The Wildfire Season (27 page)

He runs for the next fifty yards, but the smoke congeals at the top of his lungs. Still the kid walks just behind him. His breath now an audible rasp.

‘Where are they?’ he finds himself asking, over and over.

The kid answers by pushing Miles’s shoulder forward. The same urgent clip that Miles had delivered to him years ago on the Dragon’s Back.
The only difference is that, this time, the bony hand knocks Miles into the fire instead of away from it.

He nearly steps on the baby’s head. Its cotton dress sending up whiskers of smoke. The green eyes held open. Sparkling.

Miles picks the doll up, smooths the hair back from its face. The smoke obscures whatever lies more than twenty feet ahead of him, but he knows where he must be. He drags his boot through the ash and finds part of a spraypainted H in the grass. A few steps on and the outfield gives way to the sandy diamond, the white bases left plugged in the ground. He finds the backstop fence and leaves the doll leaning against it, arms outstretched, as though begging him not to leave.

Miles starts in the direction of the main part of town but, more than once, the haze turns him around. He’s sure of his bearings only when he bumps into the trampoline. He smooths his hands over the elastic tarp and recognizes it as the one Rachel had played on. The girl turning to look straight up at him, sure he’d be there. This, of course, being several lifetimes ago.

The fire is part of the town now, sneaking onto the grass roofs of some of the cabins just beyond the road-maintenance compound. Although he can’t see it from here, Miles figures it’s even odds whether his own place still stands or not. The grass in the yards smoulders where shrapnel from
exploding poplars has landed. Out back of the Raven Nest, rings of yellow rip up the wooden goalposts of the neglected soccer field.

He feels his way around a couple of corrugated tin gates only to find himself in another backyard. He recognizes it as that of a neighbour of Jerry McCormack, a guy known only as Toot, a trapper who keeps a team of huskies in town. In the winters, he uses them to run the length of his trapline. The rest of the time, the dogs stay in the kennels that Miles tries to find his way out of now. The huskies pace around him, their tails snug against their holes. The noise of Miles’s footsteps sets them to howling.

He opens their cage doors. The dogs scramble out, looking to each other, to Miles, for direction. One of the huskies trots out of the yard, and Miles and the rest of the dogs follow it. For a second, all of them stop in the road and take an accounting of the situation. When Miles walks on, the dogs stay where they are, looking around for someone to put their harnesses on. Only a half-dozen strides later, when Miles looks back, the smoke has smudged out everything but the sound of their panicked whimpers.

Even as he turns to continue, the same smoke lifts all at once. An updraft that pulls the grey off him and leaves the world momentarily exposed.

He sees the familiar detritus of Ross River in an overwhelming particularity. The pickups outside their respective mobile homes, the flag
snapping over the school, the pissing cherub—everything overstating its place, suffused with internal illumination. Miles has a sense of seeing something he was not meant to see. Private but perfectly natural at the same time, as when a child walks into his parents’ bedroom to witness their naked lovemaking.

His feet guide Miles directly to the door of the Welcome Inn Lounge. He stands there for a second with his hand on the handle. The same spot that Alex and the girl had stood less than a week ago. His vision of the future had started with them here, on the line between inside and outside. Just one step from one to the other and everything changes. Like being born. Or burned. Miles isn’t sure that it matters. If there’s a chance that what you’ve decided to belong to lies on the other side, there is no choice but to open it and walk in.

They have waited too long. The fire has forced them into a direct ascent for the last three hundred yards to the ridgeline. With every second step, the she-grizzly glances up at the crest and sees her progress reduced to nothing.

Her mistake had been to travel sideways as long as they had instead of up and over. She stayed on the avalanche chutes and alpine meadows of the St Cyrs’ north face in an effort to put a buffer between herself, her cub and the rifles. Now, with the fire raging through the whole of the valley behind them, the sow sees that she had identified the wrong threat all along. There can be no chance of escape if her cub falls, no matter how many guns or wildfires pursue them.

