred such lazy fires for every square mile, more on the edges of swamps and bogs, where the fuels are rich but lie deeper. Most never awaken. They come to the end of whatever nourishes them and slowly suffocate, without a struggle, their hearts weak from birth. But this one is different. It was born with intent.
There. A white puff tails up from below, as though exhaled from an underworld cigarette. Another. Soon the smoke becomes a steady stream, broadening, clinging to the deadfall like morning fog.
Before it is extinguished, it will claim a land area greater than most national parks, leaving a lake of ash behind. It will turn bones to swan feathers. It will kill, and hide the bodies better than the most calculating assassin.
It will do all of this as though motivated by some idea of itself, by ambition, by hate. But as with all fires, it will have no desire but to live.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_c4802460-6e0a-5f95-8d8c-e925f4fbe3e8)
Why Miles?
Alex has wondered this perhaps more than anything else. Why had she decided to shed all her shyness for that one sun-glowy, blue-eyed boy over all the others? Why him, sitting alone on the back fire escape of a Montreal walk-up at the first party of the new term, the weeks ahead of her fizzing with possibility, never mind the next year, the next five?
Sometimes she’s sure it was his mouth that made her step out onto the fire escape on her own. Her housemate, Jen, a boy-crazy psych major from Massachusetts who liked to regard Alex as ‘so Canadian’ (which meant, for her, an innocent who didn’t stand a chance in the corrupt negotiations of sex), had asked where she was going when Alex had left her chatting up a pair of sniggering frat boys in the bathroom lineup, and Alex had told her, ‘I’m sure you can handle Beavis and Butthead on your own,’ and walked out into the cool night. It was his mouth that did it, she’s almost certain. His lips fine but deeply coloured, a mark of delicate youth on a face she would have otherwise thought of as broad featured, even rough. She saw him through the kitchen window, noticed his mouth and wanted to kiss it, as she had wanted before, daydreamingly, of others’. What was remarkable about this boy’s lips was that she wanted to kiss them first and then divide them with her tongue, slitting them apart as a blade opens an envelope, so that she could see what shape they’d make around his words.
‘Have you ever tried to eat the stars?’
Alex is literally taken off balance. It’s the heels she borrowed from Jen’s endless collection jamming through the metal slats as much as his question.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough.’
‘When I was a kid I would pick them right out of the sky. They had a taste, too.’
‘Were they good?’
‘Oh yeah. Too good. My mom told me if I ate too many I’d start to shine.’
Only now does Miles look at her directly, and Alex thinks that it’s too late. This boy has already had more than his fill of stars.
Miles pulls a clear plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and shakes it in the air. Inside, a cluster of withered caps and stems leap over each other as though in an effort to escape.
‘What’s that?’
‘Mushrooms,’ he says. ‘I spent the summer out on Vancouver Island. Picked these lovelies myself. Very friendly.’
‘So, instead of stars, now you eat magic mushrooms.’
‘I’m always putting something in my mouth.’ He shakes the bag again. ‘Want some?’
‘What do they do?’
‘You mean you’ve never—?’
‘No. I’ve never most things.’
‘That’s okay. They basically take whatever mood you’re in and enhance it, make you see beyond what you’d normally see.’
‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’
‘A lot of things.’
‘Name one.’
‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’
‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’
Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.
But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.
‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.
‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’
‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.
Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and churrasceira restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.
They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.
At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.
‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.
‘And brighter.’
‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’
No, that’s you, Alex nearly says.
Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.
‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’
Alex’s apartment is a small 3
/
over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled dough from downstairs.
‘It makes me constantly hungry,’ she says, pouring both of them glasses of ice water. ‘But I love it. So do the mice.’
‘Have you set traps?’
‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live somewhere, right?’
‘That’s not ridiculous.’
‘Do you have mice?’
‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘In my van.’
‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’
‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’
In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.
She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.
‘What is that?’ she says.
‘What?’
‘That.’
Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.
‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.
‘A flat mouse.’
‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and phwat!’
‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.
Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.
When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.
Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’
Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.
Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.
That summer, they sublet the apartment and Miles drove out west for the same job he had worked the past four years, taking a position on a forest firefighting crew in the British Columbia Interior. Alex joined him for the ride as far as Vancouver and found work at an East End daycare. They saw each other as much as they could, Miles coming down to the city on his breaks and Alex taking the eight-hour bus ride to Salmon Arm on Saturdays to spend the night with him before taking the bus back on Sunday morning.
On the return cross-country drive, in a Robin’s Donuts parking lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw, Miles gave Alex a ring he’d won from his foreman in a poker game.
‘It’s collateral,’ he said.
‘You want a loan?’
‘I want your time.’
‘I don’t get it.’
Miles placed his hands against the sides of Alex’s head. She could feel them shaking.
‘Next summer is going to be my last one working the fires. And when I come back, I want to give you something with a real rock in it.’
‘Are you looking for an answer now?’
‘That’s up to you.’
Alex slipped the foreman’s ring on her finger, a silver band with the name ROY on it in raised fool’s gold. She turned it against her knuckle until the metal warmed her skin.
‘It’s not really my style. And it’s way too big,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep it anyway.’
They spoke frankly, always and right from the start, and best when of grave things, confessions, the conveying of bad news. For Miles, this involved the story of his missing father. A chemical engineer at the Nanaimo pulp mill who married Miles’s mother, bought a modest house near the harbour, and on the day before his son’s fifth birthday, left without leaving behind a note, an address, anything to suggest he was ever coming back.
Honesty was never an issue between them. They were truthful out of the need to be together, and plain talk came as naturally to them as desire itself. Before they knew it—and for the first time in their lives—they were speaking as man and wife.
Miles was accepted to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Alex took a position at the Arrowsmith School for learning disabled children in the same city. Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before the beginning of their new lives together, of true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season.
His name is Tim, but everyone calls him the kid. Every attack team Miles has ever worked on has had a ‘kid’, a nickname automatically assigned to the youngest member of the crew. But this one deserves it. He has the sort of face that is an indisputable foreshadowing of how he would look twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, and how even then, he would still be the kid. Round and shinychinned, his skin so flushed as to be an almost laughable display of good health. At first, Miles told himself to call the boy by his proper name, so that at least one of the crew saw that he was doing a man’s job and deserved to be recognized for it. But by the end of the second week even Miles couldn’t fight the obvious and called him nothing but ‘kid’ from then on.
The fire camp Miles has been assigned to is about twelve miles out of Salmon Arm, at the petered-out end of a logging road. When Miles arrives, he is taken into the camp office, where the fire director as well as a rep from the pulp company sit on the other side of the room’s single desk. Miles wonders what he could have already done that would justify being fired.
Instead, they make him foreman. The pay isn’t much better than a crewman’s, but the desk will be his, and use of the camp’s only phone, which will allow him to call Alex in the evenings and catch her before she goes to bed, three hours ahead of him in the east. And he knows there likely isn’t anyone in camp more knowledgeable than himself. Alex calls him a pyro-nerd. When he reads for pleasure, it’s always scientific studies of how fire starts, how it lives, how it dies. Government ‘burn pattern’ reports. Historical accounts of smokechasing disasters—Mann Gulch, South Canyon, Peshtigo.
‘You have two things to take care of out here, Mr McEwan,’ the pulp company guy says at the end of the interview, the only time he speaks at all. ‘The trees and the men. Just know that the company owns the trees.’
‘What about the men?’
‘They’re all yours.’
Miles never thought of the crew as his, but he felt his responsibility as its leader at every moment, not so much a weight but something added to his blood to thicken it. It made it easier that Miles liked them, especially the kid. Another pyro-nerd in the making. Asking questions about the origins of pulaskis, the combination rake-hoes designed for cutting fireline in different ground conditions. Volunteering for the nastiest tasks—staying the night to keep an eye on spot fires extinguished the day before, axing a snag into pieces to see if the smoke had hidden inside it, manning the radio when everyone else opted to make a dent in the beer stocks. He did all of this not to seek approval but because he wanted to see how it was done. The rest of the crew liked him for this, too. Not only because the kid relieved them from unpleasant work but because he so plainly loved doing it. It was hard even to make fun of someone like that.
Miles also admired the way the kid could spend time with him without disturbing his thoughts. As a result, he spoke more freely with him than with anyone else on the attack team. Although Miles never brought up the topic of their friendship, he knew that this is what they had found together. Alex asked after him in every phone conversation they had. She always called him Tim.
‘There’s a pattern to every crewman’s career,’ Miles remembers telling the kid on one of their long drives between watchtowers. ‘The first year you learn, the second year you complain, and the third year you actually enjoy yourself. There’s almost never a fourth year.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘Five years,’ Miles says, laughing. ‘But I’m still learning. With fires, there’s always something you think you know but don’t.’
What Miles neglected to add is that without fires to work on, there’s not much to learn anything from. This year, June and most of July turn out to be curiously uneventful months, despite the above-average heat and string of eighteen days without rain. Aside from a handful of smouldering snags lit up by lightning, and a burning garbage can at a roadside picnic area fifteen miles to the south, the camp is fire free.
The crew spend the time inventing increasingly complex practical jokes, eating too much, pretending to be soldiers. Miles has experienced stretches like this before, though not nearly as long, and is coming to the end of make-work tasks. The two pockmarked pickups had been waxed into glittering auto show pretties. The cache’s store of tools were sharp as butcher’s cleavers, the other supplies hung upon hooks or lined in straight aisles according to an ‘attack priority sequence’, just like the manual dreamed it might be. The bunkhouse was painted top to bottom four times, followed by a poll on each colour’s aesthetic merits. By the middle of July, it was neon pink. A unanimous vote (Miles abstaining) determined it would stay this way for the rest of the season.
It isn’t until the first week of August that they receive notice from a spotter plane of a smoker at the bottom end of a gulch funnelling down into the Mazko River, two hundred miles north. Miles had known that something was there for the past twenty-four hours, as the spotter had to pass the site twice to determine whether it was an actual fire or merely a ‘ghost,’ the mist that can rise in locations near water. The delay in identifying the fire hasn’t allowed it much growth, though—the plane’s last report was of a tight congestion of small spot fires, each one no bigger than the smouldering sticks left behind at morning campsites.
There is a tradition among attack teams of naming a fire they have fought on, large or small. Most of the time it arrives at the end, after mopup is completed and some detail of the location or episode that occurred over the course of the job lends itself. But when they disembark from the helicopters in the lee of the smoke-fogged valley, the kid tosses a name out right away. The crew stand at the crest looking at the Mazko a half mile below and the four or five dozing spot fires where the gulch’s walls meet. The slope down is steep, but they should be able to get to the fires and back up again without climbing gear or ropes. What will slow them are the loose pieces of shale scattered over the hillside, black diamonds of sharp armour like the scales of a serpent buried just below the surface. Although there is usually some debate surrounding an initial suggestion’s merits, the kid’s first try sticks without question. The Dragon’s Back.
Miles is reluctant to touch the dragon’s skin at all. It is one of the first principles of firefighting to avoid cutting line partway down a hill with the fire below. Better to come at it from the lower point and push it higher, the entry in this case being the banks of the river. But when Miles radioes the fire manager, he is told to continue down the slope and fight from above.
‘Get a jump on it and it’s simple as pissing in an ashtray,’ the manager says.
It’s not in Miles’s nature to argue, and his men are so bored with the disappointments of a fireless season that some are already sidestepping into the gulch, shouting jokes about taking long enough to make it down that they might be in line for some overtime. Miles, on the other hand, tells himself it will have to be quick. The longer they stay down there, the more chances there are to be surprised.
When their eyes begin to sting from the smoke, their cheeks freckled with ash, Miles looks back at the crest and judges it to be about four hundred yards up. Next, he does a size-up of what they have to face: a few spot fires, all more than twenty feet apart, licking at green stalks of cheat grass and fescue. Off to the side, a small patch of oak scrub stands untouched. They’ll take the smokers one by one and get them early enough that they won’t have to cut any fireline. Miles doesn’t want to give it that much room to play.
‘Split up in threes,’ Miles tells them. ‘Pick one and hot-spot it. When it’s done, hustle on to the next. By noon, the sun is going to roast us like turkeys down here.’
The day is already showing temperatures that are well above average, and the valley walls only contain the heat, the shale a million dark mirrors magnifying the sun on their backs. Still, for the first half-hour, the men go at their labours with something near joy, the simple pleasure of cutting the earth with the blades of their pulaskis singing up the muscles in their arms. They complain about the work when they aren’t working, but now that they are, they bury the smoke in purposeful contentment.
The kid is the first to hear it.
Less a sound than its absence. Nothing like the silence that can sometimes visit a crew in the way a break in the conversations around a dinner table can leave a room in an accidental quiet. What the kid hears is not an interruption but an end. It makes him think of the project he submitted to his highschool science fair. A perfect vacuum. The demonstration involved sucking away all the air in an empty fish tank, an invisible violence taking place within. Now it’s like he’s inside the tank, looking out.
‘The fuck was that?’ he asks nobody in particular, but Miles hears the question. And now that his attention has been called to it, he can hear what the kid hears too. Unlike the kid, he knows exactly what it is.
‘Let’s move out!’ Miles shouts, circling his arm over his head, directing the men up the hill.
For a time, they only look at him. They’ve just arrived, the spot fires not halfway to being buried. It seems the new foreman is something of a joker. One of the crew acknowledges Miles’s gestures with a honking laugh, and the rest of the men except the kid join him in it.
‘I’m not kidding. Take your shit and haul it on up.’
‘Quittin’ time already, boss?’ the first of the laughers shouts back.
‘We’re not quitting. We’re pulling back. Right fucking now.’
All of them look up at the sound of thunder. Shade their eyes with their hands, searching, but the sky remains a cloudless dome. The thunder rolls on. More a tremor in the atmosphere than something they hear, like standing over a pot of water coming to a boil.
A fire whirl. That’s what the kid heard, what they can all hear now. A conflagration creating its own wind. But what terrifies Miles isn’t the vacuum of a fire whirl but the fury that he knows must follow it.
He glances back to see the fire roiling up at them from the bottom of the gulch. At this distance, it looks to him to be a swarm of yellowjackets spewing forth from a rupture in the earth.
It’s happened sooner than he had guessed. A blowup. The most feared event in fighting fires in the bush, but rare enough that most crewman’s careers go by without seeing one. What begins as a series of spot fires sends hot, lighter air up, and the cooler, heavy air sweeps in to take its place, creating a kind of burning tornado. The spot fires that had stood apart a moment before join together. Invisible gases rise into the air hotter than the white heart of a flame. The ground itself is ignited.
‘Drop your tools!’ Miles orders them, only now noticing that the men, including himself, have been slowed by the heavy pulaskis pulling at their shoulders. ‘Let go of whatever you’ve got! Now! Now!’
Most do. But despite his repeated command, a couple of the men refuse to release the grip on their shovels. Whether from an embedded sense of attachment or from shock that has seized their minds on nothing but the crest above them, Miles couldn’t know. The rest of the crew, now sixteen pounds lighter and with the benefit of pumping both of their arms forward, are able to move at a quicker pace than before.
From Miles’s broader perspective as last man back, he calculates that it still won’t be enough. The men farthest ahead have already grown sluggish against the steepening hill face. At best, they’re managing a couple hundred feet per minute. A fast fire will make triple that in forest conditions, and as much as eight hundred feet a minute in long, graded grass like this. Even faster if it’s a blowup.
They’re caught. A textbook firetrap, and he led them into it, allowed himself to be bullied by some shithead over a radio. Miles can do nothing now but will the men on, ordering one leg in front of the other in his head. Go, go, go, go. So long as he pushes them with these unspoken words he tries to believe they cannot fall.
There is no strategy to what they do now, nor could there be. Miles would be unable to find a single tactic in the wildland firefighter’s training manual to help even if he had it in front of him. It is a foot race and nothing more. There is the fire, the crest, the closing yards between them. There is the searing muscles in the men’s thighs, already cramping, reducing their strides to useless penguin hops. There is a window of time about to be shut. A situation that calls only for what Miles’s first foreman used to call FEAR. Fuck Everything And Run.
From his position at the end of the snaking line, Miles watches and, in half-second evaluations, takes note of his various crew members’ progress. Men he would have guessed to be the most nimble end up tripping over their own ankles, one falling chin first against the rock-strewn hillside and sliding helplessly backward. Another runs with his arms straight above his head, as though at gunpoint. None of them call out to each other. None of them scream. But the humanless quiet that results terrifies Miles more than anything else. They are frantic and inarticulate as vermin. In less than a minute the fire has taken their identities from them, their language, their dignity. It kills them before it touches them.