The bear turns and, as though in confirmation of her thoughts, watches her cub collapse on the rocks. His legs stiff but still twitching, each limb yet to realize its estrangement from the earth.

He had been the bigger of her two, but now,
on his side, she can see the ribs pushing against his coat. His teeth coated in white lather. He wants only for her to see how far he’d come and how hard he’d tried. How he still tries.

The sow lies down next to him, feeling the last of his breaths stroke her snout. Already, the hole from the hunter’s bullet opens wide beneath him, as though his will alone had held the wound closed until seconds ago. The blood glues stones to their fur.

Even when the cub lies still the sow stays with him. Her nose a thermometer against his tongue, gauging how fast it goes cold. She inhales what’s left of his living scents, etching him on her memory using tools more intimate than words. She will linger here until there is no trace of him left to be detected in his coat, the leathery cups of his ears, the different ground covers they have travelled recorded between the pads of his feet. She holds nothing inside of her but him.

He doesn’t so much open the door as pass through it, Casper-like, his feet drifting over the floor in a pantomime of walking just as Mrs Bader’s had when he carried her over the mountain. But who carries him? Miles wonders if the kid is now in charge of his body as well as at least half his mind.

The first surprise is that there is more smoke inside than outside. The seething murk makes it impossible to squint farther than the first tables, the only beacon into the room’s depths an electric
can of Coors streaking over the Rockies. It’s not that the lounge is on fire. It’s that its circulation is so poor that once a smell or vapour has seeped in, it becomes trapped forever.

From out of the fog, an elfin shadow emerges. The cherub from the Welcome Inn’s fountain. Uprooted and now walking alone, haunting the hotel it had served over its misplaced, chipped plaster life.

In the next moment the cherub puts on clothes, a pair of canvas sneakers. When Rachel steps forward Miles is glad, first, that he won’t now have to make conversation with a naked chubby kid with a bladder problem.

‘You’re late,’ she says.

Miles picks the girl up and, to his own surprise, smells her. Roots his nose around her jasmine neck, her citronella hair, sniffs at what he recognizes as the Mountain Spring Fresh! fabric softener he keeps on top of the dryer at the cabin. The force of his laughter sets him rolling on the back of his heels. He wonders if kissing her cheeks this much will rub them raw.

Alex is next to appear. He watches her face take shape as she comes closer through the smoke. Its almond outline first, followed by the particulars. As he counts them off, Miles realizes that although the picture from his memory was accurate, her features strike him as new. The spray of freckles. The serious lips. The sensual bump of her nose. He has struggled against the full recognition of her
beauty since she passed through the same doorway he has just passed through himself, but now he is too weak, too grateful, too angered by what small pleasures have been denied by his pride to not see her whole. Even after two crossings of the St Cyrs he feels unworthy of the reward of letting his eyes linger on her this way.

After a moment, he lowers Rachel to return to her mother, but the girl stays where she is, rapping his leg with playful jabs. Against his other leg, Stump has arrived to lick the stains off Miles’s pants in welcome.

‘You came back,’ Alex says, and the obviousness of her statement draws colour to her cheeks so bright that, even in the lounge’s gloom, Miles can see it.

She can map the distance he has travelled in the fallen line of his shoulders. Instead of erasing him, his exhaustion has translated his body’s language for her. It has left him open, readable. His knees have begun trembling now that he has stopped walking, and Alex fights the urge to slip her hands under his arms and bear some of his weight.

She lets him stare. As both of them know, the price for holding still long enough to see is to allow being seen.

His eyes—the blue ridges, rust spots, the burst vessels against the white—tell her what drove him here from however far away he has come. For once, she sees not only all that’s broken but the working pieces that remain.

It is Miles’s turn to be kissed. Hard, and only once. But there’s a message in it, too. Passed in the taste of salt on the other’s lips.

When Alex pulls away, Miles feels the cracking of a grin that he can’t set halfway right. He knows what he must look like, and how he will always carry a face like a car wreck to one degree or another, and he could care less.

‘You came back,’ Alex says again.

Miles can only nod at the truth of it.

‘There was supposed to be one more helicopter,’ she says.

‘Terry Gray told me.’

‘When are they coming?’

‘They aren’t. Not until the visibility gets a lot better than what it is.’

‘We’re going to wait for it?’

Miles looks past her shoulder. ‘Where is he?’

Mungo waves at him from one of the tables closer to the bar.

‘What are you hiding from?’ Miles says. ‘Wouldn’t bother me if you took a beer or two out of Bonnie’s fridge.’

‘Thought I’d keep my distance.’

‘I’m not sure anybody could make these two do what they didn’t want to.’

‘I know it.’

‘So if I’m going to kick your ass, it’ll be later, when I’m in the right mood.’

Through a momentary tunnel of clear air, Miles can see him smiling his way. Then, at an abrupt
turn in the older man’s thoughts, the smile disappears.

‘Tom’s safe,’ Miles says. ‘So is Margot and Mrs Bader. They’re at the camp on the other side.’

Mungo nods. Something tells all of them not to ask about Wade or Mr Bader.

The four of them gather in the open doorway, standing in an expectant circle. They might stay this way longer if not for the howling of the dogs outside. Somewhere on the edge of town, the huskies have discovered the fireline.

‘We have to go,’ Miles says, already leading them down the steps of the lounge and into the slightly fresher air of the parking lot.

From here he can see that, even in the time it’s taken him to locate the Welcome Inn, the fire has formed a closer circle around the town. Alex and Mungo notice it too. For the first time since Alex led her down to the bleachers the day before, Rachel begins to cry.

‘We can’t wait for an air-vac. We’re just going to have to get out the same way I got in.’

‘You got the truck through?’

‘No,’ Miles says. ‘I walked.’

This knocks any other questions out of them. What they couldn’t know, he tells them. How he found Mr Bader’s body on the rockslide, how he came across Margot, Tom and Bader’s wife hiking over the ridge of the St Cyrs. How he came back.

With a single sniff, Rachel stems her tears. ‘How far is it?’ she asks.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe fifteen, twenty miles.’

‘Is that
far
?’

‘Up and over a big hill. But you? I think you can do it.’

Rachel nods. She steps around Miles and beckons to Alex and Mungo to follow. It strikes the adults that the girls is the most prepared to begin of all of them.

They walk quickly to the fire office with only the shrieks of Toot’s dog team passing between them. From the supply room, they collect two small packs and fill them with water and rations. Mungo considers aloud the merits of bringing oxygen tanks, but Miles tells him to forget it. The added weight will slow them enough that being able to breathe for an additional twenty minutes won’t make a bit of difference. The same goes for hard hats, gloves, the aluminum Shake ‘n’ Bake tents they could hide under if the flames overtake them. They are well beyond the faint hopes of safety gear.

They march along the main road out of town like hitchhikers waiting for the next truck to take them to Faro or Carcross. The names of these other one-bar, one-store communities feel as far away from them now as Paris or Tokyo. The road takes them to the maintenance sheds, where they find the first flames running in the ditches on either side. Another hundred yards on, pylons of fire reach up and over the salt pile.

Miles takes them in. Above them, a square of impudent blue opens over the inferno.

‘Where’s Stump?’

Rachel’s question freezes them in mid-step. The dog had left the lounge at the same time as the rest of them but now he’s nowhere to be seen.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ Miles tells the girl, gripping her by the shoulders. ‘He’s got a nose for us. When he’s done digging up the bone he doesn’t want to leave behind, he’ll catch up.’

‘Don’t
lie
!’

She flicks his hands away with a single twist.

Then she’s off. Arms pumping at her sides. The backs of her legs a blur of pink sunburn.