None are as slow as the kid. It’s not his physical conditioning that works against him, as he is stronger than most, light and long-legged. It’s that he can’t help from looking back every five or six strides. No matter how brief his glances, simply turning his shoulders and blinking once against the rolling wall of flame is enough to break whatever speed he had worked up. When the kid’s eyes return to the man ahead of him he has lost another five feet, and he must dig his toes in and start climbing all over again.
Because Miles won’t allow himself to overtake any of the others, the kid slows him down as well.
Don’t look at it! Miles is shouting at him, but the kid doesn’t hear. He says it another three times before he realizes that the words are pronounced only as an idea within him. He works sideways across the hill to the kid’s line of ascent and slams his palms against his shoulder blades. Every time the kid turns, he pushes again. Don’t look at it, Miles says with his eyes, and this time, the kid gets it.
And then Miles looks too. He’s astonished at the fire’s speed. The conditions are perfect for it making a sprint like this—dried stalks of high grass, the accelerant of oak scrub at the bottom of the gulch, a slope for the flames to climb—but he still can’t believe how it defies what he’s ever observed of fire before, the way it turns gravity upside down. Now Miles can see that it’s true what he’s been told a thousand times. Only fires and bears run faster uphill than downhill.
Ahead, Miles can see the first figures making the crest. The fire is so close he can hear it—not its vacuum but its resulting explosion of flames. The whirl opened up and new air rushing in to fill the space in a metallic screech, a subway train grinding the rails as it goes too fast around a bend. The kid covers his ears.
The two of them are the only ones who remain below now, a little over a hundred yards short of where the slope levels and falls away into forest. It is close enough that Miles can see the individual fingers of grass at the top bending against the rush of heat. The fire will have burned the same blades to black wicks before they get halfway to touching them.
It is close, but Miles has noticed how his pace has slowed almost to a standstill, and the final ascent is far steeper than any other section of the hill. The other men have a chance of making it, so long as the fire is delayed on the crest. But even if they had wings it’s too late for Miles and the kid.
Miles lunges forward and grabs the kid’s arm, stopping them both. Without explanation, he slips his hand into his pack and pulls a fusee out. He lip-reads the kid’s voiceless words—Don’t stop! Don’t stop!—but only raises his hand in reply. Miles ignites the fusee with the lighter he takes from his pocket. When it flares to life, he bends to touch its spitting mouth to the straw around them.
An escape fire. A small burning of grass lit before the main fire hits, so that the burned area—the ‘good black’—can be stepped into and, with their heads buried in the ashes, the worst of the fire may pass around them. It is a technique Miles has only read about. He remembers stories of turn-of-the-century natives saving themselves and any pilgrims who would join them, far out on the Great Plains lit up like a prairie inferno. But there is no mention of escape fires in any of the current training materials, and for good reason. Miles knows that more men have burned in the good black than have been saved by it. But they will die if they run on, and die if they stand where they are. Miles decides for himself and for the kid. They will be an experiment.
Miles steps into the circle, the stalks still snapping and sending live sparks up his pant legs, and waves at the kid to join him. Just ten feet away, the kid stays where he is. Staring at Miles in an uncomprehending palsy of disbelief. Why is his foreman starting a fire when there already is one, a huge one, coming right at them?
For a moment, the two men meet each other’s eyes through the smoke spiralling off the grass. The kid’s effort to see the sense in what Miles has done plays visibly over his face. His throat seared shut, leaving all his questions to sit, heavy as marble, in his chest.
The kid is so close that Miles could grab him and try to pull him in. If the kid resisted, both of them would be caught outside the good black as the main fire hit. Still, if he holds on to the kid’s wrist and falls back, it might be enough for them both to tumble down into the smoking ash and breathe. That’s what Miles would tell the kid if he was lying next to where he is now. Breathe and stay low and bury your face in the charred soil where the pockets of oxygen might be and wait—
Behind them, the fire screams.
A shattering, human sound that sends the young firefighter scrambling a few feet higher up the slope. Though his voice doesn’t reach his own ears, Miles can feel his shouts splitting his throat open.
He lifts his head from the ground to plead with the kid to come back and feels the first swipe of fire across the side of his face, tearing the shirt from his side.
I’m burning, Miles thinks.
A realization so simple it precedes understanding, precedes pain. But he doesn’t lie down. Opens his mouth again to utter another wordless command and hears only the plasticky pop of his own skin.
He can only watch as the boy runs on. That, and make one last attempt to be heard. But before Miles can close his lips around his name, the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire.
They keep him away from mirrors. Anything that can cast a reflection is hidden by the nurses. The chrome kettle in his room is removed, the curtains drawn at twilight when the glass surface begins to send back images of whoever may be trying to look outside. Even his cutlery is replaced with plastic knives, forks and especially the spoons, which, depending on the side turned to him, threaten to balloon or collapse the already distorted features of his new face.
For the first several days, the drugs keep him from knowing when they’re taking off his bandages or peeling away dead layers of his skin. Morphine delivers him to a place well beyond the hospital room’s beeping, bleach-reeking reminders that he is on a bad-news ward. The drip into his arm prevents him from caring about his injuries, how he might look if he ever gets out, about anything. Yet he remains aware of the events around him. The terrible food. A distressedlooking Alex with her hair tied in a bun (he hates it that way and thinks of asking her to let it down, but doesn’t want to trouble her). His wish for something better to be on TV. Even the fire. He remembers trying to pull himself up the slowmotion slope, the unfamiliar sound of his own screams, the sight of the kid sucked back into the furious waves. He remembers it all, but it nevertheless feels second-hand, fictional, like the memory of a film seen years before.
The morphine leads him to a beautiful indifference. He loves the morphine. The days pass in rolls of gauze. Delicately applied and removed, the nurses forcing smiles, nearly constantly asking him Are you okay? He has no idea what okay would be under the circumstances, or what it ever was. Yup, he says. The last thing he wants is to hurt anybody’s feelings. He just yups his way through his first three weeks in the burn ward, and holds Alex’s hand with the one he can still move, all without a clue as to what might follow from here.
They pull back the sheet and leave him bare between dressings for a while now, to ‘get a little air on the business,’ as one of the nurses puts it. Although he’s told not to, it allows him to feel the shape of the burn. From beneath his skin a shell emerges, rough as the edge of an empty tin. Not all of him, though. He has been split in two. The left side of his face is as he remembers it, but the right is a Halloween mask, all hardened latex and stray, unconvincing hairs. His hand continues down his neck, and he discovers that the half-mask comes with a half-bodysuit too. He strokes his chest from one side to the other. The line between the burned and unburned skin comes up hard against his fingertips, abrupt as the intrusion of the Rockies on a continental map. The east of him is smooth flatlands. The west, rows of jagged teeth.
Without warning, they pull the morphine out of his arm and replace it with a pair of Tylenol 3s on his breakfast serviette. The first thing he does is cry. It’s the sight of the puny albino pills that does it. These are to be his new friends? He bawls so hard he can’t catch his breath. Coughs himself out of bed, starts bawling again. The emergency bell that attaches his thumb to the nurses’ station rings without pause, so that they close the door on him and let him wail himself to sleep. Even through his tears he’s ashamed of himself, and makes some attempts at self-control, but then the image of the white pills returns to him, and it’s all over.
When it comes, sleep is no better than waking. What’s worse than the pain are the dreams. They start at different places, but all of them end with Miles running. There is no fire. What he runs from is invisible but explicit, human and not human, a creature with unfair advantages. A vampire, the voice-over of his dream tells him. One that pursues him through a grid of dark streets. Miles knows that he will lose the race but he rushes on, rounds another corner, hoping to find an avenue of light that never appears. Then, when the undead thing comes up next to him, Miles turns to see that it’s the kid. Teeth bared, ravenous. The kid wrapping his mouth over Miles’s neck. Ripping and swallowing.
When they release him from the hospital, the doctor gives Miles a pharmaceutical loot bag to take with him: tranquilizers, Tylenol 3s, steroid cream. Alex holds him by the arm on his good side, his steps slow and frail, head swimming. He can’t tell whether the sensation of being helped along by his girlfriend makes him feel pathetically young or pathetically old.
They are asked to stay in town for a few days to participate in the coroner’s inquest into the kid’s death, although it’s obvious to all that it’s really Miles’s trial. Fire is fire, and people who fight them get hurt from time to time. But the kid is different. His foreman stopped running from a fire to build one of his own and the kid had carried on up the hill. One rational decision, one irrational. If common sense determined rightful outcomes, the wrong man died.