‘Rachel!’

His voice stops her. She stays put even as he walks to where she stands.

‘You’ve got to come.’

‘Stump?’

He considers another sweetened fabrication, but says nothing. All he does is look at her.

When he offers his hand, she takes it. Though neither mention it, both of them hear Stump’s howl join the huskies’ through the smoke as they go.

When they return to Mungo and Alex, Miles squints skyward to find the raven. Within seconds, the wind changes again and he is blinded by the stinging smoke. Miles is their sole guide now, and he doesn’t know the way. But when he looks back at Mungo, Alex and the girl, he finds only trust in their faces.

He slows at the sight of a shoe a half-dozen strides ahead of him. Its human incongruity standing out against the unmarked hillside. Little of it remains but a white loop of canvas, blackened holes for absent laces. Wade bends to pick it up and it audibly crinkles in his hand. He brings it closer to his eyes and is able to make out the material’s pattern of laughing penguins wearing bow ties and top hats.

It must have dropped from the girl’s foot, but not long ago. And whether walking or carried, she would not be alone.

The tattered loops of the child’s sneaker strikes Wade as the best luck to come his way in some time. For one thing, it provides him with the knowledge of where the three of them are, and that they are not far. It also promises an opportunity to put Bader’s rifle to use before exhaustion or smoke claims him. Even in his condition, he should be able to catch up. And given the Winchester’s range, he won’t have to get too close, though he thinks he might like to. In Wade’s experience, the real pleasure of the hunt lies in the unexpected ways the animal comes down.

He starts off again with something like elation, the world viewed through a shimmery film. He’d whistle if he could remember a tune. A salute to his second life, his
after
life, one destined to deliver the clear results that his first time round had denied him. It’s a comfort to think that perhaps his true talent has been waiting for him all along.
Here on the barren slope, in the daylight murk of the underworld, in death.

They run on coals red as chimney brick. Heat cuts through the soles of their feet, eats their toes. It removes all balance from their strides, so that they hobble forward on what feels like open stumps. On fires such as this, Miles has worked on crews who have risked being swallowed by a fast-moving line in order to take off their boots and pour the last of their water in to cool them. None of those were as hot as this.

He spins around to check on Rachel and catches sight of her sprinting legs, her one remaining playground sneaker. Only now does he recognize the little black cartoon figures on the canvas as penguins in tuxes. She runs in the middle of the line they have formed, behind him and Alex but ahead of Mungo. He considers picking her up, but he’s not sure he could carry her for long, and for now, she seems to be managing as well as the rest of them.

They dodge around trees dripping sap like candle wax. Even as she runs, Alex watches as floating sparks land in the lichen hugging their trunks. The moss flares, then immediately extinguishes, using up all the oxygen around it in a flush. If there isn’t enough air to burn tinder—she wonders almost idly, already losing connection to her thoughts—how much could there be for them to breathe?

Something grips them by the ankles, a loop of
muscle that forces each of them to stop. Glued to their places in a marshy pond. One that may have been as much as a foot deep a week ago, but the heat has evaporated all but an inch or two in its centre. At first, they can only move their heads, scanning the soft edges, where panicked game have left a tattoo of prints in the earth. The water that seeps into their socks the temperature of stock left to simmer on the stove.

‘My head,’ Mungo says. His voice so soft it’s not really there.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m
upside down.
I think I’m—’

Mungo interrupts his own whispers by vomiting what looks to Miles like a quart of milk over his boots. When he’s finished, the older man nods, as though it was an event he’d seen coming for some time. His face so evenly pale it appears powdered with icing sugar.

‘Don’t think about it,’ Miles says, not sure if this is good advice or not.

It’s enough to send Mungo stumbling on again with the girl in front of him. Before he joins them, Miles steals a glance at the fire reflected in the marsh’s water. Torches held by a thousand invisible marchers, making their way down in deepening circles beneath the surface.