The panel includes two of the managers who sent his team into the valley, and Miles tries to mentally hammer nails through their eyeballs as he listens to them ask their questions. They want to know how he could possibly justify his ‘grossly unorthodox defensive tactics.’ Miles calls it an escape fire. He calls it the good black. The managers call it unsound manoeuvres. His trial is one of semantics. They don’t allow themselves to forgive him, but he can feel them wanting to. One says, ‘You were a good firefighter, Miles,’ and the past tense reddens the scar on his cheek.
In the end they do him the favour of coming up with excuses on his behalf. Miles wasn’t much older than the kid himself, after all. The conditions were severe. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe that only one man went down. Though his methods were well outside of acknowledged procedure, the investigators accept that Miles had done everything he could have done within his abilities and experience.
After, in a motel room in Salmon Arm with a NO ANIMAL SKINNING notice over the headboard, Alex and Miles lie side by side in the darkness, fully clothed, fingers locked over their chests like corpses. They talk about what they should do next. Neither of them can think of an option aside from what they would have done if the fire had never happened. They will leave in the morning for Toronto. Alex will take up her job at Arrowsmith’s, and Miles will enter first year of med school. They will start again. Neither of them mentions the promise of marriage that Miles had made the year before.
They drive through the mountains, onto the high ranges of Alberta, across the cruise-control prairies, and over the humped spine of Lake Superior, all in a brooding near silence. Alex never asks about the fire, but Miles can sense her aching to. There’s a buzz of vicious pleasure in refusing to help her open the topic, every hour of silence a greater punishment than anything he might think of to say to her. Behind the wheel, Miles takes an academic interest in his own anger. For instance, he would never have guessed he would resent Alex’s sympathy even more than her curiosity.
The sight of Toronto shrinks them in their seats. Even the lake seems to pull back from the downtown towers. Its waves reluctant, perfunctory, the water the mottled grey of desert camouflage. They drive straight to the apartment Alex has found, a basement one-bedroom on Shaw Street, the only thing reasonably close to both her work and the university that they could afford.
‘It’s not rue Rachel,’ Miles says, looking up and down the street, the tiny front yards blurred with wrought-iron fences.
‘It’s different here,’ Alex agrees. ‘It’s all different.’
They unload their minimal belongings and, after one walk through the apartment, Miles tucks himself under the sheets of the futon and stays in the bedroom for the next week until classes start. Even then, he skips his lectures as often as he attends them. Instead, he drifts through the streets of the new city and feels its eyes upon him. He plays the game of trying to catch people staring. Most of the time, his observers are quicker than he is. But when he snags slow ones, he sticks his tongue out and laughs like a serial killer and watches them scuttle away in what they think is fear, though he knows it’s really shame.
His refusal to speak doesn’t prevent Miles from tracing the growing shape of fury within him. Alex can see it too. It comes to the point that all she will allow herself to tell him is that she loves him, but even this gives offence. He interprets her simple, desperate words as a lie, something she repeats to convince herself of. It is impossible that Alex could feel the same about him as she once did. If he has been turned into a monster, won’t their love have been similarly deformed?
More and more, Miles fears that if he stays with her, something as bad as what happened to the burned boy will happen to Alex. There is also the newfound worry that he might hurt her himself.
They make love only once after the fire. From the morning Miles was released from the hospital, over and over Alex had invited him to her. She had worn only the clothes he had most liked to remove, suggested massage oil backrubs, whispered dirty in his ear. Every time, Miles had declined. Finally, after she grazed her tongue across the back of his neck as he stood before a crackling frying pan in the kitchen, he had turned to her and said, ‘Don’t you get it? I’m not interested in a mercy fuck,’ before returning to flip his eggs. She had not tried again after that.
What hurt her more than his rejection was the extent to which he was wrong about what she was asking of him. Mercy had nothing to do with it. It’s true that she wanted to bring them together, if only for a time, as the open talk that they used to find so natural had deserted them. But her desire was real.
On this night, though, it is Miles who reaches for Alex. Aware of the sound of their own breathing, each clinging to the cold edge of their opposite bedsides, he had rolled over to bring his lips to her shoulder. Both of them are amazed at how even this tentative kiss revives something in them. Miles stays next to her, folding himself over her side. He wants to say a sweet word. Anything plucked from the standard vocabulary will do. But the mere thought of uttering any of them hurts his throat, like a bone caught halfway down.
They surprise themselves with the energy they find, a ruthless yearning. Everything they do is lingered over, repeated, another moment won against the long night. Despite this, they can sense an absence in each other’s touch. The room’s wintry drafts find ways between them, licking around the borders of warmth their bodies create.
Afterwards, they watch the flashing blue light of a streetcleaner tumble across the ceiling. This time it is Alex’s turn to search for words and for everything she might say to strike her as laughably belated. It’s not the fire that has come between them, she thinks, but an awareness of themselves. They never used to be self-conscious around each other, and this nakedness brought them an easy honesty, the gift of speaking without gain or penalty. Now they censor their thoughts as though someone is in the room with them, judging their appropriateness, their timing, whether they actually believe what they say or not. The streetcleaner’s blue light retreats through the curtains.
Although she cannot tell Miles why she cries now, her back to him again, she knows it’s because of this. Not the loss of words. Alex weeps for what they have found, the terrible discovery of what love prevents us from seeing as obvious. They have never been one, always two.
By the end of October, Miles stops attending classes altogether, spending his days in the laundry-strewn darkness of the apartment. Although Alex stocks the fridge with T-bones and leaves Mason jars of homemade spaghetti sauce for him in the freezer, he lives on delivery pizza and Chinese, the smelly boxes growing into a cardboard tower outside the bedroom door.
One day that is otherwise the same as the fifty that came before, Miles hears Alex unlock the front door and knows that something is about to change. She drops her keys on the kitchen table and the sound rips through the apartment like a crack of thunder. The storm is breaking and Miles welcomes it. He wants to stand tall enough for the lightning to find him.
‘What’s your plan?’ Alex asks him, standing over the shadowy hump of his back under the sheets.
‘I’m a man with no plan.’
‘Really? You look like you’ve got your crashand-burn all figured out.’
‘No pun intended.’
‘I wanted to tell you something. If it makes any difference.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘I’ll never leave you.’
‘Hey! History’s most broken promise.’
‘It’s not history’s promise. It’s mine.’
‘You’re a good girl, Alex. But not that good.’
Alex crumples onto the end of the futon. She finds his cold foot sticking out and strokes the top of it, but it wriggles away at her touch.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she says.
‘You’re not the judge of that.’
Alex leans forward and switches on the bedside lamp, which casts a tight circle of light out from under the shade. She can see Miles now. The covers pulled up to his chin, his hair a nest of greasy tosses and turns. His eyes blink against the forty-watt bulb as though he had just stepped into the midday sun.
‘I’m right here,’ she says.
‘You don’t have to be.’
‘I’m telling you I know you.’
‘You have my apologies.’
‘Just listen, Miles. Listen. Even if you don’t want to hear.’
‘Hear what, Herr Doctor?’
‘You’ve always blamed yourself for what your father did, and now you’re mixing that up with what happened in the fire.’
‘There’s a nice logic to that, I admit,’ he says, tapping his chin. ‘It even seems to make sense. The trouble is, it doesn’t. You keep looking for sense where there isn’t any.’
‘So tell me, then. Tell me the senseless truth of it.’
‘The kid died.’
‘And?’
‘The kid died.’
‘His name was Tim.’
‘I know his name.’
There is no gesture Alex can think of that Miles wouldn’t take as an insult. She disgusts him, although he assumes it is the other way around. If he said something first, something of his own, no matter how it might hurt her, it might be a way in. But he won’t. He will reply, but not confess, not accuse. Her frustration knots its way through her shoulders, seizing her into a sculpture of pain.
‘You’re so angry and you don’t even know it.’
‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Not at me. You’re angry at yourself.’ Alex pauses to take a new breath that will manage her next words at a lower register. ‘At your father.’
‘You can’t be mad at someone you don’t remember.’
‘But you can hate them. You can hate them easier for not remembering.’
‘Words of wisdom from Princess Nicey-Nice. What do you know about hating anything? You’re too pure for that.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I stand corrected.’
‘Everybody’s capable of hate. That part’s simple. The hard part is finding the strength to be capable of forgiving yourself, too.’
‘That’s really wonderful. What section of the Hallmarks did you find that one in? Sympathy for Burn Victims? That would be it, wouldn’t it? Right there between the Sorry for Your Amputation and God Loves You…Please Don’t Overdose on the Sleeping Pills.’
‘Nothing is going to change unless you lose this whole sarcastic—’
‘For Christ’s sake, Alex! Love doesn’t want to spend any time in a shithole like this,’ he says, pulling the sheet down and sitting up all at once. He frames his face with his palms and squeezes the skin into blotchy folds. ‘Love likes it pretty. It always has. Look at me.’
‘It’s not about what you—’
‘Look at me!’
And she does.
Alex sees a ghoul. For the first time, she recognizes Miles’s scars for what they are. She sees their permanence, the wish she has that they weren’t there, the memory of what he looked like when they weren’t. It makes her gasp.
‘You see? You see?’ Miles is shouting at her, and she cannot reply because he’s too close, too loud. And because the answer is yes. She sees.
She tells him of her doctor’s visit in a note she leaves on the pillow next to him as he sleeps. It isn’t long. Half a page of news listed in punchy headlines.
It’s yours.
I’m going to keep it.
I still love you.
We’ll talk tonight.
Much later, she wondered how long after waking it took for him to decide.
He packs in the morning when Alex is away at work. He can’t face the rest of the apartment, so he starts with the bedroom essentials, stuffing a duffle bag with jeans, wool socks, half a dozen bedside-table paperbacks. Then he floats through the other rooms, holding framed photos of themselves to his eyes—kissing in the bleachers at a McGill vs. Queen’s football game, dressed up and drunk at a friend’s wedding—before putting them down again. He rattles through the piles of CDs but can’t remember who bought which one for whom, and discovers he doesn’t want to listen to any of it again anyway. They have collected so much meaningful garbage together that simply looking at it now makes him feel heavy, his veins pumping mercury.
He means to leave Alex a letter. In his mind he imagines an impossible document, at once less and more than an explanation or an apology or a cataloguing of his thousand unmanageable torments. Something along the lines of a thank-you note, or perhaps the obligatory sentence in an author’s acknowledgements page expressing gratitude for all the help he has received but accepting all errors as his own. He even begins a draft, but it doesn’t survive the first reading. No matter how much he keeps out of it, the words can’t help referring to the kid, the gluttonous melodrama of his own selfpity. His second attempt is yet more minimalist, but ends up saying the same things with even greater force.
Miles can see the cruelty in leaving no trace of himself behind for her. It would seem intentional to Alex, one last, silent rejection, but he decides he has no choice. In the end he does nothing more than slide his keys under the door after pulling it shut.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_e649e856-6409-5314-ba96-e7fb1d164d97)
Miles has a dog with bad dreams. When he’s home during the day he can hear Stump’s sleep-muffled barks from the end of the bed the two of them share, the three-alarm woo-woo-woomph! associated with visitor warnings. Then something turns for the worse, and the terror that the dog faces brings out unfamiliar barks of distress, each distinct from the rest, as though he refuses to believe this could actually be happening to him, a good boy whose only fault is lifting himself to table edges to clean the plates once the diners have left the room.
Their arrival saves him from one such nightmare—in-progress. Without even the faintest pause, the dog pads across the brown shag of the living room and begins licking Rachel’s face.
‘This is Stump?" Rachel asks, the dog lapping at her laughter.
‘That’s him.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why Stump?’
Miles has to think about this. It wasn’t because any part of the dog was missing. Instead, his name came from the way that, when Miles first spotted him from the side of the road, an abandoned pup sitting on his haunches in a clearcut of forest a few miles outside Teslin, he was nearly the same size and stood with the same square, unmovable silhouette as the levelled stumps of lodgepole pine and tamarack.
‘Stump!’ Miles had called to him when he pulled over in his truck, and the dog had understood that this was his new name and came trotting over to have his side thumped.
‘You’re a Stump,’ his master said again, simply, as though Miles had finally discovered another living thing that was as much a Stump as he was.
‘Because that’s his name,’ is all Miles tells Rachel now.
Miles thinks of Stump as the Mr Potato Head of dogs, his disproportionate features assembled with apparent malice, or perhaps humour. His nose as long as a ratter’s (though he fears holes of any kind, and requires some coaxing to warm Miles under the bedsheets on hungover mornings). Oversized ears that stand rigid atop his head in a kind of victory salute. Eyes as dark and bulbous as chocolate chips. For all of these handicaps, Stump made friends easily, a talent due in no small part to his indiscriminate distribution of kisses, the pink waterslide of his tongue reaching out for the faces of all who know his name, scratch his silver goatee or simply bend within range. He is so generous with these compensations that some call him ‘handsome dog,’ although it is clear that handsomeness is about five crossbreedings removed from his present appearance. Still, he’s not without his prejudices. He has never liked Wade Fuerst, for example. This for obvious reasons, even to a mongrel simpleton like Stump.
‘Comfy,’ Alex says, running her fingers over the varnished log end tables and peering up at the oil painting of a wolf howling at a too-yellow moon over the wood stove.
‘I don’t need much,’ Miles says.
He leaves the door open behind him, but the air inside the cabin remains laden with a combination of uncirculated scents: the gamy moose steaks that Miles has been thawing and eating for his dinner four nights out of seven ever since Margot started dropping them off, the mildew of the hall bathroom that no amount of ammonia scrubbings could entirely get rid of. Now, with Rachel and Alex in the room with him, Miles smells the cabin as a visitor would, and he’s embarrassed by what it says about his life. The bachelor’s neglect. The sockfarty aura that likely follows wherever he goes.
Alex circles the room, stopping to pull back the curtains and looking out at the picnic table with beer bottles sprouting up around its legs like mushrooms, and beyond it, the wall of forest that borders the backyard and marks the end of Ross River itself. She puts her cheek against the glass and looks both ways, but the cabin is far enough from the rest of town that no neighbours are visible. Even here, Alex thinks, Miles has chosen to live on the outside of things.
‘Momma! He’s following me!’ Rachel shrieks, walking backwards down the hall with Stump wagging after her.
‘He sure is,’ Alex says, pulling away from the window to study the dining-room table next to it. A plate smeared with egg yolk, three half-filled coffee mugs, and at the opposite end, a chess board with a game laid out over its squares.
‘Who are you playing?’ she asks, picking up the white queen by her crown.
‘My mother.’
‘She lives here?’
‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’
‘You don’t visit?’
Alex places the queen down on the board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.
‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’
Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.
‘How do you play?’ she says.
‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it, and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’
‘If nobody knows where you are.’
Miles nods.
‘The postcards are almost as fun as the game,’ he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’
‘Your own postcards?’
‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’
‘You make your own postcards?’
Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.
‘The winters are long,’ he says.
Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside from rolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.
‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.
‘Why?’
‘Just come here.’
Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.
Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.
‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.
‘One with a shower would be nice.’
‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’
‘And tell her Miles sent us?’
‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’
For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.
‘You have to go now,’ he says.
The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takes Rachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.
Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place—these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.
It took less than an hour’s walk through this weedy, broken-hearted nowhere to forget most of what she expected he would have become. All she’s certain of is that he’s in worse shape than even her most malicious scenarios. It’s what allowed his talk of postcards and the sight of his big-eared dog to make a momentary dent. But even as she feels a brush of pity come and go, what remains is her desire to spray kerosene over the half of him the fire missed, toss a match his way, and watch. Not only for the pain it would cause, but to leave a tattoo that would forever mark his cowardice, his uncorrectable failure to the world. She has thought about this for longer and in greater detail than she would ever admit.
Alex is strangely glad to find that she still hates him. As much now that she’s found him as she had the evening she’d come home to their empty apartment and looked for the note he hadn’t bothered to leave. She’s grateful that the sight of him has done nothing to alter her fundamental judgments. Her planned retributions.
What she hadn’t seen coming is how much he frightens her. One of the things she hadn’t told him about her past four summers was that a couple of the people she’d shown his photo to had recognized him, or at least had a story to tell. A mechanic in Dease Lake said the scars made him sound like a guy ‘way far up,’ one that had nearly killed a man for looking at him and asking if Halloween had come early this year. A hardware store clerk in Telegraph Creek claimed to have heard about someone with burns down one side of his face ‘like a line of shade’ who hunted solo, living on grizzly meat and firing his shotgun at anyone who came within a half mile of his camp. Alex didn’t believe these stories, nor did she dismiss them. She simply added them to the composite portrait she was assembling in her mind. One that took hideous shape as she added a murderous grin, jellied eyes, blood-soaked teeth.
The first summer had been something of an accident. A weekend drive out of the city after the end of term. She spent her first night in a creepy motel near the marina in Parry Sound, and found herself enjoying the creepiness, the foolish thrill of being a young mother on the lam. In the morning, instead of heading back, she turned north, then west. At lunch, she bought a half-dozen identical postcards showing a row of oiled men’s torsos frying on a beach and sent them to the people who might be wondering where she’d gotten to. ‘I’m taking our show on the road,’ she wrote. ‘We’ll be gone for as long as the credit card and Pampers hold out. Please don’t worry.’ She signed each of them ‘Love, Alex and Rachel (a.k.a. Thelma and Louise).’
She bought a tent and sleeping bag in Dryden, a camp stove in Medicine Hat, matching toques for her and Rachel in Jasper. Even as far as Fort St John she still wasn’t looking for Miles in any concerted way. And yet, more and more, Alex found herself glancing through the windows of roadhouses, waiting for heads to turn her way in convenience store lineups, judging each town she passed through on its merits as a hiding place.
The next year, once school was out, Alex had plans to spoil herself for a change, a splurging on cheap good-for-you treats. She would catch up on the prize-winning novels she’d seen praised in the paper for their ‘affirming’ and ‘meditative’ qualities, start jogging again, plant tomatoes in her building’s communal garden. To steal a few hours of freedom during the week, she enrolled Rachel in a daycare downtown. The girl’s resistance, however, became apparent almost immediately. The daycare workers called with reports of her clawing at the fence around the Astroturfed playground. When asked to come inside with the other kids, she would only stare up between the surrounding buildings at the postage stamp of blue above.
The daycare people suggested it was homesickness, but Alex recognized the real cause of the girl’s protest. After the long, indoors winter, Rachel had taken Toronto’s warm sun as a broken promise. In the stifling evenings of their apartment, she would uncharacteristically cry, refuse favourite foods, fuss before being put down to sleep. She wanted out.
In the middle of June, overheated and underslept herself, Alex rented a car and took Rachel up to Algonquin. The idea was for the girl to sleep on the drive and be rewarded with a swim in one of the park’s thousand green lakes. As soon as the hazy suburbs’ brew-yer-owns, discount warehouses and twenty-four-screen multiplexes shaped like UFOs had given way to regrowth forests and grazing fields, the girl was quiet. Not asleep, but tranquilized, her fingers splayed against the car’s window like an antenna receiving signals that had been unreadably scrambled in the city. Once at the park, Rachel’s mood was wholly transformed. Alex hadn’t realized how much she missed seeing her child smile, and how long she had gone without.
When they returned to the apartment two days later, it was only to buy a used truck, pick up the tent and camping gear and leave messages with family and friends. They were heading west again. Looking back on it now, Alex sees the last thing she brought along as almost an afterthought. A photo of Miles she’d slipped in an envelope and stuck in the glove compartment.
She’d done it for Rachel. She’d done it for herself. She swung between these justifications from day to day, often between the hours. Both were true. Alex had vowed from the beginning not to keep Miles’s existence a secret from the girl. And letting her see him at least once might help put some of her brewing questions to rest in advance.
Alex had her own dark wishes. More than anything, she wanted Miles to hurt. There was little she would be able to do all alone on this count. But with the girl, there might be enough left in him that could still be poisoned.
Yet now, as she walks with Rachel, her pink sneakers skipping over the stones, she feels the careful plans she’d devised shift an inch under her feet. Miles ran away. She chased him down. Other than this, all she’s sure of is that whatever is going to jump out at her, she won’t turn away from it. That’s Miles’s trick. Hers is to sink her teeth into the truth of a thing and not let go until she’s tasted it.
‘I like him,’ Rachel says.
‘Oh yeah, baby? You like Miles?’
‘Miles?’ The child stops and stares up at her mother. ‘I like Stump, Momma. Stump licked me.’
Chapter 6 (#ulink_ef3517ff-3803-55f3-9c62-39e0c683f7fc)
All of Ross River has gone to bed, though many, tonight, cannot sleep.
Some wonder about the woman and girl who had come all the way here only to walk with the fire chief around town like tourists with a guide. One sees an animal’s eyes peering out from the closet. One wishes the self-pitying child’s wish to never have been born.
Another cannot believe it was only this morning. Both his waking mind and dreams confirm it. Only this morning he was thinking the firestarter’s thoughts. Whether he lies with eyes open or closed, he lives through the same hours. When he comes to the end he can only return to the beginning to live them over again.
He lies awake through the night, certain he can smell it. A lick of heat. Barbecued pine. Sulphur curling his nosehairs. A memory of fire in place of fire itself. He knows this even as he sits up all at once and fights to reshape his gasp into a yawn.
He assumed that creating the firestarter would be a convenience. A temporary alter ego that would allow him to return wholly to himself after he was finished with it, cut free like a booster rocket once gravity has been defeated. Instead, the firestarter clings to him. In fact, he can feel the beginnings of a struggle, another’s hand on the wheel. It is still weaker than he. Thoughtless and mute. But it has a desperate tenacity he hadn’t expected, an unmanageable weight. It threatens to take him down with it like a drowning dog.
He thinks of what he would give in dollar terms to sleep without dreams until morning. Starts at two-fifty and soon approaches everything he has.
It’s not guilt. Not exactly. It’s not yet worry, either. Tonight, what denies his rest is what the firestarter would say to him if it ever learned to speak.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_e9595eae-9afe-52ab-9ef6-29351dfaa523)
Even from four miles off, during the few hours of a July night’s darkness, the bear can smell Ross River before she spots the orange glow of its homes. Melted lard, yeast, the generator’s dizzying fumes. All of it attracts her, so much stronger in its promises than the highbush cranberries and wild sweet pea, the only other food she can detect in the vicinity. They have been moving continuously for a full day without eating, and now hunger sharpens her senses as do the distant traces of smoke that have been pursuing them the whole time. She allows her cubs to rest, rolled back on their haunches, chewing at air. The three of them have made their way to the top of a rock outcropping that pokes through the treeline, midway up the slope of the Tintina Trench.
The sow has been here before. Last autumn, with her mate. It’s how she knows that, in daylight, they could see the entire Pelly valley from where they are. Now, with the dawn only a blue thread atop the horizon, the killing ground is a field of shadow. Below them, the town throbs in electric flames.
She doesn’t fear the people she knows to be there, but unless she has to, she will go no closer. It would be easy to push through one of the many breaks in the fence around the dump and feast on whatever spilled out of the piled bags she gutted. During the summer her mate stayed with her (far longer than other wandering, rutting boars), they would come here from time to time. The decision arose less out of necessity than as an addiction to the landfill’s exotic pleasures. On the rare occasions that the dump manager came by to throw the beam of his flashlight over one of them, the other would bark from the opposite direction, diverting his attention. The beam leapt blindly in his hands. In seconds the sow and her mate would be through the fence.
But there is only the cubs with her now. They have never been close to people, and she wonders if their curiosity would cause them to pause, blinking at the light. She has seen this hypnotism used on other animals by hunters in the woods at night. No amount of barking could wake them once the dazzling bulb had captured their eyes.
They will not go closer to town. They will not run any farther away either. Over the other side of the range to the south is a river that, by now, will be running with easily scooped grayling and trout. And here, in the St Cyr foothills, they are the only bears. Whatever food is available will be theirs without competition. She looks at her cubs. It will be another year before they will begin to make these calculations on their own, and for a moment, the thought of the time ahead exhausts her.
She lifts her snout and turns to the east in the direction they have come from. The cubs do the same. The oddly stringent smoke is still there. Stronger than the hour before. Though it hasn’t moved, the sow feels that it wants to. And when it does, it will come this way.
In the morning, Miles stands in the shower until the hot water in the tank goes dry, and after it does, stands a while longer under the cold. It doesn’t make him feel clean as much as raw, a layer of skin peeled off, leaving him tenderized. Sometimes it helps him to think. Today, the water draws all thought out of him, washing half-formed sentences down the drain. By the time he turns off the taps he’d be slow in coming up with his birthday, his postal code. When he steps out of the stall the only thing he recognizes is Stump’s tongue licking his legs.
Beyond the bathroom window the morning sun is so bright it looks to Miles like the prolonged flash of some distant megaton explosion. And maybe it is. It is a summer of fire everywhere but here.
Even in a place as disconnected as Ross River, the images of disaster have found their way to him. On the TV hanging from chains in the Lucky China’s ceiling, he has crunched and tartar-sauced his way through lunch while watching evacuations of famous ski villages and less-famous pulp towns on the lower mainland of British Columbia, the ruin of Washington State vineyards, flames licking against million-dollar glass cubes terraced over the hills of San Bernardino and the Simi Valley. Crews from as far as Ohio, Minnesota and Georgia have been dispatched to assist on the suburban infernos of Oregon and California. Reporters can’t get through a story without speaking of it, with a grimness only half disguising their excitement, as ‘possibly the worst wildfire season in living memory.’ Every time they use the phrase, Miles can’t help wondering whose living memory they’re talking about. He’s still alive. They should ask him sometime.
That the fires are so vast that smoke has been carried on the prevailing winds to redden the sun as far east as Winnipeg and St Louis might surprise some of the experts, but not Miles. He has seen a summer like this one coming for a long time. Global warming. Continental drought. Fuel loading. The last of these being the biggest factor. After years of urban sprawl and ‘development’ of what remains of the western forests, fighting fires has become more necessary in order to protect man-made values. The trouble is, the more smokers you put out, the more deadwood there is to blow up the next time around. Fire doesn’t like being made to wait.
When he’s dressed, Miles walks out to the main road and along the half mile to the fire office. The morning light continues to dazzle him, glinting off anything it can find, even the gravel, white as chalk. The rust-stained tin of the fire office looks as though it’s been painted silver overnight.
Miles had expected the place to be empty, but King is already there, sipping at a mug of instant coffee. When Miles walks in he barely turns. Dreamy. That’s what the kid is. Which makes him a little dangerous, too.
Patrick ‘King’ Lear is this year’s part-timer sent up from the University of Northern British Columbia’s forestry management program to fill out the crew. He’s not the worst that Miles has seen, a physically strong boy who obviously loves the bush and, like Miles, sees firefighting as a way to get paid for living in it. But there’s an absence about King that made Miles at first suspect the kid was on drugs of some sort, one of the new kinds that make you rapturously amazed by everything. Now, he has come to believe that this is simply King’s nature. What’s worrying is that, on a burn site, it’s not exactly the optimum mental state for your men to be in. Crookedhead may not be any better on the raw intelligence side of the ledger, and Jerry is always looking for a way out of the hottest or heaviest work, but at least their defects are predictable. With King, you can’t tell when he might stop clearing deadwood or hacking out a fireline, hypnotized by the beauty of embers floating through a stand of aspens. Miles can only thank Christ that there hasn’t been a fire of any substance for the length of his tenure as supervisor. They’re good men. He cares for them more than he’s comfortable admitting. But Miles would prefer to not see them tested by anything bigger than the bonfires of discarded mattresses they practise on out at the dump on Sundays.
‘King,’ Miles says.
‘Hey there, boss.’
‘You looked at the morning spotter reports?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Not a thing?’
‘It’s almost weird. There’s smokers in every district but ours.’
‘And the towers—?’
‘Aren’t seeing anything but a sunny day.’
‘How nice.’
Miles looks at King and, for the first time, sees a younger version of himself in the hard brow, the blue, elsewhere eyes. He wishes he hadn’t. And in a sense, he hadn’t—King doesn’t really look like Miles, not in the way you would ever confuse the two. It’s only that King’s self-containment, his distracted temperament that disguised something you might not want to get too close to, makes Miles think that those may well be the same impressions he leaves with others.
‘I sent Mungo to check on you last night,’ Miles says.
‘Three sheets to the wind, and he’s checking to see if I’m awake.’
‘I wanted to get him out of the bar more than anything else. I was hoping that once he’d said hello to you, he’d find his way home to say hello to Jackie.’
‘You’re a man with a plan.’
‘Always.’
Miles says this and hears its emptiness in his chest.
‘Speaking of plans, I was looking for you yesterday,’ King says.
‘What for?’
Wanted a sign-off on the pumper to do a training session. But you weren’t around. The pumper was gone, too.’
‘I went for a drive.’
‘A drive?’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s just strange. It’s a strange thing to—’
‘Don’t do this. It’s not the right day.’
King raises his hands in surrender.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ Miles says. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour and call the crew, get them out of bed so they can be here by the time I get back. Start with Mungo. He takes the longest.’
‘Absolutely,’ King says, returning his attention to the coffee mug on the table. ‘But there might not be anything for them to do when they get here.’
‘You never know in this business,’ Miles says, and slaps the kid on the back hard enough to make them both wonder if it was a friendly gesture or something else.
The Welcome Inn Lounge is empty except for Bonnie, who slams beer bottles into cases behind the bar, and Miles regrets coming in this way to look for Earl, the innkeeper. Bonnie pops her head up, a you’re-not-going-anywhere grin on her face, and he knows he’s about to be carpet-bombed with questions that a sour, bronchitic Earl would never trouble himself to ask.
‘And how are you doing today, Bonnie?’
‘Livin’ the dream,’ she says, wiping her hands on her sweatshirt. ‘Any fires this morning?’
‘Haven’t you heard? We’re a smoke-free environment up here.’
‘A good one up in Dawson, a couple little farts down in Haines Junction, and nothing for us. That just isn’t fair.’
‘It’s a bitch, it’s true.’
‘We don’t get something soon and your boys are going to be under my feet next year even more than usual, asking to put it all on their tab. And you know something? I won’t be able to do it. Those chuckleheads don’t blow a candle out before winter and it’ll leave you and Terry Gray as my only paying customers.’
‘We’ll get our fire.’
‘It’s not just me.’
‘I know all about—’
‘It’s like dominoes. You fellas lose your jobs and we’ll all come falling after you.’
‘Don’t worry, Bonnie. You’ve heard of a rain dance? Well, I did a little fire dance for us this morning.’
‘You did?’
‘Oh yeah. Had smoke coming out my ass. You should’ve seen it.’
‘Maybe next time.’
Miles glances toward the open back door, down the hallway that leads to the motel outbuilding. If he made a run for it right now he may not have to answer a single awkward inquiry. But he’ll have to act quickly. Bonnie has placed her hands on her hips, elbows out. A gunslinger ready to fire.
‘Is Earl around?’ Miles asks instead of making a move, his boots stuck to the gummy floor.
‘Need their room number?’
‘You could at least make a show of minding your own business.’
‘Friends visiting?’ she asks, pretending not to have heard him.
‘They’re people I know.’
‘Now that’s a funny thing. When people I know come to town I have them stay at my place.’
One night. That’s all it takes. One night for not only Miles’s life to take a serious turn toward the complicated, but for every citizen of Ross River to have heard about it. He can see this in Bonnie’s bosom, of all things. Her breasts swelling high against the cotton in the pride of a job well done.
‘It’s a different situation from that,’ Miles says.
‘Different how?’
‘Listen—’
‘I like her. Just so you know. I like the look of the woman. Sensible. And tougher than you’d guess, seems to me.’
‘Is that your female intuition talking?’
‘Better. That’s my bartender’s intuition talking.’
Miles laughs a genuine laugh, and suspects that his lack of sleep has left him giddy and vulnerable. But to his astonishment, Bonnie decides to let him off the hook.
‘Go see Earl. You can talk to me about your fascinating life any old time.’
‘It’s not fascinating,’ Miles says. ‘But one of these days, I’ll tell you my whole boring story. You’ll just have to promise to keep it between you and me.’
‘I’ll make any promise you want. It’s keeping those promises that gives me trouble, that’s all.’
As he does every time he sees it, Miles wonders where the hell the stone fountain in front of the Welcome Inn came from. A pot-bellied cherub pissing in spurts, which makes Miles think of his own private struggles, the prematurely enlarged prostate that bedevils his nights. He’d love to know the story behind it. This half-ton piece of Renaissance kitsch that somebody took the pains to haul up here and that Earl, a man who seems not to care a whit about others’ comfort, plugs in every day that the temperature is above freezing. For the thousandth time, Miles makes a mental note to ask Bonnie about it the next time he sees her, and knows even as he does so that he will forget, again, as soon as the statue is out of his sight.
He climbs the outside stairs to the second floor, walks to the end of the outbuilding where Earl told him he’d put Alex and Rachel. (’Nice and quiet out there,’ he’d said, but Miles knew it was the room directly above the kitchen, and even though quiet, would stink of whatever daily special was lobbed into the deep fryer.)
Miles studies the cracks in the door’s paint, waits for the whistle to leave his breath before knocking.
‘Momma,’ Rachel calls out when she opens the door, wearing the same strawberry dress. ‘Miles is here.’
‘Good morning,’ he says, speaking over the sound of Alex flushing the toilet somewhere within the gloom.
‘Where’s Stump?’
‘He likes to sleep in.’
‘He does?’
‘Oh yeah. He’s real big on the sleeping.’
‘Bet I could wake him up.’
‘Bet you could.’
Alex emerges from the room’s darkness to place her hands on Rachel’s shoulders.
‘Enjoying your stay?’ he asks her.
‘Aside from the gunk bubbling up the bathtub drain and the sheets that smell like chicken fingers, it’s five star all the way.’
‘Mmm-mmm,’ Rachel says, licking her lips. ‘Chicken fingers!’
Alex is wearing a Clash T-shirt that Miles recognizes, the London Calling one with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. It allows him to see how tanned she is relative to the white cotton, as well as the strength in her arms. He had not come here to admire her, or to indulge the nostalgia brought on by raggy clothes she hasn’t gotten rid of, but he finds that he feels both. He makes the decision to fight these things directly. And if they break through his defences, he can’t allow himself to be surprised.
‘Momma?’ Rachel says, craning her head back to face Alex. ‘Can I go outside?’
‘If you promise to stay on the grass here, or in the back.’
‘I won’t go far.’
‘It’s not about far. It’s about being where I can keep my eyes on you.’
‘I won’t go far from your eyes.’
Alex lifts her hands from the child’s shoulders and she shoots out past Miles. There’s a quaking in the wood as she runs away.
Miles stands at the door with arms folded high on his chest. He feels prissy and miscast, but now that he’s here, he can’t do a thing about it.
‘Just leave it open behind you,’ Alex says, stepping back. ‘I like to listen for her.’
He steps inside and can smell the steamy mix of soap and shampoo from Alex’s shower along with the more historical traces of cooking seeped through from downstairs. He slides over the cigarette burns in the carpet, past the two single beds and rabbit-eared TV, to stand before the small window at the opposite end. It’s bright outside but the light stops dead at the frame. Despite this, a daddy-long-legs roams the other side of the glass, searching for a way in.
‘Why here?’
He turns. The room is much smaller now that the shadows have pulled away to show the walls.
‘The only other hotel’s in Faro, and that’s—’
‘Not us. You. What was it about Ross River that made you stay?’
‘The land is good. As good as any place in the Territory. And the town is—’ He stops to remember what he was about to say, and realizes there’s nothing there. ‘The town is nowhere,’ he goes on finally. ‘I suppose it’s somewhere for the people born here. And for the Kaska it means all sorts of things, good and bad and other stuff I don’t have a clue about. But for me, it’s the best nowhere I was able to find.’
‘I knew that’s what you’d be looking for.’
‘And that’s how you found me.’
Alex shrugs.
‘I tried the easy ways first,’ she says. ‘But there was no phone number under your name anywhere. I even tried looking up your mom, but she’s totally off-line, too.’
‘She got rid of her phone when she realized the only person she has to call anymore is me. And we’ve already made our own arrangements on that count.’
‘So what did that leave me with? Fifty thousand miles. I would come to a road that ran off whatever road I was on and I’d follow it to the end. When I couldn’t go any farther on the last one I could find—that’s where I knew you would be.’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Nowhere’s nowhere,’ she says. ‘Not when you’re in it.’
Miles doesn’t agree—he’s living proof that she’s wrong—but he doesn’t contradict her.
‘How long did you plan to keep it up?’
‘This was it,’ Alex says, clapping her hands together once, hard. An everybody-out-of-the-pool sound. ‘August first. Ten days from now. Four seasons rolling from Eugene to Pink Mountain to Spokane and I’m finally ready to quit. Then you’re right there. A bogeyman on a bar stool.’
‘It must have cost a hell of a lot. And your parents can’t be giving—’
‘To look for you?’
Alex releases a nasty laugh and sits on the end of the bed. The mattress screeches in protest. When she settles, however, her body is unnaturally still, as though something had switched off inside of her.
‘A tent, a cooler full of hot dogs and bananas,’ she goes on, sliding her hands down the front of her jeans. ‘The rest is pretty cheap, really. Buy a used pickup at the beginning of the summer and resell it on Labour Day. The rest of the time it’s driving and stopping. Showing a picture of you to everybody I meet, like a cop in a TV show. Excuse me, ma’am, have you seen this man? And they would look, and make a sad, oh-poor-dear face and shake their heads. I’d tell them to look again and imagine half his face scarred. Because it’s weird, you know, but I never took a picture of you after you came back from the fire. Have you ever noticed that people only take pictures when they’re happy? Anyway. Anyway. I’d show the old photo of you for a second time and tell them to add in a scar. Sometimes they wanted to help so much that they’d lie and say yes, they thought they saw somebody like that around last week. At the back of the pool hall, asking for spare change outside the liquor store—one of those places where you’d expect to come across the sort of person you wouldn’t want to take a good look at. But I became an expert at detecting the sound of wishful thinking, and move on. Drive and stop and out comes the picture. Excuse me, sir. Drive and stop. When it got to the end of August, we’d turn around. That was it. That’s the whole itinerary for four years running. Our annual adventure. The only summer holidays Rachel has ever known.’
Alex stops now, a little breathless, and feels a blush heat her cheeks at how long she’s spoken. It’s been a while since she’s talked to anyone aside from Rachel, and Alex knows that Miles can hear it as clearly as she can.
‘I thought of changing my name,’ Miles says, turning to face the window again. ‘But I figured I didn’t have to. For the natives, names are sacred. For the rest of us, we just feel better off not knowing.’
‘So it was easy.’
‘There was a time you couldn’t get away from things as easy as I did. You were born someplace and you died there. If anybody asked who you were, you knew what to say. Your family name. Your church. Your trade. Nobody talked about finding or reinventing themselves. You were only who you were.’
His face has drifted so close to the window that his nose has grazed its warm surface, leaving a print behind. He pulls back an inch. Behind him, Alex waits for him to complete his thought, and only now does he realize he had one.
‘It’s different now, though,’ he says, and watches the patch of steam his words make against the glass. ‘People move around. Try whole new lives on for size.’
‘I guess that’s freedom.’
‘Oh yeah. Free as birds.’
‘Is she there?’ Alex asks after a time.
‘I can see her,’ he says, and realizes he’s been half watching Rachel for as long as he’s been standing there.
Miles forces his eyes to focus. He looks out across the tall grass of the Welcome Inn’s back lot to the yards of mobile homes beyond it. In one of them, a bunch of Kaska kids play on a trampoline. Rachel is there, her strawberry dress lifting wide and sucking back against her legs with every jump. Miles is amazed how quickly they all have gone from introductions to holding hands, screaming in made-up terror. Without instruction they have worked out a pattern where only one pair of feet connect with the elastic tarp at a time, sending them into the air and the pink rubber bubbling up after until the next bare toes push it earthward again.
As Miles watches them he places three of his fingertips against his scar and draws them down. He does it so delicately that, to Alex, it appears that he is searching for something in the marks, reading his face like Braille.
‘Do you have somebody here?’ she asks, and her voice pulls his hand away from the burn.
‘You mean like a girlfriend?’
‘You can choose the term you’d like.’
‘No, I don’t have somebody.’
‘I’m a little surprised.’
‘You shouldn’t be. I’m not looking. And even if I was, there’s nobody here to look for.’
‘There’s that girl in the bar last night.’
Alex isn’t smiling, but her voice is. Viciously amused. Miles has forgotten it. The tone of accusation, mocking and inescapable.
‘What girl?’
‘The pretty one. The only one. The one who gave me the once-over and then burned her eyes right through your forehead when you walked out.’
‘Margot,’ he says. ‘She already lives with an asshole, she doesn’t need two.’
‘From what I saw of her, I’m sure she thinks that’s too damn bad.’
‘Listen to you. You’re here for twelve hours and you’ve got everybody’s secret motives all figured out.’
‘Not everybody’s.’
Outside, Rachel looks up at where Miles stands and raises both her arms in a jubilant wave. With a start, he realizes not only that she can see him but that she could for as long as he’s been standing where he is.
‘You must be lonely,’ Alex says behind him.
‘I suppose it’s a matter of getting used to something to the point that you don’t even notice it anymore.’
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